Feeling Overwhelmed Postpartum? How to Use Psilocybin for Postpartum Depression and Overwhelm
Throughout the world, 17.22% of women experience postpartum depression after childbirth. In some areas of the world, like Southern Africa, the rate of postpartum depression is as high as 39.96% though. So this is a problem that should be a higher priority for mental health studies than it currently is. Postpartum depression is often lumped in with regular, regular depression (Major Depressive Disorder / MDD) and it is treated in the exact same way as MDD by doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists. But maybe we could all do better than that. If you or a loved one is trying to get rid of postpartum depression without drugs, psilocybin mushroom therapy is worth considering.
First and foremost, it’s important to note that psilocybin works to heal the brain and body. It does not create a dependence and it’s not harmful to the body. There are different ways to work with psilocybin for postpartum depression, but the different methods don’t cause long-term dependence and they don’t harm the body or cause negative side effects like those caused by antidepressant drugs. The difference between psilocybin and antidepressants is easy to understand with just a little bit of learning. So let’s expand on how antidepressants are different from psilocybin for postpartum depression and overwhelm below:
How Psilocybin is Different from Antidepressant Drugs
First of all, psilocybin is a natural substance. This is important because antidepressant drugs are synthetic, lab-produced versions of natural substances that mimic some of the activity of natural substances. Unfortunately though, synthetic, lab-produced versions of natural substances that are produced by Big Pharma are always made to be just a little bit different from what our bodies produce. This tiny difference in terms of chemical structure guarantees two things 1) that the drug is patentable and therefore profitable to Big Pharma and 2) that the drug will work very well at first and then the body will later notice the difference (that it is synthetic) and it won’t work as well. The tiny difference between naturally produced substances in the body and the drugs produced by Big Pharma is that the synthetic drugs cause side effects, some of them serious. And the introduction of similar, but not identical substances that alter our biochemistry causes the body to go into a state of desperation wherein it can no longer rebalance and solve its own problems.
Psilocybin is natural. It is produced in nature to interact with the human brain and body in a predictable way. Psilocybin specifically works with the autonomic nervous system to release trauma and excess stress that can buildup in this system of the body to cause chronic pain, physical disease, and mental health issues. Psilocybin is particularly famous for its ability to help people with relationship issues, but it also releases trauma including the trauma that many women experience while giving birth.
Though many women don’t really know the definition of trauma and they don’t necessarily believe that their birth experience would warrant using a label so strong as “trauma”, in fact, giving birth is one of the most common forms of trauma that a person will ever experience in their lives. Most babies experience trauma when they’re being born. And most women experience trauma through the process giving birth. And even if your mind rejects the idea that your birth experience was traumatic, your body certainly felt many unpleasant things during the process. Our bodies are designed to be able to shake off this trauma, but we often fail to do it for one reason or another. In any case, once stress or trauma takes up residence in the autonomic nervous system, any number of health issues can take shape. Chronic pain, diseases like chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia (to name just two), or mental health issues like postpartum depression are common in response to trauma-overload or stress-overload.
Disrupted sleep plays a role in postpartum depression. Having a baby is a major life change involving trauma. It is through healthy sleep that we process a life change and trauma. But often, it simply isn’t possible to prioritize sleep after a new baby is born. Though the lack of sleep doesn’t last forever, when you’re the one with severely disrupted sleep or a severe lack of sleep, it can feel like forever. Psilocybin can help normalize sleep for women who are not able to sleep for 3 days straight to get their thoughts in order again.
While antidepressant drugs work to cover up symptoms of depression, psilocybin actually releases the trauma or stress underlying the postpartum depression and overwhelm. Psilocybin is sensitive and intelligent. It has its own consciousness. It recognizes the difference between postpartum depression and other forms of depression like MDD. Antidepressant drugs are not intelligent and they are not sensitive to our human needs. They were created to make money. For postpartum depression, psilocybin works not just on the mother’s depression, but also on her ability to make a loving connection with the baby. Psilocybin, after all, is one of the most important sacred medicines for relationship issues, including issues between mother and child.
Lydian’s Experience with Psilocybin for Postpartum Depression
My daughter, Lydian, had severe postpartum depression. Her husband had left her when she was 7 months pregnant to return to his home country which was in the midst of a civil war. She was ill at the time with a kidney infection. The baby was healthy, but she had a lot of pain during the pregnancy and her husband leaving didn’t help matters any.
When the baby was born, Lydian was severely depressed. She had a lot of fear about her husband dying or not returning (he later returned home to her and the baby and became an excellent husband and father) and she also struggled with D-MER (Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex), a type of mental health issue that specifically occurs around breastfeeding and that involves a sense of impending doom or extreme anxiety just before milk ejection. She really wanted to breastfeed her baby so she soldiered on despite the D-MER, but she was very distant at times. I used to say that it was like she’d “gone to the Far-Away-Place”. I worried about her. I was also depressed and traumatized, and I wasn’t sure what to do.
Breastfeeding created an extra challenge for Lydian. What could I do for her to help her with depression while breastfeeding? It took a while for her to define the D-MER problem and find a name for it. Once she knew what it was and why it was happening, it gave her a sense of control. But she was still depressed and she often “felt like her heart was going to throw up”, (her words). I couldn’t give her the herbal antidepressant, Mucuna pruriens, because it would cause her milk to dry up.
Month 1-3: Craniosacral Therapy for Postpartum Depression and Feeling Overwhelmed
About a month after the baby was born, we started to do craniosacral therapy appointments to release trauma. A husband-wife team, Josefina and Leandro came to our facility in Mexico to work with both Lydian and the baby. They were life-savers in those earliest months after the baby was born. We did weekly appointments with them until the baby was 3 months old.
I had some psilocybin mushrooms in storage from a trip to Oaxaca several years prior. They were no longer full-strength, but when the baby was 3 months old, I suggested that Lydian begin working with the psilocybin to see if it helped her.
On her first trip, which was not psychedelic and very light, she cried. That was a major breakthrough for her because during pregnancy, crying was physically not possible or at least not palatable. Every time she cried during pregnancy, she’d also vomit. So, on this first trip, she merely cried.
Lydian pumped her breasts 3 hours after taking the psilocybin. John and I gave the baby milk from a bottle 2 hours into the psilocybin trip (which usually lasted 3-4 hours), and then Lydian would breastfeed again right away after her trip ended. So she continued doing full psilocybin trips while continuing to breastfeed with support from John and me.
We had a limited supply of the psilocybin, so she did another trip every 4-7 days until we could get a new supply. We didn’t try microdosing because we didn’t have enough of a supply at that time.
Psilocybin has a very short half-life of 163 minutes, just a little less than 3 hours. This means that by 3 hours into her trip, the amount of psilocybin in Lydian’s breastmilk was minimal. As long as she pumped before feeding the baby, the baby was exposed to only a very tiny amount of psilocybin which we all felt was probably good because the birth had been difficult. We felt like this very tiny amount of psilocybin for the baby through the breastmilk would probably be beneficial.
The results from that first psilocybin trip was so incredible that we all decided to continue having Lydian do psilocybin for postpartum depression by taking the mushrooms as a full dose every 4 to 7 days. When she came back from that first trip, she was smiling, something we hadn’t seen in a long time. She was able to talk about the issues she was confronting with logic, but also with emotion. And, most importantly, it was like she could see the baby again. She looked her into the baby’s eyes and she was able to make that connection that she’d been struggling with for so many months. The baby always slept better and was much calmer on the nights after Lydian’s trips.
The first 4 trips that Lydian did were with mushrooms that were not at full-strength, but despite this, she made great strides in terms of her emotional state. She would come back from her trips and talk about what she’d “gotten” – what she’d learned, remembered, experienced, etc. – with John and me. As soon as we were able to get a bigger supply of psilocybin mushrooms, John and I started taking them too. Then we would take turns doing full trips. Lydian’s relationship and communication with her husband turned a corner around this time. As a direct result, he decided to come home and work with the psilocybin mushrooms to heal his own trauma too.
Psilocybin for Postpartum Depression
Not all pregnancies end well. I had a stillborn baby and 2 miscarriages when I was a young woman. One of the major themes that I worked through on my psilocybin trips had to do with those babies that I’d lost. It was difficult material and I had stored it deep inside of myself for lack of proper resources to be able to access it and then actually deal with it in a productive way.
I recalled a time right after our stillborn baby was born, when I was desperate to find anything that would help relieve the pain I was feeling. I looked for support groups for parents of stillborn babies but there were none that I could find where we were living at that time. I became sick. A doctor diagnosed me with fibromyalgia. I couldn’t pull the sheets up on my bed at night because my joints hurt. It was a scary time for me and for John, but I did eventually get through it and in fact, finding ways to overcome serious health issues became my life’s work.
But “getting through it” is not the same thing as “integrating trauma” and “finding meaning in it”. I felt angry for a long time. I felt jealous of other women who had successful pregnancies. I felt cheated by god and by life. And I behaved in strange ways at times and in response to triggers because I didn’t ever fully process what I’d been through.
John, of course, experienced similar pain as a result of our stillborn baby and our relationship suffered beneath the weight of it. So, when he and I began working with psilocybin mushrooms, all of these old wounds presented themselves for healing. A wound like this that doesn’t heal is something you carry with you for decades sometimes, if you can’t get ahold of something like psilocybin to help you process it. Women who have experienced a situation after the birth of a baby that’s challenged them deeply may benefit a great deal from doing full trips with psilocybin.
I tell this story about our stillborn baby and miscarriages, because I’m acutely aware of the fact that not every woman develops postpartum depression despite a happy ending. Some women develop postpartum depression because of something that feels very off-course in their lives. The child-bearing years are challenging – some of the most challenging years in a person’s life.
Though Lydian’s husband did return home safely to her, she spent 7 months after the birth of the baby in a state of No-Knowing about whether her husband would come home or not. The psilocybin helped us bring that relationship between her and her husband into focus to balance our own reactions to what was going on and essentially create space within which a happy, positive trajectory could take shape. It was up to Lydian’s husband to take the steps to return to her, which he did, and then to do work on himself to overcome his own issues, which he also did, but not every woman’s husband will make the same choices. Nonetheless, psilocybin can help create space for positive endings and life trajectories that are positive, and hard-to-imagine when you’re overwhelmed by something that seems insurmountable. After a woman has been crushed under difficult circumstances, it can be almost impossible to put the pieces back together without something like psilocybin.
Psilocybin can’t fix everything that goes wrong around the birth of a new child, but what it can do, is help the heart heal and help the person who’s working with the mushrooms get back onto their soul’s path. When you’re on “the right path”, some really miraculous things can happen that aren’t on your radar when you’re depressed all the time or in a state of being “crushed”. Psilocybin can help you put your pieces back together again.
Psilocybin Macrodosing: How to Use Psilocybin for Postpartum Depression
Macrodosing with psilocybin should always be done with Intention! We use a capital “I” for Intention to bring attention to this crucial detail because we’re talking about steering your course and making sure that you acknowledge that mushrooms are living beings that are going to communicate with you and counsel you from the inside.
We’ve worked with women who did not use Intention prior to doing full mushroom trips or who were unwilling to square up with themselves and their own emotional content and toxic thoughts prior to taking psilocybin. The results are less striking when you aren’t willing to confront yourself fully. Psilocybin will not do all of the work for you. You have to be willing to change your mind and go into your trip with an openness to change what needs to change in order for you to feel good again.
It’s not uncommon for women to experience a bottleneck of material at the beginning of their psilocybin journey. If you have lifestyle changes that need to be made, for example, you may get stuck on this detail. We’ve worked with people with fast-food addictions who have had trouble getting into their core material even with Intention because of how fast-food hijacks the emotional self. Click here to read more about how to overcome a fast-food addiction.
Everybody has a different experience with psilocybin and in fact, every psilocybin trip is different. Find a quality product with some predictability in terms of dosing if possible. Click here to buy psilocybin online for macrodosing and full-trips.
Psilocybin: Intention
Intention is where you decide what you want to work on during a mushroom trip. You need to create an Intention for yourself because without an Intention, after the trip you won’t know if you’ve accomplished something or not. This is not to say that mushroom trips end with trite, barely-noticeable results…nope…that’s not what I’m saying. Rather, what I’m trying to say is that if you have something that pains you deeply, perhaps something about your relationship with your baby or your spouse or some hateful thought you have toward yourself or someone that you actually don’t hate or don’t want to hate, it’s important to zero-in on those things as your Intention. It’s helpful because later, you’ll be able to look back on where you started in terms of your thinking and your feelings – the Intention – and recognize that you got somewhere on your trip and that you likely ended in a place that you literally couldn’t even imagine when you started the trip.
How to Do a Psilocybin Full Trip for Postpartum Depression
Psilocybin dosing guidelines for full-trips will depend on the psilocybin product that you’re using. If you have severe postpartum depression, plan to do psilocybin microdosing between full trips of psilocybin. It can take 10-30 full trips with psilocybin, depending on your situation to get to a point where you don’t need the psilocybin anymore. Click here to buy psilocybin online for macrodosing and full-trips.
If you’re doing psilocybin macrodosing, you need to have someone you can talk to about your trips after you’ve completed them. Talking through your experience is part of the integration process. Click here to learn more about our integration psychotherapy services.
If you can’t afford to do psilocybin integrative psychotherapy, at least use a journal and write about your Intention before and then again after (or even sometimes during) your trip. This is not as powerful as talking to someone, but if you’re going to work with psilocybin alone, you need to track your progress so that you can move the right-brain “felt sense” experience into a left-brain linguistic narrative.
Microdosing between trips can help you continue to “stay close to the shroom world” while still maintaining your ability to function in your relationships. Typically, people take 1/20th to 1/8th of a full dose of mushrooms for microdosing. Take the microdose daily or even twice daily until you get through the first few psilocybin trips. When you’re ready, you’ll begin to forget to take the microdose at times or you’ll simply wish to not be “in the shroom world” once you’ve healed. Be aware though, that it can take a year or longer to work up to a point where you feel comfortable NOT taking a microdose or NOT doing full trips with psilocybin anymore depending on what you’re trying to integrate or work with. Click here to buy psilocybin for microdosing online.
I Get Angry with My Baby: Psilocybin for Postpartum Overwhelm
Many women don’t have time to stop and really introspect about what’s troubling them postpartum. Life is busy after a baby is born. Feeling overwhelmed is common during this stage of things, but when postpartum depression and overwhelm are combined, it can be hard to get a grip. This is where psilocybin microdosing can be helpful. Click here to buy psilocybin for microdosing online.
Psilocybin microdosing is an alternative way to work with psilocybin for postpartum depression and overwhelm. Microdosing allows women to continue to function normally in their daily lives and it also gives women the opportunity to dip their toe into the world of psilocybin before attempting a full-trip. If you work, you can microdose with psilocybin and still function. If you drive heavy machinery for a living, take the lower dose (1/20th of a full dose) at first until you know how it makes you feel.
I’ve worked intensively with psilocybin so I know how it feels to microdose and also how it feels to do full trips. When I notice that I feel angry and I can’t resolve my own anger, taking a microdose can help me think the anger through to a point of resolution. The same is true for depression although if the depression is deep enough and dark enough and persistent enough, I do a full trip with psilocybin to get to the bottom of it.
If you’re not ready to do a full psychedelic trip with mushrooms for postpartum depression and overwhelm, consider instead doing microdosing with psilocybin and 1 session per day with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR (see below). as a starting procedure to release trauma and begin healing. At some point you may feel comfortable enough with the mushrooms to take ¼ of a dose or even ½ dose and work your way up to a full dose in this manner. Just be sure that you have someone trustworthy to babysit if you have children under your care once you get up to ¼ of a dose or higher. Also note that taking a ¼ to ½ dose can help you feel some of the same effects that you’d feel while taking a full dose of psilocybin, you may feel these effects without experiencing the insights that happen on a full trip. I know from my own experience that taking ½ the dose for a full trip of psilocybin can make me feel and release some powerful negative emotions, but I can’t “hear” what the mushrooms have to say about it. So I don’t get the same level of insight from taking ¼ to ½ dose of mushrooms that I would get from taking a full dose. Nonetheless though, it can be helpful to take a ¼ to ½ dose if you feel fear about taking a full dose of mushrooms.
Psilocybin Peaking
When you do a full trip with psilocybin, the peak often occurs around 2 hours after you take the mushrooms. Peaking is often a turning point for women when they begin to get some insight into the initial part of the trip. During the initial part of the trip (which often begins 30-60 minutes after taking the mushrooms), you may feel awful feelings. If you feel awful feelings, try to name them so that they can pass from the “felt sense” of the right brain into the linguistic left brain for release. Feeling awful feelings on a psilocybin trip is like lancing a wound. It gets you one step closer to healing postpartum depression.
Psilocybin Microdosing: How to Microdose Psilocybin for Postpartum Overwhelm
The proper psilocybin dose for microdosing is usually 1/20th to 1/8th of a full psychedelic dose of mushrooms. You can get a macrodosing product or full shrooms and use them for microdosing, just be sure you have an idea of the proper dose for a full trip. If you don’t know the proper dose for a full trip, start with a very small amount and see how it affects you. Increase the dose slowly over time and observe the effects to find a dose that works for you.
A lot of microdosing sites recommend that people take days off from microdosing, but this isn’t always necessary or advisable. In some cases, it may even be necessary and beneficial to take psilocybin microdoses every day or even twice daily, especially if you’re just beginning to work with the mushrooms for postpartum depression and overwhelm.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR for Postpartum Depression
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR is an eye-movement exercise that you do with Intention to locate traumatic memories or emotions that are stored in your autonomic nervous system. EMDR mimics the movements that the eyes make during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep cycles. REM sleep cycles help us release trauma and process stress so that we can move on during the day, but if you aren’t getting enough rest or if your thoughts are regularly being interrupted during the day (which is normal for parents with small children), this natural mechanism (eye movements) through which we process stress can be hijacked.
EMDR is something that you can use by itself, with psilocybin microdosing, or even as part of a protocol of trauma release when you are between psilocybin trips. EMDR helps the right hemisphere of the brain talk to the left hemisphere of the brain so that they can communicate clearly with each other. EMDR also releases pressure on the cranial nerves which connect the autonomic nervous system to the brain. So while EMDR is safe, easy, and gentle, it’s still powerful and it does many things all at the same time. We always recommend that people who do psilocybin microdosing also work twice weekly (or daily, if necessary) with EMDR to release trauma and process stress. Women who are awakened frequently by a small infant or who are interrupted regularly during theta or alpha-brain wave states throughout the day can also benefit from using EMDR for a better mood.
You can click here to do a free trial of EMDR online. EMDR is easy to do and you don’t have to be taking psilocybin to benefit from it. On the other hand though, if you are working with psilocybin, EMDR will complement the effects. Our experience is that often, after several sessions of EMDR work, women feel more confident that they can handle working with psilocybin.
Summary
Though many women feel like taking psilocybin mushrooms for postpartum depression is irresponsible, in fact, in many societies, it is irresponsible not to submit to the psilocybin mushroom to resolve serious issues like postpartum depression. If a child is suffering because a mother is not willing to confront herself using psilocybin mushrooms, entire communities suffer. The belief that psilocybin mushrooms are bad or that they should be grouped with street drugs and alcohol is something that we’ve been taught to believe by Big Pharma. Though Big Pharma has no issue with the idea of women taking antidepressants for the rest of their lives and though society has accepted this possibility as the status quo does not mean that it’s “correct” or good for people. And the flip side of this argument, that using psilocybin to overcome postpartum depression is bad or “incorrect”, is similarly suspect. A number of very respected people today believe that our logical brain – the frontal lobe – developed because our distant ancestors consumed these mushrooms.
Contact us at info@medicinassagradas.com if you’d like to visit our facility in Mexico to work with sacred medicines.
Resources:
Wang, Z. et al. (2021). Mapping global prevalence of depression among postpartum women. Retrieved August 23, 2024 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8528847/
Jairaj, C. and Rucker, J. J. (2022). Postpartum depression: A role for psychedelics? Retrieved August 23, 2024 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9354062/
Grinspoon, P. J.(2024). How Long Do Shrooms Stay in Your System: A Look at Psilocybin Half-Life. Retrieved August 23, 2024 from https://addictionresource.com/drugs/shrooms/how-long-stays-in-system/
Pederson, M. B. (2019). I Ate Psychedelic Mushrooms to Treat My Postpartum Depression. Retrieved August 23, 2024 from https://www.vice.com/en/article/microdosing-magic-mushrooms-postpartum-depression-treatment/