WWhen the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Rachel Dreyer was on the front lines. She worked as a physician assistant in the emergency department of a large hospital in the Seattle area. Patients arrived every day, sick and dying from shortness of breath.
“I wore the same N95 mask for three weeks,” Dreyer, 48, told me recently. Between shifts, she kept it in a paper bag. “Every day I worried about death. People like me, fit and healthy, were dying.”
For months on end, Dreyer experienced the worst stress she had ever experienced. Then things got even worse. The atmosphere in the hospital and the city has changed. “At first people pretended to be kind and supportive, and then they became nasty, evil, selfish and mean,” Dreyer said. “I found it very difficult to understand why people acted this way.”
“I would like to bring back the joy. I want to be able to laugh and cry. I want to feel something.”
Constantly angry, exhausted and depressed, Dreyer moved to a rural town in Washington State to work at a community hospital. She thought the change would be good for her. This brought her to a new level of despondency. Patients were now complaining that Covid didn't exist, it was a government conspiracy.
“I went from managing really scary traumatic situations to being told I was part of some government lie to get people out of…well, I don't know what,” Dreyer said. “I tried to be polite, but I had to say that there is no way you can convince me that this is fake, contrived or a liberal hoax, because I’m pretty sure I didn’t shove tubes down people’s throats for fun.”
By 2022, Dreyer has become an emotional zombie. At the time, she said, all she could think was, “I don't want to feel like this anymore. I want the joy back. I want to have lightness. I want to be able to laugh and cry. I want to feel something.”
When Draper learned about a clinical trial of psilocybin to relieve burnout and depression in 2022, she didn't hesitate to sign on the dotted line. clinical trial was designed for people like her: healthcare workers who have been working on the Covid front lines. She also laughed at the prospect, she said. “Oh, someone wants to pay me to get pumped up? Okay, cool.”
Before Medicine Day, Dreyer said, the study researchers explained to her why she was a good candidate. They told her, she recalls, “You don't have a long neurobiological history of this kind of depression and stress, which tells us that your brain isn't necessarily predisposed to feeling this way. It's an acute stressor that's causing this. If we can rewire your brain and convince it not to feel this way, it will probably work.”
“It healed childhood wounds. It was understanding my gifts in the world.”
The six-hour trip surprised Dreyer. “My journey had nothing to do with the hospital or Covid,” she said. “It had nothing to do with anything current.” She encountered what she described as “the three mothers of the universe,” who showed her that it was her job to bring light to others. She watched as they removed her soul—”that beautiful white light shaped like an egg”—from her chest, explained it to her, and placed it back “into that nest of blankets.”
“It healed childhood wounds,” Dreyer said. “It was understanding my place in the world. It was understanding my gifts in the world. It changed my life.”
Dreyer's story is representative of the renaissance of psychedelic medicine. Drugs like psilocybin promise something extraordinary: rapid, almost magical relief for mental health problems that don't respond to traditional treatments. But now scientists are challenging that narrative—a topic I explore in my book. Nautilus article, “What does your brain do under the influence of psychedelics?? Scientists suggest that it may not be the changes in brain activity caused by psychedelic drugs that explain their therapeutic value, but rather the subjective experience—and consequences—of drug use.
Dreyer agreed that the drug did not help her fully recover. Before the psilocybin trip, she says, “the work I did with a therapist, trying to figure out how to separate my personal life from my work life and learn to be gentler and less harsh, prepared my brain for change more than anything else. I was ready for a change. I was in the perfect place and time for it.”
According to Dreyer, the enduring power of her psychedelic journey lay in its re-experience. Six months after the clinical trial, she began having panic attacks. “I thought, 'What does this mean?' And then I realized that what I experienced during my journey is what it means. I had a moment of clarity and then my whole body calmed down again. And I could just keep going.”
Today, Dreyer says she is no longer overcome by anger over hospital rules, such as the maximum amount of time she can spend with patients (20 minutes). “I realized that I shouldn’t waste my energy on this because that energy isn’t coming back to me in any positive way.” Now a patient care worker, she has moved to a part-time hospital job and opened a private health and wellness clinic. “The whole vision for this place and what I should do came from my journey,” she said.
Main image: Tasnuwa Elahi; featuring Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock
