"We can either just live in pain or we can try and fix it ourselves."

When Tyler Mann first started getting cluster headaches a little over a decade ago, he'd crawl into his bathroom, turn off the lights, shut the door, and scream as loud as he could for up to an hour until the pain went away. Sometimes he'd pass out before that happened. Other times he'd contemplate suicide. 

"I've had headaches where I was literally considering hanging myself from the shower rod," Mann told me. "Literally, I wanted to just wrap a belt around my neck and make it stop, several times. That's why I don't own a gun." 

In the beginning, he'd get the headaches as often as six times per day, for months at a time. His doctors offered no explanation. So, like many people with more symptoms than solutions, he turned to the internet for help. That's when he discovered a Facebook group where thousands of others said they suffered from the same condition—a little-known neurological disease called cluster headaches, for which there is very little research and no known cure. They referred to themselves as "cluster heads," and each was more desperate for relief than the next. Many of them, frustrated with the lack of clinical studies, had turned to extreme methods of treatment. 

According to users of the group, one thing seemed to consistently provide long-term relief: psychedelics like mushrooms, LSD, and DMT, all of which consist of Tryptamine, an alkaloid that is believed to activate serotonin receptors in the brain. The most obvious problem, though, is that all of these drugs are illegal in the United States—scheduled in the same high-risk category as heroin—which means they're far from medically proven, and the self-administered dosing and its results can be wildly inconsistent. For people like Mann, who describes this form of self-medication as "citizen science," the risk is worth it if it means not having to endure debilitating pain and suicidal thoughts on a regular basis.