Benjamin Mudge

Benjamin Mudge is the founder of Bipolar Disorder CIC: a not-for-profit company doing advocacy, education, mentoring and research work for people with bipolar disorder. He is nearly finished a PhD in Psychiatry at Flinders University, researching the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca for people with bipolar disorder. He taught himself the science of manic depression to be able to manage his own personal experience of it, while he was a psychiatric patient and working at neuroscience laboratories and GlaxoSmithKline. After psychiatrists prescribed him 17 different pharmaceuticals over a period of 10 years (all of which were problematic), he gave up on pharmaceutical psychiatry and decided to find his own solution to living with manic depression. He has been managing his condition with ayahuasca for 16 years, without any need of pharmaceutical medication. His vision is to make sacred ayahuasca ceremonies available to bipolar people as an alternative treatment to pharmaceutical drugs. He is also an advocate for the religious freedom of ayahuasceros and led the mission to the Parliament of the World’s Religions that succeeded in receiving the Parliament’s recognition of ayahuasca ceremonies as legitimate religious practices. His spirit is expressed via two music projects: Santa Estrela and Mudge FM.