Psychedelics and the Female Body: Science, Safeguarding and Innovation with Dr. Grace Blest-Hopley

Psychedelic medicine is on the cusp of becoming a licensed treatment in mental health - and the evidence base behind it has been built largely without women in mind. In this session, neuroscientist and psychedelelic researcher Dr Grace Blest-Hopley looks at where the clinical science actually stands, and at what happens when we take women seriously as a group with distinct biology, distinct psychology and distinct lived experience.

The session runs in four parts, with an open discussion to close:

1. Where the science is now. The clinical applications of psychedelics, the growing evidence base, and the imminent licensing of a psychedelic for use in mental health - what that means in practice, and what it doesn't.

2. Why women need to be understood - a safeguarding lens. How women's biology, physiology, psychology and lived experience interact directly with the psychedelic experience, and why understanding this is fundamental to keeping women safe, in clinics and in community settings alike.

3. Innovation for women. Using psychedelics to address the disease burden women carry disproportionately, and the women-specific conditions that have long been underserved by research and by medicine.

4. Lived experience. What it is to move through the world in a woman's body, and how that surfaces in the psychedelic experience itself.

We'll then open the room for a shared discussion - questions, experience and wisdom exchanged between the community, rather than delivered at it.

Dr Grace Blest-Hopley (PhD, AKC) is a neuroscientist and the founder of Hystelica, the first research organisation dedicated to understanding female biology for the safe and effective use of psychedelics. She completed her PhD and postdoctoral research at King's College London, where she remains a Research Associate, and collaborates with the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London.

Grace is also Director of Research at the Heroic Hearts Project, where she leads on research of psychedelic use among military veterans - work drawing on her own background as a former reserve infantry officer. She works with clinical trial teams to make sure female participants are properly and thoughtfully accounted for in how psychedelic data is collected, analysed and reported.

She is a researcher, an educator, an advocator and is a regular speaker at festivals and conferences on psychedelics and the female body.