The next time Campus Safety catches you with a plastic container under your bed filled with dirt, fertilizer and slowly sprouting mushrooms, tell them you are going through a real tough breakup and are choosing to use an all-natural method to fight depression in lieu of being hopped up on Prozac.
It may not work in the short-term, but it’s possible you could win your case a few years down the road on appeals, as it appears science is starting to turn in your favor.
Researchers in Zurich believe that psilocybin—the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms—may help fight depression and anxiety by blocking negative emotions.
The processing of emotions can be impaired by various causes and elicit mental disorders. Elevated activity of the amygdala in response to stimuli leads to the neurons strengthening negative signals and weakening the processing of positive ones. This mechanism plays an important role in the development of depression and anxiety disorders. Psilocybin intervenes specifically in this mechanism
Basically, it stops the bad feelings from ever entering your system.
According to [Rainer] Krähenmann, this observation is of major clinical importance. Depressive patients in particular react more to negative stimuli and their thoughts often revolve around negative contents. Hence, the neuropharmacologists now wish to elucidate in further studies whether psilocybin normalises the exaggerated processing of negative stimuli as seen in neuroimaging studies of depressed patients — and may consequently lead to improved mood in these patients. .
So, down the road, tripping could be prescribed for your health. Get ready to fake some serious sadness to feed your fix.
[Mushroom via Shutterstock]