Shroom recipe to cure anxiety and depression.

Recently, researchers have begun to experiment with psilocybin as a potential treatment for depression and anxiety. This line of research was frozen for decades and is still difficult to pursue, given psilocybin's status as a Schedule I substance. This means the drug is classified by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as having no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.

In the past, though, psilocybin and other hallucinogenic drugs were at the center of a thriving research program. During the 1960s, for example, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary and his colleagues ran a series of experiments with magic mushrooms called the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Among the most famous was the Marsh Chapel Experiment, in which volunteers were given either psilocybin or a placebo before a church service in the chapel. Those who got psilocybin were more likely to report a mystical spiritual experience. In 1991 a study found that participants who got the psilocybin remembered feeling even more unity and sacredness than they said they'd felt six months after the fact. Many described the experience as life altering.

"It left me with a completely unquestioned certainty that there is an environment bigger than the one I'm conscious of," one told the researchers in 1991. "I have my own interpretation of what that is, but it went from a theoretical proposition to an experiential one. … Somehow, my life has been different knowing that there is something out there."