Curing depression with… mushrooms. [OR: How easy it is to forget yourself]

A study looking at whether the psilocybin (an ingredient found in hallucinogenic mushrooms) drug can reduce anxiety and depression in cancer patients.

The findings look more than promising…

Three years later, Mr. Mihai, now 25 and a physician assistant in Las Vegas, said, “I’m not anxious about cancer anymore. I’m not anxious about dying.” The session, he added, “has made my life richer.”

[…]

At N.Y.U., psychotherapists tried to layer the session into patients’ memories by asking them to write about their visions in a journal and discuss the experience in meetings. The Johns Hopkins study, led by Roland R. Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist, had monitors who urged participants to “trust, let go and be open.”

[…]

In 2013, Kevin entered the Johns Hopkins trial. During his session, he saw spirals of iridescent spheres that folded in on themselves. The experience did not restore him to his former life, he said, “but I have a greater sense of peace of what might come. I’m very grateful, beyond words, for this trial. But you have to approach the session with the right intentions of why you’re doing it. Because you’re going to meet yourself. ”

[…]

One theory is that psilocybin interrupts the circuitry of self-absorbed thinking that is so pronounced in depressed people, making way for a mystical experience of selfless unity.

[…]

Dr. George Greer, the co-founder of Heffter, does not see a commercial future for psilocybin, even if it is eventually approved for therapeutic use, because these patients needed only one dose. (1)

One dose and you forget about yourself. This is all it takes.

Do not try to read the details.

Focus on the big picture. It shows something truly remarkable.

It is not the details of the specific trial that are important. It is the easiness with which someone might lose himself that is important. We are one… mushroom away from the connection with the cosmos. One… mushroom away from letting go all these things that look crucial to us as we speak.

So fragile for something (Ego) that looks so important…

Be careful.

Yes, we are tossed alone in the forest.

But the forest is full of mushrooms…

Your problems only exist because there is a solution.

Just don’t forget the salt!

🙂