Fifteen years of crime reporting left me with PTSD. Magic mushrooms helped me begin to recover

I didn’t mind the blood at first: the red streaks and puddles that sometimes remained in the street once the corpses were hauled away. Nor did I mind the screams of the mothers who rushed to crime scenes only to find their sons lifeless and bullet-pocked behind police tape.

None of what I saw in my first years as a crime journalist bothered me much. I couldn’t allow it to. For crime reporting is mostly a test of how much suffering you can witness—the grief of families, the trauma of survivors —without letting it affect your ability to file on deadline. Those who can stomach the work might make a career in breaking news. Those who can’t usually beg off the beat within a few months.

I worked in the daily newspaper business for 15 years, covering multiple acts of violence and trauma each week. For the Miami Herald, I chronicled a seemingly endless spate of late-night shootings and robberies. For the Palm Beach Post, I spent weeks at a posh Boca Raton mall trying to get inside the mind of a serial killer who had used the property as a hunting ground. And for the New York Daily News and Newsday, I worked hundreds of scenes: homicides, hold-ups, stabbings, drive-bys, beatings, drug beefs, gang shootings, murder-suicides, cop killings, fatal fires, and horrific car wrecks. I commonly saw corpses, and routinely interviewed traumatised survivors of violence.

Then, a few years ago, the work began to take a toll. I started having vivid nightmares, developed insomnia, and exhausted myself daily attempting to monitor every inch of my surroundings, so that whatever horrors fate held in store for my community that day would not be visited upon me.

If covering the news in metropolitan America teaches you anything, it’s that unspeakable tragedy will impact someone new in your coverage area every few hours—someone who awakens to find the world one way, their loved ones healthy and happy, and ends their day with that same world wrecked beyond recognition. I became obsessed with avoiding such tragedies in my personal life, to the point that I would typically only leave the house for work assignments (more blood was being shed, always, but at least it wasn’t mine or my family’s).

Still, the nightmares didn’t cease. Young men I had interviewed for news stories as well as my books The Triangle and Pill City—mostly gang members who, after our interviews,

had been maimed or killed by gunfire—appeared in my dreams, pleading with me to help them.

When insomnia displaced my nightmares, I lay awake at night ruminating on various horrors: the charred corpses of a mother and her daughters I’d seen in a crashed SUV; the smell of death emanating from a decaying body hidden in an apartment wall; or the sound of a gunshot victim howling in agony as he was loaded into an ambulance.

My waking hours were no better: editors dispatched me to chronicle new traumas each day, morbidly joking about heinous acts while sitting comfortably in their cubicles sipping coffee.

I turned to therapists and doctors, who diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder. Traditional treatments aided me little, perhaps because I was still being exposed to death and trauma while covering the news each day.

It didn’t help that I was being attacked on social media for doing my job. My writing career had suffered a blow following the publication of a Baltimore Sun story that questioned the more controversial claims made in my 2017 nonfiction book Pill City: How Two Honor Roll Students Foiled the Feds and Built a Drug Empire. The paper's crime reporter had attacked my reportage in a front page story and social media criticism spread like wildfire. Soon, newspapers I'd written for were scrutinising work I'd done years earlier with a fine-tooth comb. Newsday compiled and published names of interviewees I'd once spoken to for breaking news stories, but who could not be located again through public records. And the New York Times removed two quotes from a story I’d penned about opioids.

None of my stories was ever retracted, nor were any factual corrections issued as a result of the scrutiny. But the negative publicity was enough to tarnish my reputation in the journalism world—a world in which one's reputation is everything.

Amid the uproar, my PTSD seemed to worsen. Sleep eluded me almost entirely. I quit my job teaching journalism at Queens College to focus on writing a new book, but anxiety and exhaustion robbed me of my drive and attention span.

Then, during another sleepless night, I came across an article about psilocybin and its potential benefits for PTSD sufferers. Having made a living chronicling drug gangs, I was no stranger to the perils of narcotics. But after immersing myself in literature on the subject of therapeutic dosing—a wealth of research showed such treatment helped heal emotional trauma—I decided to give psilocybin mushrooms, known colloquially as “magic mushrooms”, a try.

My psychedelic experiences aimed at self-healing were transformative. In them, the same gunshot victims who had haunted my dreams now returned with a message of hope, assuring me that the end of one’s life is not the end of one’s impact on the world—that they would live on through loved ones, as well as through my books and stories.

My anxiety and paranoia lifted, and I began to see the folly of using either as a cudgel against tragedy. My five senses – instruments of torture in the hands of PTSD – became my allies, allowing me to recognize the beauty and possibility inherent in all my waking moments.

It had been years since my last spiritual experience, an encounter at Israel’s Western Wall, but now I heard the voices of my Jewish ancestors urging me to find the wisdom that lay beyond tragedy.

After just a few psychedelic sessions, followed by periods of deep reflection, my sleep greatly improved, my nightmares grew infrequent, and my fear of imminent, personal tragedy dissipated. Psilocybin mushrooms gave me a new perspective—one of acceptance and gratitude for all I’d seen and done in my career, including the painful moments.

The violence I’d covered had come with a lesson only the mushrooms seemed able to unlock: suffering was inevitable, and my efforts to avoid it pointless. The only way to sufficiently answer tragedy was to embrace its opposites: love, pleasure, beauty, friendship, whenever and wherever they appeared; to cultivate and appreciate these gifts and, when they fled, to accept their flight gracefully and without regret.

Today, thanks to this new perspective, I no longer struggle as mightily as I once did to keep my demons at bay. It is due to the transformative power of psilocybin that I have my peace of mind back. While I still cover grisly subjects and deal with symptoms of PTSD, I am no longer perpetually haunted by my work.

It is a perspective most veteran crime journalists struggle to attain—often through costly therapy and medication—but one a mushroom may be just as capable of instilling.

Kevin Deutsch is a crime journalist and author who lives in New York City

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If you have been affected by any of the issues this article, you can contact the following organisations for support:

mind.org.uk

beateatingdisorders.org.uk

nhs.uk/livewell/mentalhealth

mentalhealth.org.uk

samaritans.org