48-year-old founded ‘Moms on Mushrooms' to share the practice of microdosing for mental health

Tracey Tee, 48, and her business partner spent nearly a decade building a successful brand and traveling across the country performing parent-focused comedy sets.

"And then Covid [and] the lockdowns happened," she says. "Within two weeks, we had to cancel nearly 100 shows for 2020, and lost everything. Almost a 10-year business just slipped through our fingers like sand. And the grief of that, especially what felt like an epic failure that just wasn't our fault, was intense and then compounded with the lockdown."

Tee was juggling responsibilities like supporting her daughter with online school and navigating a new normal. She was also on "a spiritual exploration" for years before Covid-19 rocked her world and everyone else's, which was largely due to medical issues she was experiencing.

When Tee was 41, she was prescribed a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a common form of antidepressant, to support her as she transitioned into menopause after undergoing a full hysterectomy. The sudden shift into menopause led to major changes to her physical and mental health, Tee says, and taking an SSRI helped but "no one ever said when to stop taking it."

But what she stumbled on during the pandemic led her to deeper spiritual exploration, she says. And eventually a new business venture.

"Some girlfriends invited me to a camping trip that summer [in 2020] to just camp out with some moms," Tee says. "And do some shrooms."

At the time, Tee had never tried recreational drugs, but was interested in plant-based medicine and had been studying psychedelics for years. She lives in Colorado where psilocybin mushrooms are legal to grow, use and share.

I "just kind of always thought, 'Well, I'm a mom. I can't do that. Like, that's not for me,'" Tee says. "And when I finally did do it, it was just the most confirming, life-affirming night."

Prior to her first experience with psilocybin, Tee had decided she wanted to wean herself off of her SSRI, but wasn't given guidance from a doctor about when or how to do so. Without a clear timeline, Tee wasn't sure what would happen if she took an SSRI forever, or decided not to take it at all.

Around 15% of participants in 79 studies experienced withdrawal symptoms when they discontinued their use of antidepressants, according to a recent review published in The Lancet Psychiatry. Symptoms ranged from insomnia, irritability, headaches and dizziness.

So, Tee sought out an alternative solution for managing her mental health as she began to wean herself off the SSRI: microdosing psilocybin mushrooms. Tee is not a doctor or a mental health professional, and was not advised by a medical doctor.

Microdosing is taking a substantially smaller dose of a drug than the average amount. Psilocybin is the active component in psychedelic mushrooms that can cause a warped sense of reality including self perception.

"This isn't something that I take every day. And you actually never want to microdose everyday," Tee says. Around the time that she stopped taking an SSRI, she would microdose mushrooms between "zero and five days a week." There are some periods in her life when she doesn't use the drug at all.

Tee says that once she was able to experience how psychedelic mushrooms helped her to process her emotions and then move on from them, she "felt very strongly that this medicine was the conduit to bring mothers together to actually heal."

"And that's how Moms on Mushrooms was started," she says.

Moms on Mushrooms

During her comedy tour, Tee met moms from across the country and heard their stories. From her conversations with these women, she learned that "there's a deep level of distress, of anxiety, of overwhelm, of sadness, of depression and a kind of existential ennui that is pervasive [among mothers]. And it's concerning."

She found that many of the women she spoke to were turning to substances like pills and alcohol to cope with "broken marriages" and "a lot of trauma."

In response, Tee came up with a way to bring moms together to "really talk about what it is that's bothering us. And allowing those neural pathways to change, allowing those addictions to fall off," she says.

Moms on Mushrooms is the platform Tee created for moms to discuss their interest and experiences with psilocybin mushrooms. The group meets both online and in person.

"We have a private monthly membership, it's only $2 a month. And once you get inside there, it's just kind of like Facebook, for moms on shrooms," she says.

Tee offers courses on safety and intention when microdosing psilocybin mushrooms. The Moms on Mushrooms site says the goal is not to be "high" but to be "careful, curious, caring [and] cautious."

Members of Moms on Mushrooms did not want to speak with CNBC Make It on the record about their experiences with the group and the use of psychedelic drugs to treat their mental health. Tee says this is "for obvious reasons," citing the stigma around the drug.

In spite of that stigma, Tee says the group has become this "community of women who help each other out," and that microdosing has allowed moms in the community to confront their feelings and work through them to become happier individuals and happier parents.

In 2021, a year before Tee founded Moms on Mushrooms, she and her family were severely injured when the car they were travelling in was struck by a drunk driver. The crash left the family "very injured, but, [it was a] total miracle that we survived," she says.

Following the accident, Tee says she experienced intense post-traumatic stress, but "was able to alchemize that trauma and the terror of that day [by] microdosing."

"I felt like the sadness and that grief was just kind of like coming up and out of me," she says. "It wasn't going back down. It wasn't sticking."

Recent research conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis may explain why psilocybin helped Tee process and start to heal from her traumatic experience.

Research shows psilocybin may have positive effects on people with some mental health conditions

An intensive study done at Washington University in St. Louis focused on seven healthy adults and monitored their brain activity after receiving high doses of psilocybin in a regulated setting over the course of 18 visits.

Each participant received brain imaging before and after taking psilocybin. "We were getting a baseline of what their brain networks and their brain activity look like," says Dr. Joshua Siegel, faculty at NYU Langone Health with the Center for Psychedelic Medicine. Siegel worked at Washington University in St. Louis when the study was conducted.

Then, participants came in for follow-up visits and were given either psilocybin or Ritalin, which served as a placebo for the study because it also causes an arousing effect, similar to that of the stimulation from drinking coffee.

During brain imaging an hour after administering the doses, Siegel and researchers noticed that the psilocybin caused core parts of participants' brains that are responsible for creating a person's sense of self to be extremely disorganized. Those areas of the brain are also critical for mood and habits, he adds.

"This causes a kind of sense of ego dissolution, and this very unique, subjective experience that is outside of the ordinary day-to-day consciousness," Siegel says. "It signals the brain to be in a more plastic and adaptive state."

Essentially, psilocybin's effects on the brain led to more flexibility in the way that a person thinks which could alter how they respond to certain emotions, especially negative ones.

Over the past decade, clinical trials have shown that a high dose of psilocybin taken in a clinical setting under professional supervision can generate positive results for people with depression, anxiety and alcohol addiction, Siegel adds.

And the results of taking a large dose of psilocybin seem to be positive and long-lasting.

Participants in the study that Siegel co-authored returned two weeks after their last dose of psilocybin so researchers could see if there were "lasting changes in the brain."

Results showed that the effects psilocybin had on the brain lasted up to three weeks after a dose. This can "give someone who is in a maladaptive state of depression, or potentially other illnesses, the chance to reset and to create new patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior and mood," Siegel says.

The findings of Siegel and his fellow researchers were specific to participants who received psilocybin in its purest state, not from eating psychedelic mushrooms. Participants also received a high dose of psilocybin, not the significantly lower dose that people who microdose would be consuming.

Siegel emphasized that he hasn't seen compelling evidence to support microdosing for depressive symptoms, or other mental health conditions.

Psychedelic therapy should be conducted under medical supervision, doctors warn

While the findings of recent research and anecdotes signal that psilocybin may be helpful for some people with certain mental health conditions, Siegel does provide a warning about the potential side effects.

"All prior psychedelic clinical trials screened out and excluded anyone with a history of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, or who is at high risk because they have a first degree relative with either of those illnesses," he says.

There is a risk that taking psychedelics can cause a psychotic or manic episode, even if a person doesn't have a medical or family history of those conditions.

Siegel strongly suggests if you're considering psychedelic therapy that you seek out professional support to engage in a "controlled setting where you have a trained therapist, and you're in a safe environment."

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