What Happens When You Try To Treat OCD With Psilocybin

Adam Strauss is standing in his New York City apartment, clutching the frayed cord of his headphones, trying to decide between the two MP3 players on his desk: an iPod and an iRiver, his Korean counterpart. He plays the same song on everything, swinging the silver plug of his headphones back and forth like a 1930s switchboard operator.

They try different music, different genres, different instruments. The IRiver tends to sound better, but the iPod offers a bit more midrange. The iPod has a good battery life, but the iRiver lasts eight hours—longer than the average continuous music player. Then again, it doesn’t have an MP3 player. Is eight hours enough?

They go back and forth, back and forth, testing voice types, rejecting buttons, visual aesthetics. His inner monolog races as fast as ticker tape. Do aesthetics matter? It will stay in my pocket all day. I’ve never seen a line at the door of iRiver, but people stop at the Apple Store to get an iPod. Maybe those people know something that I don’t. Or maybe those people are chumps, to pay you need a low device!

It would be one thing if it was Adam’s choice of MP3 player to buy. After all, it was 2003, the height of the audio revolution, and Adam was a 29-year-old audiophile. But it’s not just the iPod and the iRiver. For Adam, there were other choices—a shirt to wear to work, lunch, even which side of the road to walk.

At one point, in order to simplify his way of making clothing decisions, Adam bought 11 matching shirts with blue buttons. But he quickly found enough difference with the end of his shirt. He believed that there was a right shirt to choose; every morning he would spend 20, 30, then 45 minutes trying to find it. If only he could know which shirt was the best, he could control his fate.

On one level, Adam knew how stupid it all was. He was not stupid; he graduated from an Ivy League university and ran his own company, which at the time was the world’s largest digital audio library. He was educated, talented, and successful—but soon, his addiction problem was taking over his life.

OCD results from a complex combination of brain chemistry, genetics, and environment. During the interview, Adam compared his OCD to drugs. “Heroin is not what people with opiate addiction are looking for, they’re looking for a high.” heroin is the thing that gets them high,” he told me. “I have OCD, heroin addiction, and the most interesting thing is the dopamine you get when you feel like you’ve gotten it.”

But with OCD, he didn’t have to go to the street to fix it. The only tools he needed were in his head. Adam would have made up his mind—it should be iRiver-then prove to themselves that they haven’t listened to enough hip-hop. Before he knew it, the two boxes were open on his desk and he was moving the headphone cable back and forth.

Soon Adam was canceling plans with friends, arriving late for work, and spending sunny Saturdays holed up in his Manhattan apartment. In an effort to hide his OCD from others, he shut himself off from socializing, which left him with more time to destroy his thoughts.

He told me: “For people who do bad things, heroin is very easy. “All you care about is rehabilitation. Everything else can’t be the same.” For Adam, it was like making a choice. A lifetime can only begin when he knows which MP3 was the best. He was stuck in a bad way and had no way out.

The desire for control shapes our decisions, our relationships, and our thoughts about our environment. Psychologists consider the desire for control to be a psychological need. Yes, taking control of your life is a good thing. But when the desire to control is too strong, or when we try to control things beyond our control, it can be very destructive.