Her trip was traumatic; at one point she was looking at a huge whirlpool in the sky, watching the essence of her mother being sucked away from her. “I woke up screaming and bashing my fists against my ears,” she says. The sitters left her on her own. It was only later that she realised they were high as well. The experience put her off psilocybin, but not the idea that drugs might help her. “Whatever these chemicals were doing, it was something that nothing else had ever been able to do.”
At home Cartwright immersed herself in the literature. In her book she describes weeping with relief after googling “intrusive thoughts” and discovering that other people have them too, and that they can be a symptom of OCD. The more she read, the more she began to question the medical model underpinning diagnosis “that distress is a biological disease. I think the evidence for that is really slim,” she says. This transformed the way she thought about her symptoms, but it also raised a question: “If my problem was not explained by the idea that there was something wrong with my brain, then what was the explanation?”
Cartwright grew up in the Midlands and had a difficult childhood. Her father, a documentary director with a studio in Birmingham, was made redundant in the early Nineties and her mother, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, was in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Cartwright had talked about these issues “ad nauseam” in therapy, she says. “But what psychedelics seem to do is to take that cognitive understanding and make it felt.” She started to experiment with MDMA, which is “gentler” than psilocybin.
“I’m quite a risk-averse person, so I was rigorous in my research and tried to mimic as best I could the clinical trials protocol,” she says. She took the drugs during the day in her flat in east London, replicating the dose used in clinical trials and spacing each one a month apart, with a break after three months. The first was a “classic euphoric” trip, she says, but those that followed brought up traumatic material, often from her childhood. Unlike with psilocybin, though, she was always aware that the events she was reliving were in the past.
She experimented with less dramatic alternatives too: she was left in tears by craniosacral therapy, which supposedly adjusts the immovable joints of the skull through gentle touch; and she tried eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, made famous by Prince Harry, who has used it for trauma treatment. Both involved inducing dreamlike states that brought up complicated emotions. Meditation also helped; she had her most powerful non-hallucinogenic trip on a ten-day retreat in California.
To benefit from the full effect of the drugs, she needed a therapist to guide her. They would meet after each trip and discuss the significance of what had come up. This is crucial: “What is being trialled at the moment is not psychedelics, it’s psychedelics in combination with psychedelic therapy.” The further they went down this path, the more convinced she became that intrusive thoughts were not symptoms of an illness at all, but a protective response to the more difficult aspects of her childhood: “The thoughts emerging were sort of saying, ‘Look over there, think about anything other than what is actually happening.’ "
Five years on from her journey to Amsterdam, Cartwright has not taken any hallucinogens for more than a year. The intrusive thoughts flare up at times of stress, but they have reduced by about 95 per cent. She is off medication and hasn’t had therapy in three years. She says her mental health is better than it has been for decades, and is convinced that the drugs were able to offer help that her years of therapy and medication could not, and that the demand for them in this country (where more than eight million people were prescribed antidepressants in 2022) is huge. On the morning we meet she has given an interview to BBC Radio 4, and her phone is lighting up with requests for information from listeners, who are asking for help to find safe ways to access the treatment.
Her “breakthrough journey” — the trip that really seemed to clear some sort of mental block — happened in 2022 during a group mushroom retreat. The idea of it had filled Cartwright with horror, “but that was exactly why I needed to go”, she says. She was introduced to a guide she trusted by a psychiatrist who had been involved in some trials at the Maudsley Hospital in south London, and decided she felt safe enough with her to give psilocybin another shot.
She found herself in a house in the countryside with eight strangers. Their ages and professions were mixed — there was a teacher, someone from the military. All were struggling with their mental health in some way. They took the drugs under the supervision of three “facilitators”. Cartwright recalls a woman in her sixties having a horrendous trip, screaming and bashing her fists. She wanted to look away but couldn’t — and as she watched she realised that she had regressed to childhood and that her younger self thought that her mother was dying. But in that moment, she also realised that she was going to be OK. “It was a moment of beautiful connectivity, a sense of peace and understanding,” she says.
Written by: Rosie Kinchen
© The Times of London
