Mind Forward
About this Event
The inaugural Mind Forward event. Advancing brain science and mental health innovation, from psychedelics and CNS therapies to brain longevity, biotech and digital therapeutics.
At Mind Forward we strive to produce quality, fact-based content, events and information for the entire mental health value chain.
We aim to be the one hub connecting all stakeholders including patients, researchers, clinicians, therapists, investors, business owners and policy makers, working together towards advancing mental health care into the future.
Mind Forward is powered by Prohibition Partners — the team behind PSYCH Symposium, Cannabis Europa, Business of Cannabis and the Cannabis Health Symposium, established producers of Europe's most influential industry conferences.
- PSYCH Symposium
- Cannabis Europa
- Business of Cannabis
- Cannabis Health Symposium
Agenda
🕑: 10:20 AM - 11:00 AM
A Human in the Loop? The Evolving Role of AI and LLM's in Therapy
Info: The headline fear, that chatbots will replace human therapists, isn't where the interesting story is anymore. It's where AI sits alongside the clinician that matters. APA's 2026 survey found over a third of psychologists now have patients using AI as a supplementary support, and regulators across the US and EU have spent this year drawing a clear line, not against AI in mental health, but against AI pretending to be a licensed clinician without one in the loop. A wave of U.S states have passed laws requiring human oversight rather than banning the tools outright, and under the EU AI Act, therapeutic chatbots remain permitted, they simply can't manipulate or replace clinical judgement.
🕑: 11:00 AM - 11:40 AM
SSRI Alternatives: The non-drug pathway
Info: Rather than rendering SSRIs obsolete, neuromodulation devices are positioning themselves as viable first-line alternatives, key adjunctive therapies, or exit ramps for patients who cannot tolerate or do not respond to traditional pharmacotherapy.
This panel will look at the current landscape for clinical-grade and at-home consumer devices, the evidence behind them and how they could help establish a new treatment paradigm for depressive and anxious disorders.
🕑: 11:40 AM - 12:20 PM
Impact and Aftermath: Brain Injury, Mental Health and the Care Pathway
Info: Traumatic brain injury and the mental health consequences are the part most consistently underserved. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, sleep disruption and suicidality follow TBI at rates well above baseline, and in veterans the overlap between blast exposure and PTSD blurs presentation to the point where the two are hard to separate. Willie Stewart's FIELD study at the University of Glasgow, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found former professional footballers died from neurodegenerative disease at around three and a half times the rate of matched controls. Treatment is where the picture fragments. Options such as neuromodulation, photobiomodulation and hyperbaric oxygen attract significant interest based on earlier data, while psychedelic medicine has produced some of the most striking veteran-specific signals.
🕑: 01:30 PM - 02:00 PM
2% of the Funding for 51% of the Population: Women's Mental Health
Info: Women are twice as likely to experience depression. They are more likely to be prescribed an antidepressant for a hormonal transition, more likely to be diagnosed late, and far less likely to appear in the trial data that produced their treatment. Women's health received a record $2.6bn in venture funding in 2024. That was still around two per cent of healthcare venture capital.
This session looks at how half the population became a blind spot, and what is finally being built to correct it. From hormone-informed psychedelic research and cycle-aware digital therapeutics to the new public funding entering the field, the panel examines which innovations are real, which are wellness in a lab coat, and what it takes to design female biology in from the start rather than correcting for it afterwards.
🕑: 02:30 PM - 03:00 PM
Food or Drug? Regulating Compounds That Change How You Feel
Info: Alcohol is the most widely used GABAergic drug in the world, and one of the least precisely regulated. It sits outside the medicines framework entirely, despite acting on the same receptor system as benzodiazepines. The compounds now being developed to replace it face the opposite problem. They are designed to produce a measurable psychoactive effect, but the only route to market runs through food safety regulation.
Professor David Nutt has spent close to four decades on the GABA-A receptor, from his time at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to his current chair at Imperial College London. This session sets out the pharmacology of selective GABAergic modulation, then turns to the regulatory question it creates.
🕑: 03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
The Myth of Psychiatry's Magic Bullet – And What Ibogaine Reveals About Better
Info: For over a century, psychiatry has operated on a single premise: that mental suffering can be located in a broken mechanism and corrected by the right drug. SSRIs were the field's boldest attempt at that promise — and the evidence suggests they largely failed to deliver it. Drawing on 16 years of clinical ibogaine experience, Jonathan Dickinson argues that the problem wasn't the drugs themselves, but the model behind them. Ibogaine offers a provocative counter-example: a medicine that works not by suppressing symptoms, but by restoring the interior conditions from which genuine healing becomes possible.
🕑: 03:30 PM - 04:00 PM
Capital Returns to Mental Health: Where the Money is Backing Real Innovation
Info: Mental health innovation has spent two years being quietly repriced. Eli Lilly's July acquisition of AtaiBeckley for up to $3.8 billion is the headline, but it sits inside a wider pattern. Bristol Myers Squibb's $14 billion move on Karuna produced Cobenfy, the first new mechanism approved in schizophrenia in decades. Boehringer Ingelheim put $50 million into Click Therapeutics in April to carry a prescription digital therapeutic through to launch. Digital health venture funding rebounded to $7.4 billion in the first half of 2026. Small molecules, psychedelics, software and devices are all being funded again, largely for the same reason.
This panel looks past the deal values at what the capital is actually buying: which modalities are pulling it in, what the first launches have taught the sector about evidence and reimbursement, and whether this cycle ends differently from the last one.
Where is it happening?
GBP 251.33 to GBP 314.33
