Mathias de Lattre’s Mother’s Therapy begins with a private dilemma and refuses to resolve it into an argument. Twenty years ago his mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder; the medication prescribed for her, he came to believe, damaged her health more than the condition itself. Over roughly a decade he pursued a different possibility — psilocybin, the hallucinogen produced by some 180 species of fungus — and eventually a psilocybin-based cure was given to her, apparently with some success. The book assembles the material surrounding that decision rather than campaigning for it. There is no militancy here, only a record placed before the reader.

The research reaches widely. De Lattre follows psilocybin through the painted caves of southern France, through mycology and medicine, and into traditional healing practices in the Peruvian jungle; it also takes him to scientists studying the compound in London and Zürich. Photography and text carry equal weight. Essays and texts by Olivier Chambon, Remi Coignet, Jacques Mabit, Vincent Verroust and de Lattre himself give the images a scientific and historical frame, while Daisy Hildyard’s editing holds the various registers together.

What distinguishes the volume is its refusal of the polemical mode. Psychedelic research invites advocacy; this book substitutes documentation. The personal stake — a son’s intuition about his mother’s treatment — does not simplify the questions it raises about psychiatry, natural substances, and consent. Carel Fransen’s design and the bilingual English-and-French text acknowledge that the subject crosses both clinical and cultural borders.

For collectors, the book’s interest lies in that combination rather than in any claim of scarcity. A photographer who becomes a researcher, a family case study presented alongside scientific and ethnographic material, and a publisher known for treating difficult subjects with care: Mother’s Therapy is a considered object, and it rewards the attention it asks for.