The ‘gnarly and painful’ therapeutic potential of ‘magic mushrooms’

The history of psilocybin 🍄Psilocybin mushrooms have been part of religious rituals in Indigenous societies for thousands of years. Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy has the potential to treat many mental health conditions, Barrett told me, including eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety and chronic pain. Research will need to be scaled up dramatically for the compound to be approved as a pharmaceutical drug, Barrett said. If researchers can produce these results in a large-scale study, it could mean significant relief for people with treatment-resistant mental health conditions. There are no magic technology fixes for our individual or collective mental health struggles.