Using Psilocybin to Treat Depression

my idiosyncratic experience

In the interest of being the person I needed desperately to see a few years ago, I am fairly open about my battle to overcome PTSD. For a couple of years now, I’ve used psilocybin to help me with PTSD and related depressive episodes.

Important stuff up front, here. If you are considering using psilocybin to help yourself with your own PTSD or depression, you should understand how my situation is different from yours, and thus why you should not be using me for your model. You should also be hyper-aware of the risks and take precautions. Do your own research, and plenty of it.

I have professionally diagnosed Complex-PTSD. This is not the same thing as PTSD. Here is my layperson's explanation: PTSD is when something very bad happens that the person must find a way to integrate and accept and heal from such that they can return to their pre-trauma, relatively normal life. C-PTSD is when trauma happens so early and often that the person never has a normal developmental trajectory and thus a normal life to return to. Thus, my experience is likely not a model for you. Other important points:

1. I am in treatment with a skilled therapist and have been for some time. 

2. I use psilocybin consciously, carefully, and responsibly. I am also, by personality and nature, extraordinarily conscientious. If you're not, give that some thought before you even consider this.

3. A dear friend who also has extensive experience with psychedelics, someone I trust on a very deep level, makes himself available to talk to me while I am tripping. I can and do trust him without fear, and that trust goes deep enough that I don’t need words for it. My “lizard brain” trusts him. If you have PTSD in any form or serious depression and you don't have a skilled therapist AND a psychedelically-experienced friend in whom you can safely place enormous trust, you should probably not even consider this.

4. You should remove the possibility of self-harm. Guns and anything else you might be inclined to hurt yourself with if you had a very bad trip and lost full access to reality should not be accessible to you.

5. Remove the possibility of doing other damage to yourself to the fullest extent possible. I have a trusted friend change my twitter password, among other precautions.

My First Experience: the Baby Steps

My first attempt, a couple of years ago, was on about 1/3 of a trip dose. This was an exceptionally good experience. It flipped off the part of my brain that is locked in a constant struggle wherein either I feel worthless or I don't feel worthless. If I don't, then my battle against that sense of worthlessness becomes all-defining and, ironically, somewhat counterproductive. If your sense of feeling worthless diminishing is what gives you confidence that you're not worthless, you're not really helping yourself that much. That paradigm is confusing and a terribly vicious circle. It's like deciding not to keep score and then using the decision not to keep score as evidence…that you won. What psilocybin did for me, that first time, was give me 3 hours of freedom from that paradigm. It simply ceased to exist. That gave me a powerful memory of freedom to work on integrating. It gave me a sense of what it would be like to at least not hate myself, and even perhaps to like myself.  We are all a mixture of hardware and software. That experience gave me a direction and a sense of how to work on re-writing my software. Bringing new code online, to extend the metaphor.

Treating Depression with a Brain Reboot

Several psychedelic experiences later, I had learned that a trip serves as a brain reboot. A previous trip, in late December, relieved my depression for about six weeks. Last Friday, after being seriously depressed for about a month, I used psilocybin to treat my depression. The effort was successful and in this essay I will explain how I went about it and what the experience was like.

Dosing

I get mine from a supplier who provides it in a fine powder, which is good because the dosing can be very precise. I got these capsules on Amazon, filled them, and took the dose over/with a meal, as my stomach tends to be easily upset.

Physical Effects

On psilocybin, I have two intense physical effects. First, I get very, very cold. This has happened consistently on all my trips, so now I prepare for it. I had an extra blanket on my bed, was wearing two layers of clothing, and both turned up the thermostat and turned on the extra heater in my bedroom. I don’t know if this is just temperature dysregulation, period; or perhaps if my body works so hard at metabolizing it that it fails to do a good job of heating the rest of me. Regardless, the effect is consistent enough that I now prepare for it so it isn’t a problem.

Second, I get very unsteady on my feet. I don’t have to make special preparation for this because I habitually keep my apartment extremely neat, clean, and picked up, so there’s nothing in between the bed and bathroom, for example, to trip over.

Psychological Effects: Why

The dose I took this time was about 2/3 of an intense-trip dose and about half of my previous highest ever dose. My goal was not to visit my interior in a deep way to try to work on myself, as it has been for most of my previous trips. I just wanted to reboot my brain, to get out of the nasty cycle I’d been in where everything took so much energy just to function.

My method of coping with depression these days is to “keep calm and carry on,” pretending nothing is wrong. This works. (Until it doesn’t). What kept happening as the depression dragged on is that reality would reassert itself and I would have a violent mood swing. That would require energy and discipline to return to the pretending state. This was better than what happened when I couldn’t pretend (lots of crying jags, poor sleep, nightmares, etc.) but it was exhausting.

I understood some of the reasons for my depression, but not all, and most of the ones I understood are outside of my power to influence. I can’t make the local authorities drop vax passes and mask mandates. I can’t wave a wand and arrange to spend time with people who love me, as they all live far away (spread across five different US states). I can’t stop the implosion of western civilization. But these things have been going on for a long time, so I knew there was more going on, and exploring them via a trip was ideal.

Psychological Effects: First Wave

What happens when the psilocybin kicks in is that the barriers between my conscious emotions and the unconscious thoughts and beliefs that were feeding them, vanish. My trips happen in waves, intense experiences that fade to a quiet stillness before kicking up again. This one was three waves in length.

The first one, I was settling in. The “switch” in my brain that I mentioned earlier, was also flipped off. I was free to examine my mind in a way that’s not accessible to me normally. I was aware of how awful things have been lately, but able to explore it with curiosity. I explored the landscape and realized that my fear and anxiety and sadness were less all-encompassing; and instead, made quite visible. I could see the darkness as the exact metaphor I use for dangerous depression—an abyss. I was extremely vulnerable while in this state. My usual psychological defenses are formidable, but the psilocybin broke them down and I was dealing with the most very basic, raw reality of my psyche. I was exploring the terrain, figuring out where I was and what I had access to, a surprisingly literal experience of going on a trip.

Psychological Effects: Second Wave

During the second wave, I experienced something that’s a pretty good example of the kind of vulnerability I’m referring to. Sense of time gets badly distorted during a trip, so I don’t know how long this lasted. I was in bed under two blankets, curled up with a teddy bear, and moving out of the “exploration” phase of the trip and into the deeper experience of taking a close look at what I was moving towards, to, and through.

Having located it, during this second wave it became clear to me that the abyss was very close, and it was quite clear to me that those emotions made up a state — a psychological state equivalent to a physical hole — that was absolutely and immediately available for me to fall into. In the tripping state, they would have been intensely powerful, unpredictable, and horrifying; I would not have been able to use my usual tools to control them. It felt like I was tiptoeing around the edges of this deep and very dark hole, looking down and determining not to fall but realizing the risks if I did.

With my inhibitions lowered and the intense emotions so close, the next thing I experienced was an intense desire to not be alone. I was scared of falling into it, scared that I didn’t have the wherewithal to keep myself out, and scared that I deserved what I would suffer if I did fall into it. That is an irrational notion on the conscious level, but the barrier between conscious and unconscious had fallen and the “I’m worthless and bad and deserve bad things” programming of my early childhood, which still affects me and that I’m still working on re-programming, was right there, powerful and ready to grab me.

My best guess, given the amount of fear and intense sense of need I felt, is that I was very much in a state of regression—that the part of me that’s stuck in a developmental stage around age four or five was where “I” was. That’s likely a consequence of my C-PTSD, but I can’t be sure.

Why I Was Brave Enough To Risk It

Six or seven times, I pulled my phone close and brought up my on-call friend’s information in Signal. Once I typed in “please call,” but didn’t send it.

No, I didn’t ask him to call me, and I didn’t call him. Why? I didn’t need to. I can’t explain how I was still enough of my adult self to recognize the difference between needing and wanting, despite being so deeply regressed, but I was, and I knew I didn’t need to not be alone. I only wanted to not be alone. So I didn’t call.

But I could have. I could have called, even totally regressed and feeling the emotions of the part of me that’s still four or five years old, and it would’ve been really and truly okay. He would have been comforting and reassuring, said exactly the right things, likely prevented me from falling into the black hole, stayed on the phone until I felt ok being alone again no matter how long it took, and never would have given me the slightest grief later— neither about taking up his time, nor about any specific details of my experience. Nor would he ever, in any sense, have taken advantage of the vulnerability that he noticed/gained access to this way.

My friend is not perfect, but he’s perfect for this—trustworthy, reliable, safe, and the very last person I worry about betraying me. It is impossible for me to imagine, even if I fucked up badly and deserved it, that this person would ever consciously hurt me.

If you are going to use psilocybin to process trauma or treat depression, having someone either present or on-call that you can trust this much is, in my opinion, mandatory.

Psychological Effects: Third Wave

Once I was able to decide that I could explore this on my own without falling into the hole and being swept up, the terrain I was exploring became clear. As I examined my experience in my own mind, I understood the root of my recent depression.

The conscious parts of my programming that are bullshit are very easy to deconstruct. I’m not worthless. Obviously. I’m not unloved. Obviously. I’m not unlovable. Obviously.

What was going on? I was so overwhelmed and exhausted by being alone, by missing out on any chance for anything fun—restaurants, seeing plays, meetup groups, church; by not getting nearly enough exercise (because I already fell and broke a bone once this winter and a deaf girl who’s clumsy AF shouldn’t go running outside in -10 degree weather, but also all the local gyms require masks); by the fact that I have no idea when I will be able to do anything in person with anyone who matters to me again; by all of that, and more, that I was wrapped up in the emotions that go with my programming even though I wasn’t consciously running those programs.

And once this happened, it became a self-propagating problem. Those emotions are exhausting. Getting normal amounts of work done under the pull of those emotions, is exhausting. It was taking so much effort just to function that the extra energy and effort I needed to understand what was happening just wasn’t available.

Psilocybin broke down the barrier between conscious and unconscious experience, which let me see what was happening clearly enough to take control of it.

Understanding and therefore some level of control restored, I got my energy back. I had the ability to think about something other than how sad and exhausted I was, which becomes a self-propagating cycle the other way — I get more done, which makes me happy, which leads to more positive emotions, and the snowball effect becomes an avalanche—in a positive direction.

Did I Hallucinate?

My usual experiences are less hallucinatory and more amusing. For example, I see things that actually exist, but I see them differently. Patterns in the floor or ceiling move and vibrate. The whole world seems to hum in a gentle, soothing way. This time was similar, in that a memorable voice from something that dominates my brain’s white noise at present was narrating parts of my experience. Recently, I’ve been streaming South Park on the extra monitor while doing work that requires less than total focus, and my favorite character is Eric Cartman. Cartman’s voice was saying things like, “Be careful! There’s scary shit in there!” when I was examining the perimeter of the abyss. This wasn’t funny at the time, but it was hilarious in retrospect.

Why Not Just Use SSRIs?

Several people have already asked me this. I’ve tried them in the past. I don’t like them. They make me sluggish, kill my libido, and the overall physical well-being cost is very high.

Humans have been having psychedelic experiences for a lot longer than we’ve been trusting Big Pharma, and this method works for me. I am in a good situation—living alone, with an ideal friend available to help—to use this method, and will continue to do so. Next time I will plan a trip as soon as it’s clear that I’m depressed and not just having a bad couple of days.

Conclusion: Housekeeping

This is my first paid-subscribers-first post. I’ll publish another one (possibly two) in March. Each time I release a new one, I’ll unlock the old one for the free subscriptions.

Your paid subscriptions all come off my formidable student loan balance, and I wanted to thank you all again. I really appreciate you. The forward motion towards freedom is one of the best and most hopeful aspects of my life.