The latest wave of psychedelic research is focusing on conditions that disproportionately affect women. But amid claims ranging from poor-quality data to abuse, is the female future of psychedelic therapy a shift we should be celebrating?
F rancesca raises the ceramic cup to her lips and takes a deep gulp, feeling the thick, mud-like liquid hit the back of her throat. The drink is unlike anything else she has ever ingested; at once medicinally herbal and as acidic as bile. The concoction is ayahuasca, a plant-based psychedelic tea, which has been blended by an indigenous Peruvian shaman for this ceremony, taking place at a retreat a couple of hours from the nearest city.
Twenty minutes later, the first tingles hit. Geometric shapes etch themselves on to the insides of her eyelids; hours bend into one another. She feels herself cocooning into a stream of soft pink and bold red, dissolving into what she can only describe as ‘divine feminine energy’. Reflecting later, she will assign a profound meaning to this: that she was shown what her life could look like should the anorexia that has pulled at the corners of the fabric of her life since she was 15 be banished.
Compound interest
Using psychedelics to ease the symptoms of an eating disorder might sound decidedly offbeat. But Francesca’s path – or a version of it – is one that’s being explored by researchers at Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research. There, scientists are investigating the role psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) could play in treating anorexia nervosa. It will see around 20 people assigned female at birth with an anorexia diagnosis undergo psilocybin-assisted therapy, with the study’s active phase scheduled to complete in May 2023. Should the results be promising, the next step would be a phase-two randomised control clinical trial.
Should that prove positive, this would progress to a phasethree trial – the stringent escalation of testing any new medicine must go through before it can be granted a licence by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Meanwhile, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, a similar pilot study has been conducted. While analysis is pending, one researcher told WH they’re ‘cautiously optimistic’ that the therapy could be helpful for some sufferers.
On the face of it, such developments sound encouraging. And yet, news that the latest wave of psychedelic research has a female focus is also being met with caution. For while psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy – in which professionally supervised dosing sessions of a compound such as LSD, psilocybin or MDMA are interwoven with drug-free therapeutic sessions – continues to generate positive PR around the world, some voices within the field are deeply t
