Autism is a social disorder that has varying ways of treatment and no one therapy or drug has proved to be completely effective. Psilocybin’s ability to open up a patients perspective and view on life is beginning to regain momentum and new studies are underway on their effectiveness and proven success with helping autistic adults. A Personal Story. A Personal Cure On Reddit, an individual with autism retells his journey of how psilocybin helped him with his social disorder. The latest study on microdosing psychedelics led by Luisa Prochazkova of the Cognitive Psychology Unit & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition at Leiden University, “Exploring the Effect of Microdosing Psychedelics on Creativity in an Open-Label Natural Setting,” was published on October 25 in the journal Psychopharmacology. “Taken together, our results suggest that consuming a microdose of [psychedelic] truffles allowed participants to create more out-of-the-box alternative solutions for a problem, thus providing preliminary support for the assumption that microdosing improves divergent thinking.” On the pharmacological side of things, a 2006 study showed that autistic adults had impaired binding to serotonin receptors in certain areas of their brains. Impaired serotonin signaling has also been implicated in conditions like depression and OCD. Psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA dramatically increase serotonin levels in the brain, so this could potentially be a mechanism through which psychedelics could help autistic people. In addition, recent evidence suggests that the Default Mode Network (DMN), an area of the brain responsible for attention and focus, acts differently in autistic people. This links into findings that psychedelics can disrupt the DMN, allowing people to break out of cyclic, focused and often damaging forms of thinking. It’s possible that psychedelics could help autistic people break free from a system of mind that keeps their attention fixed on unhelpful things.

Psychedelics & Autism: Stories Of Success