Benjamin Mudge

Benjamin Mudge is the founder of Bipolar Disorder CIC: a not-for-profit community interest 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 ceremonies for people with bipolar disorder. He taught himself the science of bipolar disorder to cope with his own personal experience of it, while he was a psychiatric patient and working at neuroscience laboratories and GlaxoSmithKline. After psychiatrists prescribed him a series of 17 different pharmaceuticals (all of which had adverse effects), he walked away from pharmaceutical psychiatry and searched for his own medical solution to living with manic depression that is compatible with creativity, spirituality and exuberance. He has been managing his bipolar condition with ayahuasca for 18 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 and has a developed a unique recipe of ayahuasca and a special ceremony protocol that optimizes safety and efficacy for bipolar people. Mudge has a background of activism in peace, anti-apartheid and feminist movements 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.