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I was a depressed teenager a long time ago and I am almost certain mushrooms made things worse.

I didn't need mushrooms. I needed therapy, friends, a social life, a sex life, goals, something to look forward to in the real world.

All I found on mushrooms at the time were horrible existential loops that just made things more hopeless. I would read about people having these peak wonderful experiences or Mckenna alien experiences and just get more depressed that even the mushrooms didn't help me.

It is almost blasphemous in this space to say what actually ended up changing my life were SSRIs. A little prozac fixed something that was just chemically wrong in my head.

What seems obvious is there is enormous variability in people's brain chemistry so the tool to fix the problem has to be quite specific for the individual.