'Five Trips': Read an excerpt from TV anchor Kendis Gibson’s psychedelic healing memoir
Often TV news anchors come to feel like family – we spend evenings and mornings with them, laugh with them and mourn national losses with them. But what’s behind the smile and signature newscaster voice?
A lot of things, says Kendis Gibson, a two-time Emmy winning journalist who has appeared on ABC News, CNN, CBS News and more.
His memoir, “Five Trips: An Investigative Journey into Mental Health, Psychedelic Healing, and Saving a Life” is out now from Simon & Schuster. It chronicles the most intense moments of his career – on the ground at the Twin Towers covering 9/11, co-anchoring ABC’s “World News Now” and interviewing Beyoncé. But it also takes you behind the bylines: A panic attack forced him to cut an interview with Queen Bey short. Working in an environment he said was racist and toxic led him to cope with sleeping pills. He attempted suicide.
‘Five Trips’ is one journalist’s healing journey with psychedelics
“Five Trips” tells Gibson’s life story through five psychedelic trips that helped him heal from childhood sexual abuse, racial trauma and the death of his first love. MDMA, psilocybin, ayahuasca and LSD helped him embrace his Blackness and his bisexuality, Gibson said.
Clinical trials show psilocybin and MDMA-assisted therapy may help treat serious mental health conditions including anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Psilocybin, sometimes called “magic mushrooms,” is legal only in Oregon and Colorado, but saw momentum on ballots this fall. With “Five Trips,” Gibson hopes to destigmatize psychedelic use as medicine.
Part memoir, part reported investigation, Gibson's book interviews exclusively experts of color. It’s an intentional move to counter the “whitewashing” of psychedelics, which has indigenous roots in Africa and South America, he told USA TODAY. He says he wrote this so Black and brown people can see psychedelics as a possibility for healing trauma, racial and otherwise.
“There’s somebody who’s going to see themselves in this book, and maybe it’ll open their mind a little bit more into what is out there for them to be able to find help,” Gibson says. “Somebody that millions of people see on TV and is welcomed into their homes goes through (mental health struggles) like anybody else. So they know they’re not alone.”
USA TODAY has an exclusive excerpt from “Five Trips” from a chapter about Gibson’s experience taking ayahuasca in Peru:
Read an excerpt from ‘Five Trips’ by Kendis Gibson
Experiencing your “death” is not like you anticipated it would be, and it certainly wasn’t for me. There wasn’t a doctor there to declare the time of “death” or someone to check my pulse, no one to deliver last rites. In my early suicidal ideation, I figured I would go out following a bottle of sleeping pills with an alcohol chaser or a dramatic plunge from my twelfth-floor Manhattan apartment building. But now, there I was, experiencing my demise, and with the weird cognizance of my obituary: “Emmy Award–winning journalist Kendis Gibson officially died at 9:30 p.m. central time on August 25.”
I was lying in a dark hole on the wooden floor, sprawled across a yoga mat, my head resting on a tiny pillow, deep in the Amazonian jungle in Peru, at least a three-hour boat ride from any other human. I was in a grand room that doubled as a food hall, bar, and church. The metal roof on the building was alive with the sounds of every nocturnal creature slamming into it in a jungle cacophony. Knowing I was at the precipice about to jump into that next phase, the shaman overseeing this jungle séance increasingly chanted a traditional icaro like a homing beacon for my soul, ready to exit my body. I stared at the ceiling and my eyes closed, yet I could see everything around me, including the stars. It was as if someone had peeled back a retractable roof on this giant tin hut. I could see the Big Dipper, the planets, and even occasional shooting stars moving from the right to the left of the Milky Way. And yes, it was the entire Milky Way, unlike I’d ever seen before. So many stars clustered together, forming a dusty cloud in the night sky, and it was almost blindingly bright.
I saw all this with my eyes shut and felt the energy of those heavenly bodies moving through every cell in me. My shaman intensified his rhythmic sounds calling the spirits to release whatever force lay deep within me. The chants intertwined with the colorful images crisscrossing my head. Each inflection in his voice and critical change in his wordless chorus changed the kaleidoscope I observed. My body pulsed and my chest lifted, pulling toward the ceiling with each vocal inflection and rhythmic change. My mouth was wide open, doing the most intensive breathing exercise possible. It was the only thing I had control over at the time. My arms latched onto my side, glued to the hip. Only my hands moved, my palms toward the sky, twitching uncontrollably. In my head, the most unique, frightening, and enthralling experience happened simultaneously.
Keep breathing. We can’t do it if you don’t breathe.
Why are you so in your head about this? It’s a simple process.
Are you just a complete idiot? This is what you wanted, and it is happening. Keep breathing, you lifeless tool.
The voice in my head was a bit of an abrasive, insensitive asshole, so imagine how I felt when I realized that voice was my own consciousness and that I could be a prick sometimes, even to myself.
The shaman came over to my area in the dark and smoked some form of tobacco over my head as I lay there, breathing heavily and experiencing extreme body spasms. I inhaled carefully through my nose and exhaled through my mouth. I lifted my upper torso and sat upright on the mat. I was unaware of my being but still conscious of my actions. Within minutes of sitting upright and my head wobbling aimlessly, a familiar feeling came over my body—I needed to throw up. With my eyes still closed, I felt my way around my space to find this tiny bucket I had already carefully puked into the previous day and picked it up as if it were a holy grail or something deserving of worship. I leaned over and violently heaved into this tiniest of bowls.
Keep breathing, the voice in my head reminded me. Although I felt invincible, it was the only function I needed to maintain throughout. The shaman walked over, stumbling in the dark toward me while singing his rhythmic song. This time, he was equipped with a liquidy substance that smelled similar to witch hazel and rubbed it on my head as I leaned over the bucket.
That’s all, said the voice in my head, referring to the puke. As I slowly lay back down on the mat, that harsh, sarcastic voice sounded increasingly condescending.
Are you done now being a wussy? Let go. But let go of what? At this point, I had no control over much of my body. I had no idea what this testosterone-filled voice in my head expected to happen next, but it happened as I lay there, focusing on my breathing. My upper body violently and unexpectedly lifted toward the ceiling. It was in the dark, with only the moon and Milky Way providing lighting to reflect my shadow, but it was sufficient enough for those in the room to say my movements gave the complete impression of Linda Blair’s character in The Exorcist. My chest lifted my lifeless head upward before flopping it back to the pillow below. With barely enough time to grasp what transpired, I inhaled some air. It happened again, but my body lifted even higher this time. It was as if someone on the ceiling had a string attached to my chest and quickly yanked it upward. My body, at this point, was just a vessel. I had no sensation, despite full awareness of my rapidly twitching hand. Yes, I remembered to breathe.
I blurted out a “wow” while thinking, This is a powerful drug. The voice in my head chimed in: It’s not a drug; it’s natural life. Apparently, there were now two voices in my head having a debate. As I lay down on the mat with my eyes still closed and pronounced rhythmic breathing, trying to make something of what happened, I realized I was dead. My soul had left my body. That sarcastic voice that grew increasingly louder was, in fact, my soul, my ego, and I was staring straight at this dark matter. My mind and body had transitioned to the other side, and it was time to figure out what I was doing there in the middle of the jungle of Peru.
If you or someone you know needs mental health resources and support, please call, text or chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or visit 988lifeline.org for 24/7 access to free and confidential services.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Psychedelics helped this news anchor heal from racism, trauma
