This article was made possible thanks to on-site reporting by Sasha Mbilika.

Last week, more than 250 professionals in the psychedelics space gathered at London’s Conway Hall for the third edition of PSYCH Symposium.

Researchers, regulators, investors and thought leaders gathered to discuss the past, present and future of psychedelic medicine in the UK and abroad.

Prof. David Nutt: The Harm of Psychedelics Has Been “Grossly Exaggerated”

Opening Remarks were given by Professor David Nutt, founder of Drug Science, the organisation that partnered with Prohibition Partners in hosting the Symposium.

Nutt shared a quote by Lord Dick Tavern, who has been a major influence in maintaining a sensible public dialogue about science, leading the charity Sense about Science to become the first patron of Drug Science. 

Nutt shared a quote from Lord Tavern: “It may take time, but in a democracy, those who base their case on strong evidence and are prepared to argue for it with conviction are likely to prevail in the end. The sensible policy on the use of drugs is not a hopeless cause”

Nutt said the quote echoes optimism for industry progress and highlights Drug Science’s ongoing role in the field as it recovers from the 1971 UN Convention that banned classic psychedelics worldwide. 

Nutt reported that potentially hundreds of millions of premature deaths result from inadequate mental health care and a decline in research. He continues to advocate for greater awareness, noting that the harms allegedly produced by psychedelics have been grossly exaggerated.

Prof. Nutt and Compass’ Dr. Guy Goodwin Discuss Access To Psychedelic Healthcare

Nutt remained on stage, and was joined for a panel discussion with Dr. Guy Goodwin, Compass Pathways’ Chief Medical Officer. The talk was moderated by Anne Philippi.

Guy discussed the company’s role in bringing psychedelics into mainstream health. Compass’ phase 3 study, recruiting almost one thousand patients, was completed earlier this year. 

The company is currently on track to submit a dossier with the US FDA in mid-2026. Goodwin explained that the FDA is less affected by politics than before and has seen great consistency of performance and messaging.

Goodwin also discussed Lykos Therapeutics’ failure to pass FDA standards for MDMA therapy and said that data published by the FDA on the decision provides a learning opportunity.

After highlighting concerns for veteran welfare as driving forces for some pro-psychedelic policies, Nutt communicated the importance of reframing the cost of mental health treatments to reflect their value.

Nutt said that he sees overall optimism about the future of psychedelics in mainstream healthcare and the potential for significant improvements in mental health treatments. Key challenges for moving the needle on policy approvals include improving the public perception and media coverage of psychedelics, discussing a possible rebrand to “neuroplastogens.”

He also noted the importance of demonstrating the true cost-benefit of psychedelic treatments to the public and regulatory authorities.

Justin Smith-Ruiu: Psychedelics and the Reality of Experience 

The conference’s main keynote was held by Justin Smith-Ruiu, professor of philosophy at Paris Cité University, who recently published “On Drugs,” a book that blends autobiography, intellectual history, and philosophical inquiry to explore the transformative impact of psychedelics on human consciousness and thought.

Smith-Ruiu discussed the potential of psychedelics for philosophical inquiry, offering engaging reflections on his personal experience with psilocybin, which helped him overcome a major depression and influenced his philosophical work. 

He advocates for philosophers to consider the legitimacy of psychedelic experiences in their inquiry.

As part of a series of historical speculations, Smith-Ruiu said philosophers like Descartes and John Locke might have used psychedelics in the 17th century, as evidenced by the historical availability of psychedelic substances like fly agaric and ayahuasca.

He calls for academic philosophers to question their grounds for excluding psychedelic experiences from philosophical inquiry, challenging academic philosophy’s historic exclusions. He noted that between 1925 and 1975, no anglophone analytic philosopher openly admitted to having a psychedelic experience and argues that philosophers should rely on first-person intuition and seek out unusual experiences.

The philosopher questions why modern philosophy has neglected psychedelics as a significant data point in understanding perception and reality.

Smith-Ruiu argues that psychedelic experiences can clarify how we perceive reality and challenge entrenched assumptions about the mind and world. The phenomenological tradition in philosophy values inner experience as a means of accessing the basic structure of reality, he said. First-person reports of altered states can reveal hidden structures of selfhood, time, and meaning.

Panel Discussion: Psychedelics in the Real World —Where Are We Now?

Prof. Michael Lynskey, Researcher at Drug Science, moderated a panel which explored concepts of “real world” drug use, including medical, recreational, and informal use, with an emphasis on equitable access and diverse application, agreeing on the need for inclusive regulatory models to ensure safe, effective psychedelic use.

The panel included Prof. Celia Morgan, Professor of Psychopharmacology at the University of Exeter, Dr. Helena Aicher, Researcher and Psychotherapist at Universities of Basel & Zurich, Prof. Ranil Gunewardene, Director of Evolution MET, and Steve Rolles, Senior Policy Analyst at Transform Drug Policy Foundation

According to the panelists, 99.999% of psychedelic use occurs outside clinical settings and most recreational use is pleasure seeking, involving social settings like parties, raves, or casual gatherings.

Psychedelics demonstrate the first true innovation in mental health treatments in 35 years and have the potential to address treatment-resistant conditions like severe depression and trauma, showing promise for complex mental health cases.

As per real-world cases of legal psychedelic use, the panelists mentioned Australia as the first country to legalize psilocybin and MDMA for therapeutic use. Switzerland has had “exceptional permissions” for psychedelic therapy for over 10 years. Significant regulatory gaps exist between medical, recreational, and wellness-oriented psychedelic use.

In two years of psychedelic treatment in a major Sydney hospital, zero adverse outcomes reported and some patients require multiple treatment rounds (3-6 doses) for complex conditions.Psychedelics have a lower risk profile compared to some conventional medications like Clozapine, the panelists said.

However, challenges exist in the clinical research space. Most clinical trials have rigid exclusion criteria that prevent studying patients most likely to benefit and traditional rating scales often fail to capture the nuanced, qualitative improvements patients experience.

In the UK, there’s a growing underground therapy movement. There’s also increasing interest in community practice models for psychedelic use thought there’s limited formal availability for psychedelic treatment.

The panelists recommend to develop more flexible regulatory frameworks, create harm-reduction strategies, improve accessibility to psychedelic treatments and continue research into diverse application contexts.

This article was submitted by Lucy da Silva, Psychedelic Support Therapist and CEO Silva Wellness, as part of Psychedelic Health’s op-ed program. To submit article ideas, please email news@psychedelichealth.co.uk

I once was addicted to alcohol and drugs, which I was lucky enough to overcome through the 12-step programme. This journey was steeped in peer support and a real sense of community. Over the past five or so years, I have also had my fair share of psychedelic healing experiences, most of them in group settings.

Entering this sphere, I was fortunate to come from a place of internal containment and grounding, since my healing journey had begun long before my first psychedelic experience in a ceremonial setting. As a qualified and experienced psychotherapist, I was well versed in self-care, the analytical lens of Jungian interpretation and, most importantly, trauma knowledge and containment.

What these seeds of experience began to sow for me was an awareness of how clinical excitement can sometimes overshadow the slower work of building adequate systems that protect, hold and integrate – striking the delicate balance between respect for indigenous traditions and the demands of medicine-inspired healing. As a therapist, my work often focuses on the healing that takes place after harm has occurred. But my own experiences in medicine ceremonies (some profound and safe, others not so much) led me to wonder: what would it mean to design safety from the ground up?

The psychedelic field has made extraordinary progress in just a few years. Regulatory frameworks are evolving, clinical trials are expanding, and public interest is growing faster than any of us could have predicted. There’s a palpable sense of momentum—of medicine, culture and consciousness beginning to reconnect. The renaissance is not on its way—it is here! 

Come meet the leaders shaping the future of psychedelic medicine. Join PSYCH Symposium: London 2025, December 4 at Conway Hall.

Yet much of this progress still takes place within the same paradigms that shaped twentieth-century psychiatry: models focused on efficacy and access, rather than on the deeper architecture of care. We talk about scaling treatments, but rarely about scaling safety—about designing systems that protect psychological integrity as much as they deliver clinical outcomes.

The conversation about psychedelic medicine often stops at the clinic door. But the next frontier of innovation isn’t pharmacological; it’s relational, community-driven and systemic. It’s about how we build environments that recognise trauma not as an exception, but as the context from which most people seek healing. This is especially relevant when utilising psychedelics for the treatment of substance use disorders.

Co-Design Workshops: Trauma-Informed Care and Community Integration in Psychedelic Therapy

When we had the opportunity to apply for a government-backed R&D grant, it offered the chance to formalise what I had personally seen and encountered in group settings—as well as what I had heard through anecdotal conversations with individuals I met along the way, including clients who needed help processing uncontained trauma after group experiences.

With the grant focusing on individuals suffering from substance use disorders, I was motivated to propose a trauma-informed model in a group setting supported by community integration initiatives. I also wanted to address the elephant in the room: expanding access. With ketamine treatment via IV costing around £10,000 in the UK, affordability remains a serious issue. My goal was to explore how we can scale treatment options safely. We need to ensure that the very systems we design to help people heal do not inadvertently replicate harm.

Rather than studying participants, we’ll be studying systems, and asking what those systems need to look like to prevent harm before it happens.

Our study (scheduled to kick off in November 2025), Co-Design Workshops: Trauma-Informed Care and Community Integration in Psychedelic Therapy, aims to explore how safety can be intentionally designed into emerging psychedelic care models before they become mainstream. It will run as follows:

1. Three stakeholder groups (clinicians, peer facilitators and mental health service designers) will participate in a series of co-design workshops.
2. Using journey mapping and system mapping, the sessions will explore how trauma-informed principles can guide safe, accessible models for group-based ketamine lozenge therapy (KLT).
3. The aim is to co-create conceptual frameworks that integrate ethical design, accessibility and community wisdom from the outset.

What we hope to learn is that safety is relational, shaped by culture and trust just as much as by clinical control. Trauma-informed practice, emotional readiness, education, and attention to set and setting before any medicine is ingested should form vital components of integration.

Promoting integration as preparation—as the precursor to treatment, as a modality in itself—mirrors what the 12-step programme does so well. Peer-led community, robust support and follow-up systems could become the scaffolding that extends care beyond the session, supporting longevity in healing.

This also ties into the concept of reducing hierarchy by amplifying lived expertise and modelling the inclusivity that psychedelic care must embody. It can help individuals lean towards treatment rather than resist it—a common challenge in both community-led and private addiction treatment programmes.

As the long-term aim of this project is to align proposed frameworks with voluntary sector and NHS infrastructure, we envisage that it could inform future service delivery and policy development. Most importantly, we hope to begin a wider discussion about how future frameworks can be wrapped in nurturing ethics and, above all, safety.

If we can integrate trauma-informed principles from the outset, the future of psychedelic therapy could look very different. We might see small, community-based groups supported by skilled facilitators who understand containment as much as chemistry. Integration models could become embedded within peer networks, where shared experience is part of the medicine itself.

Services could evolve through co-design rather than correction, shaped by lived wisdom as much as professional expertise. In this vision, innovation means not just expanding access, but building safety, inclusion and care by design.

Because the psychedelic renaissance will only ever be as safe as the systems that hold it and designing those systems is the real frontier.

As this project begins, we have a rare opportunity to slow down—to listen, collaborate and build the ethical foundations before psychedelic care becomes fully mainstream. Trauma-informed design reminds us that safety is not simply the absence of harm, but the presence of trust, transparency and relationship.

If we can weave those qualities into the structures that support psychedelic work, from the clinic to the community, we stand a chance of creating a field that heals without replicating old wounds.

This study is just the first step, but it marks an invitation to the wider field: to design consciously, collectively and with care at the centre.

Because the question is no longer whether psychedelics can heal, it’s whether we can design the systems that allow that healing to endure.

Image by andreas160578 from Pixabay