Anatomy of a Bad Trip: On the Less-Than-Magical Side of Magic Mushrooms

The clinical literature describes bad trips as experiences that include fear or panic, paranoia, sadness or depressed mood, anger, confusion, and dissociation. Laypeople describe bad trips as experiences that include encountering terrifying entities and places, experiencing anguish, grief, and despair, revisiting traumatic childhood experiences, having painful insights, upsetting realizations, or an anxiety attack, and thinking you have gone mad. Even a nonexperience can be a bad trip. Folks hoping to have a mystical experience but don’t may question their worthiness. For others, a bad trip is characterized by intense frustration from failure to “go deep.”

Some bad trips fade once the psilocybin is out of your system. Others leave the tripper disturbed—sometimes for a long time. Sean O’Carroll has treated many people who have suffered from “non-ordinary state trauma,” the trauma caused by a bad trip, and it can leave someone in a “very wobbly or fragile place.” His framework for understanding and helping these folks is informed by data he’s gleaned from hundreds of firsthand client experiences. “In each case,” he said in a conversation with me, “I’d hear about the trip experience, their ongoing difficulties, and the context in which the trip took place.” After a decade of listening to these stories, he noticed bad trips tend to cluster into categories.

The severest category he has observed includes “existential” themes relating to the person’s fundamental sense of themselves or reality. “In these instances, the integrity of the self is often felt to be fragile or under persistent threat,” he said. In an existentially themed bad trip, the individual resists the drift toward ego dissolution, that aspect of a trip where the boundary between the self and the world disintegrates. The tension between the psychedelic’s pull toward dissolution and the ego’s struggle to maintain its integrity can lead to persistent feelings of fragmentation—the sense that nothing is real, that no one else really exists. The tripper may think, I am fundamentally alone, I am not me. That’s in line with data collected by the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, which quantified the experiences of over six hundred people who reported extended difficulties following a trip.

They found the most common forms of extended difficulty—meaning difficulties that persist after the trip is over—were anxiety and panic attacks, existential struggle, social disconnection, depersonalization, and potentially crippling derealization. Derealization is when people can’t tell if they are in a dream or not. A heartbreaking case of this may have occurred in 2023, when an emotionally distressed off-duty pilot tried to down a passenger plane two days after a mushroom trip and having had no sleep for forty hours, because he thought he was dreaming and just wanted to wake up. People in a fragile state of mind because of psychedelic use might be best off seeking care from a therapist with a background in psychedelics, because to an everyday psychologist, these symptoms suggest psychosis.

Many observers have commented on bad trip archetypes. For example, dying—entering the void, falling into the abyss, being overpowered—is common bad trip territory. When I solicited stories from my social media circle, they described encounters with the pits of hell, black holes, holes gooey with rot, and vortexes that they are either sucked into or, despite the terror, drawn to. In a talk about his book Sacred Knowledge, the eminent psychedelic researcher and psychologist William Richards told a story about someone who, when his trip finally subsided, said, “Phew. I made it,” and when Richards asked what he meant, the tripper explained he had spent his entire time swimming against a vortex, trying desperately not to be sucked under. Another fellow “dreamed” he was lying on a beach and could not move. As the tide slowly came in, he still couldn’t move. Even after he was covered with water and his breath began to gurgle, he could not move. He remained aware as the ocean covered him more and more deeply.

Another archetype is the threatening encounter. A tripper may deal with demons, monsters, parasites, spiders, and, in one case, a giant starved crow, which attempt to threaten, consume, or possess the tripper’s soul, or point out that he is a bad person. In the cases where the tripper continues to feel haunted after the drug has worn off, therapy may help put his experience into some kind of manageable perspective. For example, some trippers come around to see their monsters as personifications of their vanity, envy, or shame. “What is so important here,” wrote Dr. Richards in Sacred Knowledge, “is the discovery that the monster has meaning and in itself is an invitation to enhanced psychological health and spiritual maturation. Its purpose is not to torment but to teach.” This explains, I think, the evolution of the nomenclature. Yesterday’s bad trip is today’s enlightening one.

For many people, magic mushrooms can dredge up memories. But sometimes the memory is not familiar; it may be a false memory or a repressed memory—though repressed memories are, according to the American Psychological Association, extremely rare. This can create great uncertainty and mental anguish, as when someone experiences a “memory” of child sexual abuse. When people are confronted with disturbing or confusing scenarios in their trips, it can be difficult to differentiate between memory and symbolic visions, said Sean O’Carroll, and they may wish to seek help.

More garden-variety bad trips are those where you spend six hours experiencing anxiety and paranoia. Elizabeth and her husband were married in a farm setting in the presence of family and friends. On their way to the reception, they each ate a little mushroom a friend had given them. No big deal, they thought, but an hour later, Elizabeth couldn’t make sense of anything around her. What’s more, the reception was held at outdoor tables with wildflower arrangements and candles, but the day was windy, and the candles kept blowing over and setting the centerpieces on fire—distracting enough for a sober person. “It was disconcerting,” she said. “We were the focus and I realized, I’m on a trip and everyone is going to know, and I felt something bad was going to happen, that I was a bad girl. For a while, I didn’t know what was going on. The anxiety came from the expectation to function in the world, which, of course, I was unable to do.”

We are, as the social neurologist John Cacioppo described, obligatorily gregarious. It is a biological imperative to function socially. “If I encountered a tiger by myself, I might get eaten,” said Elizabeth. “But if I encounter a tiger with ten other people, I’d have a good chance. So, feeling isolated and alienated is deeply unnerving.”

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Excerpted from Have a Good Trip: Exploring the Magic Mushroom Experience by Eugenia Bone. Copyright © 2024 by Eugenia Bone. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.