Anne Hamilton, founder of the Survivorship Collective, shares her personal experience with cancer survivorship and how psilocybin therapy helped her find peace with mortality and re-engage with life.
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1. What was your cancer diagnosis experience and how did it transform your life?
I was diagnosed with advanced-stage breast cancer in my thirties and went through the whole circus. Most of 2018 was a blur of chemotherapy, followed by a double mastectomy, then radiation—which came with plenty of complications because why keep it simple? I wrapped it all up with my final surgery in 2020.
I was lucky to have excellent doctors at Cedars-Sinai. I’m still a big fan and even keep in touch with them—like a weird group of pen pals, but with less exciting vacations.
Before cancer, I was a litigator. While I was practicing law, I found myself increasingly drawn to advocacy—not from the legal angle, but through storytelling. So although I have a legal background, at heart, I think of myself as a storyteller. That’s how I navigate the world now.
2. What was the most challenging part of your cancer journey?
I think the hardest part of the cancer journey wasn’t just surviving treatment—it was figuring out how to resubscribe back into life. It wasn’t enough to simply not die. I wanted to actually re-engage with the world in a real, full way. And that turned out to be incredibly hard.
A lot of things fed into that struggle, and honestly, some of them feel unavoidable. Part of it was the disconnection I felt from my own body—a defense mechanism that served me well during treatment, but became a problem afterward. And then there was the looming reality that cancer could come back. That possibility felt very real, especially as I watched friends of mine have recurrences and, devastatingly, die young. Trying to figure out how to integrate all of that into an authentic life became a huge stumbling block for me.
The frustrating part was that, on paper, I was doing everything right. I had excellent medical care. I was seeing my psychologist and my psychiatrist. I was on antidepressants. I have a wonderful family. By all accounts, I was checking every box. But inside, I was still absolutely terrified of the future—to the point where it was almost paralyzing.
I was so afraid to look ahead that I stopped wanting a future at all, because the idea of it was just too terrifying. Instead of staying stuck in that dark place, I just stopped thinking about it altogether. I wasn’t engaging with the world in any real, invested way.
So for me, the real work wasn’t just healing physically—it was figuring out how to resubscribe back into life.
3. How did the disconnection from your body during treatment affect you?
Honestly, I think it was my brain’s way of protecting me. When you’re going through something traumatic, your mind can flip a switch into disassociation so you don’t feel everything. And for me, that was necessary. Because if I’d felt the full emotional weight of what was happening to my body, it would have been unbearable.
There’s a lot of unwanted touching that comes with serious illness—a parade of strangers poking, prodding, and causing pain. People whose names you don’t even know are doing things that are, let’s be honest, inherently kind of violent, even though they’re meant to save your life. And you’d never allow any of it if your life wasn’t at stake.
So my brain disconnected. It was a shield that helped me get through treatment.
Of course, the challenge came afterward. Once the crisis was over, I was left to sort through everything that had happened—and figure out how to reconnect with my body and integrate all of it back into my life.
That takes time, if it happens at all. For years, I wouldn’t let anyone touch me.
I tried a lot of tools to help with that: qigong, meditation, daily yoga at home. Those practices definitely helped me start to inhabit my body again. But it was still a process. Because trauma isn’t just physical—it’s emotional, too. And coming back from that kind of disconnection takes time.
4. What led you to try psychedelic-assisted therapy?
I was really struggling. I was actively looking for help because I felt completely stuck.
There’s this narrative you’re supposed to fit into when you survive cancer—that you’re a warrior, that you’re supposed to be happy and grateful all the time. And I just wasn’t feeling that way at all. Instead, I felt guilty for not being happy. I felt like I was failing at survivorship.
I’d been given this incredible gift of still being here, while so many of my friends—people my age—didn’t survive. I lost many friends to cancer, and I was painfully aware of how lucky I was. But even with that knowledge, I wasn’t thriving. I wasn’t re-engaging with the world in any meaningful way. I was alive, but I wasn’t really living.
So I started searching for different ways of coping. I told my friends, “Hey, I’m not in a good place. What do I do?” And I tried all sorts of things—therapy, meditation, yoga, support groups. Some of it helped a little, but I still felt stuck.
Then one of my friends mentioned psilocybin and told me about some of the research happening at Johns Hopkins. I was curious, so I started reading everything I could get my hands on. Eventually, I decided to try it and see if it could help, because I was honestly at the end of the resources I’d been able to find.
I had a very good experience. But I want to be clear: I don’t recommend that people go underground to seek this out on their own, and traveling abroad for these experiences can be very risky—especially for people dealing with serious illnesses, and particularly for young women. It’s not for everyone, and it’s definitely something that should be approached cautiously and, ideally, in a safe, clinical setting or above ground in a state-regulated context. But for me, it was deeply helpful and gave me a perspective shift I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else.
5. What was your experience with psilocybin therapy like?
Everybody’s experience with psilocybin is different, so mine might look nothing like someone else’s. But for me, the biggest takeaway was finding peace with the idea that I might die.
One of the hardest things about facing mortality is that we can’t really look at it directly. It’s like staring at the sun—you can’t look straight at it because it’s just too overwhelming to bear. But at the same time, you have to look at it if you ever want to make peace with it.
My journey with psilocybin was somewhat difficult, because during the experience, I actually witnessed my own death. I watched myself die. But because I had a skilled facilitator guiding me, and because I went in with the intention of dealing with this fear, I came out the other side with a much more peaceful relationship with death.
It’s not that I want to die young—I absolutely don’t. I don’t want to die at all, if we’re being honest. But now, the thought of death doesn’t terrify me in the way it once did. And that’s been a profound shift. When I think about death now, the core emotion I have is a kind of calm, not fear.
6. What led you to start the Survivorship Collective?
While I was on a retreat to celebrate my five-year cancerversary, I met a young woman who, like me, had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her thirties. But in her case, the cancer had come back. She had metastatic breast cancer and was still so young. Over time, she became one of my closest friends.
We found ourselves talking a lot about uncertainty, the future, and death—the kinds of conversations you fall into quickly with someone who truly gets it. I shared my own experience with psilocybin and how much it had helped me. And during that conversation, I realized something important: there are so many people who are curious about this kind of healing work, but who don’t have a safe or legal way to access it.
It felt deeply important to me that anyone interested in exploring this should have a safe, supportive path to do so.
At the time, it was late 2023, and Oregon had just passed a law making state-regulated access to psilocybin legal—though it’s still illegal at the federal level. Suddenly, it didn’t feel quite so frightening to talk about this as a real possibility. I’ve never wanted to encourage people to go abroad for these experiences, especially those dealing with serious medical conditions. But in places like Oregon—and now Colorado—there’s access to excellent medical care, and potentially, a legal path to psilocybin therapy.
That’s what sparked the idea for the Survivorship Collective. I founded it alongside other cancer survivors because we recognized a real need within our own community. It’s an organization created by the community it serves, and I think that’s incredibly important.
We advocate fiercely for our community’s needs in this space. We believe in taking care of our own. We focus on education and harm reduction because people deserve safe, informed choices. And we believe that our voices—those of us who’ve faced mortality up close—need to cut through both the “woo-woo” and the corporate interests that are increasingly crowding into this field.
Because ultimately, this work has to be about people—and about sacred things: about death, and about finding meaning in suffering and grief. That’s what we’re all about at the Survivorship Collective.
The Survivorship Collective connects the cancer community to informed, state-regulated, legal, and facilitated psilocybin therapy in a supportive group setting. For more information about their programs and upcoming retreats, visit their website.
Important Note: Always consult with your healthcare team before considering any new therapy or treatment approach. Psilocybin therapy is not legal in all states and may not be appropriate for everyone.
It’s also important to understand that psilocybin remains classified as a Schedule I substance under United States federal law. This means it is considered illegal at the federal level when not in a clinical setting, with significant restrictions on its use, possession, and distribution, despite certain states like Oregon and Colorado creating regulated legal pathways for therapeutic use. Anyone considering this therapy should be fully informed about the current legal, medical, and personal risks involved.
Anne Hamilton is the founder and executive director of The Survivorship Collective, the first non-profit connecting the cancer community to safe, legal, psychedelic-assisted therapies. After surviving advanced-stage cancer as a young adult, she became an advocate for better mental and spiritual care for cancer patients, survivors, and their loved ones. Hamilton is a former litigator, 9th Circuit Clerk, and a current member of the Psychedelic Bar Association. She has worked in government, with nonprofits, and in higher education as a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is a 2025 Mira Fellow, a certified mediator, holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from Stanford University, and is a graduate of Notre Dame and the American Film Institute. She lives in Los Angeles.