Individuals wanting to participate in a clinical trial should talk to their health care provider. If you have any mental health issues, magic mushrooms can make them worse. "The trials we run at King's use synthetic psilocybin compounds and are conducted in controlled therapeutic environments with trained professionals on hand to minimise the impact of adverse events," he says. "In recreational settings, like any drug sourced through non-official means, the user does not necessarily know what they are taking and can easily find themselves in trouble if they experience unexpectedly severe side effects." Frank, the anti-drug advisory service, warns magic mushrooms can make you feel "paranoid, anxious, overwhelmed" and can cause dizziness, sickness and stomach pains, while the NHS lists them among the drugs that can trigger psychotic episodes.

Psilocybin mushrooms were researched from the 1950s to the 1970s by a few prominent academics, including Harvard University’s Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. The men publicized the fungi’s consciousness-expanding properties, which are somewhat similar to synthetic drugs such as Deadhead LSD. Widespread recreational use of these mushrooms, however, prompted state and federal governments to strictly control them in many places. Archeological evidence suggests that humans have been using "shrooms," also called magic mushrooms, for ceremonial and medicinal purposes for thousands of years. Listening to music and surrounded by candles and flowers in the decorated clinical room, Michael anxiously waited for the drug to kick in.

She hopes it opens the door for non-Indigenous Mexicans to learn from Indigenous practices. Small-scale studies on depression and alcoholism have shown that psilocybin may be useful for treating these diseases as well. A 2012 smoking cessation study by Michael Bogenschutz from the University of New Mexico, published in the journal Drug Testing and Analysis, found that psilocybin and counseling had much better success rates than counseling alone. Thirty-nine patients in the experimental group were given psilocybin and then underwent traditional talk therapy for smoking cessation. This mechanism of using psilocybin to enhance the effectiveness of traditional therapy could be useful in treating a wide variety of ailments that are currently primarily treated with talk therapy and counseling. Class A substances are supposed to only include drugs that pose a risk of serious harm to the user or public outside of a medical setting, but there’s no evidence that psilocybin fits those criteria.

If you choose to use magic mushrooms, having the facts may help you make safer decisions in the process. If you’re concerned that you / someone you know is struggling with substance use, or you have more questions, you can search Resources Around Me for support services nearest you or connect with Kids Help Phone. If you decide to use substances, you can learn how to take actions to put your safety first and reduce the risk of harm.

In 2023, Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the agency responsible for regulating medicines, decided to allow authorised psychiatrists to prescribe some psychedelics for certain mental health conditions. The TGA permits the prescribing of MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. Psilocybin, a serotonergic hallucinogen, is the main psychoactive substance found in psychedelic mushrooms, and alters perception and mood, and produces hallucinations in individuals who ingest them (Nichols, 2016).

Openness is a scientifically defined and quantified factor of human personality that measures capacity for intellectual curiosity and creativity. According to MacLean, this is one of the first pieces of evidence that adult personality can be altered, as personality is usually considered to be set by high school. For our study, we are looking at anxiety, depression, quality of life, and existential distress and demoralization in people with late-stage cancer. The preliminary data that we have right now are very encouraging — they show that a therapeutic process, using psilocybin as a component of that process, can have a profound improvement in symptoms of depression, anxiety, and existential distress. It does look like psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy can improve those things. However, for many of these trials, the sample sizes are very small.