What Psychedelic Medicine Still Gets Wrong About Women
Heather Lee has spent years working with psychedelic-assisted healing for midlife struggles and mental health, and she says this type of work is long overdue.
As psychedelic medicine develops, more attention is turning to the people whose experiences have received less focus. For psychedelic medicine, veterans, younger adults managing anxiety and burnout and people living with treatment-resistant depression have already driven much of the conversation. Meanwhile, women over 50 who are navigating grief, identity changes, illness and the struggles that accumulate throughout midlife have largely been an afterthought. Heather Lee believes that needed to change.
A different kind of midlife crisis
Lee is a licensed clinical social worker and licensed Natural Medicine Clinical Facilitator who has spent more than two decades practicing integrative mental health. In recent years, she has focused her work almost entirely on guiding women through psychedelic-assisted healing experiences, a specialty that remains relatively rare in this developing field.
Her new book, The Psilocybin Sessions: Real-Life Stories of Women’s Wisdom Awakening with Psychedelic Medicine, talks about women who explored psilocybin while navigating grief, estrangement, aging and the search for a new purpose.
The book doesn’t talk about psychedelic medicine as if it’s a cure-all. But it does something the public conversation has been slow to adopt: taking seriously the women in midlife and later adulthood, asking what healing can look like for them.
The accumulated weight of unacknowledged loss
Part of what draws Lee to this population is what she sees as a widespread failure to recognize the particular kind of grief that arrives after 50. Women in this stage of life are often grieving multiple losses at once, including parents, partners, their own health, their past roles or communities that have disappeared. Because these losses tend to happen gradually, they can go unacknowledged for years. There’s no funeral once you have an empty nest. There’s no ceremony for the past version of oneself.
At the same time, many women reach this period having spent decades focusing outward on their careers, children, aging parents and relationships. By the time they begin asking what they actually want or who they are now, those questions can feel foreign.
According to Lee, that combination of accumulated loss and long-deferred self-inquiry is part of what makes psychedelic-assisted experiences potentially meaningful for this group. Psilocybin, she believes, may create conditions in which people can revisit long-held beliefs about themselves. Ideas like “I’m too old to change” or “this is just who I am now” are seen in a whole new light.
Recent research and the personal side of the experience
Interest in psychedelic medicine has grown considerably in recent years. Researchers continue to study its applications for depression, anxiety, trauma and end-of-life distress. Several states have introduced new regulations, and healthcare organizations have expanded their research efforts on the topic.
But Lee is paying attention to what clinical data alone doesn’t fully capture. Clinical trials often focus on measurable changes, but personal accounts can show how people make meaning from their experiences. Some participants describe feelings of awe, connection or renewed purpose as meaningful parts of the experience.
The women whose stories appear in The Psilocybin Sessions are real people navigating widowhood, trauma, major life changes and shifts in identity. Their accounts add personal context that may not appear in symptom-based results alone.
Where personal experience meets purpose
Lee’s perspective is shaped not just by her clinical work, but by her own personal story. As a cancer survivor, she brings direct experience with illness, mortality and the kind of existential reckoning that major diagnoses tend to force upon someone. That background informs her work with clients confronting similar struggles.
She was recently appointed to the advisory board of End-of-Life Psychedelic Care, a nonprofit focused on expanding education and access for patients facing terminal illness. This role demonstrates her clinical experience and her overall commitment to ensuring that end-of-life experiences are met with appropriate support.
A conversation that’s just beginning
As psychedelic medicine continues to grow, the question of who is benefiting and who is being left out will continue to shape the practice. Lee’s work is an effort to include more of the people who have historically been left out by insisting that the practice has more to offer.
For women who have spent decades attending to everyone else, the chance to turn attention inward, even if it’s late or imperfect, may be among the more significant possibilities psychedelic medicine has to offer.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Psychedelic-assisted therapy should only be pursued under the guidance of a licensed clinical professional.
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