Even if it only provides some relief to a subset of the total population, I would think that the side effects of psilocybin are better than the side effects of say, a SSRI antidepressant.
In the UK and other northern areas, a lot of it is due to seasonal affective disorder, where there's not enough sunlight. Vitamin D only does so much...
Yes, I understand that maybe the rational response to cold and dark and cloudy weather is not a cheery attitude, but if you love there you've got to do something. We can't all live in Hawaii.
Yes, I believe a large portion of UK depression cases are due to factors largely outside the individual’s control. Doctors have even labeled this “shit life syndrome”. It is particularly pronounced in coastal towns of the UK where high paying jobs and opportunities are scarce. Subsequently, the town becomes something of an open air prison; you know you could live a better life if you could afford to move but you can’t earn or save enough to do so. See:
That being said, I can hypothesise from personal experience that mushrooms can help in at least one of the following ways:
- They can help you see things you were missing or unlock new perspectives. Maybe it’s something small like being able to communicate better with someone. Maybe it’s something large like realising you could be happy living out of a campervan or moving past a trauma. It’s rare to come out of a mushroom trip without some kind of insight into something.
- They can help you feel part of something bigger than yourself. This lessens your own suffering because, even if you’re the President of the United States, you’re not that important in the grand scheme of things.
- You become re-aware that everything is in a constant state of change. Even if you’re in a rut right now, it probably won’t always be this way.
I would say that you can be mentally aware of all these things but taking mushrooms allows you to actually feel it or believe it. For an example of this, listen to the recent episode of the Tim Ferris or Joe Rogan podcast featuring Gabor Mate. Gabor describes how he led some patients to a shaman retreat to heal their trauma and ended up being taken aside by the shamans for five days of one on one private ceremonies because they sensed he was not fit to lead the group. He describes how, whilst he believed mentally in the ability to change and the principles behind it, he doubted his own ability to do it. After five ceremonies with the shamans he was finally able to internalise it on a deeper level so it was no longer just a thought exercise.
If you want to experience this thought/feeling dissonance for yourself, put yourself into a situation you’re afraid of but in which you are practically safe. For example, if you’re afraid of heights go to a climbing wall, and watch an instructor belay someone down a wall. Then do it yourself. Even though you know on a mental level that everything is perfectly fine, once you get up there you will have at least some trepidation of letting go of the wall and being lowered down to the ground. This is an example of internal dissonance.
I suspect that knowledge workers such as software developers are particularly prone to this kind of dissonance. There is a tendency to take the Descartes stance of “I think therefore I am” to an extreme where we can start to believe that thoughts are all we are when in reality thoughts are just one part of inner experience.
People will no doubt state that inner experience and outer experience are in fact just one and the same and that is almost certainly correct on some level. Regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs we can all agree that changing the body on some level changes the mind (if this weren’t the case we wouldn’t have any psychoactive drugs at all). But we experience them separately (I do not experience a thought as being part of my body like my hand) and so it helps to have models to navigate those experiences.
Traditionally, this has been to divide inner experience into four realms, Mind, Emotions, Will and Bodily Sensation, commonly referred to as Air, Water, Fire and Earth, with the fifth element Void referring to your focus. For example, a common meditation may start with a “body scan” where you shift you focus to various parts of your body. Here you are filling your “Void” with each body parts sensation (Earth) and filtering everything else out. You may then move on to a meditation where you shift your focus to your thoughts and observe what they are doing. Now you are filling your void with “Air”.
Through doing this kind of work, you begin to realise that the scope of meditation goes far further than just “sitting down and breathing”. In fact, one monk developed 40 different objects of meditation depending on what was afflicting the student and what was needed to return them to a state of internal balance:
In my opinion, there are two reasons why breath work has become so commonly used as the focus for mediation that it has become almost synonymous with it for the average layperson:
- breath directly affects the nervous system and hence internal state
- breath is the one thing you can rely on during almost any situation
On the latter, it is pointless to become an expert meditator if you completely lose your cool when life throws you a difficult situation. Meditation is there to help you deal with life not the other way around. There are many situations when you cannot just stop what you are doing to go sit and look at a candle for an hour. However, in nearly every situation in life, be it an urge to act when to do so would be foolish, the pain of a broken body after crashing a plane, a violent thought in the heat of an argument, or overwhelming sadness after the loss of someone dear, you can always turn your attention to your breath and formulate a response that will help improve your situation.
I fear they are just trying to fight the symptoms not the causes.