TW: Suicide

Steve Ball

Steve is a New Zealander who lived in Sydney before relocating to Amsterdam. He’s a Chief Technology Officer working in software development. As someone with Complex-PTSD since the age of nineteen, he pursued all conventional options for treatment within the health system but found that talk therapy was re-traumatising and antidepressants exacerbated his dissociative symptoms. In 2020, after reading the research results of MAPS’ clinical trials for treating PTSD with MDMA and similar studies with psilocybin for depression by Imperial College London, John Hopkins Medicine and Harvard Medical, he decided to undertake psychedelic-assisted therapy with MDMA. Over two sessions, he experienced a life-changing resolution of his childhood trauma and a full cessation of the debilitating PTSD symptoms that he had carried for 34 years. He no longer meets the diagnostic criteria for PTSD and has become an impassioned advocate for making these powerful healing life-saving medicines available to other sufferers.

Your Host

Dr Deb Roberts, PhD is the Mind Medicine Australia Podcast host for Season 2 and has been a MMA volunteer, guides the weekly staff meditation, on the MMA Lived Experience Panel and has a life-long relationship with mental (ill) health yet been able to navigate a fulfilling existence through various means.

She is deeply passionate about conversations related to wellbeing. She uses her own lived experience as well as the reality of having two family members who ended their life seeing no treatment pathway forward. One was her older sister who tried countless medicine combinations, therapies and facilities over 30 years.

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Mind Medicine Australia exists to help alleviate the suffering and suicides caused by mental illness in Australia through expanding the treatment options available to medical practitioners and their patients. We will establish safe and effective psychedelic-assisted treatments to treat a range of mental illnesses.

In furtherance of this mission, The Mind Medicine Australia Podcast ‘Season 2’ aims to connect, listen and share the power of lived experience stories of mental health challenges and altered states that cultivate wellbeing and utilise the collective voices to inform research directions, policy and system change. This podcast will explore modalities including but not limited to altered states from the use of psychedelics, breath work, yoga, mindfulness, meditation, nutrition, sleep and exercise.

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Thank you for listening to the Mind Medicine Australia Podcast.

You can support Mind Medicine’s work by making a tax deductible donation to us and more specifically you can support the Patient Support Fund. Your donation will support research, access and affordability for psychedelic medicine.

The information provided in this podcast is for general information purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine or other professional health care services including the giving of medical advice.

The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional and medical recommendation, diagnosis or treatment. The use of information in this podcast is at one’s own discretion and is not an endorsement of use given the complexity inherent in this medicine under the current viable widespread illegality of their usage.

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