Translated from our German original by AI. The German text was researched, written, and edited by the Psychedelia Foundation team and remains the authoritative version.
A recent literature review examines the frequently repeated claim that fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) is widely used as a means of suicide. The authors Kevin Feeney and Tristan Kallweit analyzed English and German language literature for this purpose, including scientific publications, mycological specialist literature, mushroom guides, and ethnographic sources.
Their finding: the available literature provides no sufficient evidence of a historical or present-day trend of frequently using fly agaric for suicidal purposes. Nor could the authors find indications that A. muscaria is a reliably lethal means of suicide.
The review did not find that no such cases exist at all. The authors identified individual documented suicide attempts, including one case from Germany in 1955. No widespread use of fly agaric for suicidal purposes can be derived from these, however.
The authors take a particularly critical view of the way unsupported claims are passed on within the scientific literature. They show, among other examples, a case in which a publication attributed an alleged death by suicide with A. muscaria to an older source that, on their examination, did not document that case at all. Such unchecked or erroneous citations could have contributed to establishing the notion of fly agaric as a common means of suicide in the literature.
In this context the authors speak of “amanitaphobia”, a bias against A. muscaria that they see in parts of the literature, in which its dangerousness and lethality are overstated. For the notion that Amanita muscaria is frequently and reliably lethally used for self-killing, the review finds no robust basis.
In sum, the authors argue for an evidence-based assessment of the risks of Amanita muscaria, and for not letting unsupported statements about its toxicity and use become supposed scientific facts through repeated citation.
