Research says some hallucinogenics could be as effective as antidepressants. Times fashion editor and mother of two Harriet Walker checks into a psychedelic retreat to see if tripping can stop her feeling so stressed.
Over the past few years, I have become surrounded by mushrooms. We all have. Tea, T-shirts, supplements, documentaries, books, charms, cushions, tinctures – and chocolate. I saw a slab being handed round at a 40th recently, then chatted to a friend who’d had a nibble to take the edge off at a five-year-old’s birthday party. In my hedonistic uni days, magic mushrooms were taken exclusively by people who dressed like wizards; now this drug is ubiquitous and it looks like artisanal Dairy Milk.
It was during lockdown that I first heard of friends going on “shrooms walks”, blissing out in nature and enjoying enhanced perception, a trippy glow. Next, the clubbers I know began taking them on nights out for the rainbow visuals and lack of hangover. Tech bros and City types proselytise about microdosing tiny amounts to help with daily focus and decision-making. Suddenly, many of the stressed parents I am friends with are doing so too, explaining that they play better and are more patient with their kids because of it.
Almost everyone I know breaks off a square or two or has a few drops the way they might once have deployed a glass of wine on a Friday night or a beer on a sunny day. It isn’t legal in the UK, but that doesn’t seem to stop anybody.
The active ingredient (hallucinogenic) in magic mushrooms is psilocybin. Last September, Imperial College London researchers declared it as effective as the conventional antidepressants that cost the NHS £55 million ($121m) a year, while also boosting participants’ well-being and sex drive. Some people have used it to stop smoking or drinking, others to come to terms with bereavement or tackle burnout. It is said to counter anxiety, overthinking and irritability. Tick, tick, tick. I began to wonder what it could do for me. So I booked into a £5000, five-day psilocybin retreat in the Netherlands, where magic mushroom truffles (though not the shrooms themselves) are legal. My endlessly generous husband stepped up to solo-parent around his own busy job while I tripped my tits off in a tastefully renovated farmhouse in the middle of a forest in the north of the country.
Why did he agree to this, you might wonder? Perhaps because he too has had a sense of me being a black cloud in our home. I have a great job, two brilliant, easygoing children, a strong, fun marriage, nice kitchen, supportive family and plenty of friends. So why do I often feel too uptight and disappointed with myself to enjoy it all?
That is why I reserved my spot: a constant low-level thrum of stress, guilt, worry and tetchiness that is expressed mainly to/at those I hold most dear. An inner monologue of scorn, inadequacy and pressure to achieve; and relentless focus on efficiency, planning and hyper-organisation because the alternative – chaos, mess, forgetting things, failure – is terrifying.
In 1998, Amanda Feilding – a research partner of Albert Hofmann, the first scientist to synthesise and try LSD – founded the Beckley Foundation to advance psychedelic research and advocate for evidence-based drug policy. She later separately co-founded Beckley Retreats to provide safe, legal, and transformative experiences that blend modern science with ancient wisdom. The website promises “safe, legal and transformative ceremonies”. Sign me up: I don’t want to be this version of me any more.
“It’s a very different experience to taking mushrooms at a festival,” the retreat facilitator and biodynamic therapist Ben Sheinwald tells me. “People have their defences taken away. And the mushrooms are not the end – it’s a process of change that happens bit by bit.”
This is the neuroplasticity effect that psychedelic drugs have been proven to have on the brain – with war veterans suffering trauma, for example. Those who take them experience a window afterwards in which to alter their thought processes and ultimately their habits. I find myself wishing for a bit of plasticity in advance as our group assembles on the first evening and we start with the sort of getting-to-know-you games and sharing about ourselves to which I consider myself allergic. There are 13 of us, from America, the UK and Europe, ranging in age from twenties to seventies: friendly, apprehensive, all with something that brought us here.
“We have a whole range of people,” says Sheinwald, “but the presentation is similar: patterns of anxiety and variations on fear. They might be comfortable in their lives and jobs, but they have a yearning to feel at home in their own body.”
I am told that by the end of the week we will feel a deep connection to each other and that the mushrooms know what I need. Nod and smile – I haven’t come to make friends and I’ll be the judge of that, thank you very much.
After dinner (all vegetarian this week) I head to bed in a room I am sharing with a stranger, a situation that makes me deeply uncomfortable. Better get used to that, a little voice says in my head, because it was your self-indulgent idea to come here when there’s nothing wrong with you.
Hurtling through kaleidoscope tubes
Our first day starts with yoga, then a session of “conscious connected breathing”, a method of continuously inhaling and exhaling developed by psychedelic scientists to mimic the effects of the drugs they were working on after they were banned. It is an out-of-body feeling that leaves me trembling on my yoga mat with tears in my eyes, though I am not sure why.
The trip will take up the remaining hours of daylight and last well into the evening, 2-8pm. I am nervously wound up beforehand. I’ve been high before – it’s fun! What I am worried about is the fact we must do it not wandering the forest finding wonder in dapples of light, but on the mattresses laid out in a semi-circle in the yoga studio, behind the blackout masks we have all been instructed to bring.
This is the “inner work” version of psilocybin, as opposed to the giggly night out kind. The dose I am taking is equivalent to 3g of mushrooms. We are not in hipster chocolate territory now.
I am handed a glass tumbler by a woman in a white robe – our ceremony leader, Tamara. In it is a lukewarm ginger and lemon tea in which psilocybin truffles have been steeped. They lie in walnut-like chunks at the bottom. It comes with a spoon and we are instructed to combine drinking the tea with eating the fragments. It’s bitter and endlessly chewy, but not hugely unpleasant, though it can be nausea-inducing for some – hence the plastic buckets thoughtfully placed between each of the mattresses.
It is a bizarre experience to be able to rummage through your heart like a filing cabinet.
We are asked to set an intention, and I – slightly self-consciously – ask the mushrooms for perspective on my life. I want to enjoy being me, I say, wondering whether I need the bucket already for spouting such unforgivable sentimentality.
Had I known how quickly the mushrooms would get back to me, I might not have had that last-minute emergency wee: as I return to my mattress, my vision is beginning to glister. By the time I am lying down, mask on, I am hurtling through kaleidoscope tubes, harlequin stripes streaming like lines of code.
Laughing shadowy figures dance and spin – Aztec masks and characters from a Bosch painting. I’m briefly concerned about being a psychedelic cliché. I experience an unfamiliar sympathy for my baffled brain.
Everything is beautiful, but the speed feels bewildering. I am completely rigid, clinging on to the mattress with such intense tremors in my legs that a facilitator holds my feet until they pass. I want to lift my mask and say thank you, but last time I peeked out, everyone had horns. I keep hearing a phrase from yesterday’s workshop repeat in my mind: “Dissolving the ego, dissolving the ego.” I am so dissolved I am not quite sure where my hands are any more.
Yet I am completely lucid. You can ask for help if you’re scared, I tell myself, but what can they do that you can’t? You have to work this out. I am surprised by the confidence I feel.
I start rummaging in the patterns, finding I can slide them to one side or scan through them, then panic because I don’t know what I’m looking for. In the room beyond, I can hear laughing and crying, maybe some puking. Tamara’s band is singing songs about forests and being loved.
I bolt upright and she comes to me. “Am I OK?” I ask, and she holds my hand. “Of course!”
“I’m worried I can’t fix it.” I don’t know what I mean and I desperately want my mum and dad.
“Maybe it isn’t broken?” Tamara replies.
I am suddenly very frightened that nobody will care for me now I am a grown-up. You just have to let them, I hear my brain saying, instead of trying to do it all alone. Swirling between each of the mattresses in the room are glittering golden tendrils, attaching us all together.
Back under the mask, I am staring at a sky full of stars. One becomes my daughter’s face. I wonder how I could ever be anything other than kind to her, let alone so ratty that I sometimes see her retreating into watchful cautiousness. I am terrified she doesn’t know how much I love her. “I’m so, so sorry,” I say out loud.
It is a bizarre experience to be able to rummage through your heart like a filing cabinet and examine what is usually too painful. The golden tendrils hold me like a net; I am safe and loved, grateful for everyone in the room and waiting at home. The stars become people I can consider then peacefully extinguish. The sky scrolls with Star Wars writing: everyone I know who should book into this place pronto.
Afterwards, I am wrung out, like an old dishcloth. So many tears and so much snot, perhaps it’s no surprise I feel lighter – giddy, almost. The next morning – despite a splitting headache that came from not drinking enough water because I was scared the loo would eat me – I have a sense of rolling back the rock from my tomb. I’ve been reborn! Totally sorted now! I send text messages with lots of kisses, then put my phone away again. I have barely been looking at it, at first deliberately and now because, whenever I pick it up, a phrase comes into my head: “Life is not happening in there.”
I sit up and say: ‘Please help me’
The day between our two “ceremonies” is what Beckley calls “integration” – group activities aimed at analysing what we saw without labelling it too precisely. People are contemplative and open. There is hugging; I don’t hate it. I walk in the forest and think only about the landscape, rather than trying to anticipate my next worry.
At the second ceremony, my dose is higher and I ask the mushrooms to come on more slowly. Gradually, colour and shapes begin to spin again. Yet I find myself growing restless, yawning, mundane thoughts crowding in. Am I bored? I feel cross. Why am I always so ungrateful? This is so typical, that while everyone else is seeing the face of God, stupid me just wants to go home. I am ruining everything. Again. “Urrrgh, shut up,” I say into the quiet of the room.
Then the lights are gone. I am on the moon, by myself. I have never felt so lonely in my life – I am winded by it. I am desperate to see my family. I can’t feel anyone else in the room at this point, no connection, no care. I just know there is a huge problem and it begins to dawn on me … that I am it.
You have nothing to complain about, says my brain. Stop whingeing and get on with it like you normally do.
Instead, I sit up and say something I never let myself utter: “Please help me.”
I’ll spare you the details of how many Kleenex boxes were harmed during the dissolution of my ego, but a facilitator called Hannah holds on to me through all of it and strokes my forehead – just like my mum used to – as it subsides. By the time I am through it, the trip is ending.
I am so happy to be back from the moon that I move around the room embracing people.
I think of how hard normal me would be cringing, then sweep her aside. My mattress has started to look like a hospital bed. I’m not ill, I tell myself; I feel more OK than I have done for a long time. I am so happy to be back from the moon that I move around the room embracing people.
They are all pleased to see me too and I know I must hang on to this feeling: I am the only one judging me so harshly. I get the giggles with one as we watch her bare feet expand and contract.
After another day of integration, it is time to say goodbye to the friends I didn’t know last week, but have been to the moon with and back. Many of them look as though a bulb has been switched on inside them since we first met.
“These experiences can be profound and stay with you for the rest of your life,” says Sheinwald. “It’s not overnight, but I’ve seen wonderful change in people.”
On the plane back, I feel like Scrooge: I see the moon episode as how life would be if all the criticism in my head was real. That bleak anger and sad confusion is what I have been transmitting to my family. I never want to feel like that again.
Since I came home, I have chosen to be light-hearted and patient. My daughter has started giving me spontaneous hugs like she used to. Things that used to stress me feel at a remove: I can weigh up if they matter or not (the answer is usually no). I ask my husband if I seem different. Totally, he says – Zen and accepting. “If anything, I have been the grumpy one,” he admits.
It’s early days, but I am sleeping better than I have done in months. I haven’t wanted to drink and seem to be off my occasional emotional support vape. When my mind spins out over things that haven’t happened yet, I find myself doing involuntary gestures, as though conducting an orchestra, to dissipate the worry before it takes root.
For now, I have the perspective I asked for and it is something I can keep returning to. Maybe the cloud has lifted. Maybe the mushrooms did know what I needed.
Written by: Harriet Walker
© The Times of London