Ecstasy tablets, with an imprint of the country of Australia (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images) In Sydney, Australia, Rebecca Huntley had been seeking psychiatric care on-and-off for thirty years when she heard from an otherwise straight-edged friend about her experience going through MDMA-assisted therapy. At the time, MDMA , also known as the party drug ecstasy, had been outlawed in Australia since 1987 , despite research suggesting the drug can treat mental illness . But Rebecca’s friend connected her with an underground therapist providing this service to a select clientele. After a rigorous vetting process, their first session took place at Rebecca’s house, a quiet place surrounded by trees.
“I felt like I needed something other than what I was doing,” she told Salon. “I was grinding my gears in terms of my mental health; I was pretty angry all the time. So I thought I’d give it a go.”
“It’s like you’ve jumped forward in light-speed to an accelerated point in your mental health journey,” Rebecca added. “For me, particularly the first session released an enormous amount of pain and grief and sadness that I had been spending years trying to push to the periphery of my consciousness. And the next day, after the drug was pretty much out of my system, I woke up feeling like I’d woken up in a different kind of body, a calmer body, a body that was more grounded.”
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After that it was a six month process, including two more trips with MDMA and follow-up integration sessions to make sense of the experience. Rebecca wrote a book, “ Sassafras ,” about her journey.
“It’s up there with giving birth to my three children in terms of genuinely life-changing experiences,” she said.
In 2023, Australia became the first country in the world to legalize both MDMA and psilocybin-assisted psychiatric therapy, strictly under very specific conditions: MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and psilocybin (the drug in “magic” mushrooms) for treatment-resistant depression.
"I woke up feeling like I’d woken up in a different kind of body, a calmer […]
America rejected MDMA, but Australia didn’t. Here’s why psychedelics have been embraced Down Under
