August 5, 2026
Trip or treatment?
Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?
Magic mushrooms for anorexia? Survivors hopeful, skeptics say ‘not so fast’
TLDR: A small early trial suggests psilocybin with therapy may help some people with anorexia, and one participant says it saved her life. In the comments, readers split hard between hope that taboo treatments are finally getting a chance and skepticism that this is just the latest miracle-cure hype.
The science story is serious, but the comment section is where the sparks fly. The article follows “Christina,” a woman who says a clinical trial using psilocybin—the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms—helped save her life after years of anorexia, hospital stays, and failed treatments. Small early studies suggest psilocybin plus therapy might reduce symptoms and help people feel ready to change, which is a huge deal for a condition with frighteningly high death rates and too few effective options.
But online, nobody is calmly nodding along. One camp is basically shouting, “We’ve been saying this for years!” They argue psychedelics can help “rewire” the brain and blame decades of taboo and the war on drugs for slowing research. That side got especially emotional when one commenter shared a heartbreaking regret: losing a family member to anorexia and wishing psychedelic therapy had been tried sooner.
Then come the skeptics, armed with side-eye and historical comparisons. One wary commenter said all the hype feels a bit like the era when people treated radium like a miracle cure—not exactly a flattering comparison. Another dropped the classic internet wet blanket, invoking Betteridge’s law: if a headline asks a big question, the answer is probably no. And yes, there was darkly comic mushroom banter too, including a grower joking that it’s wild how something that grows in literal filth becomes such a hassle.
So the real mood online? Hope, grief, distrust, and mushroom memes—all fighting for the mic.
Key Points
- •The article profiles a London patient with anorexia nervosa who joined a psilocybin clinical trial in 2022 after conventional treatments failed.
- •It states that standard psychiatric treatments such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and antidepressants work in only about half of patients with eating disorders.
- •Researchers are studying psilocybin-assisted therapy for anorexia, with small early trials suggesting reduced symptoms and higher motivation to change.
- •A pilot study of 21 women with anorexia nervosa reported improvements when psilocybin was combined with talk therapy.
- •The article says a 2023 Nature Medicine study found significant drops in eating-disorder scores in four out of 10 patients after a single psilocybin dose.