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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

I'm so sorry. I've been there too and that powerlessness is devastating.

It seems like the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction from how we treated mental illness in the previous century (aggressively locking people up in institutions).

It would be a huge benefit to society if we could find a (relatively safe from abuse) mechanism to treat people who are "functional" yet too mentally ill to stop their self-destructive behaviors. I'm not sure how that would/could work, but it's a worthwhile goal.

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> It would be a huge benefit to society if we could find a (relatively safe from abuse) mechanism to treat people who are "functional" yet too mentally ill to stop their self-destructive behaviors. I'm not sure how that would/could work, but it's a worthwhile goal.

There is a way. When I was lost, dealing with my own problematic issues with drinking, I found another path. Taking a single dose of LSD-25 made me examine the root cause of my drinking, and made me understand just how self-destructive I had been. I've never been religious, but for those 8 hours I felt more connected to everything around me than I had in my entire life. I felt love for the first time. I touched the surface of God, of goodness, of kindness with my soul. And it healed me. Like a bright light, healing me of all of my old emotional wounds. It opened my eyes, so I could see for the first time.

Great, let’s give LSD to everyone instead of alcohol. /s

It's not about being given things. It's about earning them, earnestly.

Sounds like it’s worth looking into...

Absolutely not, and definitely not on a regular basis. Pro-tip: frequent usage has diminishing returns according to SWIM :-)

But has a therapeutic tool, I'd advocate for most people to have a (safe) psychedelic experience at least once in their life. It can profoundly change the way you see the world and yourself, and that has ramifications in how we cope with pain. Using alcohol for that is not a good thing.

I absolutely agree and we are not alone in this assessment. The MAPS project is doing wonderful work to advance this: https://maps.org/.

That said, my point was about how to get a loved one into treatment against their will. That's dangerous territory because of abuse, but it's a topic worth continual exploration.

> It seems like the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction from how we treated mental illness in the previous century (aggressively locking people up in institutions).

I'd argue it's more of the same: finding a way to pretend they don't exist.

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