About a year into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a biology teacher named Natalia Soloshenko noticed something unsettling happening to her mind.
She wasn’t physically injured. Her town had avoided the worst destruction. But the constant air-raid sirens, the steady news of death, and the psychological weight of uncertainty began to accumulate. She struggled to concentrate, words slipped away, and her memory felt unreliable. She found her emotions flattening into irritation rather than grief.
In biological terms, her nervous system was doing exactly what prolonged stress forces living systems to do: shifting from growth toward survival.
Eventually, she tried something unconventional by microdosing Amanita muscaria, the red-capped mushroom long embedded in Eastern European folklore. To her surprise, she felt calmer. Her migraines eased, cognitive clarity returned, and she began to feel emotionally responsive again.
An article by journalist Diana Kruzman, recently published in New Lines Magazine, explores how as the country faces an escalating mental health crisis, some people are turning toward the controversial and ancient mushroom Amanita muscaria.
Mental Health Crisis
Ukraine is currently facing one of the largest population-wide psychological stress events in modern Europe. A 2024 World Health Organization report estimated that nearly half of Ukrainians now experience mental health concerns.
Yet access to therapy, psychiatric care, or medication remains limited, particularly during wartime disruption. Cultural stigma around depression and anxiety still persists across much of the former Soviet world, where psychological suffering has historically been endured privately rather than medicalised.
In this vacuum, many people have turned toward something closer at hand: traditional ecological knowledge.
Foragers across Ukraine report rapidly rising demand for Amanita muscaria. Rather than large intoxicating doses associated with myth or shamanic practice, most users are microdosing – consuming small amounts intended to avoid hallucinations while promoting calm, sleep, and emotional stability.
Even soldiers at the front have reportedly begun using it.
Amanita contains ibotenic acid, which can be toxic if improperly prepared, and rigorous clinical evidence for therapeutic use remains limited. While Ukrainian psychiatrists have warned that perceived benefits may reflect placebo effects, there are lots of anecdotal reports of profound benefits from consuming the mushroom.
But focusing only on whether the molecule “works” risks missing the deeper biological pattern emerging underneath.
Adaptation
Living systems under chronic stress do not simply fail. They adapt.
When environments become unpredictable, organisms seek mechanisms that restore regulation. Forest ecosystems do this through biodiversity and fungal networks that redistribute nutrients after disturbance. Immune systems recalibrate after injury. Neural networks reorganize after trauma.
Human behaviour follows similar principles.
In Ukraine, people are not merely seeking intoxication or escapism. They are searching for ways to stabilise an overwhelmed nervous system using tools available within their cultural and ecological environment.
Amanita muscaria interacts primarily with GABAergic signaling – systems involved in inhibition, calmness, and sleep regulation. Users often describe effects resembling reduced neural overexcitation rather than psychedelic expansion. Some entrepreneurs now isolate muscimol, its primary active compound, marketing it as a form of situational stress relief.
Yet interestingly, many practitioners insist the mushroom cannot be reduced to a standardized pharmaceutical product.
Because amanita cannot be reliably cultivated in laboratories, it resists industrial scaling. It grows only through symbiotic relationships with trees (birch, pine, and oak) forming ectomycorrhizal partnerships beneath forest soil.
Reconnecting
Modern medicine excels at acute intervention. It isolates variables, identifies mechanisms, and designs targeted solutions. And don’t get me wrong, this approach has saved countless lives.
But chronic stress, trauma, and psychological exhaustion behave less like mechanical failures and more like ecological imbalance.
Where industrial thinking tends to ask: Which compound fixes the problem? Living systems ask: What conditions allow regulation to re-emerge?
Many Ukrainians interviewed ultimately described something revealing. The mushroom itself was only part of the relief. Foraging, walking through forests, reconnecting with seasonal rhythms, and participating in shared cultural practices appeared equally meaningful.
One forager supplying amanita to soldiers admitted he did not attribute major psychological change to the mushroom alone. What helped most, he said, was simply being back outdoors. The act of moving, breathing, reconnecting with landscape and family tradition were just as important as the substance itself.
In other words, regulation emerged through network effects, not a single intervention.
Decentralised Biology
Fungi offer a useful metaphor here.
Mycorrhizal networks help stabilise ecosystems by linking plants through distributed exchange systems. Resources and chemical signals can move across these fungal connections, allowing stress responses and recovery to emerge collectively rather than through centralized control.
Human health appears to follow similar principles.
Under extreme societal stress, Ukrainians have not waited for centralized systems to restore psychological stability. Instead, decentralized solutions have emerged organically, such as community knowledge, traditional practices, ecological relationships, and locally accessible remedies.
Some of these solutions may ultimately prove scientifically effective. Others may rely partly on expectation, ritual, or meaning. But the point is that biology rarely separates these cleanly.
What This Reveals About Health
I think that the most interesting question raised by Ukraine’s amanita boom may not be whether the mushroom treats anxiety or trauma, but why, under conditions of prolonged instability, humans consistently return to nature-embedded practices that restore rhythm, attention, and connection.
Modern society often approaches health as optimization, adjusting biochemical parameters to maintain performance. But living organisms evolved within dynamic ecosystems, not controlled environments. Regeneration tends to arise through diversity, adaptation, and relationship rather than precision alone.
Seen this way, amanita’s resurgence is an example of the human tendency to re-enter ecological networks when institutional systems become overwhelmed.
A Perspective Shift
Walking through forests in the Carpathian Mountains, one forager described amanita simply as helping people “forget about it, like a bad dream.” Yet what stayed with observers was not people tripping out and checking out. They saw people noticing autumn colours again, sleeping more deeply, feeling briefly present despite the presence of war.
What we see in nature is that when systems become overstressed, they rediscover pathways back into relationship with the environments that shaped them.
And mushrooms, growing unnoticed at the boundary between soil and consciousness, continue to remind us that resilience is often decentralized, adaptive, and ecological in nature.
Source: The Mushroom Captivating Wartime Ukraine by Diana Kruzman – New Lines Magazine
If you’re interested in exploring the science, culture, and emerging patterns shaping our relationship with fungi, health, and regenerative biology, you can read more in The Spore Report – a weekly newsletter connecting mushrooms, metabolism, and modern life.
