New Documentary Details Pilot’s Mental Health Crisis After Mushroom Use

Two days before boarding a flight from Everett, Washington, to San Francisco, California, off-duty pilot Joseph Emerson ate magic mushrooms for the first time and stayed up all night. He was suffering from a rare condition called hallucinogen-persisting perception disorder (HPPD), his doctor later said, which is characterized by extended hallucinations and feelings of derealization. 

“I did something unfathomable to me, something I have to take responsibility for, and that I regret,” Emerson told “Good Morning America” on August 23, 2024, just before the airing of a New York Times documentary on his story. “There was a feeling of being trapped.” He asked himself, “‘Am I trapped in this airplane?’” and alarmist thoughts filtered through his mind like, “‘This is not real, I need to wake up.’”

While traveling, Emerson sat behind the pilots, threw his headset across the cockpit, and shouted, “I am not OK.” Then came the move that made headlines around the world. He believed that he would wake up and “get out of this unreal reality” if he pulled the two red handles — the emergency shut-off levers — in front of him. “I reached up, and I grabbed, and I pulled the levers.”

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At that point, the flight crew swiftly subdued Emerson before he succeeded in turning the engine off. “What I thought was, ‘This is going to wake me up, I know what those levers do in a real airplane, and I need to wake up from this,’” he told GMA. An inflight emergency was declared and the plane was diverted to Portland, Oregon. Emerson was handcuffed, upon his request. “It’s 30 seconds of my life I wish I could change, and I can’t.”

At the time, on October 22, 2023, Emerson said he had been suffering from a depression that was triggered by the sudden death of his best friend, Scott Pinney, who had died from a cardiac event. Emerson and Pinney’s father Frank became drinking buddies, and just before the fateful flight, went to hang out at Frank’s remote yurt with a group of friends. There, Emerson was offered psilocybin mushrooms.

“The night that I took the magic mushrooms, I did not sleep that night,” said Emerson. “This sleep deficit I believe may have also impacted [me].” Ahead of his trial in the fall for 83 charges of recklessly endangering another person and one count of first-degree endangering an aircraft, Emerson has sought to place this tale within the context of a wider crisis within aviation in which pilots are afraid to seek help for any mental health issues. “Right now there’s a perception that if you raise your hand and say something’s not right, you don’t fly again,” he said.

Emerson has founded a non-profit with his wife Sarah called Clear Skies Ahead, to help champion mental and physical pilot health. In the months since the incident took place, he says his mental health has improved. 

“I’m doing the best I can do to work through that process and I’m better for it, which is kind of a weird thing to say. But I really am better for all of this, it’s not the way I would have engineered [it], but I’m just doing my best today.”

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