Comment by hppdthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hppdthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Alright, I'll bite.

I developed HPPD in 2017, and I've been seeing unusual things for a bit over 2 years. The HPPD was triggered by dropping on the order of 1000-1400 micrograms of LSD - and for context a reasonable dose was 50 micrograms. This was way too much, and I fried for a few days. I'm not sure when I came down because HPPD decided to show up and it took me a while to realize that the HPPD was, well, persistent.

The effect is pretty minimal - I see faint geometric shapes in the sky, blank walls, monochromatic screens, such like that. When I look at things like pine trees or complex shapes the patterns vanish. The patterns are actually quite pretty, though it gets irritating at times. It's hardly crippling, but maybe I've gotten lucky.

A few months before I developed HPPD, I also developed tinnitus due to a combination of incredibly severe stress, severe life-long depression, and a doctor prescribed high dosage of Zoloft. I got my ears tested and I have perfect hearing in my left and near perfect in my right, so this isn't auditory damage. In contrast to HPPD, tinnitus can be crippling. Tinnitus is a neurological condition so there's no limit on how bad it can get - and when it gets so loud that you can't hear people over the tin, you get pretty desperate.

With both HPPD and tinnitus, the only real treatment is to learn to not let it get to you. As you become more stressed and anxious the symptoms worsen, so if you fixate on it then you'll quite literally drive yourself mad.

HPPD is vaguely frustrating, but I know that it was my actions that caused this. However I'm livid about the tinnitus because it was most likely a legally prescribed drug with known side effects, and doctors hand out scripts for that stuff like it's candy. It's easy to say "oh no, the psychedelics are going to break our brains!" - but doctors regularly prescribe ototoxic drugs, SSRIs that are _incredibly_ habit forming and aren't effective in the long run.

If you don't want HPPD, maybe take it easy on the drugs, but in the grand scheme of thing there are numerous medical practices that are dramatically more damaging than seeing some mildly weird shit.

Happy to answer questions if that would help anyone here.

Interesting. It could suggest that you formed some permanent new connections between some unusual parts of the brain.

My own experience was kind of opposite so far. In the beginning I had pretty apparent visual illusions, like wall corners, patterns breathing, or actually seeings beams of light shaped by different music, even on 100ug.

But over time it seems my brain was somehow adapting to it. On many following trips, the visual illusions become more like 'shaking' a little bit, just some noise.

I started to think that either the acid's gone bad or I had a different kind of sorts.

Some time ago, even on 300ug, i had almost no visual illusions (which was quite disappointing, as I expected the music to still bring it).

Instead, I have a more vivid imagination.. But it's not visual, just more like if you think of some scene from memory.

I have never heard Tinnitus described as a neurological condition. I had pretty bad Tinnitus as a result of a jaw injury. It has gradually faded but it made sleeping difficult for a very long time.

I'm on the run so can't respond in depth, but check out ototoxic drugs which attack the auditory nerve. SSRIs may not be directly ototoxic but numerous studies have shown that sertraline can cause tinnitus, due to the role that serotonin plays in filtering audio signals. So there are multiple causes of tinnitus, and the impact of SSRIs is partially known but not fully understood.

Seconding you're point on SSRIs. I'm currently reading Ed Bullmore's Inflamed Mind, and he makes the point forcefully that there's no way of measuring SSRI levels in regular clinical practice, they way blood pressue, cholosterol or white/red blood cell levels are tested.

Perhaps I’m the exception but on the off chance it can help someone else I had tinnitus for my entire adult life and it disappeared almost overnight when I started getting botox injections for migraines.

I was surprised to have my new audiologist describe it as neurological, and it can be the result of the brain trying to fill in "missing gaps" of auditory signals- like the static on analog TVs. Then said new studies show hearing aids can reduce the severity of tinnitus, even when hearing loss is moderate.

She's fairly fresh out of school, and I haven't been able to filter out yet whether there is any new science, or if it's more of a trendy academic topic included in new textbooks, or even a new sales tactic by the hearing aid companies.

With HPPD, do you find that you're able to increase/decrease the levels of distortions by mentally moving into it/ pulling out of it? I developed fairly severe HPPD from a large dose of LSD as well. This was about 20 years ago. It eventually waned over the course of a few years and is no longer noticeable though.

50 mcg is a pretty small dose. Not as small as micro-dosing, but like first timer being extra cautious sized.

1000-1400 mcg is like 5-7 solid doses, which is no joke, but it's not 20-30 doses like you sort of imply.

To be fair it was tabs of acid rather than anything precisely measured, but it was enough to keep me going for 48 hours. Might have been more, might have been less, but that's really a bit too much.

100 mcg is to me a standard dose, and having done 1000+ mcg a couple times myself I can say that's a lot! I also had HPPD after a year or so of heavy psychedelic use.

It's a gigantic amount. For context Hoffman took around 300mcg and was clearly tripping very hard (based on his account); that's around 4X street acid at 75mcg per tab.

Even if you were to measure a single tab as 150mcg the OP is claiming they took nearly 10 tabs, which is a massive amount, you'd be out of your mind for days.

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