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. “But they weren’t helping me ”
