“New Frontiers of Psychedelics” with Tania de Jong 

[00:00:00] Hey and welcome to this week's episode of Perspectives I am your host Sharon Pearson, and we are joined today by an extraordinary guest who has done some remarkable work in a field that is maybe to some of us, a little left of center. Her name is Tania de Jong and she is the founder and executive director of Mind Medicine Australia.

And she has done some phenomenal work in moving forward, ensuring that some psychedelics and MDMA may becomes legalized within Australia for therapeutic purposes. This is a topic that I find truly fascinating,  Tania is  executive director and co-founder and board director of Mind Medicine Australia. And it is a registered charity acting as a central node for regulatory approved and research.

[00:01:00] Psychedelics. She is identified in the psychedelic invest top 100 influential people in psychedelics, and she became interested in the resurgence in psychedelic research field after searching for ways to manage your own mental health and her own wellbeing. And we talk about this in the episode, she explains and walks us through her first psychedelic experience and how it transformed her with the support of her partner, Peter, she set out on a quest to have a therapeutic experience, but being able to do this in a safe and legal setting, which as you probably know around the world, isn't that easy to accomplish, have to experiencing this life-changing experience.

She realized the potential of these medicines and she very clearly and distinctly calls them a medicines, not an illegal substance. And she also makes it clear here that MDMA and the psychedelics we talk about are not addictive, despite what we may have heard in the moral panic that can be attached to conversations like this.

So she's on a mission to help [00:02:00] alleviate the suffering caused by mental illness in Australia that she truly believes is not necessary. And when you hear us have this conversation and you hear about the stats and what's been achieved in clinical trials around the world, right now, there are over a hundred clinical trials taking place around the world, including at John Hopkins, one of the most renowned research facilities in the world.

And when you hear these results and we'll include in the show notes, links for you to get more information and maybe to some research as well. So you can see for yourself how profound an impact. that  these medicines combined with therapy can have on people who are suffering from PTSD, depression, anxiety, even eating disorders.

It is, mind-blowing what I've been learning. She also is part of my Mind  Medicine Australia helps to and has phenomenal facilitators, helping to train the facilitators of tomorrow, the psychiatrists and psychologists and the therapists who will, when this becomes legislated within Australia [00:03:00] guide people who want to experience a transformation from the depression or their anxiety or their PTSD, and the team is training them entire process of how you can go through this therapeutic process.

This is not an advocacy program for taking drugs. illegally is not an advocacy program for going to a rave, getting smashed and not drinking water and becoming a statistic. This is a conversation based on current research in 2021, and it is really exciting what the future holds. It's so great that you're joining us today.

Tania thank you so much. I'd love for you to share with our audience a little bit about your journey as to how you got here to having that as your backdrop, Mind  Medicine Australia, if you would please. Sure. Look that's a really long story, but I mean to cut a long story short well my drug of choice has always been singing.

So I have always [00:04:00] loved singing and it's been a wonderful form of meditation relaxation. There'll be entertainment connection, so many things for me. therapy  so I've never felt the need to have any drugs of any kind. And I've never, in fact, I've always been quite anti-drugs. And so it is, it is surprising that I do have this as my backdrop, but I guess to cut a long story short, you know, I'm the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

My grandmother invented the foldable umbrella in Vienna in 1929. So you know, innovation is very much in my blood and I have founded two previous charities to Mind Medicine Australia, plus about six other creative businesses as well. And I've been a performer before, you know, all of, all of my sort of adult life, even though I was told, never double that having singing lessons at the age of 14 and.

But I also, I did a law [00:05:00] degree and I've always been extremely entrepreneurial. And so, you know, I sort of, I guess, become the serial entrepreneur and as I've evolved and growing I become interested in different things and there's just sort of been this yeah, I mean to where I am today, where I'm, you know, a co-founder and executive director of Mind  Medicine Australia, and those still you know, I'm very passionate about my work as both a performer singer and speaker, and some of the work that I do for collective healing.

A lot of the event production work I do as well is tied in to  this. So in a sense, it's bringing together a whole lot of different things that I do. But Mind Medicine  Australia is, is certainly all consuming. Like it's taking a lot of time up for me and my husband. We do this pro bono and we also do, that's the question I get that you do all these other things, [00:06:00] but why that is the backdrop, that's what I'm interested in.

How did you arrive at a place where make getting, helping and facilitating the movement for psychedelics to become legal for medicine? Or how did that happen? Yeah, so that really happened because I've always been interested in hacking myself. So, you know, I've, I've tried lots and lots of different things, different diets

you know, I tantra   mantra cryotherapy my therapy, you know, hyperbaric oxygen all sorts of different retreats, relationship, work personal development. And physical sort of stamina sort of modalities that I've always been really interested in. And I never heard about psychedelic assisted therapies until about five and a half years ago.

When I read a blog of Tim Ferriss, who's one of the great donors and investors in this field and he announced that he was donating a [00:07:00] hundred thousand US dollars to impure colleagues to trial of psilocybin   assisted therapy to treat depression. I'm not, I don't suffer from depression myself, but I certainly know a lot of people who are suffering with depression.

I've worked with a lot of people who are suffering with depression. And so I clicked on the link was to an article by Michael Pollan in the New Yorker magazine called the Trip Treatment  and I read this article and it was about, in fact,  profiling, a Jewish man who was going to an end of life, probably had a terminal diagnosis, but he had been experiencing, I think, some transgenerational trauma.

And I had also. Being experiencing that I didn't really know what it was. You know, I'd have some strange dreams from time to time where maybe I was, and this was awful, you know, where I standing in front of a Nazi firing squad and things like that. And I'm thinking, well, where is this coming from? You know, this is, [00:08:00] I wasn't there for that.

And so I felt that there was, you know, parts of my psyche, I guess, that were still carrying some of this ancestral trauma. And so when I read, you know, about this guy's sort of remission conditions and things, I thought, all this sounds amazing, you know, like amazing. And so I said to my husband read this article, I think we should, don't do this treatment.

Hey, read it. And he said, oh, you know, it sounds interesting, but he didn't take any more interested in it, but he said, well, if you want to organize it, just go ahead. And he generally does say that about a lot of things. And so I then reached out to Dr. Robin Carhart Harris. Who's one of the leading researchers in this field who was mentioned in the article and asked him if there were any healthy patients trials that we could participate in because we don't have a mental illness diagnosis, but there weren't any taking place in the, in, in Europe at the time.

And so we were eventually referred to a [00:09:00] guide in the Netherlands and we then flew to the Netherlands where we worked with that guide and had a massive medicinal dose of psilocybin yeah, I've been pure psilocybin, which was preceded by Syrian Rue, which is a MAOI inhibitor. So the protocol was called silhouette, Cisco, which was a combination really of psilocybin and some of the effective well scope because of the Mio inhibitor Syrian ruined.

This was. A huge experience. Like we were literally shot out of   our bodies into other dimensions, into the multi-verse you know, journeys, this journey that we went on. And of course our journeys were entirely different. Peter's his father had committed suicide when he was thirteen  also. So, wow. You know, we all carry trauma either directly or indirectly.

I think we're all carrying a lot of angst and grief along with us. And particularly now I've never felt so much [00:10:00] that way, carrying as a, as a collective and disconnected and huge disconnection and, you know, wonderful thing about these medicines is the enormous sense of connectivity that they bring, you know, the sense of being connected to yourself, to others, to the planet.

I really is very profound and the healing that waits. Was enormous. And it's not that we were really ill or that we weren't not functioning or anything like that, but we became much better functioning. You