Magic Mushrooms Cured my Depression.
I micro-dosed with psilocybin to treat depression with positive results.
Its not really what you expect to be doing as a 40 something father of three; skulking around on the moors picking magic mushrooms, but thats where I ended up in the autumn of 2022. In the winter of 2020 I had lapsed into a bit of a depression, I could blame the lockdowns, I could blame the vaccine, (it did coincide with getting 2 shots of Astra Zeneca). But I’m going to be scientific about this, I don’t know the cause and I never will. What I do know is depression is not fun, in fact it’s the exact opposite of fun. Even fun isn’t fun when you’re depressed.
Depression seems to run in the family, my grandfather took his own life, and so did his father. I never felt the urge to join them thankfully, but I was in a state of perpetual Meh! Nothing brought me any pleasure, I was irritable and distant, I lost days and weeks and months to.. well nothing. I just sat there, not doing anything much at all. This wasn’t the serious depression that leads people to believe that they are worthless, that the world would be better off without them. I never lost my own sense of self worth, although it did take a pretty big dive. I knew that what I needed to do was to get out and get busy. Get more involved in my work, engage more with my family, start working through that mountain of little jobs at home, the ones that would make my wife happy. But I just couldn’t do any of it. As soon as I tried my body felt like lead, I’d need a rest, manual jobs tired me out instantly, and office work was impossible to concentrate on for more than a few minutes. The tasks piled up, and I failed to complete them with alarming regularity.
Some people might find this situation familiar, I suspect many people suffer from this chronic loss of will power. As someone who had started and run a business for 20 years it was pretty new to me. I was used to working 70 hour weeks, to getting things done, I had hobbies too, I enjoyed getting out with the kids, doing fun stuff, dad stuff. In my depressed state I still did things, but nothing gave me any pleasure, like the engineer at my emotional mixing desk had moved all the sliders to position 3 and then just fucked off and left it like that. I’d meet up with friends and family and have nothing to say, nothing! My mind would go blank, I’d try and make conversation but it would feel like such an effort. And all my jokes dried up, all of them. I’m not saying I’m Peter Kay, but I used to be able to have a laugh, not anymore. I was locked in this world of white noise which drowned out everything else.
Its not like my mind was empty, in fact it was busy. It was so busy that it was hard to concentrate on anything else. I’ve always been a bit of a daydreamer, I still think that’s a good thing. But my daydreams had changed, instead of positive dreams of the future, new business ideas, and plans for adventures with the family, my daydreams had become nightmares. I imagined terrible things happening to us, I’d get angry about things that people hadn’t actually done, but what if they did! Even when I caught myself catastrophizing and asked my self the question ‘why are you thinking about this shit?’ I’d still catch myself doing it again and again.
I knew something was wrong, and I knew I had to do something about it. It wasn’t going to go away on its own, (although I spent the first three months thinking that it would). I had heard about the use of Psilocybin to treat depression, and I made a point of reading more about it. I watched Michael Pollan’s Netflix series How to Change Your Mind I had listened to Paul Stamets on Joe Rogan. Then I saw the Magic Medicine documentary with Robin Carhart Harris, where they treated depressed patients with Psilocybin. It all seemed pretty positive, there was just one problem, You can’t buy Psilocybin, and it was nine months until mushroom season.
I was worried that I might not be able to wait that long. I knew that there were other things that I could do, exercise for one. This is where the will power problem reared its head again. My work used to keep me pretty fit, I’m an arborist, but as the business grew my role had become more managerial, I had a detached pec muscle in 2019 that had all but finished my tree climbing career, so I was getting out of shape. I owned a selection of kettlebells and pre depression had managed to use them pretty regularly. but now I really struggled. There was one thing that I did daily, that was walking the dog. I decided to make that walk into something more. I started doing it with a weighted rucksack. The effect of this was that I did get fitter, I lost a stone and I was much stronger. My lower back issues cleared up as well, (I suffered with sporadic back pain for years, and in the past had a prolapsed disc that had caused permanent nerve damage). After a few months of almost daily rucking my back had never felt better. Unfortunately my mind had. It would be wrong to claim that the rucking had had no effect on my mood, perhaps it arrested the fall into a more serious state of depression. But I can’t honestly say it had any noticeable positive effect. And that was the problem! my back pain was gone, I was a stone lighter, healthier, stronger and fitter, but no happier.
As the year wore on I tried therapy. I signed up with a therapist online and started the sessions. The effect was negligible, there wasn’t anything wrong with the therapist, she was helpful, but her advice was all centred around things that I knew I should be doing, I just couldn’t bring myself to do them.
I decided to try mindfulness, I downloaded Sam Harris’s app Waking Up and began mindfulness meditations. These were quite enjoyable and I found them very helpful for regulating emotions. Mindfulness gave me something approximating another level of consciousness. That sounds a bit woo-woo but I think its best described as I developed an ability to see myself from above, or perhaps behind. I’ll attempt to elaborate; think of where ‘you’ live within your body. For most people this is somewhere behind the eyes. Mindfulness gave me another place right behind the place where ‘me’ lives. From this rearward vantage point I am able to recognise moments when ‘me’ is getting angry or sad or whatever. So mindfulness was a success, in part anyway. I still wasn’t happy though, and being able to recognise moments when I was irrationally angry or catastrophizing was not necessarily helpful in dispersing the unwanted feeling.
At this point you might be thinking why hadn’t I seen my doctor? The truth is that I knew that if I did I’d likely be prescribed some medication, most likely an SSRI. I also knew that even though a huge number of people take these every day, their effect is negligible. In fact some studies show that their effect is zero. I have also heard from people who take SSRI’s that they leave them feeling flat, emotionless, like all the sliders on the mixing desk have been left at position 5. I didn’t fancy that much. And then there’s the issue of getting off SSRI’s, some people take them for years. If you take a drug to fix a problem and after five years you’re still taking it when do you think it’s going to work? I was sure there must be a better way.
Finally mushroom season came around, here in Scotland it starts around August time and runs through to October. The mushroom in question was Psilocybe semilanceata, the liberty cap. Native to the UK liberty caps grow in grassland, usually grassland that is grazed by livestock. They are generally found in the higher country in the poorer soils that you’ll find in the hills, fields that are rarely ploughed are best. My work as an arborist involves fungal identification and so I was confident that I could identify the correct shrooms. This was important as there are a number of deadly mushroom species that can be found in the UK.
If you are interested in finding liberty caps but don’t know what you are doing there are some very good videos that can be found on line to help with identification. I’ll post a link in the footnote.
So finally I was able to go out and collect my “medicine” I struck lucky on my first trip, coming home with around 50 mushrooms. They are pretty small so thats not as much as you might think. Even though I had taken both mushrooms and LSD in my youth I didn’t feel that I was ready to take a big dose. Set and setting is the mantra when it comes to psychedelics. I could control the setting but the set, well I was miserable wasn’t I. Robin Carhart Harris’s successful experiments involved large doses, really large doses. I knew I’d be doing this on my own and the idea of a really bad trip didn’t appeal.
I had read about another method; micro-dosing. Micro-dosing only required a dose of 0.05 - 0.25 of a gram of dried mushrooms. No where near enough to go on a trip. There are various protocols for micro-dosing; you can take a dose every one, two or three days. I went with the 3 day protocol. Psilocin the active ingredient is rapidly broken down by the body leading to a tolerance to the compound. You can’t trip on mushrooms two days in a row, the second day you will still have a tolerance to psilocin and the drug will have no effect. After another day the tolerance drops off and you can trip again. It’s interesting that shrooms seem to have an anti abuse feature built in! This knowledge led me to believe that the three day method was probably the most sensible.
After a few more visits to that same field I had found that first day I had acquired enough mushrooms to have a 10 week course of treatment, plus some spare. I carefully dried out the mushrooms and powdered them in a spice mill. Then using some accurate scales I weighed out my doses. I was ready to start!
On the first day I took the dose and waited with a little apprehension for something to happen. Something did happen, but it was subtle. About 45 minutes after taking the dose I felt a little jittery, like I had drunk one coffee to many, that was all. No euphoria or psychedelic experience of any note. The jittery feeling lasted for about an hour and then I was back to normal, except that I felt a little better, maybe? It was hard to be sure, but what was I expecting? I guess that part of me hoped that I’d feel instantly better, back to my old self, that didn’t happen.
The following day I did feel a bit better, just a bit, but yes, maybe there was something happening. I carried on with the doses every third day and little by little my mood improved. We all have good days and bad days I suppose but during my depressive phase it felt like the bad days were almost constant. As the ten weeks progressed the good days became more and more frequent.
A few weeks into the treatment I noticed something else; the initial jittery period was actually helpful with mindfulness meditation. I had taken to walking the dog immediately after taking the dose, that way I would be preoccupied whilst I had the jitters. Taking the dose and then attempting something that involved sitting still, like writing emails, was not easy. My mind would wander, I was restless and easily distracted. One day on returning from my walk I sat down and did one of the Waking Up meditations; not only was it easy but I felt it was particularly useful. I ended the session feeling great! The feeling lasted all day. I began meditating soon after dosing as often as I could.
When the ten weeks was over I was definitely in a better place, I was coping better with the daily stresses and strains of life. And I was catastrophizing a lot less. The mountain of tasks that I had failed to complete over the previous year was still there, but I was picking away at it, and one by one things were getting struck off the list. I wanted to socialise more and I was better company when I did. I did have a small amount of worry that I would lapse back into depression when the treatment ended. But it didn’t happen. It had worked!
One day a few months later my wife took the family to her parents, I was home alone. I decided to take another dose, this time a macro-dose. Even though I felt a lot better I still thought that there was a little further to go, I was curious too. I had enjoyed tripping on mushrooms when I had done it 25 years earlier. I weighed out 1.5 grams; six of my micro-doses. This was still not a big dose. Terence McKenna the famous psychonaut described five grams of dried mushrooms as the ‘heroic dose’. I have no doubt that that would be quite an experience! McKenna’s heroic dose was made using Psilocybe cubensis which is native to the americas, the Psilocybe semilanceata which I had are stronger. Its impossible to know precisely how much stronger without a laboratory analysis, but it is generally accepted that on average semilanceata contains around 50% more psilocin than cubensis. Knowing this and also not wanting to emulate McKenna on my first solo attempt I opted for the modest 1.5g dose.
Describing a psychedelic experience is extremely difficult; I’m not going to attempt it here. I went into it with an open mind and made an effort to make the experience as comfortable as possible. It lasted about four hours, and I have to say I loved it! I lay in bed in the dark playing some trippy music that I had found on youtube, (a surprisingly good choice). I closed my eyes and let the whole experience wash over me. There were a couple of moments where I felt a little fear or anxiety, but these were fleeting. I had heard somewhere, possibly on one of the documentaries that I had seen, that one should always be curious during a trip. So when something frightening appears: either thought, feeling or vision, just be curious. This I was during my trip, it served me well.
The next day I felt great, really good, in love with the world, I was excited to see my family again and ready to take on life. I was feeling especially positive about the future but the biggest thing that I took away from the experience was a feeling of calm. An inner fortitude that told me everything was going to be ok. I had an appreciation of the world and the people and things in it that I didn’t have even before my depressive episode.
So now six months later, how am I? What are my conclusions? Life is good, I still have the odd bad day, don’t we all? But in general I am back to where I was in 2019, as far as my mood goes anyway. I think that the experience has broadened my mind a little, I am perhaps a little more empathetic towards the rest of humanity. Don’t get me wrong I still hate Nicola Sturgeon. I still get angry about the state of the world but it doesn’t affect my mood. I still suffer the same problems that we all do in life, difficult colleagues, stroppy kids, disagreements with my wife money worries etc. But none of it gets me down in the long term. I just deal with it all, just like we all should. And that can only be a good thing. Normal is the new normal.
Footnote:
If you are experiencing depression or any mental illness and are interested in taking magic mushrooms I’d suggest that you do a lot of research before you do. I am not recommending their use as an anti-depressant and I am not suggesting that they may work for everyone. There are a number of health concerns to consider. Psilocybin increases blood pressure, this could be an issue for some people. It can also trigger psychotic breaks, so that too could be an issue for people who are predisposed to such things. Both of these risks will be lower with micro-dosing and higher with macro-dosing.
Disclaimer out of the way, if you are interested in taking mushrooms but don’t know how to find them I think this is a pretty good place to start.
I loved your writing! Thanks for sharing! I have also only had good experiences with psilocybin. I agree with you - go slow, start low, and do a lot of reading first!
Fascinating. I dunno whether we have them in Oz and I’ve always been too scared to pick wild mushrooms. Sounds like a potential business :) In Victorian times you could have just sold this stuff, no questions asked.