Ben Sessa
Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Researcher
Papers
Trials
Key Impact
An early and visible figure in the contemporary psychedelic renaissance, notable for initiating clinical MDMA-assisted psychotherapy trials for alcohol use disorder and for contributions linking psychedelic phenomenology to neuroimaging findings and clinical safety research.
Background & Research
Ben Sessa is a UK-based psychiatrist and clinical researcher whose work spans clinical trials, neuroimaging studies and scholarly reviews of psychedelic medicines. He has been an active advocate for re-evaluating classic psychedelics in psychiatry and is author of accessible syntheses on the history and therapeutic potential of these compounds. In recent years he has been centrally involved in early-phase clinical research investigating MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for alcohol use disorder, reporting safety and tolerability data and exploring drinking outcomes and psychosocial functioning in follow-up analyses.
Sessa's research profile also includes collaborations on neuroimaging studies of LSD and on mechanistic work linking the psychedelic state to large-scale brain dynamics (for example, broadband cortical desynchronization and related models of altered consciousness). In addition to clinical trial work, he has produced book chapters and reviews that situate contemporary clinical research within historical, sociological and policy contexts, contributing to the broader discourse on how psychedelic therapies might be integrated into modern psychiatric practice.