Psilocybin mushrooms, also called magic mushrooms, are no less than a biological mystery because not all mushrooms in nature are considered ‘magic’ mushrooms. Nevertheless, magic mushrooms have kept scientists interested for a long time, where they tried to find out why some mushrooms have magical qualities or how only some have evolved to contain psilocybin compounds.
While the role of the psilocybin mushroom in nature is not yet a clear answer, its role as a psychedelic in religion is well-known. Recently, it is expected to revolutionize the future of mental health treatment in the laboratory. Let’s briefly look at this psychedelic’s role in these two aspects.
Role In Religion And Spirituality
● Establishing Authority
When you think back on the stories about religion or mythology, it is not uncommon to find humankind accessing spiritual realms through psychoactive herbs or fungi. The earliest use of magic mushrooms is associated with today’s Algeria, Libya, Chad, and Peru, and many organized religions.
Archaeological discoveries like drug paraphernalia and other representation of trippers hint at traveling worshippers through the underground temple of Chavín de Huántar in modern-day Peru, which offers an environment to the human mind where it is open to spiritual activities. This is where worshippers are believed to take psychoactive drugs to travel through their minds.
Through priests who would orchestrate such spiritual ceremonies, local leaders might have used it to form an authority through a shared belief system to control the population.
● Expanding Human Memory and Revealing the Spiritual Realm
While psychoactive substances were common in many religious rituals, psilocybin was more critical to a cult, which evolved into the Soma cult, known to inspire Hinduism. The records of ethno mycologist Gordon Wasson, who participated in a mushroom ceremony by Maria Sabina, say that her chanting during the ceremony talked about a world far away from us. There lived spirits and saints, mostly a world where everything is known.
From this ceremony, Wasson speculated that psychedelics had revealed the spiritual realm. Expanding human memory and self-consciousness might also have driven societies to form art and culture, build cities, or develop into what we are today.
Some historians even believe that psychedelics and religions evolved together, and some sole credit psychedelics for the human consciousness.
• Role in Laboratory
With the development of modern science, the role of magic mushrooms has found its way to the laboratory, where psychological healing is aiming for new heights. With benefits like deeper connection, enhanced empathy, spiritual growth, some psychedelics are expected to cure severe mental health issues like PTSD, depression, anxiety, or even neurological disorders like epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, etc.
● In Mental Health Treatment
Psilocybin is yet to achieve its legal status in many states in the United States at the federal level, while in places like New Mexico, one is allowed to possess and cultivate mushrooms. However, the permit doesn’t allow one to dry the mushrooms or keep them in dried forms. The licenses of all the processes, including growing, extraction, synthesizing the drug, and offering them as treatments through therapy centers, lie with licensed therapists and manufacturers.
According to reports, people who have taken psilocybin have talked about going through a transformative experience. Combined with supportive therapy, psilocybin has the means of treating depression and anxiety to a significant extent. Many studies have proved that psilocybin can alter how the brain acquires or grasps information.
Psilocybin mushrooms can restore your brain parts to the original condition when the depression was not activated.
However, not everyone will have a good experience with psilocybin mushrooms or magic mushrooms. Bad experiences or bad journeys have been reported, so trained and licensed mental health professionals in a controlled environment must be associated while taking the drug for mental health treatment.
● In the Treatment of Diseases like Parkinson’s, Epilepsy, etc.
The news of recreational uses of psilocybin mushrooms or shrooms was quite popular during the 1960s and 1970, which now plays an essential part in strict and highly restrictive regulatory policies. This makes it difficult for researchers to conduct studies or research to gain satisfactory results. Nonetheless, in 2006, research from John Hopkins was published with a survey of the effects of psilocybin mushrooms.
The study included a scientific framework of how these drugs target the serotonin receptors in the brain and how this might be a way to treat various mental health issues like depression, anxiety, or other neurological disorders like epilepsy or Parkinson’s.
Biotechnology companies like Bright Minds Biosciences are leveraging their decades’ experiences in the biological serotonergic system to understand how some specific receptors affect our bodies. Drug developers and physicians at Bright Minds Biosciences address many mental health issues, pain, and neurological disorders like epilepsy with their drug candidates based on serotonin receptors in the brain.
Conclusion
The psychedelics or psilocybin mushrooms have come a long way from offering and showing people spiritual realms to now offering a treatment against life-consuming diseases like depression, anxiety or neurological disorders. But its benefits haven’t changed much. What new medicine discovers today about the effects of magic mushrooms has also been well-known to shamans in the past.
