Aren’t psychedelics extremely likely to cause psychosis in users?
As someone with Visual Snow Syndrome (not contracted from drugs) it is a private living hell that risking it is not worth whatever trade off you get from discovering yourself. This is going to rub some people the wrong way on HN, but until we know more about these neurological conditions, I wouldn't recommend doing these drugs outside of a clinical setting where there are very clear benefits.
There isn't much known about the mechanism that causes VSS/HPPD, but the current line in the sand that they draw for performing VSS studies is that HPPD is temporary (<6 months) and VSS is permanent. HPPD is long known to be caused by psychedelics, but the permanent HPPD is now being re-diagnosed as VSS since they're the same symptoms and activity in PET scans.
Unfortunately, there are not a lot of studies I can link to because they've only just started researching it these past couple years, but the neuro opthamologists and psychiatrist I work with have VSS patients who contracted the syndrome after using LSD or acid, with one as far back as the 70's.
We don't actually see with our eyes, but with our brains. As a neural network, the brain builds the visual image in one part, and then filters out parts of the image in another part. Kind of like how we have a sense of touch but we don't feel our clothes all the time.
With Visual Snow syndrome, the part of the brain responsible for spatial logic and building the visual image has had all the circuit breakers flipped to on. This means that the image the brain is building is at 100% all the time, and overloading the filters. Just like zooming into a 780p image on a 4K screen, the visual artifacts are visible in everything.
Unless you're seeing them 90-100% of the time you're awake, I wouldn't worry too much about it as it's natural.
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.
It's too bad, because other than that side-effect, it was doing a lot of good.
The treatment stopped after that, of course, and sharp things got put away quickly. Thankfully there are no guns in the house. There may have been latent psychosis prior.
i find it a little troubling and irresponsible when people go around promoting psychedelic drugs, advocating that everyone ought to take them. if you're going to do that, i think you ought to always include a long disclaimer about the negative side effects, just like the drug companies do on TV.
Previously it was suspected to be a mere correlation -- that there's something about underlying mental disorders that draws one to cannabis, rather than cannabis causing mental disorders. In recent years, they have established a causal relationship cannabis -> psychosis (assuming the predisposition is there, of course).
There currently appears to be no way of knowing in advance.
I expect 98% of people will be fine (based on predisposition numbers), but I've almost run out of fingers on which to count the ones who were not so lucky.
The outcome may be different if psilocybin is used occasionally, and cannabis is used never. Sadly I have not met or heard of such a person.
It could be 1%, it could be 0.1%. This doesn't change the point, that you cannot predict the long-term impact to your neurochemistry until it happens to you. You won't know if you're one of the unlucky 1/1000, until you know, and then it's too late.
I've seen it happen to nine people, and most of them did not recover to a normal standard of living.
As far as my understanding goes, these mental disorders generally have an early onset, around your early 20s, and the question of whether drugs cause them or simply speed up the timeline is unanswered. This is partly why you should abstain from drugs as long as possible - it is better to start at 25 than at 16. In other words, if you are 30, never had any mental issues and you start smoking cannabis, you are unlikely to develop schizophrenia, for example.
I may be wrong with the above, and I'd love to be corrected.