Eating psychedelic mushrooms is helping alcoholics get sober. That’s a medical treatment I never saw coming. Psilocybin is the substance in mushrooms that make people trip. It was used in a recent study where participants would take capsules of the stuff. Almost half the people who took it, along with talk therapy, quit using alcohol completely.
My favorite part of this is that scientists say that they don’t know how it’s working. They think it’s changing the way the the brain is organizing itself and creating new connections……. Both of which kind of sound scary in any other context. But, because it’s doing that, it’s allowing the person to adopt new ways of thinking and breaking the bad habits.
One of the women in the study, 67 year old Mary Beth Orr, said that the psilocybin make alcohol uninteresting to her and irrelevant. She also mentioned having hallucinations where she would telepathically merge with people throughout history and her dead father gave her a pair of eagle eyes to find God with. So, I could see how she found that more interesting than alcohol.
Further studies will look to see if it can help quitting smoking and with depression.