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I have been consuming psilocybe mushrooms ("shrooms") semi-regularly for the last several months. Doing this has profoundly changed my life for the better. I believe that normalizing their occasional, safe use as part of healthy emotional regulation would improve many other people's lives, too. So much so, that I believe that the potential legal consequences for me would amount to less harm to the world than my withholding my learnings would. Therefore I am coming out of this closet and advocating for their normalization and legalization.
What do they do to people?
Shrooms alter one's experience for about six hours, say. There is some hallucination. But more important here is the cognitive/emotional effect on one's ego process. A quick background digression:
Our personalities are compound. The chunks of personality, the various thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that arise from our experiences, jockey for attention and control. Those to which we have stronger attachments tend to win out and occupy the cockpit. These cockpit occupants and their world view are the means by which we come to have the Freudian ego. One of the behaviors of the ego is to curate our experience: attend to some sensations and thoughts, and ignore others.
A key effect of shrooms is they shift one's perspective out from this cockpit. By sidestepping the curation, one has access to a fuller range of sensations and thoughts that are naturally a part of oneself. One sees themself and the world more clearly and honestly.
What have they done to me?
I personally don't get strong hallucinations from psychedelic drugs. Shrooms give me visual effects that are mostly of the closed-eye variety and there are amusing auditory phenomena. I'm going to focus on the cognitive/emotional effect.
Some background on how I'm built. As my mind guesses or projects emotional state onto those around me, it conveys those guesses by making me feel those feelings viscerally. These sensations of others' feelings are far louder than the sensations of my own. In other words, I have much stronger empathy for others than I do for myself. My ego contains significant components that are absorbed from other people.
When shrooms disrupt this situation, I gain access to the things that were crowded out, to the rich life that arises from within me rather than being inherited from my environment. If my true self were a kindling flame, shrooms breathe oxygen upon it so that it grows brightly and expresses itself. Parts of myself that I have denied, imbalances that have yearned for resolution, proud appreciation for the good in me—these things become visible, wrapped in a blanket of compassion and peace. I have faced and felt healing in many areas that I have struggled to fully conjure in my traditional therapy. It has felt like a joyous return from exile. The improvement is immediate and visceral. I liken the experience to times when my body has been low on some nutrient, say salt, and when I finally eat something that replenishes it my body gives me a great HALLELUJAH! of relief.
My skeptical education has trained me to perform many feats of logic, rhetoric, and criticism. Living in this mindset has suppressed—repressed—my access to religious experience. I personally don't doubt the world to be a material one, and religious sensations to be mere aspects of my ordinary mind's function. But having them is a normal human fact, and, I'm starting to believe, an important component of my having a healthy ecosystem of emotions. Shrooms, by setting aside my mindset, have helped me feel powerful mystical connection. Knowing this feeling has touched me with a deeper and truer joy and hope than I had ever known. Life and peace have become so much more worth fighting for.
Separating my feelings from other people's is changing how I structure my life. As Rilke might say, I stand guard over my solitude. I seek a large buffer of space around my inner world, so that other signals do not drown it out. This means avoiding the city life and most of my extroverted tendencies. It means accepting being "lazy", "avoidant", or "unproductive". It means keeping better boundaries in my relationships, and choosing to share company only with those who connect with me while maintaining a sense of presence and sacredness of the act. I've also started being more conscious about when and how I eat. Overall there is a great sense of purification in my life. My values have shifted and my stress has largely subsided.
My senses feel much richer. In the week after a shroom ceremony, I perceive details of color and sound much more vividly, and I am tickled by more reasons to be curious about the world. I also access my intuition about things more clearly, and I feel agency to act from this place rather than having logically precomputed everything. Finally, I feel like my meditation abilities have improved because I know more about what the destination looks like.
What do my shroom ceremonies look like?
Since roughly April, I've been holding ceremonies for myself with frequency varying from weekly to every few weeks. When I notice that it's been long enough (as above, "Do I feel low on salt?"), I set aside most of a day. That day I stay home, get cozy, and limit activities and distractions. The main intention I set is to be present with myself.
I weigh out the dried fruits and then make a tea with them. Since I'm a big nerd, to maximize yield I add some citric acid, and to prevent stomach discomfort I add a ginger-turmeric teabag. After maybe 10 minutes I consume both the liquid and rehydrated solids. The flavor doesn't bother me, and I've generally had good digestive luck with this setup.
And then I generally start getting myself in gear for me-time. How long I have to wait for effects depends on how empty my stomach is. I can tell it's starting when my tinnitus changes character, connected with a sort of buzziness in my everything. The effects keep ramping up for a couple hours, hold steady for another four, then ramp back down.
Recently I combined it with an intermittent fast. It felt like good synergy, purifying my mind and spirit in tandem with my body. I'll probably continue combining the two, and experimenting with ways of adding to the sense of ritual about it.
How might you know if it is right for you?
I can't emphasize enough that everyone is different. Only you can know. Ultimately you'd just have to see for yourself, or not. I'm sorry that there isn't a better answer.
There are some great reasons to say "no". You could be worried about nausea. Heed any degree of paranoia about a panic in the altered state. If you are taking any psychiatric medications, consult your doctor first.
Do I have any tips?
Sure do.
Do due diligence. There is plenty of info out there to be read. It's not my intention to create a reference list here, so just Google it and ask your hippie friends.
Consider your dose. Don't be a hero—smaller doses are better for therapeutic value (for most people). Unfortunately, being a biological product, there is natural variability. The best response to this fact is to seek a batch that has been "calibrated" by an experienced user, and note their advice. Most people on an SSRI will have to take a larger dose, sometimes much larger.
Plan your logistics soberly. Obtain from a source you trust. Consider getting and using a scale, accurate to sub-gram. Make a safe environment for the session. Consider having a sitter unless, and even if, you are experienced with psychedelics. Consider having a benzodiazepine on hand, just in case.
Plan your headspace. The more specific your intentions, the more likely you will be disappointed. Rather, prepare to be open to the experience. Consider familiarizing yourself with mindfulness, Focusing, somatic awareness, or some other art of non-narrative introspection. This will make you most receptive to what shrooms bring. Try to have a sense of what baggage you're bringing in with you, and be ready to sit compassionately with any anxious response.
Make it a ritual. Find what choices and symbolisms make it seem sacred for you.
What should you know about the drug?
Psilocybes grow naturally in many parts of the globe and have been consumed for thousands of years. Like most things considered edible, they are perfectly safe in reasonable amounts under most conditions.
The dominant psychoactive ingredient is psilocybin. It is a member of the family of tryptamine molecules. This family also includes some of your body's neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, as well as some other chemicals that are psychoactive drugs because they mimic those neurotransmitters in your body.
It turns out pure psilocybin has a slightly less useful therapeutic effect than shrooms—it makes people more anxious, for instance. The reason shrooms work better seems connected to what's called the "entourage effect". Psilocybes include small amounts of other psychoactive compounds. These include a couple other tryptamines. They also include some monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs). The latter weaken your brain's defenses against things that mimic neurotransmitters, hence increase their efficacy; they also have antidepressant effects, and are sometimes prescribed for this very purpose. The combination of a tryptamine with an MAOI is also, and perhaps more famously, what takes place in ayahuasca.
The fruit bodies are often uncomfortable on people's digestive systems. Nausea or diarrhea is common. The most common other side effect is anxiety.
One might ask how shrooms compare to other psychedelic drugs. I emphasize that everyone is different and this answer is only mine. I have tried a good number of substances over the years. I have found mild therapeutic effect from several of them, especially LSD in microdoses. About two years ago I had my first real encounter with a tryptamine, namely 5-MeO-DMT, and it temporarily gave me great reprieve from my depression. Then I had ayahuasca and it felt not just like a relief but like it was healing something. When I finally found shrooms they were far more convenient, comparably healing, and for amorphous reasons slightly better suited to my personality. It was the first time I fell in love with a drug, and thankfully it felt like a healthy relationship. The bottom line is that, for me, microdosing LSD is somewhat helpful, and tryptamines and especially shrooms are profoundly so.
What is the legal status?
On the federal level, psilocybin is illegal, and therefore so are the mushroom fruit bodies that contain them. The FDA is currently alllowing controlled testing the of substance for therapy, but for most people this does not yet change anything.
A curious feature of the law is that the spores, which do not contain the substance, are federally completely legal. The spores remain legal at the state level everywhere except for CA, ID, and GA. You can buy them on the internet to ship to the remaining states, and there are plenty of instructions on the Internet for growing them into fruits.
Unless you grow your own, though, buying them usually means needing a dealer. The drug trade has risks, and I can't help you with that. Some localities have decriminalized mushrooms, and since most interactions with law enforcement are local, this dramatically decreases the risks in those places.