How to Change Your Mind

image aside, but I didn’t. In and through: Instead, I looked the horse in
the eyes—and promptly started to laugh, it was so ridiculous.
“That’s when what had been a bad trip really turned. Now I had every
sort of emotion, positive, negative, it didn’t matter. I thought about the
[Syrian] refugees in Calais and started crying for them, and I saw that
every emotion is as valid as any other. You don’t cherry-pick happiness
and enjoyment, the so-called good emotions; it was okay to have negative
thoughts. That’s life. For me, trying to resist emotions just amplified
them. Once I was in this state, it was beautiful—a feeling of deep
contentment. I had this overwhelming feeling—it wasn’t even a thought—
that everything and everyone needs to be approached with love, including
myself.”
Ian enjoyed several months of relief from his depression as well as a
new perspective on his life—something no antidepressant had ever given
him. “Like Google Earth, I had zoomed out,” he told Watts in his six-
month interview. For several weeks after his session, “I was absolutely
connected to myself, to every living thing, to the universe.” Eventually,
Ian’s overview effect faded, however, and he ended up back on Zoloft.
“The sheen and shine that life and existence had regained immediately
after the trial and for several weeks after gradually faded,” he wrote one
year later. “The insights I gained during the trial have never left and will
never leave me. But they now feel more like ideas,” he says. He says he’s
doing better than before and has been able to hold down a job, but his
depression has returned. He told me he wishes he could have another
psilocybin session at Imperial. Because that’s currently not an option,
he’ll sometimes meditate and listen to the playlist from his session. “That
really does help put me back in that place.”
More than half of the Imperial volunteers saw the clouds of their
depression eventually return, so it seems likely that psychedelic therapy
for depression, should it prove useful and be approved, will not be a
onetime intervention. But even the temporary respite the volunteers
regarded as precious, because it reminded them there was another way to
be that was worth working to recapture. Like electroconvulsive therapy
for depression, which it in some ways resembles, psychedelic therapy is a
shock to the system—a “reboot” or “defragging”—that may need to be
repeated every so often. (Assuming the treatment works as well when