Cody Blue Snider's Psychedelic Quest

When traditional meds failed to help with his anxiety and depression, Snider (the son of rocker Dee Snider) set out on a journey to uncover the mysteries and potential magic of psychedelic treatments. Was it worth the trip?

- By Mike Kessler

Cody Blue Snider knew the medicine was taking hold when he began to hear-really, feel-a high-pitched vibration envelop his entire body. It was 2016, and Snider was in the heart of the Amazon rain forest with about two dozen other people, many of them mental-health professionals, who'd traveled to take part in a Shipibo ayahuasca ceremony. Snider wanted out. "I began questioning what I was doing there," he says in his recently released podcast, Awakened Underground. "I felt like a kid riding a roller coaster and listening to the gears clank, climbing the rail, suddenly wanting off the ride."

Snider, who's a filmmaker and is now 32, had found his way to the jungle by means of another unpleasant roller coaster: a dozen or so years of emotional and psychological peaks, dips, and twists that started in grade school. His main challenge ADHD-was somewhat manageable with meds, whimsically prescribed by a revolving squad of doctors, but ultimately, they'd either stop working or cause side effects, like depression and anxiety, which required more meds.

"They were helping me cope," he tells MH. "But they weren't helping me heal." In his 20s, Snider started hearing more and more about psychedelics, particularly plant medicines like psilocybin mushrooms, which were being studied at universities and hospitals, and ayahuasca, which was championed by people who'd tried it in ceremonies abroad. But it wasn't so simple. Snider is the son of Dee Snider, the frontman of the 1980s hair-metal band Twisted Sister, who is straight-edge and raised his four kids the same way. Scared by what the medicines might do but still open-minded, the younger Snider spent three years reading about psychedelics before deciding to give them a try.