Tyrell Terry shocked many when he retired from the NBA at 22 due to anxiety. He's turned to psychedelic therapy for help.

• Tyrell Terry retired from the NBA at 22 years old due to the debilitating symptoms of his anxiety.
• The former college star has turned to psychedelic therapy for help, he told The New York Times.

Tyrell Terry — a former college basketball star and second-round NBA draft pick — made waves late last year when he retired from the pros at just 22 years old.

More than half a year later, a story in The New York Times details how the former Stanford Cardinal standout is rebuilding his life with the aim "to completely ditch" his basketball persona.

"I had made it," Terry told The Times. "I had done everything my parents wanted me to. I got into Stanford. I made it to the NBA, and I was wealthy, and I didn't feel fulfilled.

"I had the talent, but it's not what drives me, not what fulfills me," he added.

Terry played one season at Stanford before declaring for the 2020 NBA Draft, in which the Dallas Mavericks selected the sharpshooter with the 31st pick overall. Though he felt he was physically capable of competing in the pros, Terry told The Times he wasn't "emotionally ready to go to the NBA" as a 20-year-old.

Alone in a new city, Terry described experiencing intense anxiety relating to his basketball career that "began to destroy me," he wrote in a since-deleted Instagram post from December 2022 through which he announced his retirement to the public. He stepped away from basketball for an extended period to try to manage his symptoms, which included "intrusive thoughts, waking up nauseous, and finding myself struggling to take normal breaths because of the rock that would sit on my chest that seemed to weigh more than I could carry," he said in the post.

A team psychiatrist had prescribed a pair of anti-anxiety medications, which he told the Times sometimes helped, but also caused nausea. Eventually, at the advice of his agent, Terry turned to psychedelic therapy.

Psychedelic therapy has shown promise as a breakthrough treatment for mental health issues like anxiety and depression

Researchers have taken a closer look at psychedelic drugs — including magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, LSD, MDMA, and ketamine — in recent years as potential options for addressing a variety of mental health disorders. Studies have shown that such drugs can combat depression, reduce PTSD symptoms, break cycles of substance abuse, and unlock breakthroughs in couples' therapy.

For people struggling with anxiety, like Terry, psychedelics have been shown to alter their thought processes and allow them to break out of cyclical thought patterns that often prove debilitating.

"Psychedelics disrupt that process so people can escape," David Nutt, the director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit at Imperial College London, previously told Insider. "At least for the duration of the trip, they can escape about the rumination about depression or alcohol or obsessions. And then they do not necessarily go back."

Terry "found some comfort" in his own psychedelic therapy treatment, according to the Times, and "he still engages in it today."

But psychedelics aren't always a cure-all. And while Terry found himself in a more stable headspace following his basketball hiatus, his mental health struggles persisted when he returned to the court — first with the NBA's Memphis Grizzlies and, later, with a pro team in Germany.

"Those feelings of enjoying basketball like I thought I did, it just didn't come back," Terry told The Times.

Eventually, he decided that he couldn't "continue this fight any longer for something I have fallen out of love with," he wrote in his December Instagram caption. The soon-to-be 23-year-old has returned to Stanford's campus in Palo Alto, California, to complete the undergraduate degree he left behind when he departed for the NBA. He plans to major in science, technology, and society.