The rise of the Mushroom Mums.

It's been two years since 41-year-old mum of three, Jacinta* had a drink.

"I was your typical 'mummy wine time' woman," she says, cringing slightly, "I'd get to dinner time, crack open a bottle of Shiraz and by the time the food was on the table I'd be on my second glass. This would be most nights. Your classic suburban cliché!"

Jacinta says that while she rarely consumed more than a few glasses on weeknights, the expectation among her friends was that on weekend get-togethers, the drinks would flow a lot more liberally.

"It wouldn't be unusual for a dinner party or night at the pub to include eight or more drinks," she explains.

"But as I got older, the alcohol wasn't agreeing with me, and the more I read about the risks to my health — both mental and physical — I realised it wasn't a sustainable way to keep going."

Jacinta quit drinking in 2022 and hasn't looked back — apart from those celebratory situations like weddings and birthdays where she says she really feels the pinch.

Recently, however, Jacinta — and many of her middle-aged cohort — have begun experimenting with psychedelics as an alternative.

"One of my friends is a researcher working on psilocybin treatment," explains Jacinta, "she's a bit of a hippy, so she has dabbled in all sorts, but a few months back she told us she'd been micro-dosing magic mushrooms a few days a week — and loved the feeling."

Watch: The growing number of mums microdosing on magic mushrooms. Post continues after video.

Micro-dosing is the practice of taking small amounts of hallucinogenic substances such as magic mushrooms (psilocybin).

"The way I've described it is as a 'non-hallucinogenic' dose," explains Macquarie University's Dr Vince Polito, Principal Investigator of the MicroDep Trial, investigating low doses of psilocybin as a treatment for moderate depression.

Proponents claim they feel a range of benefits, from increased performance at work, higher levels of motivation and creativity, an increased sense of well-being and even greater physical endurance. 

"When people micro-dose, most of the time, it's not completely imperceptible. People do notice a slight shift in their mood or the background to how they feel," he says, "but it's absolutely a completely different ballpark to when someone might take a high dose in a clinical or recreational setting. It's not even close to that."

For Jacinta, the first time she micro-dosed was at a friend's fortieth birthday.

"One of my best friends measured out a fingernail-sized amount of powdered magic mushrooms," she laughs, "then mixed it into a shot glass of water, and offered it to me. I told her I didn't want to have a trip — she assured me that this was nothing like eating handfuls of mushrooms at Falls Festival in 2005 (she's known me for a while) and that I would remain in control of my faculties."

Jacinta says that about 45 minutes later, she began feeling "tingly".

"That's the best way I can describe the feeling," she says, "not tipsy or high or anything, but like my senses were a bit more alert like there was a crackle of electricity in the air. I found myself appreciating things like the way the sunshine reflected off my glass of water on the table, for example, or how lucky I was to have had such close friendships over the years. Nothing weepy or over the top — just … enhanced."

Jacinta didn't experience any visual disturbances or hallucinations, nor did she have a hangover.

"I just had a nice, bubbly time with my friends, then woke up completely fine the next day," she says.

"Since then, I've done it maybe a dozen times — although I have a growing number of mum friends who incorporate it into their routine almost like a supplement."

One such mum is Chris*, a 38-year-old marketing director with a busy job and 9-year-old twin boys. 

"I'm a runner," she says, "I micro-dose before my runs, and I find I have more stamina, a quicker recovery and am in a better mood for the rest of the morning. It's far from the trippy, psychedelic, spacey vibe that you might think you'd get from taking magic mushrooms. I wish there was a way I could get a reliable supply, rather than having to hit up my 22-year-old landscaper!"

In recent years, public interest in micro-dosing has exploded, says Dr Polito.

"It wasn't until around 2015 that the first scientific study on micro-dosing was published," he says.

"And for the first few years, there was this very sudden, very noticeable public interest through media stories, online communities, things like that. Many, many, many people began experimenting with micro-dosing with basically no science behind them at all."

That was where Dr Polito and his colleagues stepped in, to try to understand the benefits of taking small amounts of psilocybin.

"The first scientific paper on micro-dosing came out in 2018 and for the first few years, there was a series of papers that were mainly based on case studies, interviews, questionnaires, and some longitudinal studies. They used scales and psychometric measures, but all relied on people self-reporting on the effects of the practice," he says.

"Those studies were very positive about the potentials of microdosing across a range of different areas, including social connection, attention, creativity, mood, mental health and even physical symptoms, like the alleviation of chronic pain."

Listen to The Quicky where we investigate some of the studies being done and asks whether psychedelics could be the key to wellness for some mental illnesses. Post continues after podcast.

Since those initial studies, Polito says further clinical trials haven't been as encouraging for the validity of micro-dosing, though this could be due to differences in the frequency of use between people experimenting in their own lives and the way clinical trials are conducted.

He's not surprised that, given the shifting opinion of the public towards psychedelics, more and more people are interested in experimenting.

"I think there's a big cultural shift in attitudes towards psychedelics in general," he says, "and I do think micro-dosing is quite a big part of that. I mean, there was very little research for a long time, then we have had these studies showing that at high doses in a therapy paradigm, there really can be benefits in psychedelic treatment for very serious mental illnesses, treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, those sorts of things." 

"Those scientific discoveries definitely have made some ripples, but that happened, at least initially, in this context where psychedelics had a lot of baggage and cultural associations. They were seen as something that really takes people out of their minds, that can be a very intense and gruelling kind of experience. Then this idea of micro-dosing comes along, which is suggesting to people that they might be able to have many of those same benefits, but without the big, scary trip, and I think that's extremely attractive for many people."

Of course, the elephant in the room is that magic mushrooms and other psychedelics are still banned for recreational use in Australia, with little chance of that changing in the immediate future. 

For Jacinta, this is a consideration, but not a deterrent.

"Look, booze has created issues for way more people in my friendship circle than any type of recreational drug," she says plainly, "so for me, a tiny dose of mushrooms occasionally seems like the lesser of two evils by far."

* Names have been changed due to privacy.

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Feature image: Getty.