When Mikaela found out she was pregnant six years ago, she knew she needed to stop drinking. What she wasn’t sure about was how she would manage the cravings.
As a teenager, she had discovered that alcohol and opiates could dull traumatic memories, including recurrent sexual assaults that played in her mind nonstop and led to suicidal thoughts. But as she entered her 20s, eager to address her mental health, she realized what helped most was psilocybin.
Mikaela had found her way to psilocybin, the psychedelic compound active in “magic” mushrooms, with close friends at the age of 19. A few large doses a year, with smaller microdoses in between, helped her achieve a sense of calm, like the bad trip that had been her whole life before mushrooms had ended.
She also noticed they lessened her cravings for alcohol. Instead of picking up a beer when she would crave one, she tried microdosing. Indeed, recent research has shown that psilocybin may be a promising treatment for alcohol use disorder: in a 2022 study, psilocybin combined with therapy helped trial participants significantly reduce their drinking for the eight months researchers conducted follow-ups.
She scoured the internet for information, unsure those mushrooms were safe for her pregnancy. At the same time, she knew she needed to stop drinking. Under no circumstances did she want her child to grow up with an alcoholic parent – like she had.
As her Google searches brought up dead end after dead end, Mikaela, who has Indigenous Mexican ancestry, reached out to an Indigenous woman-led group that conducted ceremonies using plant medicines such as tobacco and peyote. The group was coordinating a psilocybin ceremony, where participants were planning to ingest mushrooms under the guidance of an elder, a few hours north of her in California in a few weeks’ time. Mikaela asked if the woman who was leading it, a grandmother from Jalisco, Mexico, had any insight into whether participating would be harmful to her pregnancy. The woman told Mikaela that in her tradition, mothers continued consuming plant medicines such as psilocybin throughout their pregnancies and into motherhood. Mikaela packed up her car and drove out to the gathering.
Under the canopy of a redwood grove, Mikaela accepted the fresh mushrooms the grandmother had prepared for her. As the sun began to set, Mikaela’s gaze wandered from the campfire before her to the stars above, and she fell into an hours-long meditation.
Sitting around a campfire the next day, the grandmother placed her hands on Mikaela’s visibly pregnant belly and shared a message with her and the other participants.
“She talked very openly about the meaningfulness of carrying children and our responsibility as parents and mothers, and what it means to choose to be a mom at this time,” said Mikaela, now 31.
Mikaela went on to use psilocybin, in both microdoses and full doses, throughout her pregnancy and since. She credits it with helping her develop “a repulsion to the alcohol”, she said, and to the social spaces where it was consumed.
Soon after she gave birth to a healthy baby boy, she set out to find the answers she had been looking for. She knew researchers did not usually look like her or ask questions like hers, but she wondered if Indigenous knowledge about plant medicines could be transmitted to other mothers battling mental health challenges during pregnancy – and were struggling to find answers.
“Ethical constraints have limited clinical studies on psilocybin use among individuals in childbearing years, particularly during pregnancy and breastfeeding,” she wrote in a “community research paper” surveying 411 people who used psilocybin before, during or after their pregnancies published earlier this year. “This gap in research, compounded by the lingering stigma surrounding psychedelics, has left mothers to navigate their choices in isolation.”
In the paper, Mikaela uses the pseudonym “de la Myco”, or “of the mushroom”, in place of her last name, citing the stigma and legal concerns associated with psychedelic use. (Psilocybin is still classified as a schedule one drug under federal law, though it has been decriminalized by several states.) She also uses the pseudonym on social media, where she has upwards of 200,000 followers and has built a brand offering guided psychedelic journeys, selling herbal birth control remedies and sharing her parenting experience. Alongside posts describing how to use a Queen Anne’s Lace tincture and other herbs, she describes her preparations for ingesting mushrooms and how they have deepened her spirituality. She also shares videos showing her playing, cooking and talking about feelings with her son, in response to comments that she “better pray that doing that has no long-term effects on your child”.
Mikaela’s work seeks to inject the concerns and knowledge of communities – particularly women and Indigenous peoples – that have often been excluded from scientific research, but are central to the history of psychedelic use. At the same time, it comes alongside a growing movement that is mistrustful of modern medicine – and more likely to seek advice from accessible social media platforms than unaffordable or distant doctors’ offices. And it makes some medical professionals nervous.
Over the past two decades, psychedelics have returned to the public eye as a growing body of research shows their potential benefits in treating mental health conditions such as PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, alcoholism and other disorders. In the United States, hundreds of clinical trials have investigated the medical benefits of psilocybin.
Some researchers remain skeptical of the drugs’ potential, citing the biases of researchers and poor study designs. In August last year the Food and Drug Administration rejected an application to approve the use of another psychedelic, MDMA, in the treatment of PTSD. (In December, the VA announced that it will still fund new research into MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD and alcoholism.)
Given the setback, it’s possible that psilocybin-assisted therapy will gain FDA approval ahead of MDMA. Three states have already legalized the use of psilocybin at licensed therapeutic centers – Oregon first in 2020, followed by Colorado in 2022 and New Mexico this year – while dozens of other cities have decriminalized it.
While ongoing clinical trials indicate that psychedelics, including psilocybin, may have important applications to the treatment of postpartum depression, very little is known about their safety during pregnancy. Emerging research into the health benefits of psychedelics has omitted pregnant people – as has most research on medication safety.
Regarding psilocybin, “If we don’t have information, as scientists and as medical people, we would say it’s not safe until we know that it is,” said Anita Clayton, a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia school of medicine who is currently studying the use of a drug with a similar chemical structure to psilocybin in the treatment of postpartum depression. “Because the facts we have are limited, people fill the gaps with what they want to be true,” Clayton added. “Women also need to know about potential treatment options” for mental health conditions.
The project represents one of the largest collections of experiences on psilocybin and pregnancy to date. But not everyone has embraced it.
Photograph: DJA/The GuardianDrug researchers have long taken a protectionist approach to studying medication safety during pregnancy. Their caution can be traced to the thalidomide crisis of the 1950s and early 1960s, when more than 10,000 babies were born with severe birth defects after their mothers took a widely prescribed tranquilizer for nausea while pregnant. In the aftermath, rather than studying the impacts of medications on pregnancy, researchers broadly excluded pregnant people from clinical trials. Less than 10% of medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration since 1980 have enough data to determine whether they cause birth defects.
In the absence of data from clinical trials, researchers have found other ways to monitor medication safety during pregnancy. One of those methods is the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System and other large data registries. When medications are taken widely during pregnancy – whether a painkiller such as Tylenol or an antidepressant such as Prozac – researchers assess safety through observational data.
Because of that, scientists know that many antidepressants, including most SSRIs, “do not appear to cause significant problems in babies exposed to them”, said Clayton. “Certainly not as much as untreated depression in pregnancy.”
Researchers have a sense of the hazards of certain more commonly used illicit drugs – such as cannabis (studies suggest that frequent use may be connected with an increased chance of adverse outcomes) and fentanyl (which can cause withdrawal symptoms in newborns). But the existing research into the effects of using psilocybin during pregnancy is extremely limited.
Studies have not been done to see if taking magic mushrooms can increase the chance of pregnancy-related problems or birth defects, notes a fact sheet from MotherToBaby, a network of university and hospital researchers who track information on medication use during pregnancy. One animal study did show that psilocybin crossed the placental barrier and accumulated in fetal tissue in rats, but research hasn’t been done to assess whether that’s true in humans and if it could result in developmental issues. Because psilocybin interacts with serotonin receptors in the brain, some have also theorized that if it crosses the placental barrier it could affect fetal brain development.
When Oregon legalized the use of psilocybin in licensed centers in 2020, it bumped up against this gap in knowledge. Rather than prohibiting pregnant people from ingesting psilocybin, it decided to require centers to complete an informed consent protocol with patients, which alerts them that “the risks of consuming psilocybin while pregnant or feeding with breast milk are unknown”.
After she gave birth to her son, Mikaela began collecting the limited information she could find about psychedelics and parenting, and sharing that information on social media, including Instagram and TikTok. Eventually, the Microdosing Institute, a psychedelics education network focused on the practice of taking a dose of psychedelics much smaller than one might ingest recreationally – to enhance creativity or relieve pain, for example – reached out to hear more about her work.
There, she met James Fadiman, a psychologist and writer, often called the “father of microdosing”. Since 2010, Fadiman has interviewed thousands of people who have microdosed psilocybin in an effort to develop a protocol for using mushrooms to treat common psychological and physical complaints. He published what he found in The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide in 2011.
Neither Fadiman nor Mikaela have psychiatric training – Fadiman holds a PhD in psychology and Mikaela a bachelor’s in English literature – but his strategy would inform her own research. In 2023, she and a UK-based doula publicized a survey across their networks and social media platforms. The aim was to collect the stories of people who had used any amount of psilocybin while pregnant or parenting. In recognition of the ethical complexity of conducting research during pregnancy, they were clear that they were not encouraging them to ingest mushrooms, but simply documenting their experience if they already had.
“They already made the choice,” said Wendy Shoef, a California-based life coach who later joined the team. “You’re not a part of the process. You just want to get the information from them after the fact.”
Earlier this year, the women released a collection of the stories they received so far. The survey includes the experiences of 178 people who used psilocybin during pregnancy and 237 who used it while breastfeeding. After a round of initial responses, Mikaela and her colleagues began asking mothers to report their birth outcomes, but ultimately were only able to gather data from 14. (All reported healthy, full-term births, but the small number of responses, along with the methodology of the survey, mean the results should not be extrapolated more broadly.)
Still, the project represents one of the largest collections of experiences on psilocybin and pregnancy to date. But not everyone has embraced it.
“I’m sure you’re doing a great job of collecting as much data as possible and when you have published this data in a scientific journal we might be interested in having you share these results with the public,” a representative of the Atlanta Mushroom Festival wrote back when Mikaela applied to speak at the annual gathering in 2024. “Claiming that it’s OK to consume any psychedelics during pregnancy is a very sensitive claim and is not something we want to promote without better scientific backing.”
Clayton, the University of Virginia professor, worries “the type of data that they’re trying to collect may not be informative” because it’s not coming from “a general population” but a network of regular psychedelic users with links to Mikaela and her colleagues, which could skew any conclusions. Nor does the survey control for other health-related behaviors on the part of the participants. She also notes that it’s difficult to estimate how much psilocybin a person is consuming when those mushrooms are purchased outside of a legal setting.
Instead, she said, scientists need to conduct rigorous animal studies first – and that those might reveal whether psilocybin has any impact on metrics like birth weight or developmental milestones.
Mikaela’s own biases are clear: she is a vocal proponent of psilocybin’s benefits, as are many of the women she surveyed, so it’s not surprising that the survey’s results would be positive, and she knows they cannot be extrapolated more broadly. She calls her work “an anthropological inquiry” focused less on western standards of science and more on storytelling as a way to understand people’s experiences.
Charles Schauberger, a Wisconsin-based physician board certified in obstetrics and gynecology and addiction medicine, echoes the idea. He thinks that with a willingness to follow certain guidelines, the group could produce an important qualitative study – focused on subjective experiences rather than statistical outcomes or objective markers of infant health.
“You have to be careful not to try to quantify results in a qualitative study because you can’t be sure” whether the survey participants are truly representative, he said. Instead, he said, researchers might ask: “Did you feel like your depression was better? Who did you consult to feel comfortable that it was safe to use psilocybin in your pregnancy? Did you use it just once? Did you use it multiple times? What are your feelings now that your baby’s born and you’re no longer pregnant?”
The answers to those questions might help researchers design future quantitative studies, giving them insight on where to focus their inquiries. And in a field with a severe shortage of information, that addition to the literature could be helpful, he said.
As Mikaela and her collaborators began distributing their survey, they noticed that a focus on mental health was a central thread through the responses they received.
“I mainly consumed mushrooms during my pregnancy with my second daughter because I was trying to escape an extremely toxic environment,” one woman wrote in her reply.
“I had a very troubled pregnancy emotionally. My relationship was decaying and I didn’t have the support system I needed at the time,” another woman who ingested mushrooms while pregnant shared. “I felt the calling to microdose to help me regulate my nervous system.”
Many of the women reported that they preferred psychedelics to pharmaceuticals as a more natural alternative.
“I felt severe depression symptoms for months on end and decided I needed to microdose or take an antipsychotic,” another mother who used psilocybin during her pregnancy shared. “The microdose felt safer to me.”
In their report, Mikaela and her co-authors cite breastfeeding mothers who “described feeling more emotionally connected to their babies and more capable of navigating the challenges of early parenthood with calm and clarity”.
“I was able to be present and appreciative of my life without stressing about all I ‘should’ or ‘could’ be getting done,” one mother wrote.
Many parents also voiced fears that consuming mushrooms during pregnancy or while breastfeeding their children could land them in a police precinct. As one woman wrote, she felt great “anxiety around getting my baby taken away if anyone found out”.
The legal advocacy group Pregnancy Justice has documented thousands of cases where pregnant people were criminalized over allegations of substance use between 1973 and 2022, though very few were related to psychedelics.
But Indigenous communities have been using psychedelics during pregnancy ‘for generations, perhaps centuries’.
Photograph: DJA/The GuardianNaomi Tolson, the UK-based doula who helped launch the study, said that fear of criminalization and stigma probably limited the responses they received. “Even though the survey is anonymous, people still worry,” she said.
Some scientists, such as Clayton and Anthony Scialli, a specialist in developmental and reproductive toxicology and director of the Reproductive Toxicology Center, worry about such efforts playing into the Trump administration’s full-frontal assault on the United States’ scientific institutions. Scialli notes a growing wave of skepticism of pharmaceuticals – skepticism that has been championed by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.
“If there is research out there” about psilocybin and pregnancy, “I haven’t seen it,” he said, but, “on most of the antidepressants there are many studies and very good studies”. Yet, he points to a growing conservative backlash against science: “I understand it’s fashionable for people not to believe scientific studies. After all, we have a whole bunch of people in the administration who don’t believe in scientific studies.”
For her part, Mikaela calls Kennedy “a complete quack”, but voices tentative appreciation that he has been “open-minded to psychedelics”.
At the same time, some psychedelic advocates and scholars argue that there is information out there on the safety of psychedelics during pregnancy – it’s just not been formalized in the western canon. While completing her doctoral research in the 1980s, Stacy Schaefer, professor emerita in the department of anthropology at California State University, Chico, joined an Indigenous Mexican community, called the Wixárika, on their annual pilgrimage to the lands where they have long foraged peyote. “I couldn’t help but notice that there were several women in the group, at various stages of their pregnancy. And, some of them were nursing their babies,” said Schaefer.
She learned that the women credited peyote with inducing lactation and easing labor pains. And the use of psychedelics during pregnancy was not limited to the Wixárika. She would later find that Brazilian women in the Santo Daime and União do Vegetal churches regularly consume ayahuasca during pregnancy.
“I am not advocating for western women to do this,” Schaefer said, emphasizing that, as psychedelics gain popularity, it’s vital that practitioners conserve rare plants and avoid profiting off of Indigenous practices. But Indigenous communities have been using psychedelics during pregnancy “for generations, perhaps centuries”.
Schaefer believes that the scientific community has much to learn on women’s health from Indigenous people, who possess expertise with various plant-based medicines and “knowledge of the body that may not be in the same vocabulary and terms and concepts that we in western medicine have, but they’re just as valid”.
Two years into collecting survey responses, Mikaela and her colleagues know their work is nowhere near over. But she feels like they have reached an inflection point as they begin collaborating with a doctoral student to redo the survey structure and submit proposals to publish the work in a peer-reviewed research journal.
The team aims to collect stories from twice as many mothers. Mikaela is also eager to continue following the families they have already connected with, to better understand their long-term experiences.
Mikaela doesn’t know whether the scientific community will come to embrace “community research” on women’s health that integrates Indigenous knowledge. At a moment where each of those subjects is tied up in complex political narratives and disinformation campaigns, the path ahead might be thorny. But she’s pressing on all the same.
Reporting for this story was supported by a Feriss-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship