“At its most basic, I feel like I used to before the depression.”
Others reconnected to other people:
“I was talking to strangers. I had these full long conversations with
everybody I came into contact with.”
“I would look at people on the street and think, ‘How interesting we
are’—I felt connected to them all.”
And to nature:
“Before, I enjoyed nature; now I feel part of it. Before I was looking at
it as a thing, like TV or painting. You’re part of it, there’s no separation or
distinction, you are it.”
“I was everybody, unity, one life with 6 billion faces. I was the one
asking for love and giving love, I was swimming in the sea, and the sea
was me.”
The second master theme was a new access to difficult emotions,
emotions that depression often blunts or closes down completely. Watts
hypothesizes that the depressed patient’s incessant rumination constricts
his or her emotional repertoire. In other cases, the depressive keeps
emotions at bay because it is too painful to experience them.
This is especially true in cases of childhood trauma. Watts put me in
touch with a thirty-nine-year-old man in the study, a music journalist
named Ian Rouiller, who, along with his older sister, had been abused by
his father as a child. As adults, the siblings brought charges against their
father that put him in jail for several years, but this hadn’t relieved the
depression that has trailed Ian for most of his life.
“I can remember the moment when the horrible cloud first came over
me. It was in the family room of a pub called the Fighting Cocks in St.
Albans. I was ten.” Antidepressants helped for a while, but “putting the
plaster over the wound doesn’t heal anything.” On psilocybin, he was able
for the first time to confront his lifelong pain—and his father.
“Normally, when Dad comes up in my head, I just push the thought
away. But this time I went the other way.” His guide had told him he
should “go in and through” any frightening material that arose during his
journey.
“So this time I looked him in the eye. That was a really big thing for
me, to literally face the demon. And there he was. But he was a horse! A
military horse standing on its hind legs, dressed in a military outfit with a
helmet, and holding a gun. It was terrifying, and I wanted to push the
frankie
(Frankie)
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