Everything was black, and then small dots appeared. Splashes of white and green formed into occasional kaleidoscopes of color. As the intensity grew, waves of emotion flooded in, along with a memory. 

Wearing an eye mask while resting on a couch, with a curated playlist of classical music piping over her headset, Lori Unruh Snyder was suddenly taken back to the hospital where her father had passed away the previous year. She imagined sitting in the hospital’s cafeteria, wondering what she was doing there, when she heard his voice. “I heard his voice, and it was like, ‘It’s okay. You’re going to be alright. Just do what you need to do,’” Unruh Snyder told  DoubleBlind. “I found that to be super comforting.” 

It was July 17, 2023, and Unruh Snyder was in a specially outfitted room at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, tripping on psilocybin for science. She’d never done psychedelics before, but she was open to trying new things: Diagnosed with Lyme disease, she had struggled for a decade with fatigue, swelling, fogginess, and a host of other debilitating symptoms. Many of the doctors she had previously consulted weren’t able to make her better, or even figure out what was going on. Now, at Johns Hopkins University, a team was looking into whether psilocybin could help. 

The resulting study was published this February, and it shows surprising results — after participating in two psilocybin dosing sessions, 20 adult participants reported experiencing significant declines in their Lyme symptoms, along with improvements in sleep and quality of life. At the six-month follow-up, the participants continued to show improvement, reporting a 40% decrease in Lyme symptoms. “People seemed to get better,” Albert Garcia-Romeu, the lead author of the study, said in an interview with DoubleBlind, “and those improvements seemed to last.” 

The study has limitations, however. It has a narrow scope, no control group, and only looks at a small number of participants, so it goes without saying that the results are highly preliminary. But this pilot effort still serves as a promising sign that psilocybin could be used to treat a wider range of conditions than medical experts have previously focused on. And while there are still lots of questions to be answered in the fast-growing field of psychedelic medical research, the study also offers some concrete evidence suggesting that psilocybin can be administered safely in controlled clinical settings. 

Ask anyone with chronic Lyme disease, and they will tell you it’s a nightmare. Transmitted by parasitic, black-legged deer ticks, the infection is caused by the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria. Most people recover after taking antibiotics, but in an estimated 10 to 20% of cases, the bacteria can wreak havoc on a person’s body for months or even years. 

Still, even though an estimated 476,000 people in the United States seek out treatment for Lyme every year, according to the CDC, chronic Lyme disease remains a contested and often misunderstood ailment. Ross Douthat, a conservative New York Times op-ed columnist, noted in a book on his own experiences with Lyme disease that many patients end up seeking out homeopathic remedies and other DIY solutions because they have so much trouble getting a proper diagnosis and treatment from traditional doctors. 

For Unruh Snyder, her troubles began in 2012 or 2013, when she found an itch on the back of her leg after walking through some tall grass behind her family’s new home in Raleigh, North Carolina. “What’s that? Oh, it’s a tick,” she recalled thinking. An associate professor of international agriculture at North Carolina State University, she specializes in the study of grassland science and describes the outdoors as her “natural habitat.” She grew up on a farm in Delaware, where she’d dealt with harmless ticks before, and this time she followed the same homespun procedure.  

“Detach it, burn it,” she recalled to DoubleBlind. “Didn’t think twice about getting on antibiotics at that point.” 

Two weeks later, she came down with a massive, flu-like fever. The doctor couldn’t figure out what was causing her achy joints and fatigue, and things only got worse from there. Over the coming years, Unruh Snyder’s face would swell up randomly. Once, she blanked out completely in the middle of teaching a class. “My brain would shut off, and it would be embarrassing almost," she said. “I was like, ‘Hm, I have no idea what I was saying to my students, this is scary.’” She got checked to see if she had Alzheimer’s or early dementia, even though she was only in her mid 40s at the time. 

In 2020, after struggling to breathe during a trip to Las Vegas, she told her doctor to run a battery of tests, and the results showed she had allergies to pork and beef. She looked into whether she’d developed an allergy to shrimp, which her dad also was allergic to, but tests didn’t show any issues. Her doctor suspected that she had Alpha-gal syndrome, a potentially life-threatening allergy that can develop after getting a tick bite. But the doctor also recommended that they test for Lyme disease, and the results came back positive: On March 13, 2020, after eight years of suffering, she was finally diagnosed with Lyme. 

According to Garcia-Romeu, Johns Hopkins’ interest in the overlap between Lyme disease and psilocybin began in 2019, when philanthropist Alexandra Cohen visited the campus’s Lyme disease research center laboratory. Cohen runs the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation with her husband, one of the largest sources of funding for Lyme disease research in the world, and she arranged a meeting with the late Roland R. Griffiths, a renowned psychopharmacologist who founded and directed Johns Hopkins’ Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

“[Griffiths] asked me, ‘What do you think about this?’ I said it sounds interesting,” said Garcia-Romeu, who now serves as the psychedelic research center’s Associate Director. He and Dr. John Aucott, Director of the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Research Center, began developing a “proof of concept study” centered around a few core symptoms. 

“That included stuff like pain and fatigue, but also, of course, depressed mood. We also look at sleep quality and quality of life,” Garcia-Romeu said. “We thought this would be a beginning to answer the question of what happens when we try to do a study like this. Can we find the people to do it? Would they even join the study if it was out there? If they did, would they get better at all? And if so, in what domains would they show improvements, and where would they not? [We asked] those types of simple, very basic questions to just lay the groundwork.” 

To set things up, the team recruited participants from previous studies at the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Research Center. They also recruited using “online advertisements and word of mouth,” the study reports. Unruh Snyder got involved with the study after hearing about Johns Hopkins’ research from a colleague. Being a professor and researcher herself, she gathered her medical records and did an interview, a physical exam, an electrocardiogram, a medical questionnaire, and other tests to qualify. Interested participants were required to be “medically stable” and would be turned away if, among other criteria, they had moderate or severe drug or alcohol addiction, schizophrenia, psychotic disorders, bipolar disorder, or severe issues with their heart, kidneys, or immune system. The study also sought out patients who weren’t regular users of psychedelics, ruling out anyone who reported doing them in the past year.  

As for the drugs, the researchers certainly weren’t buying shrooms on the street. The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research has a Schedule I license that allows the lab to conduct research using banned substances. However, the team also needed to secure approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Johns Hopkins Institutional Review Board in order to obtain a crystalline powder form of synthetic psilocybin, also known as crystalline polymorph psilocybin, from the Usona Institute, a Wisconsin-based medical research nonprofit. 

Being a researcher herself, Unruh Snyder naturally took meticulous notes about her experience during the eight-week study. On July 17, she drank down psilocybin capsules totaling 15 mg, with 100ml of water served in a crystalware glass. Making  herself comfortable in a room that was furnished like a chill-out hang pad, she tripped for a solid seven hours. Among the highlights was a point when she felt like she’d transformed into a piano key, jumping around a keyboard to be a white key and then a black key — a burst of creative energy sparked by her own love for making music as well as the lab’s standardized trip playlist of Vivaldi, Brahms, and other classical composers. 

Two therapists who had worked with her in multiple preparatory meetings were present to facilitate during her trip. She took a second 25-mg dose two weeks later, and lent her insights in debriefs after each session. In the months after, she felt a burst of energy. She was suddenly more active than she’d been in years. She brought an entirely new perspective to teaching at North Carolina State University, and her graduate students noticed that she seemed happier and more interactive. One day, she recalls, her husband was moved to tears when she was playing a song, because of the newfound clarity and creativity she was bringing to her music.  

“I didn’t realize how much I was holding onto,” Unruh Snyder said. “Part of what I experienced during that first [trip] was accepting that I’m living with Lyme disease. I have limitations, but I can find ways to work through them.” 

Garcia-Romeu tells DoubleBlind that the next step is to map out a larger randomized study. Noting recent discussions around the idea of developing psychedelic drugs that don’t actually make people trip, Garcia-Romeu is currently looking at some of the data with a colleague to analyze whether there is any correlation between what the participants experienced during their trip sessions and what they experienced afterwards — for example, if participants who experienced greater “feelings of oneness” or “feelings of love” saw a bigger improvement in quality of life, or a greater reduction in Lyme symptoms. Another idea for the next study would be to have staff use a brain scanner to evaluate whether there are changes in the participants’ brains associated with the Lyme condition, and how the brain may or may not be impacted by psilocybin treatment. 

The timing for a larger study seems right: Due to climate change and warming winters, ticks have been migrating to parts of the United States where they haven’t been seen before, raising the risk of more people getting infected. “What we’re seeing is a growing problem with Lyme disease. If more people are getting the condition, that also means more people are going to be getting these chronic problems afterwards,” Garcia-Romeu said. “If this could help, that’s a big win in my book.”

In the three years since she participated in the study, Unruh Snyder told DoubleBlind that she still has limitations that she has to work with due to Lyme disease. She hasn’t taken psilocybin again because she wants to preserve the integrity of Johns Hopkins’ research, in the event that she might be tapped again for future long-term study. But it’s clear that she is still experiencing the positive effects of those two psilocybin trips. 

“I couldn’t imagine my life without it now. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have this experience,” she said. “Imagine for eight years, going in and out of doctors — you have this, you have that, you have this. But your body is like, argh! I don’t think I have depression, I don’t think I have anxiety. I know my body aches, but for what reason? It was never answered correctly. You’re denied and denied, but now I’m so much more aware of what feels right for me.”

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