Nigel Strauss and Paul Liknaitzky contend that, at least initially, all training should take place within clinical trials overseen by experienced international clinicians and be limited to psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists. Liknaitzky has been developing a program to provide on-the-job training initially for around thirty therapists who will work on the Swinburne and Monash trials and who, he says, will later be able to train others. “These trials are an opportunity to train therapists ethically and rigorously through expert supervision, with real patients, using these drugs.”
“This is such a fragile re-entry back into medicine,” says Ross more generally. “We’ve got one shot at this and that’s why it will take the time that it takes — because it is so easily demonised. You need one bad experience that’s highly publicised, and then we are back at square one. You’ll see a very, very public and swift political backlash, like we did in the seventies. And then it’s all off.”
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Image: Alamy
