In June 2021, 32-year-old actor Kate Hyatt travelled to a farmhouse near Great Malvern in Worcerstershire for a plant medicine retreat that she hoped would improve her mental health after a difficult time during the pandemic lockdowns. While there, she is believed to have taken a substance called wachuma, or San Pedro cactus, a powerful hallucinogen used by Indigenous people in the Andes for thousands of years.
But Hyatt did not experience relief; instead, her mental health worsened. Three months later, she described being in “some sort of psychotic break” and feeling as if her brain was going to explode. Later that autumn she took her own life. At the subsequent inquest, the coroner’s report linked her worsening symptoms to the hallucinogens she had consumed.
