At Vital Reset, we know that facing the end of life can be one of the most challenging journeys. Psilocybin therapy has shown promise in providing comfort during this profound time. Not just in studies, but in the lives of the people we served who were facing death.
We’re honored to share insights from our colleague, Arlo Voorhees, who recently reflected on this topic after attending a screening of Linda’s Last Trip, a documentary about a woman navigating terminal cancer with the aid of psilocybin therapy.
Below is an excerpt from Arlo’s blog post:
Last night, I attended a screening of Linda’s Last Trip, a film that accompanies a 63-year old woman grappling with a terminal cancer diagnosis who turns to psilocybin therapy for solace and perspective.
As you can imagine, the film was harrowing and poignant (If you have a kanopy subscription—which is free with a library card—you can watch it here), as it gave us unrestricted access to a vulnerable human at the crossroads. While Linda’s personal story is the main event, the film does provide a compelling glimpse of actual psilocybin therapy—a rare perspective as cameras and magic mushrooms generally don’t play well together.
End of Life Benefits for Psilocybin Therapy
Linda came away from the journey with a renewed perspective on life. Instead of thinking about death all the time, she found herself immersed and in love with her daily routine. While this seems like a simple pivot from pessimism to optimism, the shift was a monumental one. Because she felt the message so viscerally, it was easy for her to devote her last 8 months of her life to life itself. She pledged to spend as much time as possible with her family. That vacation her sister wanted to take to New Mexico? A hard no before the journey turned into an emphatic, excited HECK YES. While psilocybin therapy didn’t grant Linda a permanent bliss—there is no silver bullet, folks—it alleviated her anxiety and made her more comfortable with death.
One of the most moving parts of the film shows Linda–post psilocybin experience—calmly ripping pages out of her old journals, throwing them into a cardboard box and dragging them outside to burn. While burning old poems may seem like an act of rage and erasure, Linda was actually liberated. She mentioned that the mushrooms gave her permission to start letting go. Did that mean she had to burn everything she ever wrote? Not at all. But the act of sorting, ripping and burning was one of catharsis and gratitude. What a sacred honor to be a custodian of your own estate. What a relief to unburden a loved one from that kind of inheritance.
To review, the mushrooms lifted a stagnant macabre fascination with dying and granted Linda the inspiration to let go of the things she holds so dear, acts that would have likely petrified her just a month earlier. However, these are just pieces of the gigantic lesson that transformed the rest of her life—psilocybin therapy gave her a whole new way to conceptualize death.
Death and the Psilocybin Experience
And yeah, I know—this is where the water gets murky. This is where skeptics say mushrooms are just a drug that distorts reality, a substance that monkeys with our brains to present this holistic vision of existence that has no basis in western medicine and often contradicts some of our most fundamental assumptions about life. But let’s kick this around a little. What do we really know about death? What do we know about consciousness, and what it means to be alive? Why do we label some visions of the afterlife as primitive, animistic or blasphemous when the idea of heaven seems to acutely resemble many of these ancient beliefs? I don’t intend to answer these questions and deliver a philosophical treatise, and I may be preaching to the choir, but I’ve heard folks dismiss these end-of-life revelations too many times to not grumble aloud here.
At any rate, Linda was gifted a new definition of death. Rather than a final descent into nothingness, she learned to see the next 6 months as a necessary and even, beautiful transition; indeed, she was not going away forever, but joining forces with the enchanting world around her. Her death, she believed, was not the book closing but another chapter beginning.
The evidence is in. Psilocybin therapy can rid folks of the anguish of a terminal diagnosis and allow them to feel more present and grateful for their time left. That said, end-of-life psilocybin therapy isn’t for everybody. Folks who already hold sacred beliefs about mortality don’t necessarily need another perspective. Likewise, a mushroom trip might unsettle humans who are already overwhelmed and utterly befuddled by the shock of a diagnosis. Time is a sacred thing any way you spin it, so we need to tread carefully when helping a person toward what we conceive as the sublime.
To read Arlo’s full blog post, visit: Light at the End of the Tunnel—Psilocybin Therapy and End of Life Care
If you or someone you love is navigating the complexities of end-of-life care and are curious about the potential of psilocybin therapy, we’re here to support you. Reach out to learn more about how this path might offer comfort and clarity during life’s most profound transitions.
