How Psychedelics Affect Time, Grief, and the Earth

Rachael Peterson, an ecologist who helped build a real-time, data-driven map charting global deforestation, grieved when she saw new logging roads snaking through the jungle of Papua New Guinea and illegal palm oil plantations destroying forests in Peru. Not to mention, she also battled major depression, cycling through meds and therapies to ease her malaise, but the unrelenting march toward human-induced extinction felt tangled in the very roots of the despair that was holding her hostage. Maybe it was okay to feel this way. She had a front row seat to the profit-driven annihilation of our beautiful, burning world, after all. Who wouldn’t feel like shit?

To make things worse, she and her colleagues at Global Forest Watch were convinced — perhaps naively — that their unprecedented live feed, broadcasting the miserable death of the natural world, might actually spur collective action to save the forests, endangered species, oceans, and humankind-at-large. But as time passed, rates of deforestation only got worse. Their clarion call for climate action fell on deaf ears, like the stark, arresting warnings from the Indigenous Kogi people for the developed world to temper its race to the bottom. “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” wrote naturalist and philosopher Aldo Leopold in 1949, “is to live alone in a world of wounds.” As Peterson became increasingly despondent with her work and the state of the world, she found herself more and more desperate to alleviate her own worsening plight.

Peterson’s story is a more extreme case of someone who cares about the environment, and, by her own admission, she spent much of her time in a near-fevered state glued to a computer, rarely venturing out to enjoy the vast swaths of natural beauty still left in the world. But rates of eco-anxiety and climate grief — unique conditions in psychiatry since the associated feelings pertain to something much larger than the self — are doubtless on the rise. Almost half of the 50,000 respondents in a survey for a 2023 paper reported feeling “very worried” or “extremely worried” about climate change. Google searches for “climate anxiety” have surged. Across California, people are suffering from brain fog thanks to wildfire smoke exposure. All the while, alongside Peterson’s live feed, videos and images of hurricanes, floods, droughts, and fires are exhaustively broadcast worldwide on 24/7 news channels and social media platforms.

At her wits’ end after 16 years of unsuccessful depression treatments, Peterson learned from a friend who was a med student at Johns Hopkins University that she could join a study using two high doses of psilocybin for major depression. The tip turned out to be nothing short of a miracle. “I’d never tried psychedelics, I was way too straight-laced; way too Type-A,” Peterson later told the producers of the 2020 short documentary film Nature, Summer and Psychedelics. “I was way too risk-averse, and I was afraid to give free rein to a mind I’d come to view as a traitor, as a saboteur.” But what else could she do? Continue to spend her days in a state of bereavement and existential dread, agonizing over her complicity in how, with each passing moment, there are fewer forms of life on this planet? What could go wrong within the confines of a controlled study at a leading university? 

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