We can no longer ignore the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat depression

A few times yea and a few times no. I think the bigger the dose, the more dangerous my behavior became. The lightest dose I had made me feel like a 10 year old kid. That was interesting.

So there’s definitely something to it.

The same goes for alcohol and weed.

Now that I think about it more sharply, my favorite doses:

- alcohol: 1 to 3 glasses

- weed (Dutch): 1 to 3 puffs

- truffles (Dutch as sold in smartshops): half a standard dose sold

Thanks for making me more aware on this. I was only hyper aware of this with weed. Too much weed always makes me feel I’m dying. The first few times I had that, I even believed it.

While too much mushrooms or alcohol are no joke either, the experiences were more positive (mixed in with a lot of less positive things).

Mushrooms are the only drug which reliably produced bad trips every time I took them. 0 pros in comparison to LSD.

My point always is: they can. I’ve experienced the awesome interconnectedness of psilocybin. But they can also leave you in a state where you might become suicidal on the spot. And since we didn’t have a tripsitter that became an issue.

It’s experiences like those that I realized that I like being sober.

But I agree they can, especially with more professional guidance. If anything, those people are sober and a tripsitter is a necessity.

How man sessions of yoga did you try, literally just the one? The benefits of yoga really come when you practice regularly in a sustained way and you get to know the poses and can feel how your body reacts differently each time you go into them, when you learn how not to hold tension, when you learn to follow the breath and when you learn to accept and trust your body's limits and strengths.

To me it's someone saying they tried therapy for one session and didn't feel any benefit!

Haha, cats are a better answer indeed! ;-)

I agree with the Russian roulette feel.

Can you elaborate on what makes ecstacy like Russian roulette?

I am changing my attitude on it by asking relentlessly: how is this fun?

For work the answer is: a 4 day work week helps a shit ton. I am free on Wednesday. So if I dread the workday then I am free the next day or the day after that which puts me at ease. Also, then when I am free, I am noticing that I don’t like the day much more. That gives me a powerful perspective to not blame work for when I feel unhappy.

Also, my work feels kind of easy. CRUD apps are not tje difficult beasts I studied during college.

It also helps that the founders guard work-life balance.

I don't think that most people would prefer not to stay sober. Given my experience it really depends of your age. 22 years old me would have laughed if I said that I now prefer to spend times with my friend playing board games in the afternoon instead of just drinking all night. I see a lot of people in my circles that were heavy drinkers in their 20's and now in their 30's are naturally drifting towards enjoying other things more. The catch is to not cross the line to addiction during that time, and here being middle/upper class makes the difference because it usually means your life is mostly on tracks (like having a job), with positive social pressure from friends and family to go too far. Not everyone has the chance to have that.

Well anything involved with traditionally working for a living is hellish to this generation (myself included). Given a choice I would wake up and do what I wanted that morning which usually is productive but not always and there’s no requirement it should be. But what are you going to do, work makes society run so we must do it.

That’s a very clear vivid picture. I find it very hard to imagine if I am honest. However, your comment made it a bit easier.

It sucks to live like that. I wish I could help. I’ll take a few minutes to see if there is some low hanging fruit. I know a few people quite close to me who fit this description.

I am the wrong person to ask.

Let me put it this way:

50 y/o people look at me weird when I say that I smoke a pure joint.

Edibles, don’t fully know. I do know that people that don’t like to smoke take them.

True, sorry for that. I responded to the title and to the comments.

I feel people are a bit too hyped about this and since I have used stuff like this to help me with my mental state, I hoped that my comment might be interesting food for thought.

My opinion feels a bit like a counter comment to what I read in the comment section. Since it was so different, I felt the need to make it.

Apologies for not responding to the main article. I support drugs research though. It’s silly that we as a society don’t learn about all our tools, we should learn how to use them.

Probably won’t help but it might.

Is there any form of exercise you like? Get addicted to that. See how it compares to drugs and alcohol.

For me, my favorite type of (running with my favorite pumped up music) is remarkably similar to what people I know report when they are on MDMA, and I know these people virtually as well as I know myself.

Note: you don’t have to go all the way with exercise. Exercise is not about training your body. It’s about feeling good about moving.

Example: when I lift weights and feel not into it anymore then I do one more rep to see if the feeling stays. If it does, I stop.

Don’t exercise to train. Exercise because it feels so damn good. And the moment it doesn’t, then stop.

This line of reasoning is also applied to yoga. I am the stiffest person in the world, but I love my stretches because they feel good.

Do I improve? A bit but I care way more about performing healthy behaviors while feeling good. For me, it is the only sustainable way to be healthy.

I am a stoner, decent weed tolerance and smoking just about daily. Took shrooms twice. one time was shwag shroomers that did nothing. Next time i ate one single shroom (not a big one either) . My buddy was there all fucked up like dude keep eating. Well i tripped balls for 6 hours including a phone call back home to my wife to get myself grounded haha.

No, but it's how I recognized something was wrong with me. I recognized I wasn't me.

I'm not saying I need pot to be me, but I need a little help to get through this, and right now THC is helping me. I can be more patient with my family. I can let myself explore my work, and I am a little more relaxed to step back and look at my problems, and say, "I can fix these, let's start on this one."

If your reply isn't a joke, maybe you need to find your outlet. It doesn't have to be what I found, maybe yours is painting models, or writing a screenplay, or playing video games. I hope you find it.

> but you sound close to saying "some thoughts are too dangerous to thunk,"

Some thoughts are too dangerous to be thunk indefinitely. Thoughts can trigger the release of chemicals in your body, essentially acting like a drug themselves.

This can be highly addictive. Addiction can easily make a person cruel. Poorly thought thunks are indeed very, very dangerous (ie self inflation, blaming others for everything, believing things will fix themselves).

This doesn't mean these thoughts shouldn't ever be thought, but we should never lose our way back home to reality. I've seen many a hippy who followed spirituality too far, and became so hooked on their own vibe juice that they are no longer capable of basic scientific conversations.

Sure, but that's missing the point.

Researchers need to study therapy sessions compared to therapy sessions with psychedelics. If they have enough people, include a third arm with traditional antidepressant medication.

It's not blinded, but at least we would have data to compare to existing treatments. Double-blind isn't the only way to run a trial.

> subjects don't know that there is a difference in the dose they could get, so they can't try to guess what dose they got.

Do subjects really believe this?

"Even though most trials are done with placebo groups I'm sure this one will be different"

My understanding is that niacin is often used. It is a high enough dose to cause noticeable changes and flushing, but of course isn't psychoactive.

Of course you can compare different things to each other.

That's what comparison is for.

The best way I can describe it is, before you experience anything like that, you are only aware of the normal/sober extents that your mind uses, and afterwards you realize that most the dials/knobs/gradients/ups/downs you've experienced are only within a small threshold of what your brain is capable of. Experiencing that allows you to have a better understanding of where your thoughts/emotions/experience fall on those spectrums the rest of your life. It puts the range you normally operate into perspective.

Think of it as a kind of messy recalibration, a jostle of the box of your mind. Jostling your box occasionally can help you sometimes break through a local optima to a more global optima, shaking the fuck out of your brain all the time, well, it'll probably make you creative but no guarantees anyone else will understand you.

There is _something_ that one can discover when they try psychedelics. It is a non-normal experience and so by definition will have novel data. Is it useful though? So many people couldn't have been flatly wrong (but they said that about religion) - so there could be something to it. One of that is the realization that our sensory inputs, how we process them, and also how we understand ourselves, the world, and the separateness of the self from everything around us - are not preordained. The way we look at all of them is not the only way. We think the way we think because we've evolved to it. What we see is not the objective reality; it is just a filter through which we perceive it. This experience can allow someone who's prepared for it, to break out of their own patterned ways of thinking.

But - there is a reason we've evolved to perceive reality in this way. It allows us to survive. Material concerns - health, wealth, status etc. and extractive consumption which messes up "nature", and having ego/identity distinct from nature -- all of this serve useful, vital purposes. A person who's constantly tripping will find it difficult to survive both in modern and ancient times long enough to propagate their genes.

People search for profundity in these experiences, and sure there are some. But to really understand the world and nature, I think the lens of science - observation, empiricism, and the scientific process is a better bet. There unfortunately really isn't anything _deeper_ about life. And whatever there is, personal introspection aided by psychedelics cannot hold a candle against organized human scientific endeavor.

Also, messing with one's brain is dangerous. It is one of the least understood human organs, irreplaceable, and fundamental to life like few other things.

The nature of an internal psychological experience is that it is deeply personal. The best analogy I can provide for you is that of the religious conversion. A strong psychedelic experience is like Saul being called out to by Jesus from the heavens or Moses receiving the commandments from the burning bush. In a moment, an experience once thought impossible shows them they have a humble place in a bigger picture. Psychedelics are similar, for reasons not fully understood.

Common experiences during psychedelic therapy include the sensation of having died or feeling the boundary between yourself and others or yourself and the world dissolve. You are correct to note that there is no evidence of either such things occurring during any psychedelic experience at any time to any person. It's the deeply personal quality of the experience that induces significant changes in behavior for the users.

Another great analogy is that of new parenthood. You may just see a wailing lump of flesh, defecating and crying out for nourishment. The parents themselves often see their own reflection in an endless chain of reproduction, and feel a new responsibility having been forced to really consider their place in this ongoing process.

I think you are right to be skeptical of psychedelic drugs. If you have doubts about the efficacy of the drugs as a treatment, I encourage you to skim a few of the most relevant studies. Under quantifiable circumstances, psychedelic drugs produce reliable and positive benefits to the mental health of certain types of individuals.

> They common quality is that the experiences sound disconnected from reality. They try to explain the experience and are fully convinced they learned some fundamental truth but can't explain it in any way that makes sense.

$0.02 — psychedelics help you understand the way the world is by allowing you to temporarily experience the way the world isn't. most of these fundamental truths just get verbalized as platitudes because, well, they're widely-understood fundamental truths. the benefit is in examining them with a new parallax.

> there seems to be a lot of downside in breaking critical thinking in a lot of people's heads.

agreed inasmuch as psychedelics sometimes do induce long-lasting, harmful delusions. but...the upside of breaking critical thinking for a little while is that you get to experience its limits as a mode of engaging with the world. and you get to put it back together from its constituent parts, and occasionally find that one of those parts might not belong in there.

My first "trip" I came away with the following insights, which I would not describe as particularly profound.

First, that I could sometimes be too hard on myself, for no benefit.

Second, that I had a tendency to drive my body around like a crappy old station wagon I didn't care about, some kind of hand-me-down; I realized "I am the station wagon, when I wreck this one, that's it."

Each subsequent trip did leave me with a kind of refreshed feeling, like I had the vents blown out and the floor scrubbed. That's about as ineffable as I got. Perhaps I lack imagination.

I've tried psychedelics and I totally agree.

The benefit to me is that you can understand how other people see the world. Psychedelics strip away the "you" of perception. Instead, it allows you to see the world for how it actually is and understand how different everybody perceives the world.

For me, it helped me understand that nobody cares about what I do and that really helped my social anxiety. Everyone sees the world so differently that I shouldn't worry what other people think of me.

Just my 2c.

If you work a lot on yourself, you always end up learning things you can't explain to others.

When you approach life intellectually, because it has been your best weapon until now, you tend to think that if you understand something clearly, then you can express it as clearly.

But just like it's impossible to explain blue to a blind man, it's impossible to explain realizations about what happens inside yourself, to people outside. Or maybe you'll find a way (E.G: frequency for colors), but it will have no impact on the other party because the experience it what matters.

It's weird, but there are actually a lot that happens to us that we have no vocabulary for. Or no language tools, or even shared concepts, for. It's very frustrating, espacially if you are particularly good at putting things in words.

I like step by step explanations to get a grap on things. It infuriated me when I had to learn practices that weren't taught that way. It felt such BS. But I now know that it's not. It's just our way of communicating is limited, like everything in the human condition. And the more you practice, the more you see things you didn't notice before in yourself. It's no surprise we got no word for something we seldom pay attention to.

Knowing that now, I understand why so many self-help practices seems so full of shenanigans: testimonies look irrational, full of terrible analogies and symbolism, or flat "duh, bro".

Plus, people create complicated believe systems around their experience and mix up everything. We are so desperate for the extraordinary that we will make it up at any occasion. E.G: meditation is a very mondain activity, but the term is loaded with a lot of stereotypes, expectations and mythology.

It's confusing, and doesn't scream credibility.

Also, we reuse the same labels for totally different things. I've seen hundred of people taking about psychedelics or meditating, and they do it in vastly different ways.

If you take LSD at a party, it's not the same than in a guided ceremony. If you medidate 10 minutes singing a mantra, it's not the same than a 10 days silent retreat, etc.

Then, add variety in people, the fact experience can't be measured, that there is no way to be objective about it, the placebo effect, history, culture, politics, moral, religion, other believes, etc.

And you got yourself a puddle of mud.

But it's worth exploring, I swear.

Personally, doing mushrooms helped me work out some stuff for my PhD thesis research. What he says about making your brain more plastic is the key point. I thought about things from a new angle, which directly informs my current research.

I also saw palpably how much I judge myself in every moment of the day, which I had never realized before. Reducing that judgement has become an important goal. That's just useful. It's not wacky far-out magic thinking.

Now, if I tried to describe to you the beauty of what I saw, I would say it looks like a cathedral, and have to stop there, or it will start to sound like nonsense. But that's only because we don't have useful language to discuss the specifics of the experience, so we have to try to use metaphors, which easily sound like BS, unless you've seen it yourself. But then, the metaphors used to describe any specialist field sounds a bit like BS if you don't have the technical language, or direct experience, to make sense of it.

Maybe because psychedelics don't teach you any new "objective" information but rather a completely different (and convincing) way to interpret the information you already had.

"Our perception of time flow is just an illusion". Any smart person understands what that sentence means, but the default state of your brain is believing the illusion, so you don't really feel it, you only understand the concept.

When I was on LSD, time flow being an illusion was the default state of my brain. No need to make a mental effort to understand anything. It felt as natural as breathing.

But it's hard to explain these natural things without sounding line a crazy person.

I don't think the article is arguing that the specifics of what people see in an LSD or Psilocybin trip are of significance. Rather it's the shift of perspective that often results that can be of benefit. For someone with an incurable illness, the fear of death might make their final years unbearable. An experience that deemphasises the self and puts life in context (which is what some have described) seems like a valuable treatment.

From my own personal experiences, the most profound, impactful realization I had was in simply seeing my mental state change in an irregular way. It makes you suddenly aware of all the things you've taken for granted in your mental life that suddenly seem so fluid and malleable. The observation of lots of mental walls suddenly coming down and being free in your own head, that sticks with you.

Lots of good answers here. And I think there’s reason to be skeptical.

One concrete thing I’ve taken out of it is greater empathy for my kids’ lived experience. Alison Gopnik at Berkeley talks about how fmri studies suggest that the increased connectivity between different regions of the brain on psychedelics shows some similarities to children’s brains at all times.

I can sense in my kids, particularly the one with some sensory processing issues, just how overwhelming certain situations can be by analogizing to my experiences with psychedelics. I look at her and think, yeah, I wouldn’t be able to handle this birthday party either if my brain was in that state.

I've noticed this too.

There are a number of common-phrases I'll hear like "everything is connected" or "everything is alive/sentient."

However, not everything is connected, effective thinking is very much about identifying independent problems. Also I certainly don't believe everything is alive, and I certainly don't think this opinion should be held on the basis of chemicals rather than scientific data.

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Edit: And what's most disconcerting is that they seem to think these phrases "mean" something. If they said "Well, there's really no way I can articulate it, but it's changed my emotional outlook on a lot of things" then I'd be much more receptive.

Root comment stated that taking psychedelics made him want to explore the universe more. This sounds like a concrete, positive, and sane outcome. There is a voice inside the psychedelic community that does claim to preach deep fundamental truths, but there is also a reemerging scientific and clinical voice that are using psychedelics for concrete, positive, sane outcomes.

Michael Pollen’s How to Change Your Mind is a 2018 survey of this voice.

The word commonly used for this sort of thing is "ineffable" - that which cannot be put into words.

If you want to see a less "these are magical" and more "here's some science" perspective, you might like "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan. Always very down to earth, gets into some mechanics of effects, well written and engaging.

Everything you consider objective reality is filtered through your senses and your subjective perceptions. Psychedelics highlight this by applying novel transformations to our processing of the input stream. It’s a bit like how you perceive the world differently when under the influence of emotions like fear, anger, or love, but more dramatic. They reinforce that reality is first a mental construction: it’s less fixed and more malleable than most of us have ever considered.

So when you say that people’s experiences with psychedelics seem disconnected from reality, it might be because you have an incomplete picture of how fluid, complex, and inherently incomprehensible this thing we call “reality” really is.

>They try to explain the experience and are fully convinced they learned some fundamental truth but can't explain it in any way that makes sense.

Imagine trying to describe the color blue to a blind person, or the sound of music to a deaf person.

Some things cannot be described or understood without direct experience.

I think part of is that it changes your sense of what "disconnected from reality" means. It's not like a dream where you wake up and say _ohh that was a dream_. It's more like, _ohh my whole reality is a dream, all the time_

Do you think it is possible that there are truths that cannot be articulated in words? Is it possible that there are meaningful experiences that cannot be easily conveyed by language?

There are many parallels one can draw between accounts of psychedelic experiences and mystical or spiritual experiences brought about by other methods, such as (but not limited to) meditation, ritual, music, or fasting. I haven't really read an account of such phenomena that really captures the full weight of its direct experience. Indeed, there are many ancient and continuing traditions that use psychedelic substances in a religious capacity. If one doesn't think there's any meaning in such realms of human activity then I think that's their personal answer.

Have you read the Doors of Perception [0]? It's a fairly lucid, but ultimately limited, account of psychedelic experience by Aldous Huxley. Perhaps they did send a poet :^)

> They common quality is that the experiences sound disconnected from reality.

Well here's the thing, and it's something one can realize in a very visceral way in the middle of a trip: There is no disconnecting from reality. Your experience is always some incomplete part of reality, some part of the reality of your body. I think you knew that and were getting at something else.

What I guess you mean by this: In normal operation our cognitive experience seems to "refer" to the outside world in a carefully regulated way. That makes sense because we think in order to understand and interact with our environment in predictable ways. If our cognitive processes wildly differed from the reality relevant to our safety and well-being, we would die. So, our senses are well calibrated by a constant feedback loop between cognitive processes, interaction with our environment, and perception of our environment. We are so well accustomed to this calibration that it is difficult to even perceive it unless we are very carefully attentive to our own thoughts.

Psychedelics can throw all of your cognitive processes out of that control loop that keeps them in tune with external reality. But that doesn't disconnect them from reality, your cognitive processes are part of reality. So, what are you experiencing? What are you when you are not being pushed constantly into alignment with the Other? If you could see your normal experience in the context of a much wider possibility of experience, how would that change you? It's very plausible that this kind of insight would elude even the most precise language.

All that said, I don't think psychedelics are for everyone. Some people are very sensitive to being brought out of their normal cognition and have a hard time finding their way back. I think maybe in a far future when we have reached a very advanced state of medical understanding, psychedelics could be sufficiently understood and nuanced that they could be "for everybody".

[0] PDF Warning https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerce...

From personal experience, the depression-alleviating effects of mushrooms are not caused by grand spiritual experiences (although death acceptance and a general feeling of spiritual peace do accompany the experience) so much as mental clarity that causes very powerful, practical gestalt shifts. Here's a deliberately boring but true example:

I used to be very disinterested in cleaning and tidying. I live way up in my head most days, and if I let myself, I can go weeks without really looking at myself or my environment. When I tripped the first time, I looked around myself and really saw my living situation for the first time, in profound relief. It was like cleaning grease off a camera lens. I was a stereotypical 20-something depressed academic living alone, "in filth" so to speak. I realized very clearly and distinctly that I was choosing to create this environment, and that my habit of neglecting tidiness and hygiene was an affectation I was choosing out of irrational pride (I was clinging to the childish notion that being bothered by filth was irrational and a waste of time and energy better spent working). I just... saw all that clearly, in a manner of a few seconds, and made up my mind to change my behavior. That decision has improved my life, and generally made me a happier and more functional human being (as well as a better partner to others). I've expanded on that realization to make my external demeanor and appearance more approachable, and taken the gruff, sometimes nasty edge out of my personality. This has not, to my knowledge, diminished my productivity.

Having tripped a few times, each time I've discovered and confronted some new set of facts about myself and how I think and behave that, upon sober examination, are true.

The last time I tripped on mushrooms I was overwhelmed by the cacophony of toxic thoughts that were bubbling up in my head "unbidden". It was like hearing my voice recorded for the first time - it was definitely the familiar thoughts I had every day, but I realized just how weirdly cruel and unnecessary they were. That led me into daily sitting and paying attention to the shit stew bubbling around in my head, which has really helped short-circuit some of the bizarre self-flagellating depressive thought loops that used to paralyze me.

Again, just from personal experience, mushrooms remove barriers to self-perception, and put you in a frame of mind for having powerful realizations about yourself and your relationship with the world.

They ALSO can produce some absolutely mind-blowing spiritual ecstasy, feelings of oneness with the world, an expanded appreciation of the way the natural world works, awareness and acceptance of death... but for my two cents, the big value proposition is ripping away the mental filters we impose unconsciously on ourselves that cause unnecessary suffering.

Yep I have personally witnessed a friend lose his mind. Years later he is not back to normal. This was a man that I had once admired greatly. To see him deteriorate into a disillusioned stranger was terrifying and heart-breaking. Be careful folks! Don't play with drugs when your mind isn't in the right place or if you're currently going through something in life. Make sure you have a positive mindset, do it in a very safe environment with people that you are very comfortable with because there will likely be long periods of silence.

It’s almost like mental health is just like our physical health. Not preparing ones self for changes or heavy lifting can cause muscle failure. Why is your brain any different?

I support psychedelics but you need someone who’s borderline a psychotherapist to escort you the first time and guide you long term. Too many people just swallow a pill without thinking of side effects...

Edit: Downvoted... I spent a year researching MDMA and preparing my brain for the toxic effects before taking it recreationally for the first time. Had the best ever experience and never had the ectasy hangover that’s so common with the drug.. you need to mentally prepare before doing psychoactive drugs and if you can’t you need a sitter and be ready for the possibility of a bad time.

We shouldn't make literally everyone take it, that's silly. The John's Hopkins studies do show sustained long term (6-12 months) clinical improvements for about 80% of test subjects -- from a single dose. No other psychopharmaceutical drug comes close to such success, much less with a single dose.

Yeah I would be in support of everyone trying them in a supportive setting with some professional oversight. Definitely would not recommend going it alone.

If you don't mind I'd be interested in hearing more details. I'm personally really curious about stories like this, mostly because I have the opinion the world would be better off if more people tried lsd or something once.

Sorry to hear that. Hopefully we'll learn enough to prevent such mismatches and to freely allow petitioning wanderers to become holy fools for a brief time.

Note: Done 200+ trips w/ 2 bad ones in the first 10.

They are a shortcut to insights, that without, might take a person years to come upon otherwise. And that is if they are actively trying. For most people who aren't normally driven to spend a lot of time actively self-reflecting and critically observing their world with the intent on finding truth, rather than merely confirming their beliefs, psychedelics might be the only way to kickstart things. An important property of psychedelics is that they peel away the ego, which frees one to confront ideas that might normally be too uncomfortable to think about. Of course, psychedelics are not for everyone. Like, it's probably not a good idea for people with, or at risk of developing serious mental illness. And no one should ever feel pressured to take them if they feel uncomfortable about it. But the effects are long lasting-to-permanent with regard to opening one up to seeing the world in new ways, askings questions, and not taking for granted that things are as they seem. So while I agree with you that the idea that everyone should take psychedelics is grandiose, I also agree with OP's sentiment that the world would be a nicer place if more people took them. There's too many people roaming around thinking they've got it all figured out and that there's not much else to the world than what they are familiar with in their own little bubbles. Psychdelics, essentially immediately, pop your bubble and alert you to a much wider plane of existence. It's humbling, while at the same time reassuring, to truly get a sense that we are all connected. And I think it's rare for people to actually experience this without the aid of psychedelics.

"Modern society does a great job of discouraging and masking those qualities,"

Until you attempt to shake another's position in a social hierarchy (wittingly or not). Violence, vengeance, and pettiness are not only driven by barbaric feelings. They're strategies! Ones that disgust my intrinsic aesthetics, and probably yours, but which nonetheless are wielded. So let the timid have their controlled experience with such things so that when the wolf "of man known as man" attempts to ambush them, they can drive it off.

But since we're talking about psychedelics like LSD, awakening those qualities seems like a rare experience. I think majority experience would be a light in a tunnel that younger generations seem funneled into as everything around them is increasingly predatory ala ads, distraction, substandard diets, and probably a million other parasites. Being able to shed that for a brief bit and to not shoulder the heaviness of all your frustrations and expectations is immense.

Salvia can be one of the strongest "psychedelics" (it's not really a classic psychedelic even), and can completely replace reality with something else. Often a bizarre 2D experience where someone "becomes" the floor, or the siding of a house, or whatever. Or transported to some alternative reality completely unlike our own.

It can also be extremely dysphoric and terrifying. I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I have heard that chewing it produces a less dysphoric experience than smoking it though, and is how it was used in traditional ceremonies.

Not sure how much you took and in what way. For me it was a complete loss of self memory (ego death) and a very bizzare experience which unlike most other psychedelics was also tactile and not that pleasant. And after few min you are back to being fully sober.

The last time I smoked Salvia was the most intense, spiritual out-of-body experience I've ever had. While it was profound, it was also truly terrifying and did not feel good for me at all. I think salvia is very misunderstood and underestimated by most people. You give up all control when you take a serious dose, you're just along for the ride.

Mushrooms feel wonderfully natural and therapeutic on the other hand.

I would rather not take the risk of relapse.

Someone at work today was talking about their mother having an ulcer in her liver due to excessive pain killer use.

I once slipped on a damp metal roof while installing rural internet. That flap of skin between your index finger and thumb? Imagine cutting it with scissors. No tendons were hit, but yes it hurt (instinct traded me a deep cut instead of broken legs). That pain I heeded, but I was more concerned with the pain of potential infection that I felt a few years before after breaking hand blisters during springtime. Pollen entered and infected, waking me up in the middle of the night a few days later with throbbing, swelling, extreme pain - all I could think of was the prospect of amputation.

I value the productivity of my hands more than anything, therefore without insurance I was not going to question throwing $200 towards treatment.

The work related cut needed stitches, with anesthesia (that I had a brief reaction to - perhaps psychological since I was witnessing a needle go into my hand without feeling anything). The price tag was similar. But I was prescribed cephalexin for antibiotic... and hydrocodone for "pain". I did not fill the pain killer prescription out of principle, because of course it will hurt for a few days - a useful signal issued from the body to prompt me to pay special attention to that area during regeneration.

I have been bothered ever since - these "doctors" issuing opioids like candy for the smallest ailments (perhaps incentivized by quotas therefore personal gain).

Pain is a useful signal, and if artificially suppressed - we are missing the point and ignoring nature.

If you put your hand on a hot stove, and it hurts? Then yes, remove the hand because it did not feel good. Do not suppress the pain artificially so you can keep your hand on the hot stove.

In the eyes of NA, a drug is a drug. if you use a drug that isn't prescribed by your doctor, it is a relapse. we can go about slicing hairs all day, but the bottom line is that using a drug without being prescribed by a doctor is considered a relapse.

Do you have a source about psychedelics being a cause of VS? I'm also curious what makes you say that VS is a hallucination, when it seems much more like a hyperawareness of visual noise.

If you don’t mind me asking, what is hell about visual snow? I have some visual artifacts including snow but they don’t cause any suffering. They are just things I can see that don’t have any emotional significance. I don’t think about them unless my attention is drawn to them somehow. Maybe the snow is more disrupting for you than my artifacts are? Do they limit your ability to perceive the world?

I've nearly been a murder-suicide victim due to esketamine, so yes, it definitely exists. In fact, they screen out people out of the trials with psychosis due to this known potential side-effect. They also remove people from the trials for things like that.

It's too bad, because other than that side-effect, it was doing a lot of good.

“Among people without a lifetime extremely stressful event…”

It's not unlikely that people fitting the context of this article, i.e. clinical depression, have had a lifetime extremely stressful event, causally or consequentially.

Re: antidepressants triggering mania: it is the same with stimulants prescribed for ADHD.

Somebody can have a disposition for psychotic illness and live a whole lifetime without it manifesting. Drugs could be the trigger that destroys that person's life. Maybe these drugs should be allowed to be used in certain clinical settings, but I wish they had a better grasp on the risk factors for psychosis, so they knew who not to give it to. Certainly they should be kept illegal for recreational use, including marijuana.

Considering we don’t know the mode of action of SSRI’s then no, it’s very much not the same..

Do you happen to have a source for this? Intuitively, 2% sounds like a very high number to me for what is being implied.

You're "forced" to leave in an environment with a certain structure (architecture, infrastructure) under a certain set of laws. Adding a non-damaging, mind altering temporary experience that opens people to multiple alternative thinking perspectives instead of the single one they are stuck in would be a minor addition to their already controlled and artificial environment.

Take going to primary school: sure, a minority of people are attracted on their own to rational critical learning, and would've learned on their own. But for most of us, being forced to go to school helped us immensely in our life evolution...

And going to school is a much more traumatic and permanently mind altering experience than what I suggested...

I have the same negative experience. Never felt the "relaxation" effect people get from marijuana. And i really need it, I was always told it was the strain I was smoking but I think I've tried ever major strain and never found a good one.

However CBD gummies work just fine for me without the negative effects.

Not meant to be sarcastic, just failingly self-deprecating. Thank you for the direction

Yes, and most of them know next to nothing about the drugs they take beyond what their doctors have told them. I've watched this blind faith harm people dear to me on multiple occasions.

These are the same institutions that failed across the board in preparing for COVID. Their recommendations should be scrutinized.

The first 12 years of your life are spent in the care of (ideally) parents who love you unconditionally and genuinely want you to succeed.

Under psychedelic therapy, you are at the mercy of your therapist. I'm not necessarily saying that these are bad people but a dangerous property of a soft science like psychology is that, in defining what falls within the range of normal the psychological establishment is effectively acting as an arbiter of culture. The particular personality changes that they may collectively recommend won't be necessarily be compatible with one's home culture.

Particularly when you consider that the establishment leans heavily left, meanwhile their views regarding aggression, emotional expression, gender roles, etc are fundamentally in conflict with many core tenants on the right. Learning to be less aggressive or more emotional can put you at a social disadvantage in other societies. Laypeople treat psychology as though its conclusions are as rigorous as physics but that's pure hubris - as evidenced by the thousands of successful cultures around the world with totally different approaches to many of the same issues.