Psychedelics: Legal But Still Misunderstood

A Melbourne psychiatrist spent decades building the case for psychedelic therapy — and became one of the psychiatrists pushing for Australia to legalise it.Nigel Strauss has been a psychiatrist for over 45 years, trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, and was among the first Australian psychiatrists trained by MAPS in psychedelic‑assisted therapy in the UK in 2014. He ran Melbourne's Millswyn Clinic for around forty years, worked as a psychedelic psychotherapist on Australia's first approved psilocybin trial for end‑of‑life anxiety and depression, and personally sponsored a Monash University trial giving MDMA‑assisted therapy to 25 veterans and first responders with severe PTSD — results are being presented in Amsterdam this year, and by his account most participants have done very well. His own experience with LSD as a depressed medical student set him on this path decades before any of it was legal.We talk about what changed in the science and the culture to make Australia the first country to allow authorised psychiatrists to prescribe MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment‑resistant depression, what actually happens in a psychedelic session, what shifts in someone facing death, and why an urban psychiatrist ended up planting thousands of trees and spending decades helping protect the Great Otway region.