Introduction - About This Blog

The Lagoon Nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius
(source NASA, ESA, J. Trauger)

My name is Ian and I’m writing this introduction on April 8th 2016 – around eight months after taking part in a study at Imperial College looking at using psilocybin to treat resistant depression (ignore the date above that I had to choose to make this blog entry appear first!). For those of you who may not know, psilocybin is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, possession of which has been illegal in the UK since 2005 (in their fresh form – possession of dried or ‘prepared’ mushrooms was already illegal before this).

This has created numerous legal hurdles for former government drug advisor Professor David Nutt to overcome when it came to running the trial. Leading Professor Nutt’s team is Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, who I contacted in September 2014 after watching this video of a lecture he gave on the way psilocybin works in the brain.

To cut a long (life) story short, me and my sister were abused by our father when we were children which has affected both our lives in a multitude of ways from our self esteem and self image to trust issues and our choice of relationships. While I’m proud of my sister and myself, especially for facing our father in court in 2012 and ensuring he was sent to prison, we still struggle to deal with what happened and have both suffered debilitating depression throughout our lives.

I hit a particularly bad patch of depression towards the end of 2013 and life became completely overwhelming. I tried to carry on, plough through everything and keep working as hard as I could, even though the longer I ignored it the more depressed, angry and full of despair I became. I’d been on various antidepressants, had regular counselling, had started meditating every day and trying to force myself out of the house to go for walks in the park but nothing seemed to lift the cloud. Month by month I felt myself getting dragged lower and lower. I was desperate and spent much of my life in complete despair.

It was when I was looking at other treatments for depression that I came across Robin’s lecture. In February 2015 I received an email from clinical psychiatrist Mark Bolstridge asking if I was still interested in taking part in the trial and by the summer everything was in place for the study to begin.

What follows is a diary of my experiences, written during the trial itself. I’ve spent the time since wondering whether or not to share my experiences publicly, feeling fearful of how people I know may react due to the stigma that surrounds certain drugs. This has been outweighed by my belief in the study and the potential benefits psilocybin may have for many people suffering from severe depression – plus I’ve been nudged into action by my fellow study participant, Kirk, whose own experiences you can read about on his blog here http://mypsilocybin.blogspot.co.uk.

This blog will form a permanent record of my experiences and also form a space to express ideas, theories and thoughts relating to the insights and realisations I had during the trial. I hope sharing my experiences helps in some small way to make psilocybin a widely accepted medical treatment for depression.

Why the blog is called ‘In and through’ will become clear as you read through, as will the reason I chose the background image of a nebula from the far reaches of outer space (image credit- NASA, ESA, J. Trauger (Jet Propulson Laboratory)).