mommies who mushroom lead photo
Thomas Albdorf

When I arrive at Vanessa Panzella-Velez’s fifth-floor apartment in Brooklyn on a blue-sky morning in January, she’s already taken drugs: one third of a gram of magic mushrooms. A pouch of tan capsules sits on the table—like vitamins, except powdered psychedelics.

Not that you’d know. There are none of the stereotypical signs: no trippy hallucinations or bodies writhing around like you’re looking in a fun-house mirror. Instead, there’s Vanessa, 38, a freelance social-media manager, welcoming me inside with the offer of a warm drink, cacao with almond milk in a bowl-size mug. She’s used maple syrup to sweeten it, not honey. “Is that okay?” It’s been a busy morning, between trying to fix the internet and schlepping her puppy, Cookie, to the dog park in near-zero temperatures. Later, she tells me, she has plans to help her 11-year-old stepson with his schoolwork, which includes finishing up a woodworking project and studying mixed fractions for math. That night, she’s going to a birthday party for her niece. To put it another way: Vanessa is not high. Getting high is not the point. Vanessa and her husband, Danny, 45—her stepson’s father, who is present during my visit and also on one third of a gram of magic mushrooms—have recently begun to microdose with psychedelics two or three times a week every few months. In the past, they’ve taken higher doses when they’ve needed to work through something bigger, like a communication issue. It’s a practice they say has completely transformed their relationship while radically improving their parenting.

This is a time of psychedelic renaissance, of mushroom mania. It’s a time when people are increasingly turning to psychedelics not for recreation but for healing—and many of them are parents.

It makes sense; perhaps no one is more in need of a mental-health salve. Because while parenthood is often billed as the ultimate blissed-out euphoria, for many it is where the hemorrhaging of happiness happens. It’s a sleep-deprived, tedious, anxiety- riddled road, recently made all the more difficult by the pandemic. Worn down by the malaise of modern parenting, burdened by the traumas they’ve inherited from their own parents, or disillusioned with a mental-health-care system they feel has failed them, some parents have found an answer in psychedelic substances.

A few years ago, Vanessa and Danny were in a rut. Their relationship was up and down. As a stepparent, Vanessa says, she had a lot of insecurities, especially as she struggled to get pregnant herself. Parenthood made her feel resentful, frustrated, depressed—none of the things she thought it would. She began to put up walls between herself and her stepson.

Vanessa and Danny had already tried counseling when a friend suggested psychedelics. At first, Vanessa was unsure. She had never smoked weed, not even one time. Danny was more open, but his exposure to drugs was also limited. He remembers the public-service campaigns showing an egg frying in a pan: “This is your brain on drugs.” No, they decided, they wouldn’t do it.

Except Vanessa could see how psychedelics had benefited their friend. She saw it in the easy joy the friend carried, the way grief didn’t consume her, the gratitude that seemed to guide her. “Actually, maybe this could help us,” Vanessa remembers thinking.

That was January 2019. As explanations go, Vanessa’s experience with psychedelics sounds like both a cheesy trope and a profound experience every parent would want to have. Suddenly, she could see and be receptive to more. “The mushrooms allowed me to feel vulnerable,” she says. “All the things I was afraid to say poured out of me. I was in this place of peace and love and real clarity. That experience helped Danny and I become more compassionate people, more understanding people, for love to flow through us. How could that not affect my stepson in a positive way?”

mommies who mushroom 2
Thomas Albdorf

Beginning in the late 1990s but exploding only in the past few years, a steady thrum of studies has illuminated the potential benefits of psychedelics in helping with myriad mental-health disorders, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

To name just a few: A study published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2020 found that psilocybin-assisted therapy significantly reduced or eliminated the symptoms of major depressive disorder in 71 percent of participants within four weeks. An earlier study published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease reported that when LSD was used in psychotherapy sessions, people who had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness experienced decreased feelings of anxiety. The FDA is expected to approve the use of the psychoactive substance MDMA (a.k.a. ecstasy, a.k.a. Molly) in conjunction with talk therapy to treat PTSD as soon as next year. Adding to the increase in awareness and interest is the recent proliferation of psychedelics in pop culture and everywhere. There are the plant-medicine influencers on Instagram and Nicole Kidman’s psychedelic utopia in Nine Perfect Strangers on Hulu and Gwyneth Paltrow taking Goop employees on healing psychedelic retreats on Netflix and Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence on the New York Times best-seller list. It’s estimated that more than 30 million people in the United States have used psychedelics, according to Matthew W. Johnson, the Susan Hill Ward professor in psychedelics and consciousness at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. Various studies show a spike in numbers over the past few years.

“There appears to be a clear trend of parents using psychedelics more intentionally to resolve specific life and relationship issues,” says Eric Sienknecht, a ketamine-assisted psychotherapist and cofounder of the Polaris Insight Center in San Francisco. Sienknecht is also working on the clinical trials involving the use of MDMA to help with PTSD sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelics Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit research organization. While he has observed an uptick in patients seeking out the benefits of psychedelics relating to parenthood, there isn’t hard data or research on exactly how many parents are partaking.

The movement has spawned its own catchy monikers, like “plant parenthood” and “psychedelic parenting,” and there has been an increase in support groups—both online and in person—for parents looking to connect in a safe space.

“Look around the playground,” a 30-something mom friend texted me. “At least one of those moms in Lululemon leggings has benefited from psychedelics.”

According to Sienknecht, parents have reported numerous positives following psychedelic-assisted therapy, including “having gained a wider-angle-lens perspective on their behavior and reactions to their children, access to greater self-compassion in their roles as parents, and expanded capacity to understand the dilemmas and vulnerabilities of their children with more empathy and patience,” he says. “What was also quite noteworthy was parents’ increased ability to be responsive rather than reactive to their children, especially when they were able to understand the source of their reactions in their own childhood experiences.”

Which is why moms like Mikaela, 27, see psychedelics not as drugs drugs but as medicines. Mikaela, a plant-medicine educator from Southern California who runs the Instagram account @mamadelamyco, asked that we use only her first name to protect her family’s privacy. “When we talk about psychedelics, this is really just a mental-health movement, and a lot of people who need mental-health help are parents,” she says.

After the birth of her son, Mikaela found that psychedelics eased the frustration, loneliness, and anxiety she was experiencing. “There are these big, transitory states that you encounter in parenthood that can be overwhelming or traumatic, but we can lean into plant medicines for that healing. We don’t have to separate our identities. We can be parents who use psychedelics.”

While Johnson contends there can be positives to using psychoactive substances (including no withdrawal symptoms when used in medical-treatment models), he also cautions that there are risks. He tells me that while taking psychedelics is “largely safe” in terms of physical side effects (there are a few exceptions, like for those with heart disease), the greater risk is a psychological one. “Those vulnerable to disorders like schizophrenia may see a worsening of their disorders, and any healthy person could have a ‘bad trip,’ which is an anxiety reaction that can lead to panic and potentially dangerous behavior,” says Johnson, which is why he doesn’t recommend that people use psychedelics on their own.

mommies who mushroom 3
Thomas Albdorf

Psychedelics is a broad term, but what it means is this: a group of substances, sometimes called hallucinogens, referring to psilocybin (the active ingredient that puts the magic in mushrooms), LSD, DMT, and MDMA, among others. There is also ketamine, which is technically not a psychedelic but has similar properties when administered in higher doses. The word psychedelic was introduced in 1956 by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond and means “mind manifesting.” But psychedelics derived from plants and fungi—also known as entheogens—have been used by Indigenous healers for thousands of years for both spiritual and medicinal purposes.

You can take a little or a lot. The amount and regimen are unique to each person but are typically determined by tolerance and body weight. As Veronika Gold, a ketamine-assisted psychotherapist and cofounder of the Polaris Insight Center, explains, microdosing involves taking smaller subperceptual amounts, meaning you won’t feel altered (that is, no visual hallucinations or nonordinary sensations). But you may notice an improvement in your mood, shifts in your way of thinking, or greater creativity and openness to new perspectives. Macrodosing is when you take a higher dosage and experience an expanded state of consciousness, which may include hallucinations. This can lead to catalytic shifts in one’s identity and reflections on one’s mode of living. Psychedelics are also largely illegal in the United States. The federal government still classifies most of them as Schedule 1 drugs (the same category as cannabis), meaning they “have a high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use in treatment”—even as researchers at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, UCLA, and some of the other biggest institutions in medical research have found otherwise. (According to Johnson, evidence “strongly suggests” there is no addiction potential with classic psychedelics, and they’re even being studied for their potential in helping people addicted to other substances.) In practice, that means that to get psychedelic substances, people have to rely on an underground network.

The exception is ketamine, which is FDA approved as an anesthetic and is also prescribed off label to help with certain mental-health disorders. (There is a potential risk for ketamine addiction when used as a recreational drug, says Rebecca Kronman, a licensed clinical social worker who does ketamine-assisted psychotherapy at her private practice in Brooklyn.) Right now, there are estimated to be hundreds of clinics across the country that offer IV ketamine infusions, as well as start-ups like Mindbloom, a mental-health and wellness company that will arrange a video consultation with a licensed psychiatric clinician who can prescribe ketamine tablets and a guide to lead you through the experience of taking it virtually.

“But the end of prohibition is starting to take,” says Nicole Howell, an attorney in California and a founding board member of the Psychedelic Bar Association. There are some places, like Seattle, Oakland, California, Washington, D.C., and some smaller cities across the country, like Somerville, Massachusetts, where plant- and fungi-based psychedelics have been decriminalized. In these areas, police departments are being told that arrests for possession of psychedelics for personal use should be their lowest priority. “However, public opinion and cultural attitudes around psychedelics will change a lot faster than laws,” says Howell.

That means the legal and carceral systems that have always disproportionately oppressed Black and brown people will continue to do so. “The war on drugs is a failed public policy and has caused incredible harm, specifically to people from overpoliced and marginalized communities,” says Marcela Ot’alora G., a therapist in private practice in Boulder, Colorado, and a principal investigator for MDMA-assisted therapy. According to a 2018 report by the nonprofit advocacy group Drug Policy Alliance, nearly 80 percent of people incarcerated in federal prison for drug offenses are Black or Latino, even though white people use and sell drugs at similar rates.

And even as legalization and expanded use in medical settings start to happen, there will still be complicated questions to answer. Right now, a guided session or “ceremony,” as it’s often called, starts at a couple hundred bucks. A capsule of psilocybin costs as little as $3, while an in-person ketamine session can cost upwards of $1,000. Once given the green light, a course of MDMA treatment is expected to cost tens of thousands of dollars. So who would get to benefit? What does access look like? And who gets to decide who gets access? “If approved, psychedelic-assisted therapy needs to be accessible to all who need it in a culturally respectful way with trained clinicians,” says Ot’alora G. “Furthermore, communities that have historically used psychedelic medicines need to be included in all aspects of distribution, practices, decision-making, and profits.”

“These things that are now trendy have been a way of life for Indigenous communities,” says Vanessa, whose family is from Mexico. “Plant medicine was brushed away by colonization, which deemed psychedelics to be savagery. Now, a friend was telling me, you can do ayahuasca everywhere,” she continues. “I’m glad that this medicine is getting out there, but we do need to make sure that access is not just for white, privileged people.” See the recent proliferation of Goopy psychedelic resorts marketing themselves as the ultimate girls’ getaway, charging thousands of dollars to sip some ayahuasca and do yoga.

This is where parents, long the gatekeepers of conversations and conceptions about drugs, have a chance to change the narrative. “When we think about how we have to shift this attitude around psychedelics, the way that shift happens is through parents having different conversations with their kids about drugs,” says Kronman. Vanessa says those conversations are already happening. “We’ve openly shared with [my stepson] some of our experiences and what we were able to heal in these ceremonies.”

mommies who mushroom 4
Thomas Albdorf

They are a registered nurse, a writer, a therapist, a personal trainer, and a handful of others. It’s a Wednesday night, nearly 9 p.m., and I’m participating in a psychedelic integration circle for parents on Zoom. It’s being offered by Plant Parenthood, a group started by Kronman and Andrew Rose, a mindfulness teacher and psychedelic-integration coach based in Montreal, after they realized there were parenting forums to discuss feeding woes and sleep-technique tactics but nothing for psychedelic-using parents looking for support.

“There weren’t really niche communities for parents,” says Kronman. “You could find resonance with other people who used psychedelics, but an 18-year-old who doesn’t have children isn’t going to understand the specific nuances of being a parent who uses psychedelics.” After a brief meditation led by Rose and a reminder that the space is a supportive and nonjudgmental environment, tonight’s agenda includes speaking to children about plant medicines and psychedelics, including children in the integration process, and coping with stigma and shame in parenting communities. Because while the culture of parenthood allows for jokes about moms hiding chardonnay in sippy cups and “wine” playdates, there is still a taboo around psychedelics in parenting circles. “One of the things that has come up a lot is people saying, ‘Oh, you need to do drugs to be a better parent,’ ” says Vanessa. “Meanwhile, we have memes of moms needing to stock up on tequila to deal with their kids. No judgment, but I’m not going to deny that drinking alcohol is less healthy than having mushrooms every few months.”

Many of the parents I spoke to for this story told me they stopped drinking once they began using psychedelics. And yet, they also agonized over using their real names. The risk of pairing their identities with the use of psychedelics was not nothing. “There needs to be more normalization and understanding around these substances,” says Vanessa. “These plant allies are ways to help us integrate our childhood traumas, our issues, our triggers, so that we can show up as better parents.”

Better parents, not perfect parents. You don’t just down some mushrooms and become Mary Poppins. This is something that came up when I asked about the too-good-to-be-true parts of using psychedelics. “A framework of Western medicine is that you take the pill and you feel better and you’re done,” says Kronman. “That is absolutely not the case with psychedelics. They are a small portion of what needs to happen to make changes. You may get a boost when using psychedelics, but the idea of a light-bulb moment is harmful.” According to Kronman, setting up a safe and therapeutic trip setting, getting into a more mindful state, exploring intentions, and integration—translating your experience on psychedelics into direct action in your life—are equally important.

After I began using mushrooms, I felt such a connection to my daughter. I didn't feel so angry and miserable.

Of all the stories I heard from parents across the country, the most common was how psychedelics helped shift the paradigm around how they parent. “I wanted to be this Montessori mom,” says Nat, 27, a former preschool teacher working on her bachelor’s degree in social work, who also asked to be identified by only her first name to protect her family’s privacy. “But after I had my daughter, who is now two, I found that motherhood made my mental health unbearable.”

It made her angry. As her daughter cried, Nat would scream. That made her feel guilt and shame and stuck in a pattern of dark thoughts. She felt like she could potentially hurt her daughter, a thought so overwhelming that she thought of taking her own life. Nothing could quiet those thoughts. It was those two things—her desperation and a lack of other options—that led Nat to seek out psilocybin. She gave her husband the address of where she was going and told him to come find her if she wasn’t back in a few hours. “It sounds so silly,” says Nat, “but after I began using mushrooms, I felt such a connection to my daughter. I didn’t feel so angry and miserable.”

The same was true for Lane Strahan, 44, a mother of four from Berlin, New Hampshire, who macrodosed on psychedelics for the first time last year along with her husband, Kendall, 43. “It opened my whole mind to what is important,” she says. “I’m not a talker when it comes to my feelings, but it made me vulnerable and more empathetic.”

And that is the magic of mushrooms, Kronman posits—that they can enable for those who use them “this feeling of healing within themselves of generational trauma that has been passed on to them and how that has helped them show up as better people, better parents.”


This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of Harper's BAZAAR, available on newsstands April 5.

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Andrea Stanley
A former features director at Cosmopolitan, Andrea is a freelance journalist who reports on politics, people, culture, social trends, physical and mental health, and more.