What fascinates me about the COVID-19 pandemic is how it has illuminated humanity’s ability to cope with adversity compared to the environment. Humanity has been living under the grip of this pandemic for nearly a year, merely a fraction of the time we have been harming the environment and stripping it of its resources, the biggest adversity of our time. Yet, nature has prevailed.
Mushrooms wear many caps. From superfood Chaga that aid in preventing memory loss, to ego altering psilocybin that will soon be used clinically in Oregon to treat depression and anxiety in patients — from mycelium that makes up 30% of the ground we walk on and contribute to climate regulation, to fungi that grow in the most destitute of places.
Mushrooms are multifaceted. Could they be tiny superheroes here to help humanity coexist with nature and learn from its resilience, by first teaching us to coexist with ourselves?
Century-old superhero’s
For centuries Asian countries have been utilizing the healing benefits of mushrooms. Teas, powder, food. Mushrooms have been used medicinally (turkey tail and reishi to name a few) as well as being an integral part of the Asian diet.
The west has recently taken to the use of mushrooms for their healing properties, labeling them a superfood. Heck, you can even make your own mushroom coffee at home, (I am debating whether to try Four Sigmatic, I'm skeptical of mushroom coffee because I like my coffee too much in bean form).
For as long as edible mushrooms have been used in cuisine and medicinally, there has been one that has stood out among the crowd. This type of mushroom has a more mysterious “underground” history of being used to alter one's state of consciousness; enter, psilocybin.
Psycheladics aid in depression, addiction, and anxiety
At least 18.1% of the population in the united states is affected by some form of anxiety, myself included. With depression affecting 6.7% of adults and addiction taking the cake by affecting 21 million Americans each year, most people can confidently say that themselves or someone they know has been affected by a form of these mental health concerns.
What do most of these mental health diagnoses have in common? They take you out of the present moment and leave you in a state Buddhists call “the hungry ghost syndrome”; worrying about the future, or feeling depressed about the past.
The use of psilocybin became popular in the U.S. during the ’60s, most associated with the anti-war and free love movement. Taking magic mushrooms unlocks brain states only experienced when we dream, thus allowing us to “be here now”. Think about it, have you ever had a dream you didn't feel completely and totally present in?
But the truth is these tiny fungi were not just being used by “dead heads” at concerts searching for mindfulness, they were being experimented with by Harvard professors as a way to study the effects of the entheogenic hallucinogen on human consciousness.
These professors were the well known Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), the founders of the Harvard Psilocybin Project (which they were both later banned from academia for due to a failure of establishing research guidelines and lack of scientific proof), and the pioneers of the research on psilocybin that would decades later enable it to be legalized as a therapeutic option to treating anxiety, depression, and addiction.
In 2016 a double-blind and placebo-controlled study was conducted on 29 patients with cancer-related depression and anxiety. These patients were given single-dose psilocybin (0.3 mg/kg). The results were an immediate and sustained improvement in anxiety, depression, and overall spiritual well-being. This begs the question, why is the use of psilocybin therapy not legal in the united states if it could help the millions of Americans who suffer from anxiety and depression?
In 2020 a bill passed that legalizes the use of therapeutic psilocybin in Oregon. This means that the Oregon Health Authority is creating a state-licensed psilocybin-assisted therapy program over the next few years that will be available to patients who fit the access criteria. I can practically hear Dass and Leary saying “I told you so”.
Regardless if therapeutic psychedelics are a fad that will fade away in the western world or these little superheroes will stick around to teach humanity to be as resilient as nature, the use of psilocybin, or Fantastic Fungi as Paul Stamets fungi guru calls them in his new documentary, will always be an integral part of expanding human consciousness, as it has been for centuries.
