Could Mushrooms Be the Drug to Finally Cure Eating Disorders?

The first time Sophia Anderson tripped on psychedelic mushrooms, she was 16 years old. It happened in late 2020, in the coastal jungle near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and the whole thing had been her mother’s idea. Under the influence, Anderson felt dazed and oddly at ease — which was disconcerting. For the last few years, her life had revolved around desperately and meticulously maintaining the carefully constructed reality inside her head.

Symptoms of Anderson’s eating disorder began to emerge when she was 14. After making the cut for the dance program at the performing-arts academy she attended in Phoenix, Arizona, Anderson threw herself into training. Over the next couple months, she grew increasingly fixated on her body and developed a pattern of not only restricting foods — first her Halloween-candy haul, then entire food groups — but exercising constantly. Her mother, Jennifer Jacobs, had even found Anderson, her eldest of two daughters, awake in the middle of the night doing leg lifts and sit-ups in her bed. “There was a part of me that felt that being skinnier or smaller would make people like me,” Anderson says. In ten weeks, she shed 20 pounds from her five-foot-seven frame and dropped to 103 pounds.

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