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It promises to cure stubborn depression, alleviate anxiety, free people from addiction and, in one single-person case study, seemed to restore the ability of a woman with advanced Alzheimer’s to talk and recognise loved ones.
Psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – and other psychedelics have long promised to revolutionise mental health treatment and usher in an enlightened age of mind-altering medicine.
But since an unexpected and world-leading ruling in 2023 allowed its prescription in Australia for treatment-resistant depression, not many patients have actually accessed the therapy (about 65 in 2025).
Therapy price tags between $15,000 and $30,000 are a major barrier, although rules requiring a psychiatrist to be present for hours-long sessions were recently relaxed in a controversial bid to slash costs.
Large-scale clinical trial data also remains rare; it’s difficult to garner gold-standard evidence in this realm because you can’t really test psychedelics against a placebo. Give one patient a sugar pill and another a psilocybin capsule and, an hour later, it’s pretty clear to all involved who’s tripping.
So, how to understand where we’re at with the so-called psychedelic revolution? Consider the Gartner hype cycle:
It’s a graphic representation of how new technologies roar to a peak of expectation and buzz, driven by bold promises and small studies with headline-grabbing results, before an inevitable crash when large-scale studies struggle to back the hype and expectations plummet.
Eventually, we might reach the “plateau of productivity” – a place somewhere between the peak of hype and the trough of disappointment, where a new technology’s real utility lies.
With experts acknowledging public hype and clinical use of psilocybin has run ahead of the evidence, it feels like we may have hit the trough of disappointment.
But one of the biggest-ever brain-scanning studies into the effect of psilocybin, published last week, might be part of a new wave of research inching the field up the appropriately named “slope of enlightenment”.
The new study
Researchers gave 62 volunteers, who had never had psychedelic experience before, a 19 milligram dose of psilocybin. That’s below the “high therapeutic dose of 25 milligrams” but definitely enough to get a vibe going.
Participants were asked to either rest, meditate, listen to music, or watch a movie of floating clouds while their brains were scanned.
“About an hour and a half after their first psychedelic dose, they’re getting in the MRI. So it was definitely an intrepid experience for many individuals,” says lead author of the Nature paper, Dr Devon Stoliker from Monash University’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health.
Half the participants said it was one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives. Machine learning analysis of their brain activity helped explain why, perhaps, some people have these powerful experiences with psilocybin.
“Previous findings had found that psychedelics disorganise the brain,” Stoliker says, with a chaotic and random tangle of new connections. “That almost would suggest that the individual is in a state of confusion and bewilderment.”
If their brains are haywire, why do so many trippers report epiphanies and moments of life-altering clarity?
The results busted the paradox, Stoliker says: “We found that there’s a hidden level of organisation.”
Embeddedness: Where psilocybin becomes psychological?
Two areas of the brain were key. One was the default mode network, which is active in daydreaming, self-referential thinking, and how we envision and plan the story of our own lives.
The other was the visual network, which is “closely related to our sense of the outside world”, Stoliker says.
Under psilocybin, the activity in these different parts of the brain became less distinct, perhaps contributing to “a reduced separation between the self and the world”.
People reported “meld[ing] with the MRI machine, floor, walls, air”, and becoming part of a “bigger network of things”.
‘One of the most peaceful and profound things I could ever experience.’
A participant in the study describing their experience
The researchers described this as a state of “embeddedness” and wrote it may be “central to the therapeutic relevance of psychedelics” by opening a sense of boundlessness and producing positive, blissful, spiritual experience that can translate into psychological benefits.
This reorganisation of brain activity was also influenced by what participants were doing, providing evidence that the environment of a trip (dubbed “set and setting”) is crucial to shaping potential outcomes.
The results support the idea that the “subjective experience” of psychedelics – i.e. the trip itself and what patients are doing as it unfolds – is important therapeutically, rather than just the drug’s direct effect on the brain.
Stoliker hopes the research guides the field more towards “precision psychiatry”, where doctors may be able to use brain scans and other data to more effectively decide which patients could benefit from psilocybin.
A new wave of hype
Over in the US, three big approvals for psilocybin, LSD and MDMA treatments are under consideration by the Food and Drug Administration.
One of the datasets being considered by the FDA are the results of a Phase III trial – not yet published or peer reviewed – claiming two 25 milligram doses of synthetic psilocybin sparked clinically significant reductions in depression symptoms in 39 per cent of patients (meaning severity ratings of their depression symptoms dropped by at least a quarter).
With at least one, if not all, of these applications likely to be approved in the US, “it’s game on for a whole new world of psychedelic medicine”, says Rich Haridy, an investigative journalist and author of a new book about the psychedelic industry called Trip Reports.
So, with this slew of new research and regulatory activity, are we close to crawling from the trough of disappointment up the slope of enlightenment?
Haridy doesn’t think so. In fact, he’s bracing for a new wave of overinflated hype backed by the big pharmaceutical interests behind the FDA applications.
“I feel we’re actually now running up a peak of inflated expectations again,” he says. “I don’t think [psychedelics] are as powerful as a lot of hype has claimed.”
The involvement of big pharmaceutical companies, he says, risks a focus on the drug itself over the hours of therapy and support patients receive alongside psychedelics, which studies have emphasised as crucial to reductions in depression and anxiety.
“In the more advanced trialling, the therapy’s been stripped back and the idea of them becoming kind of a drug-only treatment is being pushed forward a lot more,” Haridy says.
And with that, he says, “efficacy seems to be less durable and less potent”.
A systematic review and meta-analysis published earlier this year screened a raft of different studies and found psychedelics were no better than standard antidepressants for major depression.
That lends us a useful way to regard these drugs as the hype mill fires up again: psychedelics are a welcome extra tool for treating mental health issues. But a magic mushroom is no magic bullet.
And without more research, the slope of enlightenment is not yet within reach.
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Angus Dalton is the science reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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