Trippy Treatments

Psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” is undergoing clinical trials. It could be the biggest advance in treating depression since Prozac.

- By Adam Piore

For most of his adult life, Aaron presley, age 34, felt like a husk of a person, a piece of “garbage.” He was trapped in a reality that was so excruciatingly tedious that he had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. Then, all at once, the soul-crushing, depressive fog started to lift, and the most meaningful experience of his life began.

The turning point for Presley came as he lay on a psychiatrist’s couch at Johns Hopkins University, wearing an eyeshade and listening through a pair of Bose headphones to a Russian choir singing hymns. He had consumed a large dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in what’s more commonly known as magic mushrooms, and entered a state that could best be described as lucid dreaming. Visions of family and childhood triggered overwhelming and long-lost feelings of love, he says, “like heaven on earth.”

Presley was one of 24 volunteers taking part in a small study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of a combination of psychotherapy and this powerful mind-altering drug to treat depression—an approach that, should it win approval, could be the biggest advance in mental health since Prozac in the 1990s.