For the veterans conventional therapy cannot reach — the ones with treatment-resistant PTSD — Ukraine is opening a new frontier. Taisiya Poda sits on the board of the Ukrainian Psychedelic Research Association (UPRA), the non-profit working to bring psychedelic-assisted therapy to Ukraine: changing the legal framework, training Ukrainian mental-health professionals with international partners, and working with the Verkhovna Rada's health committee and the Ministry of Health toward the country's first clinical trials of MDMA-assisted therapy.
With the Forest Glade Center for Mental Health and Rehabilitation of Veterans, she has presented the plans for developing this therapy specifically for the people who need it most: the soldiers the war would not let go.
At the London 2025 Summit, Poda moderated the closing panel of the Veterans Leadership Forum — Freedom from Captivity — guiding two former prisoners of war, Yevhenii Malyk and Roman Hrybov, through one of the Summit's most harrowing conversations. Her own message was policy: Ukraine must change its rules so that returnees from captivity — and their families — receive adequate mental-health care as a right, not a favour.
Her preparation is unusual and exactly right for the job: a psychologist-therapist by profession, an art critic by training, and a candidate of legal sciences in international law — the therapist to understand the wound, the lawyer to change the system around it.
