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8th October 2024
05:26pm BST
Look, people do silly things, that's well known and when you couple insane capability of the human mind to do incomprehensible things with psychedelic mushroom, things can, apparently, turn nasty.
This is what happened to one man from Austria who managed to amputate his piece with a blunt axe after taking a large amount of magic mushrooms.
The 37-year-old was at his holiday home and had reportedly consumed four or five of the mushrooms containing psilocybin and subsequently began a procedure of self-conducted penis-removal surgery.
The man used a blunt axe to amputate his penis, quartering it into four pieces at which point he began to panic, placing the sections into a jar with soil and snow before covering the end with a cloth to try stop the bleeding.
The man began bleeding out and decided to look for help, finding a passer-by who escorted him to a nearby village where an ambulance met him five hours after the ordeal began.
After losing significant amounts of blood, the man was rushed into surgery where doctors succeeded in saving the tip of his penis and 2cm of the shaft.
He remained in intensive care after continuing to have psychotic episodes.
Sadly the man had 5cm permanently removed, although can still get erections and his urinary track still works.
Probably lucky for the man, he has no recollection of the whole event.
The psychedelic compound psilocybin has recently been the subject of medical studies thanks to potential treatment for mental health conditions, such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with 20 studies currently complete or under way to test it in the European Union.
This is the first reported case of psilocybin-induced self-amputation or Klingsor syndrome, a rare condition that involves self-inflicted penile amputation, as reported by the Open Journal of Urology.
The study said: "Psilocybin therapy has been tested successfully in patients with major depressive disorder. However, aside from its therapeutic effects, in patients consuming high doses of psilocybin, experiences of fear and paranoia have been reported in up to 31 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively."
