The Veterans Affairs Edward Hines Jr. Hospital in suburban Chicago, one of the largest VA facilities in the Midwest serving more than 55,000 veterans, began enrolling participants in a federally authorized psilocybin-assisted therapy clinical trial for treatment-resistant PTSD in June 2026 — part of a wave of VA-affiliated trials catalyzed by President Trump's April 2026 executive order accelerating research and improving access to psychedelic treatments for serious mental illnesses, particularly for veterans.
Hines program joins VA trials at sites in Houston, New York, and San Francisco, creating the most geographically distributed clinical evidence-generation program for psychedelic therapy in federal healthcare history. For Chicago's substantial veteran population, Cook County has approximately 150,000 veterans, with service members disproportionately from South and West Side communities that have also borne the highest burden of trauma from gun violence, economic stress, and structural disinvestment. The intersection of VA psychedelic therapy and urban mental health crisis is both clinically urgent and symbolically significant.
