Meet the neuroscientist & army officer helping veterans get the treatment they need at Heroic Hearts

Veterans face unique mental health challenges due to their service – rates of depression, anxiety and PTSD are much higher among this group when compared to the general population.

With conventional treatments offering little relief, veterans are turning to psychedelics to help them heal. Heroic Hearts was founded to help them access these medicines.

Dr Grace Blest-Hopley is the research director at Heroic Hearts. After graduating from King’s College London with a Master’s, she earned a PhD studying the neurochemical and neurofunctional effects of cannabinoids. Instead of spending her free time relaxing, Grace joined the British army, where she is a reserve Infantry officer.

I spoke with Grace about the work Heroic Hearts is doing and how psychedelics are helping veterans with brain injuries.

Some background on Heroic Hearts

Heroic Hearts is relatively new in the U.K. and is only starting to send veterans to retreat programs in countries like Mexico and the Netherlands, where psychedelics are legally accessible.

After the retreats, “the changes we see are phenomenal and utterly life-changing in most veterans we have helped,” says Grace.

“If funding wasn’t an issue, we could be helping thousands of veterans worldwide.”

Grace and her colleagues at Heroic Hearts are exploring the processes underlying these changes with cognitive and neurofunctional testing alongside a whole battery of questionnaires that look at the psychological side of things – EEG is helping them to look at any changes in the brain.

This is what they have found already

The observational study was specifically designed to take place alongside psilocybin retreats for veterans with head trauma and PTSD. Testing takes place before and after – with some during the retreat.

“A very clever part of the observational study takes place whilst participants are at the retreat and dives into the mystical experience and what it means to the participants. We’re seeing that this experience is often correlated to the improvements in people’s psychology.”

Adding EEG measurements is challenging, but they see “particular alterations in certain brain waves like delta waves, which appear to be disturbed due to brain injury and are not very rhythmic.”

Perhaps even more interesting, when “using resting states to look at these delta waves that have been reported to be very erratic in one-off cases…. they have become more rhythmic as a result of psychedelics in some case studies.”

While it is too early to tell what leads to these changes, one thing is for sure – psychedelics are helping veterans to heal, and Heroic Hearts is helping to facilitate the entire process.