If you’re hoping to find out whether psilocybin for depression is an effective therapy for you, then read this article. There has been a recent study on psilocybin and depression at the University of Imperial College in London, and in this article, we’ll share those incredible findings.
Knowledge about the medicinal qualities of mushrooms is gaining momentum in Western society – finally catching up with ancient healing traditions such as Ayurvedic and Chinese Medicine.
Supplementing with mushrooms such as Reishi or Lion’s Mane is becoming increasingly popular and can provide various physical, mental and emotional health benefits.
Now the incredible potential of magic mushrooms also known as “shrooms” for depression and anxiety are making its way into the collective consciousness, as incredible medicines.
Will conventional, pharmaceutical medications one day be replaced by the conscious use of mushrooms for depression and anxiety?
Read this article to discover the very real possibility.
The Current Solution to Depression
Depression and anxiety are true epidemics worldwide and hundreds of millions are suffering. The most common solution proposed by doctors, is for patients to start taking a pharmaceutical medication such as Prozac, Zoloft or Lexapro.
These can help by altering the brain chemistry – most notably the serotonin receptions – in an artificial way.
The problem is that while they’ve helped many people to a certain degree, they don’t get to the roots of the problem.
Often people become dependent and experience adverse effects over time.
Eventually trying to get off the medication can cause intense withdrawal symptoms such as worsening depression, anxiety, insomnia, suicidal tendencies and more.
While many people no longer feel depressed while taking these medications, they often simultaneously report not feeling truly alive either. They still feel disconnected and disassociated.
These pharmaceutical medications work like a band aid by suppressing the symptoms, rather than truly untangling and resolving the psychological knots.
Often there are unprocessed emotions at play, as well as feeling unfulfilled and disconnected from our hearts, our true values and a greater purpose in life.
To reach our subconscious and to find true resolution, scientific research is showing that the conscious use of psilocybin shrooms for depression is one of the most profound ways to truly heal.
Jungian Psychology and the Hidden Roots of Depression
The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung came up with the term ‘the shadow’ which points to the unconscious parts of our psyche, which we often ignore or suppress.
These include repressed emotions, desires, beliefs and ideas which are often deemed unacceptable or at odds with our upbringing, our culture and/or society.
We often suppress our truth from childhood and take on various forms of harmful conditioning through parents, society, media, education and more.
We’ve never been taught how to fully embody and express our own unique individuality, for example. Neither have been taught how to consciously process and work with our emotions, especially those deemed as ‘undesirable’ such as anger, sadness, shame and guilt.
Especially men have been conditioned to suppress their true feelings.
To never cry because it “shows weakness”, for example.
As a result, we’re living in a disassociated world where a large majority of people carry all kinds of suppressed emotions in their ‘shadow’ or subconscious mind.
This betrayal to our heart and soul inevitably manifests itself in dissatisfaction and disassociation, and eventually for many, in depression or anxiety.
Healing Childhood Wounds
with Psilocybin Mushrooms for Depression
Research shows that psilocybin shrooms for depression, when used in a conscious and sared way, show extraordinary potential for true healing to occur.
They can help us getting to the actual roots, rather than suppressing the symptoms which most pharmaceutical medications do.
“And they [the patients who participated in the study] had many different ways of avoiding their pain: self-medicating through food, through television, through painkillers, and often through antidepressants which didn’t really work on the root causes of their suffering. They just numbed the worst of the pain. But they also numbed other emotions too. And so many of the patients described feeling numb and unable to feel”, shares clinical psychologist Rosalind Watts, PhD, of the Imperial College in London, in the following TED Talk.
Suppression is a normal coping mechanism when we’re young. Everyone carries unprocessed emotions from childhood.
When these inevitably come to the surface at one point, it’s very difficult to recognize where they’re coming from.
Depression and Coping Mechanisms
We often think there’s something “wrong” when we feel “bad” and then turn to unconscious coping mechanisms such as food and television, as Dr. Watts shares in her TED Talk.
Unless we find the courage and right support to truly feel, we’ll always be running like hamsters in a hamster wheel and will numb ourselves even further.
“Many of them had described experiencing trauma in their lives, often in early childhood, and they’d never been able to process it or think about what had happened. And in their psilocybin experiences they were able to process these things. John had suffered from abuse in childhood and in his psilocybin dose he saw a great big cask. He knew that in that cask, was all of his pain and shame that he’d never been able to think or talk about. And he grappled with it, it was extremely painful, but in the course of the session he was able to unlock that box and accept his past. And it was so powerful. Many of them cried for the first time in years, this cathartic experience of accepting emotion and just being able to live it. We saw in six hours what you would often see in six years of therapy.”, Dr. Watts shares.
It’s very difficult to access our subconscious minds on our own. Talk therapy can help but is insufficient by itself because it only penetrates the mental realm.
When talk therapy or coaching would be combined with psilocybin shrooms for depression, however, deep psychological and emotional layers are uncovered for true resolution and deep peace to be found.
Mushrooms and Depression: Resetting Key Brain Circuits
Mushrooms not only help us in healing our traumas and emotional blockages, they can also heal and rewire the brain chemistry.
This is all done naturally, of course, in comparison to pharmaceutical medications which change the brain chemistry in an artificial and unnatural way.
In this study at the University of Imperial College of London, a group of 20 people with treatment-resistant depression had tried many types of antidepressants and regular talk therapy which never worked. On average, they were suffering from severe depression for 18 years.
After their first psilocybin treatment, none of them felt the need to seek out pharmaceutical medications within 5 weeks, and the effects on the brain were remarkable.
Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Visualisation of the brain connections in a person who has taken psilocybin (right) versus someone who was given a placebo (left).
“Several of our patients described feeling ‘reset’ after the treatment and often used computer analogies.”, said Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, Head of Psychedelic Research at Imperial, as described in this article.
“For example, one said he felt like his brain had been ‘defragged’ like a computer hard drive, and another said he felt ‘rebooted’. Psilocybin may be giving these individuals the temporary ‘kick start’ they need to break out of their depressive states and these imaging results do tentatively support a ‘reset’ analogy. Similar brain effects to these have been seen with electroconvulsive therapy. […] “Through collecting these imaging data we have been able to provide a window into the after effects of psilocybin treatment in the brains of patients with chronic depression. Based on what we know from various brain imaging studies with psychedelics, as well as taking heed of what people say about their experiences, it may be that psychedelics do indeed ‘reset’ the brain networks associated with depression, effectively enabling them to be lifted from the depressed state.”
Psilocybin Shrooms and Depression:
A New Paradigm of Healing
The growing research and promising results for healing of depression by shrooms and other natural plant medicines, is truly part of a greater and completely new paradigm of holistic healing.
No longer will illnesses be viewed as just an “error” in a “biological machine”.
Unprocessed emotions can often manifest themselves in physical ailments as well, since everything is interconnected. More and more research over the years will prove this.
For true transformation and the deepest healing, all aspects must be considered – mind, body, emotions and spirit.
To still function perfectly fine and being able commit to all your responsibilities, microdosing with psilocybin for depression, anxiety and other struggles is the perfect alternative to taking larger doses.
It can also help enormously with increased focus, increased levels of creativity and feeling less stressed overall. The benefits are truly enormous.
If you’d like to learn more and see whether you’re eligible for microdosing with psilocybin, feel welcome to apply here.
We’d love to possibly be of service to you, to assist you with the deepest healing and inner transformation.
Sources:
- Magic mushrooms’ may ‘reset’ the brains of depressed patients, study suggests
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171013091018.htm
- Can Magic Mushrooms Unlock Depression? | Rosalind Watts | TEDxOxford