When I was in my teens, I suffered from manic depression. The highs were very high. I loved them. But the lows were very low and I dreaded them. This mood problem created problems in my family-of-origin that persisted into my adulthood through mid-life until I began working with the sacred medicines, especially psilocybin.
One of my suicide attempts involved taking an overdose of acetaminophen and some other pills around the house. It was a failed attempt. I merely vomited for an afternoon, had some ear-ringing, and felt dizzy. When I woke up after this suicide attempt, I was disappointed to be alive. I took myself to school as soon as I felt good enough to drive so as to avoid my parents. At school, the spring plays were in full force so I stayed late until the end of one of the plays. Afterward, a group of girls asked me to go with them to a haunted house. This was lucky because my plan had been to take more pills that night and finish myself off.
I had never been to a haunted house.
Inside that haunt, a masked monster cornered me and I screamed and screamed. I screamed until my voice was hoarse and no more sound could come out of me. I got separated from the rest of the group which prolonged the experience. Contrary to what you might think, I came out of this haunted house feeling alive and okay. My depression had lifted and I felt like living again. It was a miracle.
It was such a miracle that I never forgot about it and one day, in my late twenties, I created a major haunted attraction in Nebraska with my husband based on the idea that people dump their trauma and leave it behind inside haunted houses. He and I used sound and light, rhythm, and theatrics to trigger people so that they could then act on their trauma, running and screaming to release it. This was before plant medicines like psilocybin were available in the United States. It was before I knew how to use magic mushrooms for depression. Now I know that while haunted houses are useful in releasing trauma, they aren’t nearly as powerful or as elegant as something like psilocybin for treating depression.
How Psilocybin Works to Heal Depression
A lot of people treat depression with psilocybin thinking that it works through the serotonergic system of the brain and indeed, that’s one way of looking at it, but psilocybin mushrooms are so much more than just a medicine that impacts serotonin levels in the brain. Psilocybin mushrooms are plant teachers that can counsel us from the inside of our bodies and minds to hit on core issues that cause depression without the need for extensive talk therapy.
Trauma is usually the ultimate root cause underlying treatment resistant depression. Psilocybin works because of its ability to release trauma that’s stored in the body. Trauma is stored in the autonomic nervous system, the part of our bodies that manages fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest states as well as the “freeze” response. When a traumatic experience occurs and we are not able to respond to it by running away or fighting against it in some way (perhaps because of social conventions or because the event occurred unexpectedly), our bodies do a “freeze” response. This “freeze” response literally causes the traumatic moment to become “frozen” in the autonomic nervous system. Any number of things might trigger the autonomic nervous system to play the trauma-reel, which can feel like a floating fight-or-flight anxiety or the “freeze” reaction which causes the entire body to go into a state of depression. Whether a given trigger causes anxiety (floating fight-or-flight) or a freeze response (depression) depends on several factors that are beyond the scope of this article. Nonetheless, once the autonomic nervous system has been hijacked and is in a state of imbalance due to trauma, it’s vital that the trauma be released or else all medications and all activity will only be geared at covering up the imbalance – the depression (which often coexists with anxiety).
Psilocybin for Treatment Resistant Depression
In conventional medicine, treatment resistant depression is only a depression that does not respond to conventional medicines like pharmaceuticals. Outside of conventional medicine, treatment resistant depression is simply “depression” that requires effort to resolve. That being said, often treatment resistant depression is not as treatment-resistant as people have been led to believe. Yet anyone with treatment resistant depression should definitely commit to 3 or more psilocybin trips before moving on to a different medicine. When we work with treatment resistant depression clients, we usually advise our clients to work with other plant medicines and nutrient supplements as well in addition to psilocybin.
Psilocybin for Suicidal Thoughts
When my husband John first began working with psilocybin, he was under duress due to a serious family issue, but he was not categorically suicidal. After he had taken a number of doses of psilocybin though, he began to interact with a part of himself that was always a bit suicidal. He had gotten so used to the voice that would tell him to kill himself that he’d learned to ignore it completely, so it was like he didn’t realize it was there and his psilocybin trips didn’t evolve into this material until he was ready for it. At that point in his psilocybin journey, he had suicidal thoughts daily throughout the day, but he didn’t feel like killing himself. The thoughts alone were distressing, but they weren’t powerful enough to push him to actually take action. It took him about 2 weeks of doing full dose psilocybin trips every other day to overcome this problem and release the underlying trauma that was causing it. That being said, if he had done those trips with a psilocybin sitter, he likely would not have had to go through such a long process of resolution.
If you have suicidal thoughts, it’s important for you to know your limits in terms of self-treatment at home. If you don’t have someone close to you to help you through the process of doing at home psilocybin trips, consider visiting us in Mexico to work with a variety of sacred medicines here with us intensively in person.
Having suicidal thoughts and depression at the same time is a dangerous mixture because it creates disillusionment, but it is possible to overcome this problem and in fact, it’s more likely that you’ll overcome it if you use some form of treatment outside of conventional medicine. Antidepressants, after all, are not designed to cure depression. Rather, they’re designed to treat depression for life and suppress depression symptoms while causing other symptoms of mental or physical illness. Psilocybin is a treatment that allows a person to delve into the root cause of depression and get rid of the depression once and for all.
Psilocybin for Anxiety and Depression
Psilocybin works just as well to treat anxiety as it does to treat depression. Both anxiety and depression are caused by trauma, which, as we described above, is an imbalance in the autonomic nervous system. If you have issues with both anxiety and depression, psilocybin can help by releasing trauma that’s being stored in the body.
Psilocybin for Postpartum Depression
Postpartum depression is debilitating during a time in your life when you’re supposed to be happy and full of energy (according to cultural rules). Often women develop postpartum depression in response to some form of trauma related to childbirth. Indeed, the technical definition of trauma is that it be something that causes a person to fear that their life is threatened. Most women experience the feeling like they’re dying when they transition to the second stage of labor. Even if labor was very smooth and easy, this sensation of dying can be experienced by the body as a trauma and it can lead to mental health issues like postpartum depression.
Psilocybin works very well to release the underlying trauma that is causing the post-partum depression. You can take psilocybin while breast-feeding by following the instructions below:
- Breastfeed your baby right before you take a dose of psilocybin.
- Note when you take the psilocybin dose.
- Wait for 4 hours until you breastfeed your baby again.
- If you have a newborn infant who needs to be fed before 4 hours have elapsed, pump your breasts and feed the baby with a bottle.
Taking psilocybin for postpartum depression allows mothers to connect with their babies, be present and alert while caring for their babies, and to heal from crippling forms of depression. When you have the courage to treat postpartum depression with an alternative medicine like psilocybin, you are not only healing yourself, but also your baby. Time and again, we see that depressed mothers have reactive infants who cry more than usual and who are in more distress than infants whose mothers are not depressed. When you calm your own autonomic nervous system, your baby’s autonomic nervous system will also calm down.
Of course, not every pregnancy goes as planned. I have lost babies and I know what kind of pain it can cause. If you suffer from postpartum depression and grief from losing an infant, psilocybin can help you navigate that grief and approach the idea of death and loss without the same level of fear that we have in our normal conscious state of mind. Losing a baby through miscarriage, stillbirth, or as a result of something that happens after the baby is born is one of the most painful things a person can experience, yet it is often downplayed and unacknowledged in the broader culture. Psilocybin therapy for grief and postpartum depression is extremely helpful to women and to men who have experienced this form of loss.
Summary: Psilocybin for Depression
If you struggle with depression, psilocybin is a medicine that is more than just an antidepressant. It is also a powerful counselor that can change your entire way of seeing the world. If you’re ready to overcome your depression