Kristen Bell says she did hallucinogenic mushrooms to battle her depression
- Bell said she's been battling depression and anxiety since her youth.
- She decided to take hallucinogenic mushrooms last year on her birthday to see if it would help.
- Bell said it made her "enamored with my own body."
Kristen Bell, who has battled depression and anxiety since she was young, recently admitted in a Self cover story that she wasn't always in the right "mental zone" during the pandemic.
Now, "The Good Place" star revealed that through reading Michael Pollan's book "How to Change Your Mind," she made the radical decision to try hallucinogenic mushrooms to better her mental health.
"[Pollan] really goes into detail about this underground academic community that has continued to study the effects of LSD and psilocybin on what they call 'healthy normal,'" Bell, 40, told actor Sean Hayes and Dr. Priyanka Wali on their podcast, "Hypochondriactor."
She continued: "There are aspects to those two particular drugs that the places you can go in your brain are much deeper and more healing than anything else."
But how could the star - known for her titular role on "Veronica Mars" and for being the voice of Anna in the "Frozen" franchise - get her hands on some mushrooms?
Bell said on the podcast that she did the mushrooms on her birthday last year, with Shepard by her side.
"I said, 'I really would like to experience this. And I don't want to, I'm not going to party with it, but I want to know what this feels like. And I want to talk while I'm doing it, and I want you to talk to me.' And he took me on a walk around the neighborhood and it was so lovely."
Bell said the mushrooms made her "enamored with my own body."
"In my head, I had separated this body that had done so much good in my life, that has taken me through happiness and pain and workouts and laziness that I was just like, couldn't stop touching my legs going, 'You're so strong. You're so elegant.'"
Research from scientists at Johns Hopkins and New York University late last year suggested that hallucinogenic mushrooms can help with anxiety and depression when traditional antidepressant medications don't work.
Researchers found that 67% of the 24 study subjects reported more than a 50% decrease in depression symptoms after the first drug-trip session. After the second session, 71% of the participants said they noticed a 50% decrease in symptoms.