Art by Valerie Thai

Aaron Campbell was 37 when he walked away from his world. For 27 years he had been told that leaving would jeopardize the chance of eternal salvation for him, his wife, and their four children. Yet salvation was just what he needed, and immediately. “Ultimately, I said, ‘If I don’t [leave], my mental health is going to continue to suffer to a degree where I don’t know what I’ll do,’” he recalls. “That was very scary for me.”

Campbell grew up in 1980s Wainwright, Alberta, a farming town of about 5,000 southeast of Edmonton. Until age 10 his community consisted of his mother, his brother and sister, and a handful of neighbours. Then, his single mom’s search for social support and spiritual direction led her to the Mormon Church (officially called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 2018, after God urged a “correction” to the abbreviated LDS in a revelation received by church president Russell M. Nelson).

In many ways Campbell, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, was raised by the Wainwright branch of the LDS, amid tight community and tighter programming. Monday was Family Home Evening: a religious lesson and activity for family completion. A weekly schedule of age-specific meetups, seminary sessions, and miscellaneous social gatherings followed, culminating with a three-hour church service on the Sunday Sabbath.

The church provided friends and support, but prescriptions and proscriptions cast a shadow. “The messaging was subtle: that if you do these things it will enrich your family, it will bring you blessings,” says Campbell. “But the implication was: if you don’t do these things, bad stuff will happen to you.” Family reputation was paramount, and meant prioritizing the programme. “It required me to basically put my authentic self to the side,” Campbell recalls. “To be accepted into the community, in order to be accepted into my family, I felt I needed to perform and have a mask on.” There was, he says, “very consistent, daily reinforcement of: the person you are is not acceptable.”

Rural, pre-internet life meant that Campbell knew no different, and his mental health suffered. At 15 he was put on SSRIs, and enrolled in a national health system with scant appreciation for therapy or supplementary practices. Only after 20 years of futile treatment did he identify his relationship with the church, invisible in its ubiquity, as the root of his suffering. “When I left, it was like putting a tourniquet on a wound,” he says. “The wound had stopped bleeding, but I’ve still got a wound. Now I got to deal with this.”

Angry and confused, disillusionment with the medical system led him elsewhere in search of remedies. He went “all in” on exercise, cannabis, and keto dieting to little avail. Then, in 2017, he came across Johns Hopkins University research documenting the alleviating effect of psilocybin on end-of-life anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients—an early harbinger of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, which started to go mainstream with Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind. Inspired, Campbell contacted a fledgling psychedelic group in Calgary. Little did he know, he was initiating a journey into a community that would change, and possibly even save, his life.

*

Mormonism was founded by Joseph Smith in New York State, amidst the fervent Protestant revivalism of the Second Great Awakening. On April 6, 1830, 11 days after the Book of Mormon was published, about 55 people gathered on Whitmer Farm near Fayette for the first Mormon congregation.

At first glance, tripping on psychedelics seems a sinful departure from Mormon tenets. The Word of Wisdom, a revelation Smith said he received from God in 1833, commands Mormons to refrain from alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee. Church prophets have since added substances that “impair judgement or are harmful or highly addictive.” But did the first prophet do as later prophets have preached? Convincing evidence suggests that psychedelics were in fact integral to Mormonism’s visionary beginnings.

In 1820 or 1821, a teenaged Smith experienced his First Vision after entering a grove of trees near Manchester, New York, seeking wisdom. “I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me,” he later reported. Heavenly “personages” then told him of the imminent Second Coming, and condemned all existing Christian churches for teaching incorrect doctrine. Smith experienced a string of such visions, from which several cardinal Mormon doctrines emerged.

A 2019 paper by Robert Beckstead, Bryce Blankenagel, Cody Noconi, and Michael Winkelman presents compelling evidence that these visions came from entheogens (chemical substances that produce altered states of consciousness when ingested). During his First Vision, Smith experienced mouth dryness, paranoia, and vivid hallucinations: symptoms consistent with entheogens—including two psychedelic mushrooms, psilocybe ovoideocystidiata and amanita muscaria—either scientifically documented to have grown in every area Smith lived, or almost certainly available through established trade networks.

It’s highly likely that Smith was familiar with these substances. His mentors, including his father, were enmeshed in folk magic, the occult, and esoteric Christian practices, some with entheogen links. His family possessed a panoply of magic-adjacent artifacts, from astrological charts to an alchemical amulet. His visions echoed those experienced by both of his parents and foreshadowed those of many early Mormon converts. Multiple eyewitness accounts describe the unusually intense visionary nature of early Mormon congregations, with symptoms seemingly manifesting on demand after drinking Smith’s wine sacrament. There was widespread suspicion that the wine was spiked.

Smith was shot dead by a mob in 1844 while awaiting trial in Carthage Jail, Illinois, after causing uproar by destroying a Mormon-critical press and, according to some reports, imposing martial law while mayor of the city of Nauvoo. Brigham Young became the new Mormon prophet. He shepherded the church to Utah and away from its probable, or at least possible, psychedelic genesis, which for nearly two centuries has been forgotten or denied.

But modern Mormons and ex-Mormons are returning to these visionary roots. The “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast is dedicated to “alternative methods for healing from trauma” and “exploring higher consciousness while healing from toxic religious shame.” Since launching in 2020 it has grown a monthly listenership of over 10,000. Divine Assembly, a Utah-based “magic mushroom church,” was founded in the same year by ex-Mormon and former Republican state Senator Steve Urquhart and his wife Sara. Though not all of its roughly 5,000 members are ex-Mormons, the church was founded in large part to help people leaving religious environments find healing through psychedelics. These congregations contain clues about the power of collective psychedelic practice to help people find new ways forward and process past pain.

*

Campbell’s first psychedelic journey came courtesy of five grams of psilocybin mushrooms. Sitting in a circle of 15 fellow trippers and six sober space holders, he became the universe. He recalls creating stars and planets and music as scattered parts of himself. He felt giggly and joyous. “It was just a magical experience,” he says.

Campbell emerged from his trip feeling more connected to everything around him. He had felt a radically new sense of perception, free from hierarchy and suppression—a mode he still feels able to slip into to view situations differently, even though no experience since has recaptured that first sense of interconnection.

The decision to contact that Calgary psychedelic community started a chain of small events that, Campbell says, have “fundamentally changed the course of my life and, frankly, probably saved me from a trajectory that was going to end up in suicide.” Much of this stemmed from feeling like he was spending time with people who understood him, who saw him for who he was rather than how well he followed the rules. The Mormon church doesn’t exactly encourage experimentation and self-exploration.

On the “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast, two ex-Mormon friends, Mike and Doug, have languid conversations about psychedelics and related matters. It sounds like Seth Rogen and his best pals running a The Kardashians-style show. In a June, 2024 episode, they talk about basic milestones in their lives their religious loved ones may not necessarily condone, like the times when they each had their first drink.

Mike and his wife were travelling, and one day he just looked at her and asked if they should share a drink. “Then we were like, ‘fuck it! Let’s just each order one drink! Let’s order our own drink!’” Doug laughs uproariously. “What a decision-making process that was, though, right? Like so scary, so terrifying to wade into those waters, right.”

“Yeah…” and the conversation sobers.

*

From 2001 to 2021, the number of people in Canada reporting no religious affiliation doubled. In the U.S., church membership dipped below 50 percent for the first time in 2020. Canadian census data contains 87,725 self-identifying Mormons in 2021, down from 105,365 in 2011. Even official LDS data, which includes inactive former members, shows Canadian membership growing slowly in absolute terms, but shrinking as a proportion of the population.

The ex-Mormon community, on the other hand, is growing—and connecting. The r/ExMormon subreddit, with 302,000 members, is the headline example, but Campbell says there are countless other ex-Mormon pockets of society. “There is something about the Mormon experience that teaches people to organize really well,” he says. The internet fundamentally changed things, and those who leave the church are now better able to connect again outside of it. Campbell says this means the church no longer controls their narrative.

Meanwhile, the psychedelic renaissance has bloomed. Psychedelic practice has a long history, from ayahuasca use across the Amazon Basin to iboga ceremonies among West African Bwiti communities and peyote usage among North American Indigenous peoples. But prohibition has reigned in the contemporary West, with promising medical research suppressed through the war on drugs. Until recently.

Research increasingly points to the potential of psychedelics in treating mental-health issues (despite serious methodological challenges, like ensuring double-blind trials with mind-altering substances and navigating the complex knot of possible mechanisms). Tectonic legal shifts are nudging countries, including Canada, toward clinical trials, medical use, and decriminalization debates. Stores selling psychedelics are semi-tolerated across Canada. Investment has boomed with the hype. And facilitated psychedelic experiences are accessible through an underground network of practitioners.

This renaissance holds growing appeal for religious communities, as evidenced by an emerging network of psychedelic chaplains integrating psychedelics into spiritual thought systems, as well as people processing the psychological challenges of leaving totalizing religions like Mormonism. Campbell is careful to stress that every experience of apostasy is unique, but there are patterns. Abandoning Mormonism generally means relinquishing a moral and spiritual worldview, which often creates a deep need for sensemaking. “You just need something to matter again,” an ex-Mormon Divine Assembly member and psychedelics user told Rolling Stone. Leaving can mean losing a tight-knit community of friends and family, plus the navigational framework of a familiar culture. This, in turn, can trigger the task of discovering your authentic self, which may contain characteristics long repressed through shame, like sexual desire or identity. For many, it can feel like being fully alive for the first time.

Powerful psychedelic experiences are inspiring some ex- Mormons to facilitate those experiences for others. Campbell now guides people through psychedelic journeys, from pre-trip preparation to in-trip support and post-trip integration. He isn’t formally trained or licensed, and doesn’t stick to a particular modality, but adapts his approach to individual clients. He works underground, mostly with ex-Mormons new to psychedelics and looking to make sense of life after leaving. They are typically middle-aged, well resourced, and curious.

Psychedelics are pattern disruptors, Campbell says. He believes the reason there’s so much research into how they can help people trying to break addictions is that they make people question their reasons for doing what they do. He helps people deconstruct these patterns as a precursor to long-term change. He typically works with somebody once, either recommending practical next steps or referring them to a medical professional with relevant expertise.

Campbell’s understanding of his work highlights what seems obvious, but is often effaced by psychedelic discourse focused on individual treatments and miracle trips: that our psychology is shaped by the systems we live within. “Any system that is well established basically tricks people into thinking that it’s not alive,” Campbell says. “It hides, and the more it can hide, the longer it will last.” This can lead ex-Mormons and others to mistake mental-health challenges for personal failings, or scapegoat leaders without recognizing how systems also enclose those scapegoats.

Community is a powerful vehicle for identifying and understanding systemic patterns. Psychedelics are often most effective as deconstructive tools when used with others who understand and can help process that deconstruction.

Later in the “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast, Doug talks about a recent trip he took that felt different. He was contemplating what makes him feel fear and anxiety, and thinking about how, once the thing he thought was causing those feelings dissipates, something else comes and takes its spot. He and Mike agree that being afraid of death is the same as being afraid to live. They talk about overcoming shame in the way we can only do with someone who really gets us. Doug talks about this moment he always has when he’s high and feels super dirty, but says it’s the grounding part of the trip for him. It reminds him, “Ya popped up from the earth, big dog! And yer going back down.” Mike murmurs understanding.

Campbell experiences similar seamless conversations now, too. “I don’t have to explain the acronyms, I don’t have to explain the backstory of any of this stuff,” he says of his experiences in ex-Mormon psychedelic circles. “People are like, ‘Yep, I get it,’ right away. That feeling of being understood, being heard, being validated, is huge —huge.” Psychedelics alone didn’t save Campbell; psychedelics plus finding community did.

*

This insistence on collective psychedelic practice resonates beyond the ex-Mormon community, and represents a broader call for a different psychedelic renaissance. Writing in Jacobin, Benjamin Fong identifies two possible renaissances. The “psychiatric paradigm” sees government institutions and psychedelic companies administering psychedelics in tightly regulated medical settings to alleviate specific mental-health symptoms. Critical psychedelics podcast “Psymposia” dubs this corporadelia: psychedelics as commercial service and psychological adaptation.

The collective paradigm envisions an alternative renaissance, rooted in a systemic understanding of psychedelic possibilities and what conditions our mental health. This paradigm proposes supplementing psychiatric services with decentralized, community-centred psychedelic practices, and connects individual healing with the need to acknowledge and even reimagine the social, economic, and political systems that shape mental health. Whereas the psychiatric paradigm reduces psychedelics to “just another little pill for skull-bound ailments,” in the words of Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis, co-founders of psychedelic-assisted therapy organization Cardea, the collective paradigm is more radical. “When used correctly, these substances are not quick-fix cures for illness but consciousness raisers,” they write. “And raised consciousnesses tend to find the public causes for personal pain.”

The collective paradigm heeds what we know about how psychedelics work. One of the few concrete research findings is that the context around a psychedelic experience— set and setting—affects its outcomes. The systems that shape us are the bedrock of that context. Proponents also cite the array of Indigenous psychedelic practices—encompassing religious, social, medicinal, creative, and warfaring rituals—as evidence of collective psychedelic possibility. Another touchstone is Mark Fisher’s “acid communism,” which holds that the psychedelia of postwar New Left counterculture helped people transgress boundaries, generate new artistic forms, and bolster new social relations capable of undermining “capitalist realism:” the seeming impossibility of imagining beyond capitalism.

What the collective paradigm should look like in practice is a complex, contested question. But experimental answers are sprouting in Canada and beyond, like mushrooms after rain. Motivated by the exclusion of racialized communities and issues from existing research, professor and clinical psychologist Monnica Williams is pioneering research exploring psychedelics as a tool for processing intergenerational racial trauma. “When people are traumatized, usually it’s of an interpersonal nature,” she recently told The Conversation Canada. “But also we find that people heal through connecting with other people.”

Williams has been involved in research documenting the impact of naturalistic (non-experimental) psychedelic use on racial-discrimination symptoms among Indigenous, Asian, and non-white people in North America. Her ketamine-assisted psychotherapy work has alleviated PTSD associated with racial trauma. Through both individual therapy and group sessions for specific communities, like Black women, she applies psychedelics to historic, cultural forces impacting mental health at systemic scales. Her work gestures toward the possibility of improving mental-health outcomes and raising consciousness around collective issues in therapeutic settings.

There is growing experimentation around collective psychedelic care. Daan Keiman is a psychedelic practitioner and Buddhist psychedelic chaplain. Formerly through The Synthesis Institute, and now through The Communitas Collective, he is at the forefront of work to develop holistic models of psychedelic care, including training for potential psychedelic practitioners, that integrate systemic, spiritual, somatic, and relational dimensions. Keiman sees systemic issues and collective experiences as integral to healthy, transformative psychedelic practices. “Psychedelics can offer us these experiences in which we feel part of something bigger again,” he says, because they help dissolve boundaries. “It becomes so incredibly important to make sure that the model of offering psychedelic care to someone can address both these experiences: of communitas, and underlying problems of alienation and belonging.” Research shows that systems shape mental-health outcomes like alienation and loneliness, he continues. Who and how we are changes with social setting, and a sense of belonging guards our mental health. Collective psychedelic practices can not only demonstrate these findings and cultivate empathy, but can also prove more accessible and cost-effective than individual services.

Another example of collective psychedelic activity is the patchwork of Canadian associations offering psychedelic advocacy, education, and experiences, from the Psychedelic Association of Canada down to local communities like Vancouver’s The Flying Sage. Empowered by creeping psychedelic permissibility, Michael Oliver started The Flying Sage after working for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies Canada, which has been instrumental in enabling psychedelic medical research. While he recognizes the health benefits and trojan-horse strategic value of medical trials, Oliver imagines broader cultural possibilities. So The Flying Sage aims to destigmatize psychedelics by pairing them with activities like cold plunges, breath work, and dance.

“Psychedelics are really great at tapping into this collective unconscious,” Oliver says. “It’s a very powerful aspect of psychedelics which at the moment isn’t really being talked about at all in the mainstream narrative.” As a meeting space for underground and overground practitioners to connect, The Flying Sage is one example of how hidden collective-paradigm psychedelic communities are underpinning the ostensibly individualistic psychiatric paradigm.

*

Campbell has learned that people are finding value not only in psychedelic trials or miraculous doses, but by combining psychedelic experiences and time spent with others. His ultimate goal is for psychedelic practice to be integrated into communities. The point isn’t that all communities must use psychedelics, but that normalizing safe, connected psychedelic experiences can help more people.

Campbell says he is struck by “just how not unique the work is that I do,” meaning it isn’t so different from the many forms of care that sustain healthy people and communities. He cites American spiritual leader Ram Dass’s culturally integrated conception of care, and his notion that “we’re all just walking each other home.” Thanks to finding both psychedelics and deep connections, Campbell has made it back to a home in which he knows himself better than ever before. He’s more present; a better parent. Regardless of faith, he hopes and thinks more people will soon be served by collective psychedelic guidance.

Illustration by Matthew Daley

My mother’s house looks like my long-repressed childhood memories. The black floral wallpaper is veiled with dust, cloaking walls yellowed by years of chain- smoked cigarettes. Everything decorative is dangerous: swords hang in place of picture frames, flanked by ominous leather ropes of unknown origin.

My mother’s house feels like a castle, but one where everyone lives in the dungeon. It’s a house made of walls that could be so beautiful, if they weren’t so broken.

When I walk back into my mother’s house nearly two decades after our estrangement—a separation born the day her drinking became too much for me to bear—everything is just as I left it, just as I imagined it after all those years.

Well, almost everything.

In my vivid visions of those dark walls, I never imagined my adult self standing within them, hugging a person who is both a stranger and my mom at the same time. And I definitely couldn’t have envisioned how I would get there in the first place—that it would take psychedelics for my mind to open enough to let me open my mother’s front door.

*

Unlike my mother’s house, my psychedelic guide’s home is a sanctuary. Her porch is enclosed by warm stone and decorated with trinkets and treasures: crystals and incense line the windowsills, spider plants spill from hanging baskets like fountains of forest. Each time we meet, we sit on the floor, a pot of magic-mushroom-steeped tea steaming between us.

My guide is an underground plant medicine ceremonialist and bodyworker who uses psilocybin—the hallucinogenic component of magic mushrooms—to help people tap into their own inner knowing. She works outside of any medical system and doesn’t call herself a therapist. Instead, she holds space for people, using mushrooms to light the way.

I visit this guide because talk therapy always fell flat for me. I could recite the painful story of my childhood mechanically to anyone who asked, but I could never texturize these tales with feeling, because I didn’t seem to have any. My emotions were invisible rocks that I carried, weighing me down so viscerally that it would take a proper excavation to set myself free. Magic mushrooms, I hoped, would help me unearth the hurt.

*

Though psychedelic therapy is slowly becoming mainstream, with the federal government acknowledging promising clinical trial results and a first-of-its-kind in Canada psychedelic- assisted therapy program introduced at Vancouver Island University’s Nanaimo campus last year, it still remains illegal and largely underground thanks to its fractured history in the Western world.

Psychedelic use dates back centuries, with early psilocybin use (called teonanacatl) linked to the Olmec, Zapotec, Maya and Aztec in what is now called Mexico. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began to study it in North America, with researchers examining whether psychedelics could treat alcoholism and various mental illnesses.

Their investigations showed some of what shamans knew all along—that psychedelics could be used to treat addictions to other drugs, recover buried emotions and process childhood trauma, or even ease the mental distress faced by cancer patients. These results were promising enough to warrant further analysis, but as psychedelics became associated with anti-war counterculture in the 1960s, psychoactive substances became outlawed. For psychedelic research, the Summer of Love became the summer of loss.

As history book authors wrote their chapters on the War on Drugs, psychedelics remained tied to a harmful, hippie stigma. It wasn’t until the 1990s that interest in psychedelic research was gradually renewed, with studies assessing the effectiveness of MDMA, LSD (acid) and psilocybin to treat depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addictions. With tempered excitement, researchers began conducting the first human trials since the ’70s, instilling a new sense of hope in the field of psychotherapy.

Today, it seems we’re finally reaching the level of societal acceptance needed for a psychedelic therapy renaissance, with Health Canada offering some exemptions for researchers and health care practitioners to study or administer psilocybin and a number of convenient (yet illegal) mushroom dispensaries openly operating storefronts in major Canadian cities, akin to cannabis shops pre-legalization. These shifts are opening a potent path to healing for people like me.

*

At each visit, my guide asks me to begin my journey with an intention. Spilling a brave breath, I tell her I’m here to work through my childhood trauma. I want to dive deep into the cellars of my psyche that I’ve locked away from myself, to go back to the time of court orders and custody battles, child psychologists and threats of foster care—all those things that slashed the already precarious tightrope connection I had with my mother. Through my words, I pour my intention into my mug of mushroom tea.

It’s not long after drinking the psilocybin that my body feels lighter, colours become fractal and I enter that classic psychedelic state of oneness. I feel as though I am floating in bliss, embraced by levity. That is, until I’m not.

Abruptly, the room darkens and my lungs feel compressed beneath bricks. I see my heart trapped in a steel lockbox inside a pressure cooker. It vibrates like water coming to a boil, getting tighter and constricting, as toxic grey smoke billows from my body. Tears flood my face in a relentless stream. Overwhelmed by panic, I can barely grasp an inhale.

Everything that happens next happens so quickly, a lifetime of painful memories flip-booked in a nanosecond. I’m alone with the lightning inside of me and it’s terrifying. Out loud, I scream.

That’s when the lockbox shatters, revealing a white light emanating from my chest. I see my adult hand entwine its fingers with those of my child self. I hear myself telling her it’s okay, that we’re safe and we can let go of the pain now. As I do, my heart seems to release its venom. It leaves behind a void, but I see it as newfound space for the loving joy I’ve yearned for.

*

Thanks to neuroscientific research, the trippy magic of the psychedelic experience can actually be explained. It’s thought that at its root lies the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), which is active during states of rest and thought. With psychedelic use, the DMN slows down, creating space for new neural pathways that override the typical mental shortcuts the brain uses to process information quickly in day-to-day life. This can open the door to creativity, new ideas, meditative states and ego dissolution. It can also help us tap into deeper states of consciousness beyond our regular, waking awareness, which is likely why psychedelic users can often access buried emotions.

When these emotions are surfaced in a safe way, led by trained therapists and integrated using other therapeutic and trauma-informed modalities like somatic experiencing and talk therapy, or daily practices like yoga or journaling, people may have a chance to accept, forgive and heal from their past experiences. For many, like myself, this can be life-changing.

My guided journeys get worse before they get better, as I dig into the lingering pain of my abandonment wound. With the support of a counsellor trained in somatic experiencing, I feel like I’m knocking my own house down, deconstructing those survival-mode walls that I built for myself in childhood. I work hard to construct something new, and each day I come home from a journey, I begin to greet a little bit more of the person I want to be.

Slowly and non-linearly, I process my anger and shame, exchanging it for acceptance and compassion. I swing through depressive states and, against my extroverted nature, I isolate myself as I struggle to navigate the world wearing the mask of the old me—a mask that doesn’t seem to fit anymore. But feeling that ungrounded comes with opportunities to foster new outlooks: I’m finally able to replace a desperate longing for the maternal relationship I wish I had with an unconditional acceptance of the human that my mother is, flaws and all.

Out of the blue, I call her.

*

On the phone, my mother’s voice sounds unfamiliar. We talk about nothing, the weather, the news. The rift of almost 20 years is too wide to catch up more meaningfully. Struggling to change the subject with grace, I blurt out that I forgive her.

My mother seems caught off guard. She says thank you and not much else. But it’s the first test of my ability to love her without expectations. I forgive her as part of my own healing, and so I forgive her with no strings attached. The simplicity of the exchange is no match for the radiance of feeling unburdened—the feeling of turning my body into a comfortable home at last.

My sharp edges soften enough to bring me to her doorstep a year later, our first hug bringing me to immediate tears. We look at old baby photos and offer each other small but symbolic tokens: the rose quartz that I carried to every journey for her, and a pair of earrings from my late grandmother for me. We promise to keep in closer touch, which we won’t do, but I’m at peace with the way we are. Because standing there, at my mother’s doorstep, I could finally see that although the walls of my mother’s house may be broken, they’re still beautiful.