Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance
The clinical era
practitioner reference, not medical evidence
The current microdosing reference, built from decades of collected self-reports.
Psilocybin and psychedelic books
Every book here is summarized in plain language and labelled for what it is: research, a practitioner guide, or one person's account. Nothing on this shelf is for sale, and no link on this page pays us.
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37 books · filter or search
Thirty-seven is a lot to choose from. These two are where we send people new to the subject, and here is why.
How to Change Your Mind
Read this one first. It is the book that carried psilocybin research to a general audience, and most arguments you will meet about it are downstream of this.
The Psychedelic Handbook
Read this one second, when you want the compounds told apart. A physician takes psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, MDMA and DMT in turn, a chapter each, in plain language.
Psychedelics and Mental Health
Research & scholarshipThe clinical era
What psychedelics do to neurons and circuits, for readers without the background.
The Psychedelic Handbook
The clinical era
practitioner reference, not medical evidence
Strassman walks the major compounds in plain language, roughly a chapter each.
How to Change Your Mind
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
Pollan brought the revival to a general audience. Usually the first one people read.
Shroom
Research & scholarshipThe revival
The standard history, and the one that checks the field's favourite stories. Start here.
Have a Good Trip
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
Eugenia Bone reports how people actually use mushrooms now, microdose to heroic.
Psilocybin Therapy
The clinical era
practitioner reference, not medical evidence
Pursell walks psilocybin therapy from the chemistry through to the practice.
Coming Full Circle
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
One man's multi-year use of psychedelics for trauma, and what he would tell you to do.
Psychonauts
Research & scholarshipThe clinical era
Two centuries of people experimenting on themselves, and what it did to medicine.
The Psilocybin Handbook for Women
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
The psilocybin questions that get asked less often, because they are women's.
The Microdosing Guidebook
The clinical era
practitioner reference, not medical evidence
A psychiatric nurse practitioner's step-by-step microdosing manual.
The Psilocybin Connection
Research & scholarshipThe clinical era
Khamsehzadeh ties mushrooms to mind and human development. Wide-ranging.
Microdosing Magic Mushrooms with the Paul Stamets Stack
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
The Stamets Stack protocol, short and self-published. A method with no trial behind it.
Entangled Life
Research & scholarshipThe clinical era
Sheldrake on what fungi actually are. Barely about psilocybin, worth the detour.
The Immortality Key
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
Did psychedelic sacraments shape early Christianity? A classicist makes the case.
The Wild Kindness
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
Bett Williams lived with mushrooms in New Mexico for years. A literary memoir.
Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
A harm-reduction guide: dosing, sitting, set and setting, written plainly.
Psychedelic Medicine
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
Interviews with the researchers who restarted the field, in their own words.
Mushroom Medicine
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
Using psilocybin as medicine, recounted with no clinician in the room.
Timothy Leary
The revival
Leary's Harvard papers, before the myth. Edited and annotated by a scholar.
Decomposing the Shadow
Reportage & memoirThe revival
One person's psychological model of the mushroom experience, built from his own.
The Psychedelic Renaissance
Research & scholarshipThe revival
Sessa makes the psychiatric case, just before the modern trials arrived.
The Psilocybin Solution
Reportage & memoirThe revival
Powell argues mushrooms drive meaning-making. Interpretive, and it says so.
The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide
The revival
practitioner reference, not medical evidence
The dose protocols that popularised microdosing. One practitioner's method, no trial behind it.
Psychedelic Psychiatry
The revival
Saskatchewan ran a psychedelic psychiatry programme for a decade. What happened to it.
Mycelium Running
Research & scholarshipThe revival
Fungi as infrastructure. Barely a psilocybin book, and the best thing here on mycelium.
Sacred Mushroom of Visions
Research & scholarshipThe revival
Thirty-odd contributors on psilocybin, from the chemistry through to the ceremonies.
Breaking Open the Head
Reportage & memoirThe revival
The book that made psychedelic writing publishable again. Iboga, ayahuasca, Burning Man.
DMT
Research & scholarshipThe revival
Sixty volunteers, government-approved DMT sessions, and the psychiatrist who ran them writing it up.
Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World
Research & scholarshipThe long pause
Stamets on a hundred psilocybin species worldwide, and the deadly ones they resemble.
True Hallucinations
Reportage & memoirThe long pause
The Amazon expedition, the mushrooms, and the theory McKenna built on top of both.
Food of the Gods
Reportage & memoirThe long pause
McKenna's big claim, that psychoactive plants shaped human consciousness. Read it as argument.
Acid Dreams
Reportage & memoirThe long pause
How LSD travelled from CIA project to counterculture to Schedule I. The politics, documented.
LSD
Reportage & memoirThe long pause
Hofmann made LSD, then watched what the world did with it. His own account.
The Healing Journey
The long pause
practitioner reference, not medical evidence
Case notes from a Chilean psychiatrist, taken before the research stopped.
Soma
Before the ban
The banker-turned-scholar who argued the Vedic Soma was a mushroom, and started a field.
The Doors of Perception
Reportage & memoirBefore the ban
The 1954 mescaline essay that every later psychedelic writer is answering, knowingly or not.
For reference only. The works listed here are third-party publications; listing is not endorsement, and nothing here is a medical or efficacy claim. A book is a reference, not clinical evidence: the register and our analyses never cite one as proof. How titles are chosen and checked is set out in the methodology. Rights holders can request removal.