Taking silly selfies with a beloved friend, laughing as we posed for the camera, my eyes sparkling, my smile bright, I felt a jolt of recognition.
There you are, I thought; I’ve missed you. Because prior to that, during a very long year, I had been suffering from a terrible depression, one in which I didn’t recognise myself at all.
It had lifted, without my even realising, thanks to a fortuitous meeting with a new neighbour who is a big fan of two things: The Grateful Dead, and magic mushrooms.
My neighbour was not a recreational drug user. Far from it. She suffered anxiety and depression for years, both of which had been alleviated by taking mushrooms.
In fact, she said her depression had gone. She offered to do a ‘journey’ with me to see if it might do something for me. Taken like this, magic mushrooms aren’t offering a party buzz, but are instead treated as ‘plant medicine’, to change the neurophysiology of your brain.
Jane Green suffered from a terrible depression which she says was lifted by a meeting with a new neighbour who was a fan of magic mushrooms
The active ingredient in mushrooms that cause hallucinations — psilocybin — has now been proven to rewire your brain, improving connections and getting rid of depression.
That’s the main difference between psychedelic mushrooms and regular mushrooms. According to experts, psychedelic mushrooms evolved to contain psilocybin as a way to fend off insects. Famously, in his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry says taking magic mushrooms helped him deal with the trauma of his mother’s death.
It was during my own ‘annus horribilis’ that I experienced the blackest of depressions. It was a year that held a series of unfortunate events, including losing my best friend, and enduring two house moves. Oh, and I was suddenly an empty nester.
Those that know me know I am the very antithesis of a helicopter parent. I have raised four children and two step-children who are independent, capable and entirely self-sufficient.
They had to be, largely because I was not nearly present enough (which I realise, as I write this article, might have been partly down to depression) and I couldn’t wait to be an empty nester. No more cooking dinner every night! No more hallways filled with backpacks, shoes and coats! No more being forced to listen to wailing on a guitar every night for hours!
But in fact, when all the children left, with myself and my husband of 16 years then downsizing shortly after, I was completely lost.
It wasn’t just that I missed the house being full or the conversations around the dinner table, but that my role as a mother was now, if not over, then drastically changed — and like so many women in this position, I had no idea how to redefine myself.
Work didn’t fill the void as I had always presumed it would. Instead, depression did, which, coupled with the menopause, dragged on for far longer than ever before. Instead of the usual few weeks, this felt endless.
In 2020, my husband and I decided to move from the US, where I had my family, back to London, where I’m from. I had a book to research, and wanted to spend more time with my ageing parents and beloved brother, niece and nephew.
Four short months later, we left London and moved back to the States, the worsening pandemic making us very aware of needing to be close to our children, then aged 25, 22, 20, 19 and 18-year-old twins.
But once home, we had no home. We had rented our house out, so spent the next few months camping out at people’s houses, in guest rooms and occasionally a sofa.
When we finally moved back into our home — a house I loved like no other — we made the perhaps impulsive decision to sell it. Practically, it was probably the right thing to do — the house was old, on the water and the water was getting closer. Everything I read about climate change indicated that the smart thing to do was to sell.
Finally, I’d brought my best friend into a work project; it was a disaster. So much so that I was abandoned without so much as a goodbye, which left me an emotional wreck.
There seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel. I honestly didn’t want to carry on. It wasn’t that I was thinking of taking my own life, but rather that I hoped an act of God would take it for me. I hoped it would be painless, and quick.
I was 23 when I was first diagnosed with clinical depression, which didn’t much surprise me, given that there are several family members affected similarly.
After a series of wrong medications, I eventually started on an SSRI anti-depressant, of which include Celexa (citalopram) and Prozac, which increased the level of the chemical serotonin in the brain. That seemed to work; it wasn’t that the dark times didn’t hit, but when they did the lows weren’t quite as low, and it was rare for it to impact my life too much.
Until, that is, the menopause hit full force in my early 50s, deepening the depression and the associated lack of self-worth.
Add in being ghosted by my best friend, and every last shred of confidence I had disappeared. When I wasn’t in bed, which was much of the time, I felt like a shadow of my former self.
I don’t tend to talk about the hard stuff, and certainly not when I’m in the middle of it. My poor husband didn’t know what to do and I had never felt so alone. So before my random conversation with a friendly neighbour about psychedelic drugs and their power to heal depression, I was ready to give up.
Now, at this stage you may well be thinking that the idea of mushrooms being some sort of magic mental health remedy is nothing but a hallucination. Another friend told me he’d taken them in his teens and was frankly terrified by them.
Yet the effects have been explored by medical professionals. In a recent study by Oxford researchers, 200 people with treatment-resistant depression were treated with psilocybin. Those given the highest dose not only saw the severity of their depression shrink, but they were also most likely to go into remission.
The active ingredient in mushrooms that cause hallucinations — psilocybin — has now been proven to rewire your brain, improving connections and getting rid of depression
Scientists at the University of California in San Francisco have also recently found psilocybin promotes greater connections in the brains of depressed people, freeing them up from long-held patterns of rumination and excessive self-focus.
Granted, my focus was mostly on bed. How to not get out of it, ever. It was clear that the anti-depressants were no longer working, and something had to be done.
So I accepted the invitation to undertake a journey — both literal and metaphorical — with magic mushrooms. My neighbour and I took a flight to Colorado, where the personal use of psilocybin has been legal for the past ten months.
In a hotel room, we sat opposite each other, curtains closed so it was dark, and spoke our intentions out loud, while I tried not to feel faintly ridiculous. Hers was simply to have a positive experience; mine, to get my mojo back. She had ordered the mushrooms, who knows where from (finding them is of course the hard part, even in a state like Colorado, which has made it legal to ‘share’ but not ‘sell’ them’).
We poured the powdered mushroom into mugs with chai tea bags, adding hot water, ginger to settle the stomach, and honey for taste.
After drinking, we lay on a large day bed, the lights turned down low, and music by an artist called East Forest playing loudly. ‘Journey music’, such as that composed by Mr Forest, is specifically composed to take you places on a psychedelic journey. I was intrigued, and nervous, in equal measure. I hoped I wouldn’t throw up.
Researchers have found that the substantial antidepressant effects of psilocybin-assisted therapy, given with support psychotherapy, may last at least a year
I lay waiting for something to happen, when gradually, after about 20 minutes, I became aware that the twinkly lights outside had got much twinklier, warmer.
The walls seemed cast in an apricot glow, as they started pulsing with what struck me at the time (and oh! How ridiculous I feel writing this) as female goddess energy. It was a bit like a voice I could hear in my head, telling me I was going to be OK, that the Universe had my back, that I am part of something far bigger than myself.
I remember feeling safe, and loved. When I closed my eyes, my mind was filled with exploding fractals of shapes and colour, like a kaleidoscope. The first four hours passed very quickly. The last two felt much more normal and we drank lots of water and hit the snacks.
Six hours later I was back to myself, feeling… fine. There was nothing frightening about it.
The next journey was a couple of months later. By then I was aware I had been feeling slightly better, but still couldn’t shake off the residual pain of being rejected by my best friend.
The walls pulsated again the second time, slip-sliding like drippy vanilla ice-cream. There was a framed poster of the Sergeant Pepper album cover on the wall, and as I watched, one by one the Beatles, and the crowd behind them, popped up into the sky. I was fascinated.
And then the voice came. Stop being so hard on yourself, it said. You are exactly who you have always thought you are. You are a good person, and we are with you. You are not alone and you are part of something much bigger. Again, I felt an ineffable peace. The third journey was a couple of months after that.
That time, I didn’t have any epiphanies, no voices, no melting pulsating walls, but I did have the exploding fractals, and a sense of connection to everyone in the room, on the street, in the neighbourhood, the world.
It wasn’t until a couple of months after that last journey, when I looked at my face in that selfie wondering why I appeared so different, that I realised something had changed within me.
I saw peace in my eyes again, a sense of self, and a glimmer of all the confidence and self-worth that had evaded me for such a long time. I realised I hadn’t had a day in bed for… months. Not only that, I was cooking again (always a sign I am back to myself), and inviting people over.
I looked forward to going out, without needing to rush back to crawl under the covers. When I had to do a tour to promote my latest book, I loved being with people, rather than wanting to hide from the world.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have found that the substantial antidepressant effects of psilocybin-assisted therapy, given with support psychotherapy, may last at least a year.
So here I am, almost a year after that third journey, proving those researchers right, for I am completely back to myself.
In fact, in the last 365 days, I have had only one ‘bed day’, which for me is extraordinary. And that was mostly because it was raining and freezing, it was Christmas, and I had nowhere to go and nothing to do but read, which is very different from staying in bed because you want to disappear.
My husband has always been entirely supportive of anything that helps with the depression and, while I have no plans yet to take magic mushrooms again, it’s a bit like having a secret in your back pocket. I know it’s there if I need it.
Dr max’s verdict: Be wary of ‘magic bullet’
Depression can be a devastating illness and the idea that there might be a magic bullet out there gives people hope. But many of us who work in mental health are worried about the lack of robust evidence behind psychedelics.
There is considerable doubt that magic mushrooms, particularly if they aren’t taken in a clinical environment, can offer the panacea that some would have us believe.
Dr Max says there is considerable doubt that magic mushrooms, particularly if they aren’t taken in a clinical environment, can offer the panacea that some would have us believe
Yes, some of the news reports we have seen over the past few years sound promising. Yet a closer look at these studies raises doubts. Professor Allen Frances, from Duke University School of Medicine in the US, has pointed out that many of the current studies were ‘predestined to have positive results’.
He has argued they are not always ‘blinded’ – meaning subjects or researchers can accurately guess who is receiving the medication and who is receiving a placebo. There is often bias in the recruitment process, too, with only highly motivated patients taking part.
I suspect psychedelics will prove to be of some value in a small, limited number of people. But I have seen many patients who have dabbled in these drugs and have developed mental health problems as a result, some severe and enduring. We need better and more extensive studies before this treatment would be recommended.