Ask people who’ve tried so-called “magic mushrooms” what the experience was like, and many will tell you it’s life-changing. Turns out, those aren’t just the ravings of a hallucinogenic mind. In fact, a growing group of researchers is excited about the potential benefits of psilocybin, the primary hallucinogenic compound in ’shrooms, which is showing a lot of promise for helping people overcome hard-to-treat (or treatment-resistant) and life-disrupting conditions like addiction and major depression.

Psilocybin can exacerbate or trigger the onset of underlying psychotic conditions, people with a personal or family history of conditions like schizophrenia are at high risk of long-lasting harm and should steer clear of psilocybin. If not used in a controlled environment with a mental health professional present, psilocybin is a powerful tool that, if used in a dangerous way, could harm the person or the people around them.

Psilocybin is not considered to be addictive nor does it cause compulsive use. One reason is that the intense experience, which can be physically and mentally challenging, may cause people using psilocybin to limit their frequency of use.

Another reason is that the human body quickly builds tolerance to psilocybin, such that people require much higher doses after only a few days of repeated use, making it extremely difficult to have any effect after more than four days of repeated usage.

The risks associated with psychedelic drugs are mostly psychological, not physical. Physically, psilocybin mushrooms are considered one of the least toxic drugs known.

Reported symptoms like nausea, increased perspiration, numbing and tremors, can sometimes make psychological symptoms like anxiety, panic attacks, paranoia, and mood swings seem worse. Long-term physical effects directly attributed to the pharmacology of psilocybin are rare, and research suggests they may also be due to latent psychological disorders.

Taking a large dose of Magic Mushrooms always has the risk of having your ego dissolve, this experience called Ego-Death is essentially the stripping away of your own ideas of yourself. It’s the stripping away of how you perceive your individual nature compared to others, but more importantly, compared to your former senses of self and how you would like your future self to be.

A person becomes free to ask themselves; Who am I? What makes up ‘me’? Do I have to be anything? Do I have to conform to anything? Surely forgetting who you are is terrifying? A person has more of a capacity to live in the moment, which alleviates some if not most of any fear that could present itself.

Don’t worry though, our human ego will always come back after the experience