Psilocybin eased his burden – Nautilus

WWhen the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, Rachel Drayer was on the front lines. She was an emergency medicine physician assistant at a large hospital in the Seattle area. Patients poured in every day, sick and dying of shortness of breath.

“I wore the same N95 mask for three weeks,” Drayer, 48, told me recently. She stored it in a paper bag between shifts. “I was afraid every day that I would die. People like me, fit and healthy, were dying.”

For months, Drayer endured the worst stress she had ever felt. Then things got worse. The atmosphere in the hospital and in the city has changed. “At first, people pretended to be really nice and supportive, and then they became vile and angry and so selfish and mean,” Drayer said. “It was really hard for me to understand why people would act that way.”

“I would like to find joy again. I want to be able to laugh and cry. I want to feel anything.”

Constantly angry, exhausted and depressed, Drayer moved to a rural Washington state town to work at a community hospital. She thought this change would do her good. This took her to a new level of discouragement. Patients were now complaining that Covid was not real, that it was a government conspiracy.

“I went from dealing with really scary traumatic situations to being told I was part of a government lie to defraud people of, well, I don’t know what,” Drayer said. “I tried to be nice, but I had to say that in no way are you going to convince me that this is fake, contrived, or a liberal hoax because I’m pretty sure I wasn’t shoving tubes down people’s throats for fun.”

Drayer had become an emotional zombie in 2022. At the time, she said, all she could think was, “I don’t want to feel this way anymore. I wish I had joy again. I wish I had lightness. I want to be able to laugh and cry. I want to feel anything.”

When Draper heard about a 2022 clinical trial to take psilocybin to relieve burnout and depression, she signed on the dotted line without hesitation. The clinical trial was designed for people exactly like her: healthcare professionals who have worked on the front lines against Covid. She also laughed at the prospect, she told me. “Oh, someone wants to pay me to get high? OK, cool.”

Before “medicine day,” Drayer said, the trial researchers told her why she was a good candidate. They told her, she recalls, “You don’t have a long neurobiological history of this type of depression and stress, which tells us that your brain is not 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 was healing the wounds of my childhood. It was understanding my gifts in the world.”

The six-hour trip surprised Drayer. “My trip has nothing to do with the hospital or Covid,” she said. “It had nothing to do with anything current.” She met what she described as “the three mothers of the universe” who showed her that her job was to enlighten others. She watched them remove her soul – “this beautiful egg-shaped white light” – from her chest, explain it to her and put it back “into this nest of blankets”.

“It healed childhood wounds,” Drayer said. “It was understanding my place in the world. It was understanding my gifts in the world. It changed my life.”

Drayer’s story is representative of the renaissance of psychedelic medicine. Medications like psilocybin promise something extraordinary: rapid, almost magical relief from mental ailments that are resistant to conventional treatments. But scientists are now questioning this narrative, a topic I explore in my Nautilus article “What does your brain do with psychedelics?” » Scientists suggest that it may not be the changes in brain activity caused by psychedelic drugs that explain their therapeutic value, but the subjective experience – and consequences – of the drug.

Drayer acknowledged that the medication didn’t do all the work of his recovery. Before her psilocybin trip, she said, “the work I did with a therapist trying to figure out how to separate my personal life from my professional life and learning to be gentler and less harsh prepared my brain for change more than anything. I was ready to make a change. I was in a perfect place and time for it.”

The lasting power of his psychedelic trip, Drayer said, was reliving it. Six months after the clinical trial, she began experiencing what felt like panic attacks. “I was like, ‘What does that mean?’ And then I realized what I had experienced on my trip, this is what it meant. I had a moment of clarity and then my whole body calmed down again. And I could go on.

Today, Drayer said, she is no longer angry about hospital rules, like the maximum time she can spend with patients (20 minutes). “I realized that’s not where I should be spending my energy, because that energy isn’t coming back to me in a positive way.” She now focuses on patient care, moved to part-time at the hospital, and opened a private clinic focused on health and wellness. “The whole vision for the place and what I should do came from my trip,” she said.

Main image by Tasnuva Elahi; with image by Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock

• Grigori Guitchouts

  Published on October 20, 2025

  Grigori Guitchounts is a neuroscientist, AI researcher, and senior associate at Flagship Pioneering, working on AI and machine learning.