People Are Taking Psilocybin for Depression — and Meeting God

T
he first time Stephanie Brinkerhoff tried psilocybin, she was a Mormon mother of three and desperate for help. She was struggling with migraines and chronic fatigue, and the antidepressants she had been on for years weren’t working, she felt. After listening to a series of podcasts about psychedelics, and learning about their reported mental health benefits, she presented her research to her Bishop, who didn’t dissuade her. 

“He was just kind of like, ‘OK, like, I trust you,’” says Brinkerhoff, who looks a lot like Sally Draper from Mad Men, all grown up. “‘If this is something that you’re approaching for therapeutic reasons, and it feels very spiritual to you and you prayed about it and whatever… Then, good luck.’” 

Still, Brinkerhoff, who had never so much as tasted coffee at the time, was nervous. “It was like this really big deal to be like, OK, I’m going to partake of an illegal substance,” she recalls. 

In 2021, she swallowed her first dose of magic mushrooms with an alleged medicine woman she found on Retreat.Guru. “I went in blind,” Brinkerhoff admits, expecting the mushrooms to iron out the kinks in her brain and nothing more.

Instead, Brinkerhoff says, she met God. But whereas the God of her childhood was a remote “deity in the sky,” she says, a “parent figure” who could both protect and punish her, the God she encountered on mushrooms was radically different. The divine felt more embodied and earth-based, she says — synonymous, in fact, with “life.”

“It made me realize that everything that organized religion was claiming to give to me wasn’t actually coming from the religion,” Brinkerhoff reflects. “Once that clicked for me, everything fell apart.” 

Within three months, Brinkerhoff had left the Church of Latter-day Saints, an organization she now describes as having committed “soul theft” for robbing her of the intuition and sovereignty she credits the mushrooms with returning.

Yet despite leaving the church, her faith in a higher power has only grown. 

“It’s kind of like we’re God experiencing itself,” she says now. 

AS PSYCHEDELICS REENTER mainstream, with psilocybin legalized for recreation in Colorado, and for therapeutic use in Oregon, millions of Americans are trying them for the first time, and some are walking away — quite by surprise — true believers. 

Danny Worwood, a family physician in Utah, says he was motivated to try psilocybin after growing disillusioned with the medical establishment, and feeling like he didn’t have good treatment options to offer his patients. “This is kind of tender to me,” Worwood tells me, voice cracking, as he recounts how magic mushrooms unexpectedly dissolved his previously-held atheism. “It was like a conduit was created for me to know God again.” 

In stumbling upon the connection between mushrooms and the sacred, Brinkerhoff and Worwood are discovering a path well-worn by indigenous peoples. Yet compared to the recent hype psychedelics have received for potentially treating everything from depression to addiction, their extraordinary spiritual potency has been less emphasized, despite the fact that the very name — psychedelics — means “soul revealing.” The alternative term that some prefer — entheogens — puts an even finer point on it: “God within.”

That’s been by design. Modern-day psychedelic advocates, haunted by ghosts of the counterculture past like Timothy Leary, who exhorted America’s youth to “drop out” and start their own religion, have mostly stuck to the secular path of medicalization, reasoning that veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder would be safer poster children — this time around — than the born-again. 

Now, this idea that psychedelics are medical tools with spiritual properties, rather than spiritual tools with medical properties, is beginning to fray. On Aug. 9, the Food and Drug Administration declined to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD, citing insufficient data, and ordering the company seeking the patent, Lykos Therapeutics, to do another trial. The decision, which Michael Pollan characterized as an “earthquake” for the budding field of psychedelic medicine, was not a complete shock; in June, a panel of independent experts also recommended against approval. 

Ironically, one of the many criticisms made at the June meeting was that Dr. Rick Doblin, the MDMA champion behind the legalization effort, was using medicalization as a Trojan horse to pursue deeper spiritual aims, suggesting that, market psychedelics as you will, the alpha and omega is difficult to conceal. Similar evangelical accusations have dogged researchers at Johns Hopkins University, particularly the late Roland Griffiths. Doblin resigned from the Lykos board Aug. 15.

Meanwhile, a year into Oregon’s experiment with legal psilocybin for therapeutic use, many of its treatment centers are searching for patients, and at least one has already folded, citing lack of demand. Part of the fizzle is due to the sticker price — as much as $2,500 for a trip and two conversations with a facilitator — but part may also be because Oregonians don’t necessarily want to use mushrooms clinically. In one 2022 survey from the Oregon Health Authority of 4,400 people, 72 percent said they wanted to use psilocybin for “general well-being,” compared to 64 percent who were interested in potentially taking it for depression and anxiety. 

Yet at the exact moment medicalization is hitting its first snags, a spiritual wind is beginning to blow, offering a way forward that some say was more appropriate all along. In May, a new psychedelic church in Arizona, the Church of the Eagle and the Condor, became the third U.S. church to win the right to worship with ayahuasca (the other two are the Brazil-based Santo Daime Church, founded in 1930, and the Brazil-based União do Vegetal, founded in 1961). The settlement marks a historic shift in DEA policy, which, in the past, has tended to view Johnny-come-lately churches claiming drugs as their sacraments with an almost impenetrable degree of skepticism. 

Naturally, church will not solve all the problems with psychedelics. Unspeakable  atrocities have been committed in the name of religion, driving many out of it in the first place, and adding a mind-altering substance into that old chalice may prove a dangerous combination indeed. There are also sometimes good reasons to take psychedelics in a regulated clinical setting, including, theoretically, a high level of rigor and safety. 

Still, Jeffrey Breau, a ketamine chaplaincy advisor at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital in Boston, and a program lead for psychedelics and spirituality at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, says that while he fully supports medicalization, spiritual and religious use will ultimately be “more successful” in terms of integrating psychedelics into mainstream society, partially because it more accurately reflects users’ experiences.

“Science always wants to be able to say, ‘We aren’t doing anything religious,’” he says, noting there are both political and methodological reasons for that. “And yet patients, time and again, are saying, ‘Well, actually, this experience is far richer than just my depression treatment or just my PTSD treatment. I’m having all sorts of other understandings and realizations.’” 

WHAT THESE REALIZATIONS are is far from a settled matter. For the initiated, they can feel like incontrovertible proof that God is real. For the skeptical, they are proof that drugs get you high. Nevertheless, slippery as they are, mystical experiences are on the rise. According to surveys from Gallup and Pew, 49 percent of Americans in 2009 reported having had a mystical experience, defined loosely as a “moment of sudden religious insight or awakening.” By contrast, only 22 percent said they had in 1962. Jules Evans, a philosopher who writes about psychedelics, predicts that such experiences “will become more common if and when psychedelics are legalized.” 

There is reason to think it is already happening en masse if still largely individually — like the spores of a mycelium beginning to colonize. In the last three years, hallucinogenic use, primarily of mushrooms, has nearly doubled among young adults. The nonpartisan RAND Corporation estimates that eight million Americans, or three percent of the population, used psilocybin last year, making magic mushrooms America’s favorite hallucinogen — a fitting yen for an empire in decay. 

Not all eight million of these consumers are touching the mystic shores, but if the scientific literature is any guide, a good portion are: In 2006, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that a dose of psilocybin (30 mg/70 kg) resulted in 22 out of 36 healthy volunteers having a “complete” mystical experience, with 68 percent reporting their trip to be one of the top five most spiritually significant events of their lives. Later, many described a sense of unity without form (known as pure consciousness) and/or a unity of all things. Subsequent studies have found that psychedelics produce mystical experiences at frequency between 50 percent and 80 percent, depending on the substance and dose.

In defining these mystical experiences — a task akin to pinning a Flubber tail on a cosmically large donkey — the Hopkins team drew on the work of Walter Stace, an English philosopher who argued that this melding sense of oneness with the universe is the classic mystical experience. By comparing accounts from Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and Muslim mystics, Stace further characterized the mystical as feeling sacred, or that what one is encountering is holy; noetic, or that what one is experiencing is imbued with meaning and is realer than real; positive, in the sense that one typically feels great bliss or peace; transcendent, or that time and space have lost their ordinary quality; and ineffable, meaning the experience is difficult to capture in words. 

In religious scholar lingo, Stace is what is known as a perennialist, meaning someone who thinks all religions are describing the same thing. His insistence that “the basic experience of the Christian mystics is descriptively indistinguishable from that of the Vedantic mystics” has irked constructivists, including Breau, who counter that we all perceive God through our unique cultural lenses, and can never take these off — not even on a heroic dose of shrooms.

Nevertheless, Breau sees psychedelic spirituality as a future — if not the future — of religion in this country. He points to the “nones,” or people who identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” In 2006, nones were 16 percent of the U.S. population, but over the last two decades, according to Pew, they have nearly doubled to 28 percent, making them the largest single cohort nationally. 

Breau judges that the nones may be especially attracted to psychedelics because most say they still believe in a higher power — and are therefore prepared for the transcendent experiences psychedelics can bring on. Eventually, he predicts, the desire to share in such profound experiences will lead to the formation of new collective rituals, as well as the reanimation of old ones. 

Already there is Ligare, a Christian psychedelic society in Savannah, Georgia, “dedicated to making direct experience of the sacred available to all who desire it,” and Sacred Plant Alliance, a membership-based association of psychedelic churches with leaders who have a range of eight to 35 years of experience and congregations averaging 350 individual members. According to Sacred Plant Alliance president Allison Hoots, there are likely between 250 and 750 such churches nationally.

Breau is currently completing an ethnography of psychedelic spiritualities, including at Burning Man, and tells me that the majority of his sources are nones who were raised Christian. Many left the church because of their sexual identity, or because their childhood church didn’t share their values, he says. 

As soon as he mentions that — the brokenhearted Christians worshiping in the desert — a vision of this psychedelic future swirls into view. I have been to this future before — tripped in it myself, even. Not in Black Rock City, but Salt Lake. 

IN 2022, WITH FUNDING from the Ferriss–UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship, I wrote about the biggest psychedelic church in Utah — the highly decentralized Divine Assembly. Founded by Steve Urquhart, a former Mormon and Republican state representative who crashed out of both institutions following a transformational ayahuasca experience in which he saw God as a woman, the Divine Assembly is largely filled with ex-Mormons who now gather in each other’s homes to take a psilocybin sacrament with an alacrity that only their Mormon upbringing could have given them. 

This is surprising only at first glance. Upon closer examination, a vortex of contributing factors make Utah, which is still around 40 percent Mormon, the perfect substrate for psilocybin spirituality. 

While it is true that the LDS church forbids the use of drugs, including alcohol and caffeine, it also looks favorably on natural, plant-based remedies. Above all, it encourages its adherents to seek the kind of direct revelation Joseph Smith is said to have had, priming some Mormons for the insights and visions that psychedelics are so good at generating.

But Mormonism is also what is known as a “high demand” religion, meaning it has a lot of rules, costs a lot of money, and takes up a lot of time. For many Mormons these demands are worth it, and contribute to an idyllic sense of community. Bridger Jensen, who grew up in Provo, Utah, in the Eighties and Nineties, recalls how all the adults in his neighborhood were his parental figures. “You’d see each other in church, they would be your teachers, and then you’d move on, and next year you’d have new teachers, and they’d be your basketball youth leaders, and they’d take you camping, and your friend’s dad would hang out with you and play ball with you,” he recalls. 

But for other Mormons, like Brinkerhoff, this intense insularity, and pressure to conform to a largely patriarchal, heteronormative culture can be unbearable. Utah has one of the highest rates of self-reported depression in the country and double the national suicide rate, twin crises that have prompted lawmakers to tentatively consider psychedelics as a public health intervention. In March, Utah unanimously passed Senate Bill 266, which establishes a pilot program allowing doctors at certain hospitals to prescribe psilocybin and MDMA to patients in a clinical setting. 

Both Republican sponsors, Senator Kirk Culllimore and Representative James Dunnigan, who happen to be Latter-day Saints like much of Utah’s legislature, say they thought psychedelics were worth a shot based on the anecdotes they heard from family, friends, and constituents — guys, Cullimore says, “you would never suspect.” 

Some of that grapevine snakes through the Divine Assembly. In 2022, when I first wrote about them, the Divine Assembly had around 1,700 members, counted by the number of web visitors who had joined for free online. When I went back to Salt Lake City in January to help moderate a psychedelic conference the Urquharts were throwing, attended by 1,200 people, Divine Assembly membership had surged to around 15,000. “I used to joke that we had members on all seven continents minus Antarctica,” says Urquhart, “but then a research scientist down there wrote to us so I gotta stop saying that.”

In person, around 100 people attend the Divine Assembly’s weekly Sunday meetups, held sober and doctrine-free in a local furniture store, where members and prospective members lounge on mattresses and make friends — some of whom eventually end up guiding for each other using the mushroom kits the Divine Assembly sells online for $75. 

This social, DIY aspect is key to Urquhart’s psychedelic vision: The community, he likes to say, is the true medicine. To that end, the Divine Assembly puts on a psychedelic festival called “Our Revival” each June, and has even bought land — 683 acres’ worth — to build a permanent church camp west of Salt Lake City. Known as the Delle, the property will have, Urquhart hopes, a swimming hole, green burial ground where members’ remains, if they wish, can return to the earth naturally, an amphitheater named after celebrity mycologist Paul Stammets, and enough campsites and cargo containers to host thousands of members comfortably. “I want it to be the most holy spot on Earth,” he says, “where anyone can worship. But how they worship is up to them.” 

Amazingly, Urquhart — a lawyer by training — isn’t worried about legal trouble, despite the fact that psilocybin is still very much a Schedule I substance. Partially, that’s because Utah has a rich tradition of religious liberty, and a deep collective memory of what it’s like to be an upstart religion on the run. Part of it, Urquhart freely admits, is white privilege. 

More recently, his confidence has been strengthened by Utah’s new Religious Freedom and Restoration Act. For many Americans, RFRA is the thing that allows cake bakers to refuse service to gay couples. Less well known is that RFRA is, at its very core, a psychedelic law, signed in 1993 by President Clinton to protect the Native American Church’s ability to worship with peyote. Under Utah’s new RFRA, the bar for defining religious activities is lower, and the penalties for hassling worshippers higher, making it significantly stronger than the federal statute. 

“They don’t know what they just did!” Urquhart gloats when I call him after Governor Cox sings the bill, arguing that the government has just accidentally made psychedelic worship even safer in the state. 

 “These are lottery odds.”

NO ONE KNOWS how Utah’s courts would adjudicate a psychedelic church. In the meantime, some Utahns are plowing ahead, mixing spirit and profit freely. 

Bridger Jensen is the founder of Singularism, a new “small entheogenic religion” named after the idea that “all things are one.” Over Zoom, he recalls how he hired his lawyer — a prominent LDS attorney. “I said, ‘Look. Are you willing to fight tooth and nail all the way up to the Supreme Court for my religion as much as you would your own?’” 

“He just put his pen down,” recalls Jensen. “Bridger, maybe you’re not getting this,” the lawyer told him. “Protecting you is protecting me.”

In a snowy white “wellness center” offering “pastoral counseling” for around $160 dollars an hour — “not more than a therapist would charge” — Jensen and his team facilitate, using psilocybin, ego death experiences for clients, whom they call “voyagers.” The explicit goal, Jensen tells me, is to realize that the ordinary self, as we normally experience it, is an illusion. 

“We are one with all people, with our enemy, with our friend, with our ancestors, and with our prodigy,” Jensen says, sounding like a puppy-dog version of Alan Watts. Such revelations, which Jensen calls aphorisms, get recorded during each voyager’s trip in a living book of people’s Scripture.

Jensen says his own ego first died on Broadway, where, after swallowing a dose of mushrooms before watching The Book of Mormon, he realized that he had been the main character: “an arrogant white missionary that thinks they know everything about God, ready to go save the world.”

Later, he would stagger out of the theater blinded by tears and a new humility. He walked the length of Manhattan that night, eventually ending his pilgrimage at the statue of Alice and Wonderland in Central Park, where he slept beneath the bronze mushroom. But while Jensen no longer practices Mormonism, he says he still loves and appreciates the people in his life who do; after all, he once was them, and, by the doctrine of Singularism, still is. 

“Our rule is we are faith-affirming,” he emphasizes, describing how Singularism serves active Mormons as well as apostates. “We have had such prominent Mormons come in our doors that it would shock members that such valiant and heartfelt and multigenerational LDS people are participating,” he tells me.

“Multiple people whom every active Mormon would recognize their voice.” 

NOT EVERYONE THINKS using psychedelics to produce mystical experiences on demand is a good idea. Beyond the obvious concerns (Commodification! Abuse of power!), there are spiritual consequences to consider. Rick Strassman, a leading DMT researcher and critic of the Hopkins lab for what he sees as undue religious zeal among some of its members, calls it “storming heaven.” “It’s an expression I picked up at my Zen temple,” Strassman says. “You just want the experience above all else. You don’t want to be a better person. You don’t want to help humanity. You just want to get into heaven.”

At the same time, scientists are finding that these mystical experiences seem to mediate the therapeutic effect that psychedelics trigger, raising the question of whether the ability to reliably induce them might be a good thing. In one systematic review from 2022, researchers at King’s College, London found that having a mystical experience was positively correlated with better treatment outcomes for conditions like PTSD and addiction in 10 out of 12 studies, suggesting that something other than just neuroplasticity is involved in how psychedelics heal. 

Eventually, says Michael Ferguson, a neuroscientist who has held faculty appointments at both Harvard Medical School and Divinity School, the prickly paradigms of science and spirituality will stop competing when it comes to psychedelics. It will become accepted knowledge, he predicts, that “these medical, clinical outcomes flow from  spiritual foundations.” 

Ferguson, who was raised LDS himself and  directs the choir in his Cambridge congregation is attempting to develop the field of neurospirituality, inspired by an epiphany he had as a postdoctorate that neural architecture, Aristotle, and Teresa of Avila were all gesturing towards the same thing: that every human may possess an “interior castle,” or a “divine indwelling,” where spirit resides. 

When I catch up with him, he is about to embark on a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Fátima in Portugal. I tell him about one of my sources, Angela DiGiovanni, a former fundamentalist Mormon who left her plural marriage after trying psilocybin under the stars in Arkansas, and seeing God as a female force who helped her give birth to the Earth. Afterwards, she understood herself to be the “the tentacles of God,” tasting and probing reality. She also shared another insight I have heard time and again: The divine cannot be found externally. “God is not in that structure” she recounted, referring to the granite temple in Salt Lake City. “He is inside of us.”

Why, I wanted to know, do so many of my sources seem to have similar psychedelic experiences, other than the fact that they are mostly white, American, and Mormon? And what to make of the fact that their trips often do not sound very white, American, or Mormon at all? Does it all boil down to set and setting? Or is it possible that there is also such a thing as a universal mystical experience, like Stace believed?

“I don’t know how there could not be,” Ferguson answers. He points to the fact that human brains “share far more of a common wiring diagram than the things that make us different,” and says that academic resistance to our shared humanity is, essentially, political. 

“I think that there is a well-placed anxiety that if we’re exclusively describing spirituality in terms of a universal pattern, that might erase or render invisible communities that have been historically marginalized and oppressed,” he elaborates. 

At the same time, he says, across cultures, “there is this recurring motif that there is a great unity to life, and that we are all co-participants in that great unity, and that when we connect to that harmony of all of life, that there is this joy and this bliss that emerges from the individual harmonization with that great unity of life.”

Call it samadhi or call it rapture. However else psychedelics may be impacting society, they are also granting direct access to it for millions of people for the first time.