Been seeing a lot of Psilocybin on the front of HN lately and I'm loving it. With Oregon legalizing it, I can't wait to try it out.
It does appear that Psilocybin has some therapeutic potential, but all of the good studies are performed in conjunction with professional-guided therapy sessions. DIY unguided experimentation is a different animal and shouldn't be confused with what's being reported in studies.
What you describe is pretty much the opposite of what this thread was like.
Negative comments (including your own) got upvoted, and there are hardly any positive comments in this thread at all.
Yes, there were some who talked of negative experiences being due to set and setting or exacerbating pre-existing underlying conditions, but plenty of other comments did not.
Which isn't to say that those explanations are wrong.
You say explaining negative experiences as being the result of set and setting is "victim blaming". Do you deny the enormous role that set and setting play in what experiences one has on psychedelics? If so, you're flying in the face of pretty much all research done on psychedelics for many decades -- which is huge amount of research, especially in the early years, before they were made illegal, and the more recent research supports it.
If you take psychedelics with the wrong set and setting you are pretty much guaranteeing you'll have a bad experience. That is as close to an incontrovertible fact as anything we know about psychedelics.
Educating people on the role of set and setting should be encouraged, because it can help lead to better outcomes. Trying to silence it by branding simple education "victim blaming" would just lead to more people having negative experiences due to ignorance, which we really don't need any more of.
I suppose a combination of quarantine with cold and dark outside ... (in the northern hemisphere, where probably most of HN users come from)
And about trying it out:
Make sure about the right set and setting, though. You need to feel save in the place and stable in the mind. Horrortrips are not so pleaseant.
Ideally, have not anything scheduled the day(s) after, to have time to process it.
At least where I live it's also the season where you can just go outside and harvest them.
If you are going to try it for the first time, and for most I feel you should at least consider it. Please first do it in the comfort of your own home before venturing to r/Outside.
This way if you're not familiar with the experience, and you get to a place of discomfort. You can sit yourself on your couch and watch mindless television while you revisit parts of your psych that you didn't know existed and slowly succumb to the fact, you are, actually an arsehole more often than you would like...
Source: I've tripped dozens and dozens of times over many, many years. And some times. You just get sad. And being cuddled up on the couch is of much greater comfort than a tent in the humid Australian bush when you wish you had a cold beer with air conditioning.
I wouldn't do it around other people who aren't part of your adventure though.
Strangers and, as you say, people who just aren't in to it will just raise the likelihood of having a bummer.