It’s time to go on a journey. Not just any journey. It’s a journey to find one’s self and to help ease suffering. Okay, maybe that sounds a little too trippy, but as you’re about to learn, the setting has to be just right for this to work.
Former NHLer Daniel Carcillo dropped the gloves to fight 164 times during his time in The National Hockey League. He was diagnosed with seven concussions. Carcillo was out of The League by age 30 because of the deteriorated state of his brain and body. He was told he had CTE-like symptoms. He was told he had mild onset dementia and that all of these things were incurable.
That’s not a list of things anybody wants to ever be told, let alone at the young age of 30. Carcillo tried to get help. He went about things the “right” way, the “accepted” way. The doctors were unable to do anything for him.
Then, just like how he fought in The NHL, he decided to fight back. Instead of meekly surrendering and accepting his fate, he did his own research and came across a potential method of treatment that might give him a ray of hope.
That method was the unorthodox and controversial decision to take psychedelic mushrooms. He wasn’t trying to just get high at a music festival in order to “enjoy the music.” What he was trying to do was to get his health back. He wanted his mind back. He wanted his life back. And now, several years later, he’s gotten his wish.
Now, Carcillo is at the forefront of trying to destigmatize psychedelic mushroom treatments and instruct people in need on how they can safely use this method to get their lives back.
With a story such as Carcillo’s, there’s really only one way to tell it and that’s to let him tell it to you. So, Blittner’s Blue Line will provide the questions and Daniel Carcillo will provide the answers. Hopefully, if any of you readers out there are in need of help, his story will be beneficial to you.
*Editor’s Note: Questions and Answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
Blittner’s Blue Line: How and why did you end up going down the psychedelic mushroom-based therapy path?
Carcillo: “It was 2015 when I retired at age 30. I’d had seven diagnosed concussions and I was being told by doctors that I had early-onset dementia and CTE-like symptoms. So, two neurodegenerative diseases that weren’t favorable to me playing anymore. So I had to step away. And then I went through the medical system for four years, doing all of the medically accepted treatments, which cost me half a million dollars and a lot of time.
“When I wasn’t getting better, I was reading or listening to the doctors on what they were telling me they could do at their specific clinic or with specific medication and I was always reading these PubMed papers of new studies that were coming out. I saw one on mushrooms and it was a study done in 2014. I saw it in 2017.
“It was an individual study on a healthy norm that had, they were under FMRI and the academic institution was tracking brain connections in the different hemispheres. Placebo brain and brain on Psilocybin. And what I saw was that this substance, after it was ingested, was the brain was over communicating. So with a natural substance, it was connecting different brain hemispheres that had been shut down due to depression, anxiety or in my case, if it did it for depression and anxiety, then it can do it for concussions.
“So, I ended up taking an invitation to a farm, in 2019, where mushrooms were decriminalized, so you couldn’t get arrested for taking them. Then, I partook in a ceremony or ‘The Journey’ and it completely saved and changed my life.
“I did take diagnostics before I left and (then) I (again) took some six months after the ceremony. And because I know how stigmatized taking a Schedule One substance is and six months after I did two high doses of these mushroom journeys, which take about four hours each time, I had reversed all the signs of any abnormalities in my brain with a QEEG.
“It was a brain scan and my blood work was completely clear. On top of that, I was eating again, I was healthy and I wanted to be around my kids. I wanted to be an active participant in my life. I (had) thought that there was no hope for concussion survivors and the number one cause of death is suicide after a traumatic brain injury.
“For a community of people who really have nowhere to turn to after spending so much time and money on treatments that quite frankly just don’t work, I thought that I should use my platform for good and start creating programs and companies that can help get the word out. And so, six years later, here we are.”
Blittner’s Blue Line: What do you say to people who are dismissive of this type of “alternative” treatment and accuse those who go down this path of just wanting to get trippy and high?
Carcillo: “What I say to people like that is to go and do your own research. Don’t listen to me. Go and look at the studies done by Johns Hopkins on end-of-life anxiety and terminally ill cancer patients. Go and look at the smoking cessation studies done, the studies done on treatment-resistant depression. There are over 190 FDA-approved clinical trials using Psilocybin for a wide variety of indications, like depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, OCD and a number of different neurological disorders as well.
“The FDA has deemed Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, as a breakthrough therapy designation; meaning that it helps and it’s safe and efficacious for intractable disease states. So, I would just tell people to go on clinicaltrials.gov and go look at those studies. They’re double-blind placebo studies and they’ve been cited thousands of times. To try to get people over a stigma, you show them research in the most rigorous scientific industry or platform that there is, which is the FDA.”
Blittner’s Blue Line: Young people are more likely to abuse all sorts of drugs, especially psychedelic ones like mushrooms; how do you prevent this from happening and keep this as a legitimate treatment?
Carcillo: “There are regulated frameworks. I have the 13th legal, above-ground mushroom facility in Portland, Oregon, that is allowed to, legally, in the state, serve mushrooms. Colorado is going to be the next state. And that license opens on January 1, 2025. In these regulated statewide frameworks, you have to be in a licensed service center. So, in a licensed facility, like the one that we have you have to be with a licensed facilitator.
“There’s a professional who knows how to sit with individuals and guide them through a meaningful journey. And then, all of the mushrooms that are grown are manufactured with a specific license, in a specific way. Then, there’s also licenses for testing facilities, because we test the mushrooms to make sure there’s no additives or adulterants and how much content is actually in them.
“It’s a very regulated framework that people are coming into. One of the most crucial things to keep in mind for anybody reading this is, you have to be in a very controlled setting or environment and music matters as well as the intention that you bring to the ceremony. So if somebody’s intention is to get better from their depression or to understand it, then that can happen; as long as it’s curated in the right manner.
“As long as you’ve found somebody who understands your trauma and can help guide you through this three- or four-hour journey. Now, there are different ways to take mushrooms. It’s not just for sick people. We’re bringing it forward for sick people in these regulated frameworks and in these FDA trials because of the stigma attached to it.
“But I also do believe that people can have access to their own consciousness and if somebody’s a well person and they are just trying to figure out what their life means, they shouldn’t be demonized for taking these mushrooms that grow freely in nature, out of the earth, that the government has deemed, without any scientific backing, that they are dangerous. It’s quite the opposite.
“The reason we’re bringing it through in these regulated frameworks is because of the stigma associated. But I do caution people that these are very powerful tools and you have to be over 21 to come to my facility in Oregon. I will say, there’s more people who we turn away than who qualify for this type of work.”
Blittner’s Blue Line: New York Jets Quarterback Aaron Rodgers has been very public in recent years with his use of Ayahuasca and “darkness retreats,” how similar or different is that to what you’re doing?
Carcillo: “I’ve done ayahuasca previously. Ayahuasca, most of these psychedelics, what they allow us and what they allow, specifically for us athletes, is a reset, a chance to take a break. It is a chance to regain control of their brain and their body. It flushes inflammation from the brain, from the body and it allows for a kind of fresh perspective on either. I think, in Aaron’s case, he’s getting towards the end of his career. So, it’s if he should continue to keep playing. All of these seem to give you a zest for life. For example, for some athletes, it does become a job at times, especially if you’ve been in it for longer than three to five to 10 years. I know that’s hard for civilians who may be reading this to understand.
“But it’s a very difficult thing to do, to be that disciplined and to put in that much work and to put your body through that type of suffering. So these compounds allow us to take a break and really figure out a few things. If we want to continue to keep playing and for what reasons and to possibly give us an understanding as to whether or not we should step away. I’m sure a lot of athletes struggle with their identity because it’s so intertwined with the sport. So it allows people to figure out what they may want to do next and really just get healthy.”
Blittner’s Blue Line: Every person reacts differently to any form of treatment, so, what was your treatment process in terms of dosage and frequency?
Carcillo: “All I have is my lived experience and what I did. I had an extreme case of symptoms. But the way that I got better is, the first two years, I was doing a mid to high dose of mushrooms every quarter. So four times a year, three months apart. Then, I had about a month washout period, where I did nothing after each one of those high doses.
“Then I did low doses, Monday to Friday, with legal mushrooms, like Lion’s Mane, Reishi Cordyceps, Chaga Garon and Turkey Tail Mushroom. I will say that these mushrooms were a catalyst to me improving my life on a number of different levels. It wasn’t just the mushrooms coupled with a bad diet, right? I started to exercise, I started to watch the things that I ate. My diet really got a lot better.
“I started to just really think about the emotions that I was putting towards my thoughts and my perspective of my life changed. My thoughts changed. Instead of looking at everything that was kind of wrong with me and blaming other people, places and things like The NHL, for the situation I was in, I started to feel better, get better and be grateful for my suffering, because I’m on a path now to use my lived experience and my story to hopefully help a lot of people.
“That feels good. So, in my experience, I’m constantly adjusting. Right now, for the last three years, I only do like two journeys a year, sometimes only one. That’s forever changing. I’ve been a well person for five years now. I don’t identify as sick (anymore).
“I haven’t for a very, very long time. So, now there’s different reasons that I do this medicine. It’s just to remind me that sometimes, the stresses of life, having four kids, being an entrepreneur and living that life can get stressful. You can use this medicine to kind of de-stress your life and give you energy again to execute the mission at hand. My life’s purpose is, I know exactly why I’m here. It’s to try to get this message out to people who need to hear it and be of service and try to connect people to this type of medicine.”
And there you have it. Dan Carcillo once thought he’d end up as just another statistic, instead, now he’s an entrepreneur and he has his life back. His mind is properly functioning and a condition that he was once told would be incurable has now been treated and corrected. Will this method work for everybody? No. Nothing is ever that simple. But his story does prove that sometimes, you have to think outside the box to get the help you need.
