A new breakthrough has been made in the endeavor of treating depression, a psychoactive substance found in ‘magic mushrooms’: psilocybin.

Psilocybin is a psychoactive compound found in a genus of mushrooms called Psilocybe. ‘Magic mushrooms’ are a popular recreational, albeit illegal, psychedelic substance in the world today, and has been found to be one of the more promising treatments for depression – with little luck being had in the progress for a better treatment in some odd years. In a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface in 2014, psilocybin’s effect on the brain of a patient suffering from depression was found to have “radically different connectivity patterns between cortical regions (the parts thought to play an important role in consciousness)”, as said by the New York Times article covering the study. Psilocybin effectively “reboots” the brain of the patient; a reboot in the brain that which suffers from neurotransmitters not acting as they should (clinical depression), seems to break the pattern of negative thoughts that comes with depression. “When suffering depression, people get stuck in a spiral of negative thoughts and cannot get out of it,” Dr. Expert said, “One can imagine that breaking any pattern that prevents a ‘proper’ functioning of the brain can be helpful.”

This “reboot” is the most promising course of action in the efforts of treatment for depression, yet psilocybin remains a Schedule 1 substance in the United States, along with heroin and cannabis. Until the legality of psilocybin changes, no sort of research on the substance can be done in America, nor can the substance be legally consumed or possessed for one’s own purposes, even be them purposes of self-improvement.

As more and more is found out about psilocybin, in the same way medical marijuana has been found to have medicinal purposes, hopefully, the same happens for this psychoactive substance for the sake of all those who suffer depression across the world.

“Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as [Carl] Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.” – Terrence McKenna