Anecdotally:

It's a drug that sort of shakes up your mind. It lets you make all sorts of connections that you aren't going to sober, unless you spend a ton of time reflecting. At the end, you gain this incredible emotional clarity which helps you regulate your emotions. This is probably why it's being studied for use with depression and anxiety.

Preliminary clinical research shows that it can help with depression and drug addiction, among other ailments.

Anecdotal benefits I've experienced (as a typically healthy person):

- Improved mood for a least a couple months (happier, more awake/aware, calmer, less fatigue, more motivated)

- Reduced feelings of stress and anxiety

- Increased empathy for others

- Increased self-awareness, in particular of bad habits. This in turn helps me improve my diet as well as keep good physical/mental exercise habits.

- Increased creativity and openness to new ideas.

From brain scans regarding psychedelic mushroom use, it shows a huge increase of brain activity, indicating a lot more neural activations, which is why visuals usually involve seeing resemblance of things you know in things like wall or carpet textures. There are also some reports that the blood flow to the region that is responsible for parsing reality is decreased and increased to other areas, which makes your internal thoughts feel more like reality.

If you think about it in terms of neural networks, your day to day life is a set of standard inputs that result in predictable emotions/outcomes. However, on a shroom trip with significant dosage, both the outside effects and internal thoughts get enhanced in both strength and with additional features, which can be enough to start moving your internal synaptic weights enough to effect different thoughts or behaviors.

This is analogous to something like going to a different country with a different culture, and living there, which in turn will change your perspectives opinions and behaviors based on experiencing life differently - after about a month or so you will likely be doing things slightly differently and thinking about concepts in a slightly different way. Magic mushrooms essentially condenses this process in a shorter timeframe.

So given the right setting, this process can provide positive effects. Of course, the trip could also exaggerate negative emotions and thoughts, however, because of no withdrawal symptoms or long lasting effects, people generally just remember it as a bad trip and don't wanna do it again. Even there, sometimes the meta effect is experiencing the bad feeling strong enough during the trip that it doesn't seem as bad when you are sober.

In general, the argument for use is that the probability for negative effects is low, but probability for positive effects is significant. So rationally it makes sense to go through the experience.

It's different from people to people, and from session to session.

I've seen a variety of positive effects, but this is annecdotal, as they are reported by the people taking the substance themself.

There is also the problem of long term vs short term. There are plenty of positive side effects that fade away after a few hours, days, or months.

Often though, people report practical insights about oneself or life, that they could not get before, and those can be lasting.

Some people report physical benefits as well. Paul Stamets famously said his speech impediment disapeared after a session.

On a personnal level, what lasted for me were:

- the understanding of some needs I had, and that I was not allowing myself to have.

- the smoothing of autistic symptoms such. E.g: welcoming of physical contact.

Both significantly improved my quality of life.

I have to insist on the right conditions, though. There affect heavily both your immediate experience and the benefits you may get. If you intend to give it a try, get an experimented, serious and benevolent person to assist you.

There are some groups that are specialized in the matter. I've done my first session with the psychedelic society: you pay them, and they organize a whole 3 days seminar for you. They were competent, caring, and amazingly benevolent. Unfortunatly they exist only in Europe.

I don't have data but first hand experience and for me it is truer to say: it enhances your level of consciousness and it allows you to experience reality from beyond your mental-emotional conditioning. Which are two things that may sound very cryptic to many people reading this, as it cannot really be described in words. It is a explaining an orgasms to a person who has never had it kind of thing.

It obviously needs more formal research, but anecdotal reports of tryptamine-based psychedelics indicate strong potential for stress management and/or general mental health recovery.

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushrooms

Massive neurogenesis for one. [1]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012800...