WASHINGTON — When routine therapies and medications failed to help Ayelet Waldman overcome intense mood swings and a deep depression, she turned to something that is generally associated with harm, not health: LSD.
Waldman makes it clear that she is the last person in the world who, under normal circumstances, would be associated with drugs. Prior to her experiment, living in Berkeley, California — a town synonymous with hippie culture — was her closest tie to a tab of acid.
“I’m like the lady in yoga pants with the skinny vanilla latte standing in front of you at Starbucks,” said Waldman, a Harvard Law School graduate and former corporate lawyer.
“The venn diagram of Ayelet world and the LSD world — there’s no venn in that diagram; it doesn’t cross.”
But the mom of four was desperate. Her mood disorder was destroying her life and threatening her relationship with her family. At her lowest point, she was suicidal.
“That’s when I realized I needed to try something drastic,” she said.
Waldman heard about microdosing, or taking tiny doses of drugs, thanks to its growing presence in the media. Researchers at Johns Hopkins and New York universities have studied the impact of psychedelic drugs on cancer patients for anxiety, and the Food and Drug Administration recently approved large-scale trials to test the effect of ecstasy on post-traumatic stress disorder in combat veterans, The New York Times reports.
After reading up on microdosing, Waldman didn’t need much convincing. Procuring the illegal substance, however, wasn’t so easy.
Waldman, who is married to Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, started asking friends, neighbors — anyone she knew — if they had any idea where she could get LSD.
“And everybody looked at me like I was completely crazy,” she said.
Finally, someone told her about an old professor who had been microdosing for years. Soon after, she found a small envelope in her mailbox with the name “Lewis Carroll” on the return address. Inside the envelope was a small blue bottle of LSD diluted in distilled water. (Waldman said she ordered an LSD drug kit on Amazon to be sure.)
Not knowing what to expect, Waldman told a friend she was taking a new medication for the first time and asked her to come over in case there were any weird side effects.
“I didn’t know whether Lucy was going to explode in the sky with diamonds,” Waldman said.
It didn’t. There were no voices, no flashing colors and no groovy trips. Just a return to her normal.
“About 90 minutes later, I looked out my window and my dogwood tree was in bloom. And I thought, ‘Oh, the tree looks so beautiful today.’ And that was the first time anything had looked beautiful in a really, really long time,” Waldman said about her experience with microdosing.
“I just felt like the fog — the ugly, miserable fog of depression — was gone. And at the end of the day, I thought to myself, ‘Wow. That was a really good day.’”
Waldman details her experience with microdosing in her new book, “A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life.”
Her blue bottle of LSD is now empty, but her hope for a future open to alternative drug therapies is not.
“We should be studying these drugs because we have an epidemic of depression … people are suffering, people are in pain,” she said.
Right now, Waldman has to work really hard to maintain equilibrium. She receives therapy, is on a hormone patch and “does a lot of different things.” She wishes she could still microdose LSD and knows it’s always a possibility if her really good days turn really bad.
“I also know that if I become suicidal again, and I feel like I’m facing a choice between breaking the law or killing myself, I will once again choose to break the law,” she said.
