Publisher's Synopsis
With 350 million people affected by severe depression worldwide, and with pharmaceutical approaches currently not working, the resurrection of magic mushrooms as psychological and spiritual healing has never been more important.From the 1950s to 1970, doctors often used hallucinogens to treat anxiety and depression before the practice fell out of fashion. In recent years, however, the street drug ketamine has gained recognition in medical circles as a possible long-acting antidepressant, and psilocybin has shown preliminary promise as a therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder, tobacco and alcohol addiction, and anxiety in people with advanced cancer. The initial studies also suggest that psilocybin is safe for patients to take at appropriate doses.Magic mushrooms are an impressive depression treatment, but they're banned by governments around the worldEven though magic mushrooms continue to prove powerful in healing severe depression, governments around the world have made them illegal. Over 200 species of mushrooms contain the psychedelic substance psilocybin. Governments continue to prove themselves good at separating us from one another, removing us from nature, and tearing us away from all that we are. We can look to skyrocketing incarceration numbers as evidence of our separation from one another. We can look to all the violence initiated by government cartels - as they bust down doors and take innocent lives in search of illegal plants. We can look to all of government's abuses and see how it has always been about trying to control one another and place restrictions on our natural rights as human beings.Psilocybin provides lasting relief from depression because it works its way into receptors in the brain, disrupting something called the Default Mode Network. This area in the brain is measurably over-reactive in people who are depressed. Psilocybin literally changes how people view themselves and their relationships with the rest of the world. It has been known to elicit a spiritual "awakening" in some people, giving them an entirely new perspective on what it means to be alive.
