Unlocking the Magic: How Canadians are Navigating the Psychedelic Landscape for Mental Health

The spotlight is turning towards psilocybin, the active psychedelic compound found in "Magic Mushrooms" or "shrooms," as its potential mental health benefits gain recognition.

This journey, from scientific curiosity to potential therapeutic use on a broader scale, faces challenges despite the country's progress in approving clinical trials and offering restricted access. While Canada has taken steps in approving such trials, issues related to regulation, training, patient advocacy, and ongoing debates around recreational legalization add layers of complexity to the unfolding narrative of psilocybin's role in mental health.

Psilocybin's recognition as a potent tool for addressing mental health issues, particularly depression, is growing.

Despite Canada's progress in approving clinical trials and offering restricted access, issues related to regulation and training remain. Advocacy for patient rights, coupled with debates surrounding recreational legalization and the significance of responsible use, introduces complexity to the evolving story of psilocybin's role in mental health.

Dr Neel Chadha is a family physician with a special focus in psychedelics. “Psilocybin a classic tryptamine psychedelic,” he says. “It acts on specific pathways in the brain, known as tryptamine pathways.”

Chadha says psilocybin is an extremely effective tool for dealing with depression as it acts on a serotonin receptor known as 5HT2A.

He commonly sees patients with depression stuck in negative patterns of thinking. Chadha says psilocybin allows you to break negative patterns and create new positive ones through neuroplasticity and neurogenesis.

Health Canada says there are “no approved therapeutic products containing psilocybin in Canada or elsewhere.” Adding that psilocybin-containing products have not undergone enough rigorous scientific testing to be approved for sale and consumption.

Medical research involving psilocybin dates back more than half a century. According to the NIH’s National library of Medicine, a total of 259 scientific papers on psilocybin were published between 1958 and 1971.

Doctor Amza Ali is the former Chief Medical officer of the Pysence Group in Toronto, and a recent contributor to medical journal Mushrooms with Therapeutic Potentials: Recent Advances in Research and Development.

He says after 1971 research slowed by half, dropping from roughly 20 publications a year to under 10.  

In 1968 the United Nations Economic and Social Council urged nations to limit the use of “LSD and similar Hallucinogenic substances” to scientific and medical purposes. They did so in order to address “the problem of the abuse of the psychotropic substances not yet under international control.”

This resulted in many countries passing legislature to restrict access to psychedelics. In 1969, Canada amended Part IV of the Food and Drugs Act, to give the federal government regulatory authority of substances like LSD, DMT, and MDA.  Psilocybin was only added in 1974.

It’s currently prohibited for recreational usage under Schedule III of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA). As of 2011, the number of publications on psilocybin began to increase.  “The increase was largely due to the American activism group the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,” Ali says. “Also known as MAPS.”

But it wasn’t until three years ago that the number of publications rose exponentially.

Thirty research papers on psilocybin were published globally in 2015. Six years later, that number rose to more than 200 published papers.

Canada has authorized the use of psilocybin in 28 clinical trials to date. Three are in progress.

Spencer Hawkswell is the CEO of TheraPsil, a leading medical legal psilocybin advocacy group in Canada. He says the organization began as a “natural response to an injustice that was taking place in Canada.”

“[The government] gave us the right to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), but for some reason didn't give us the right to medical psilocybin,” he says. MAID began allowing terminally ill patients to choose when they wanted to die in June 2016. “It’s a moral issue to tell someone that they can't access a medicine that might help them.”

TheraPsil began building its presence online, creating social media posts urging terminally ill patients to reach out to their organization.

“By just patiently waiting and continuing to advocate, we got messages from people saying, ‘I think I would benefit from this, and I would like some help,’” he says.

Hawkswell and his team began matching these patients with doctors and therapists. They lobbied for access to psilocybin in Parilament by filing applications under Section 56, which, at the time, gave patients a legal exemption to possess and use psilocybin therapeutically.  

“In the beginning we didn’t get any answers,” he says. “What do you do when the government ignores you and basically tells you to please go quietly die? You go to the media.”

TheraPsil began reaching out to major media platforms like CTV News and Global News to get their patients stories out. They also began using their own social media, gathering testimonies from doctors and patients urging former Minister of Health Patty Hajdu to grant access.

In August 2020, after over 100 days waiting for a response,  Thomas Hartle, Laurie Brooks and two other terminal cancer patients became the first people to legally use psilocybin since the 70’s.

“There are no Section 56 exemptions being granted whatsoever since the Special Access Program (SAP) was rolled out in January 2022,” says TheraPsil’s communications director John Gilhurst.

Health Canada amended the SAP to allow physicians to request access to psilocybin for their patients.

Yasmeen deRosenroll, TheraPsil’s director of Training & Operations, says filling out the SAP form can be an extremely lengthy process. Her team has created a six-hour online training program to teach physicians how to fill out the form.

“It's a really long process,” she says. “Some doctors were saying that it took them eight hours to fill it out.”

Health Canada requires healthcare professionals to complete a training program on how to guide a patient safely and effectively through a psilocybin experience. But it does not provide such a program. Healthcare professionals must seek independent training, that they must pay for themselves.

TheraPsil’s Fundamentals of Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy (PAP) training program is 140 hours long. It takes at least six months to complete.

Rob Anderson is an Ottawa based psychotherapist who has recently completed TheraPsil’s training program. He says healthcare professionals take on a lot of responsibility when participating in PAP because of the current regulations around psilocybin.

“It is a grey area. There are no college guidelines because it is an illegal drug,” he says. The risk of losing your license due to an unforeseen negative circumstance is substantially higher using psilocybin in psychotherapy than any legal drug.

In the absence of well-defined regulations for policies on care, Hawkswell says the program gives practitioners something to reference and protect themselves.

Five years ago, Steve Allgood was diagnosed with terminal stage four brain cancer in the form of an inoperable tumor. He was one of the 47 people granted a Section 56 exemption.

“I was told that I was terminal, and that there's no treatment for the type of brain tumor that I had,” he says. “And that without treatment, most people last nine months.”

Allgood fell into a deep depression, often waking up with a poor mindset, unable to do anything but stare at a wall or out the window. His brother in law suggested psilocybin assisted therapy to try and help his end of life distress.

Allgood says he “struggled to find a doctor” willing to lead the psilocybin assisted therapy. “Each time I asked a therapist about psychedelics they just said they didn't know enough about it and weren't open to it,” he says.

Allgood eventually was able to find a doctor to lead his first legal PAP session in February 2022. Since then, he has completed two more sessions, one in October of 2022 still under his original section 56 exemption. The other under the special access program in April 2023.

“It was a hard thing to accept at such a young age that my life was possibly going to end very soon. Or to accept that it was going to be extremely different. And because of the mushrooms, and all this work, it's really given me my life back 100 per cent,” he says.  

While psilocybin assisted psychotherapy is only available for a few people, using psychedelic mushrooms in Canada is quite easy.

There are illegal storefronts where you can go in and purchase dried mushrooms and capsules, or you can order them online. Grow kits are also available to order and you can grow them yourself. Grow kits are legal to purchase and sell as the spores do not contain psilocybin.

Asha Sultana is a micro-dosing coach, meaning she helps people safely use psilocybin. She began her own journey into psilocybin because she was looking for ways to help alleviate symptoms from mercury and lead poisoning, as a result of improper removal of dental caps.

She became a micro dosing coach “because there's so much information out there, and there's so little genuine intent for everyone's wellbeing,” she says. “Everybody seems to have their own motive. I just feel that it's important to have one sane voice, that you can reach out to.”

Micro dosing is not a one stop solution to all your mental health problems. “It's not a silver bullet. It's work,” she says. “There's a lot more to micro dosing than just a fraction of a recreational dose”

She suggests as a beginner to start by following the Fadiman protocol. This means ingesting a micro dose, 0.1- 0.3 grams of dried psilocybin mushroom, two to three times a week. It is important to have a 48 or 72 hour break in between doses she says.

“Then there is a break that is encouraged after a six to eight week period,” Sultana says. “The break can be two to four weeks, or the break can be a year.”

But micro dosing doesn’t work for everyone.

R. Davey is a student at the University of Victoria. They started micro dosing in hopes to reduce their anxiety and boost their mood. They didn’t seem to notice much of a difference.

Davey followed the instructions on the bottle of the psilocybin capsules but was not aware of the most effective way to micro dose.

“I’m sure I could have researched it more if I was wanting to take it more seriously,” they say. “I think more education on it would be helpful for the broader public.”

They ended up stopping because it was making them nauseous.

Davey says there are still a lot of things that need to be figured out before psilocybin is legalized recreationally.

“I don’t think a lot of Canadians at this point would respect it in the way they would need to have a safe trip on psilocybin,” Davey says. “But medically I think there's no downside to having psilocybin available through a doctor.”

Sultana says she believes that if you want to try psilocybin you should grow it yourself and go through that learning curve.

“I really want to collapse all of the intermediate players, and really remind people of how much power and agency they have,” she says.

Hawkswell is adamant that TheraPsil does not advocate for the legalization of recreational psilocybin.

“I don't think our society is mature enough, quite frankly, to have open access to psilocybin,” he says. “But to deny someone legal access to psilocybin when they qualify for MAID is outrageous.”

“I'll be damned if one of our clients is forced to choose MAID over psilocybin or over at least having the opportunity to try it,” he says.