Why a middle-aged mother spent a year sampling psychedelics

Napthali, who has written books about Buddhism and parenting, is far from the first to document the quest for awareness of the psyche using hallucinogenic drugs in My Year of Psychedelics. Harvard Professor Michael Pollan has done so in a book and a television series, and New York Times journalist Ernesto Londono will release a book on his use of the drugs to treat his depression in a few months.

They come in an era when interest in the use of psychedelics for mental health issues is booming. In 2023, Australia became the first country to permit the use of MDMA to treat PTSD, and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, for treatment-resistant depression, but there’s much discussion worldwide about whether psychedelics have the power to transform the way we manage anxiety, depression and trauma.

Sydney psychiatrist Ted Cassidy thinks so. He has treated about 13 people since medical use was legalised – two-thirds with MDMA and the rest with psilocybin. He says it helps free their mind from destructive beliefs and perceptions. “They allow you to compress a year’s worth of therapy into a day,” he says. They didn’t work for everyone, but when they worked, he said, the response was powerful.

There are trials under way across the world – ketamine, ayahuasca and DMT (dimethyltryptamine) for depression, bufo (toad poison) for anxiety, MDMA for loneliness. But the medical establishment urges caution. “There is the potential for psychedelic substances to cause fear, panic and re-traumatisation,” says Dr Elizabeth Moore, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, and the long-term effects are not known. She warns self-administration and drug-taking retreats are not only “very risky” but illegal.

Napthali thought the risks could be minimised if she took psychedelics carefully, in a controlled environment (there were 43 LSD and mushroom-related deaths in Australia between 2000 and 2023, all men using them in uncontrolled environments). But she still felt apprehensive in the middle of the night. “I had moments where I thought, what are you doing? You’re offering your body as a guinea pig. Are you crazy?” she says. “But then I woke up in the morning and I was ready for business.”

Her two sons were fine with it, but not terribly interested. “They don’t find their parents all that fascinating,” she says. She worked on an addiction helpline when they were teenagers, so had always had open conversations about drugs. She knew they’d used them, too. Her then partner (they split before the ayahuasca retreat) was “was very, very wary and very scared”. Her birth family, as she puts it, wasn’t keen on her book project either. “They just can’t get past the war on drugs, so they probably won’t read it,” she says.

She began her journey at expensive, established retreats that provided the drugs in a safe environment. “I do recommend that, actually,” she says, for the reassurance that comes from being with someone who knows what they’re doing, respects the “medicine” and gets good-quality gear.

The first stop was the Netherlands, where an odd loophole allows the use of psilocybin from the truffle of the mushroom but not the part that grows above ground. The Dutch retreat was beautiful, and involved meditating, dancing and deep discussions with strangers. Her first trip felt like a personal, physical manifestation of the work she’d been doing with sexual assault survivors. At one point, she felt like she was giving birth. “It was a way of releasing everything I’d been storing up from my job”. She “blacked out” during the second trip, and was told she sobbed uncontrollably for hours.

Toad was next. Bufo, also known as 5-MeO-DMT, is derived from the poison of the Sonoran Desert toad. It’s smoked through a pipe. Napthali took it at a retreat in the Algave region of Portugal, surrounded by rolling hills and wildflowers. Toad is smoked, and its effect has been described as “being strapped to the nose of a rocket that flies into the sun and evaporates”. Pollan thought it was horrible. For Napthali, who tried it twice at the retreat, it was like being on a “theme park ride”. But it was short – all over in 30 minutes.

The breathing exercises that followed were better, and with traces of the drug still in her system, she says she felt like Guan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, was holding her hand.

MDMA, known recreationally as ecstasy, was next. She’s middle-aged and inexperienced, so struggled to find a supplier. She eventually tracked down an “underground guide” in Noosa who would hold her hand through the process as she lay on a bed. “It was probably the best day of my life,” she says. “It was so … beyond words beautiful. I was so, so happy.” She says MDMA told her why she’d sobbed during the psilocybin trip – she’d been left to cry herself to sleep as a baby. But it also left her with a teeth-grinding problem that she hasn’t been able to shake and requires an expensive mouthguard.

The next stop was Costa Rica to try ayahuasca, a concoction of two plants used by indigenous people. Spotify’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, talks about it a lot (“I’m so disappointed that he endorsed Trump,” says Napthali). It wasn’t entirely pleasant. There’s lots of nausea and vomiting. “But the trips were very revelatory,” she says. “They gave me a lot of images that I refer to as tool.” To this day, an ayahuasca fairy appears when it’s time for Napthali to quiet her mind.

The LSD trips, first with a friend as a trip-sitter, then her son, followed. She had “helpful” visions, such as becoming a pelican princess whose fellow pelicans extracted a rock – her pain – from her chest. “The message was very much that this rock is full of gems and jewels and life lessons that are really precious,” Napthali said.

From then, though, the trips became harder to record. “They were all sort of very messy and busy and less of a narrative,” she says. She tried DMT with a man from Newcastle called Mike. It’s similar to toad and is known as “businessman’s lunch” because it lasts only about 15 minutes. People say they meet deities; Paul McCartney reckoned he met God. But she wasn’t feeling well, and the smoking hurt her throat. She tried mescaline, which is derived from a cactus plant, and felt like she was walking around in other people’s bodies.

Finally, she tried ketamine, the drug found in Friends actor Matthew Perry’s blood when he died, which he’d been taking for anxiety and depression and to which he’d become addicted. “It was less messy and murky,” she says. “I remember what happened. Platitudes that sound really corny, such as ‘why do you sweat the small stuff?’”

And so the year of taking psychedelics was over, and it was time to take stock. She’d worked through past trauma. She learned some lessons. She’d felt the dissolution of the ego. Some were better than others. I asked her which experience aligned most with her goal of enlightenment. It was MDMA. “That was just my favourite experience,” she said. “If I did the whole thing again, I might have a totally different ranking because I’m getting it from different people and in different dosages.”

The whole experience was transformative, she says, but not enormously so. “There’s lots of stories of people, people whose lives were saved, and they were dramatically, dramatically changed,” she says. “I wouldn’t say I’m dramatically, changed, but I am definitely changed.”

The most significant change, she says, is her openness to the existence of the divine. During her decades of embracing Buddhist practices, she always rejected the spiritual side. “Now I look back on that person and think, why did I wear the straitjacket?” she says. “I’ve had encounters during my trips. I’ve had little hints of lots of different things – reincarnation, afterlife, goddesses, spirits. I’ve had experiences with deities, and I’m very confident there’s an afterlife.”

I ask if this could be her mind playing tricks on her. “I’m open to that, too,” she says. “I just don’t know. I have to say that life is much more enchanting and fun and interesting and motivating when you do believe in a soul; that you know that your consciousness can exist outside your brain.”

Still, she has taken a break from psychedelics. They interact badly with her cannabis sleep medication, and then there’s the potentially lifelong teeth-grinding problem. She’s bracing for the reaction to her book, from people whose minds are not quite as open as hers. “I’ll get some hate and I’ll get some judgment. And there will be people who are like ‘thank you, thank you for letting people know we’re misinformed about these medicines’.”

National Alcohol and Other Drug hotline on 1800 250 015 or call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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