A personal story of treating social anxiety with 5-MeO-DMT (2016)
psychedelictimes.com
psychedelictimes.com
- informing yourself as much as possible (and then some) about this substance[1][2]
- not doing this alone
- reading and following the guidelines of The Conclave[3]
- very carefully vetting the people you're entrusting your safety to[4][5][6][7]
[1] - https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/5-meo-dmt
[2] - https://erowid.org/chemicals/5meo_dmt/5meo_dmt.shtml
[3] - https://theconclave.info/
[4] - https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=86872
[5] - https://entheonation.com/blog/death-fraud-octavio-rettig-ger...
- very carefully vetting the people you're entrusting your safety to
Agreed, strongly.
Set and setting are important for psychedelics. They should ideally be taken in a comfortable environment with people you trust…and hopefully they’re not tripping as well. Or at least, they have experience.
The first time I took LSD was by myself. That was…perhaps not the best idea. It turned out fine, but whoo, it was a lot.
And yeah wow on your own the first time. Damn.
I was with 2 others taking and 2 people not to guide in a comfortable environment and it was a lot even then. It's just an incomparable experience and while bad trips are actually very very rare and you should not worry about them if you've prepared everything else right, the experience is still just.. well.. wow!
Agree with all the above, but I'd also emphasize dosage.
I think I remember a study that showed the risk of people having a bad reaction is very clearly correlated to taking too much. Which should be pretty obvious.
Start slow! You can always take more.
1 - you can vomit and choke on your own vomit while being completely out of your body and without any consciousness of the outside world or bodily control
2 - some people move around a lot on it, while being effectively unconscious of the world around them... this can cause them to hit their head or otherwise injure themselves
So it's much safer to have someone watching over you.. someone who is trained to put you in to the recovery position if you start vomiting, and to otherwise keep you physically safe.
Personally I can think of one psychedelic experience that became very unpleasant (though educational!) simply because I felt the people around me thought I was insane.
So I'd say the risk of being uncomfortable with people around is of less potential harm than of dying or physically injuring yourself if you're by yourself and something goes wrong.
Besides, once you've blasted off on a serious dose the outside world disappears and as far as you're concerned no one else is there but you (sometimes not even you). But, yeah, if being around others makes you anxious then maybe you won't be in the best frame of mind when you do it (you want to maximize feeling good).. but still better that than being dead or injured, imo.
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The fact that he was a reader of Psychedlic Times to the point of using them to identify treatment centers suggests this isn’t your average anxiety sufferer. This person was a true believer in psychedelics from the start, which is a huge variable in an outcome know to be prone to significant placebo effect.
Even the subject recommends against self experimentation, owing much of his outcome to the overall experience and ritual itself. He suggests he was skeptical, but skeptics don’t get on an airplane and travel to a destination to consume psychedelics under the guise of self-healing. The placebo effect plays a strong role in many of these outcomes, with the jarring experience of taking a psychedelic and having reality dissolve act as a sort of super-place that signals that whatever experience was had was noteworthy in a supernatural way.
That sort of super-placebo effect doesn’t only amplify positive thoughts, though. Any psychedelic guide will emphasize “set and setting” as important because it’s well-known that a negative set and setting can trigger a harmful trip which can exacerbate pre-existing anxieties and negative ideas rather than making them disappear as this single anecdote would suggest. More realistically, “set and setting” had become a code phrase for post-rationalizing bad trips as being the fault of the user, not the drug, as relatively little guidance is provided about what constitutes proper set and setting. Instead, negative trips are hand-waved away as problems with “set and setting” as a way to vindicate the drug itself.
In more typical real-world experiences, life changing results like this aren’t typical. Some users report a sort of afterglow effect, but it often fades in a matter of days or weeks. This leaves some of those users chasing additional doses or wondering what they’ve done wrong. On the other end of the spectrum, psychedelic experiences can and do trigger long lasting negative affect, or even unmask latent mental illness. Again, it’s not uncommon for these to be hand-waved away as pre-existing underlying conditions or improper set and setting, but it’s important to know that negative outcomes or exacerbations of mental illness are a very real possibility.
Psychedelics are an interesting research topic, but we need to be honest and realistic that these aren’t hidden miracle cures that will wipe away anxiety and change everyone’s lives for the better after just one dose.
This story itself is not about someone turning his entire life around after a single session. As the author writes:
"Ironically, my first visit to the clinic didn't really address my social anxiety directly, as there was a lot more fundamental stuff that I had to work through. I've been back twice now..."
The afterglows are pretty long for me!
Love
Having such a negative experience was probably better though. I rebuilt my ego after a few months and permanently (10+ years now) fixed deep problems in my psyche. But it scared the bejeesus out of me and I have no desire to go through that ever again.
It can be terrifying, but my own bad trips (which happened decades ago) have taught me much more than my good trips, which were just fun. Not that I'd want to have a bad trip or wish one on anyone else, but they can be used constructively and be ultimately helpful if one tries to learn from them instead of just push them away.
Surrender to whatever happens during the trip and turning towards the fear has also been shown to lead to a positive outcome as one experiences "ego-death" and then rebirth, which is why this approach is encouraged in professional psychedelic therapy. I've read some psychedelic therapists telling their patients that if they feel like they're dying to just die.. and that it'll be ok.
Stay safe.
> This isn’t something I feel like people should be experimenting with on their own. Having that envelope, having that support mechanism, is very important. I believe the energy in the room contributes to an experience. Search out people that are knowledgeable and really have experience with these things. The integration work goes hand in hand with the actual psychedelic journeys. Having a psychedelic experience without anyone knowledgeable to help you unravel it probably wouldn’t be productive in a lot of cases. Find competent people to guide you.
I’ve got a bit of a feeling it’s people trying to make it more “we self regulate” than anything.
Personally, I enjoy them at festivals too as a party drug and mix it up with MDMA and alcohol and it’s great.
This stuff isn’t even addictive. I stopped for a period of years to test myself.
I'm glad you did so I don't have to :D
>I’ve got a bit of a feeling it’s people trying to make it more “we self regulate” than anything.
I think if it's genuinely helping people, that's all that matters to me. Everything can't be a big deal to everyone.
LSD works just fine as a party drug. Also works great if you want to use to write 600 lines of harsh self reflection and make a change in your life.
I trust people to tell me how they're feeling about it, for the most parts. It definitely doesn't feel like homeopathics or a placebo, but we'll see what the studies come out saying...
After I was experienced in some drug usage I realized that listening to these people was causing me some anxiety on trying new drugs because they were all like “BE CAREFUL! This is dangerous!”
Without that anxiety, my experiences were great! I had a blast!
Bunch of fear-mongering. Mongers of fear.
A million years ago I did quite a bit of 5-MeO-DMT and compared to N,N-DMT (or many other tryptamines) I found it to be… kind of lackluster. I wasn’t aware that there was such a large community that use this substance for spiritual or self improvement purposes.
Kudos to the people that are getting value out of this!
I'm very interested.
5-MeO-DMT also included teleporting into another dimension, it’s just that the dimension is a big empty void. It’s in no way bad or unenjoyable, but I found it to lack substance. It’s been a really, really long time since I’ve done any of this stuff and my memory might not be perfect.
I don't really understand how these things are connected.
I'm torn on this, on one end I noticed retreats in Northern Europe usually have a more "scientific" approach than, let's say, similar retreats in Peru such as Ayahuasca which is rooted in shamanism. I believe both approaches are valuable, but it's clear that a "rational mind" would be out of its element at first.
James Oroc, in another article on the same site about underground 5-MeO facilitators[1], summarized some objections which I also share:
"A lot of these practitioners like to take the tail hit on the end of the pipe because they believe if they are in tune with you, they are influencing your 5-MeO-DMT experience. I would say for one, if you've had a true 5-MeO release your experience is almost un-influenceable. Music can affect it and touch can bring you back a little bit, but the whole point is for your consciousness to go and for your body to be safe and undisturbed. I actually think the best practitioner is a licensed nurse who can put you in the recovery position. Any practitioner who would actually mess with your body in any way while your consciousness is out surfing the Akashic field, that's unethical in my opinion. And that's a common theme among all these practitioners- they all like to get really involved with your experience. So that's going to be the next major thing I write about: my ideas on the importance of a neutral container.
"I'm actually a little irritated at the moment, the way the whole movement has sort of been swept up by the New Agers and falling back into this kind of cultism. Because there was a moment when Burning Man and psychedelic culture were actually breaking free of that, and heading into a much more William Gibson punk-anarchist kind of reality. That's still mixed in there, but I feel like we keep getting pulled back into this New Age bullshit. To me, the toad shamans are a classic example of that."
For more examples of the harm some of these "shamanic" approaches can cause see: [2]
[1] - https://psychedelictimes.com/underground-5-meo-dmt-facilitat...
[2] - https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=86872
I'm very novice on this, I feel like Humanity is missing out on important tools and we're just barely scratching the surface of what's possible to heal the mind.
Legal MDMA therapy with a professionally trained and licensed therapist is probably the safest way to dip your toes in.. and, regardless of what you do, integration with a professional therapist you like and trust can be very helpful.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/reference/chiropractic/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11045895/
That is not to say we don't definitively know they do not work. We just dont know if they do anything or not. There is promising preliminary research but a lot of that research is coming out of a community that appears prone to some serious motivated reasoning. And there is a small cultural movement brewing that seeks to promote them despite our current ignorance. Proponents have made a mad dash to dump them into alt med toolbox to sit alongside acupuncture, cupping, ear candling, essential oils, etc.
Edit: Don't get me wrong. I really hope these do work as the current standards of care for most mental illness are terribly flawed. Lithium for example is amazing but it has horrible side effects, destroys your organs and for many eventually stops working. Abilify has saved a lot of people's lives but when you're on it, a lot of times you just fucking want to die. It would be great to move beyond SSRIs, mood stabilizers and antipsychotics.
Psilocybin can provide peace to terminally ill patients: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5367557/
and it's in Phase II trials for major depressive disorder: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03866174
and already has successful results in a small cohort, as published in JAMA Psychiatry: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
hell, ketamine is FDA approved for depression: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...
Cool. I look forward to seeing how it performs in long term practice.
> Psilocybin can provide peace to terminally ill patients:
Looks promising, though that is a single study with a small sample size.
> and it's in Phase II trials for major depressive disorder:
Again, compelling but small sample size
> hell, ketamine is FDA approved for depression
This approval is based on self reported symptom data from phase III trials and currently is backed up with any extrinsic measurements such as reduced suicide. It's not nothing but it's not a slam dunk yet.
Again, it's all very preliminary though it looks promising. I don't see any evidence to suggest it will become the standard of care soon but it may in the future. We just have to wait and see.
It's not just preliminary research.
At the time LSD was banned there were thousands of research papers on it, and I've read that it was the most widely studied psychoactive substance on the planet.
The research that's come out more recently about psychedelics has largely just confirmed what was already known about them, and what has become crystal clear is that they're actually far more effective for some very severe mental illnesses (like treatment-resistant depression and PTSD) than any other medication or therapy in existence.
This isn't exactly that, though.
5 Meo DMT can be synthesized, but people like to do the “natural” thing.
See “Hamilton’s Pharmacopoeia” s03e01, he interviews Albert Most, the first person to smoke toad venom, and then demonstrates the synthesis in a lab, really entertaining stuff.
I think the episode is not up for free, HBO and Vice have it. You can read about it here tho
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amandasiebert/2021/01/08/hamilt...
I am not convinced Albert Most (the pseudonym of Ken Nelson[2]) was the first to use 5-MeO-DMT.
Most/Nelson published his pamphlet in 1983, while more than 10 years earlier 5-MeO-DMT was apparently used by the Church of the Tree of Life and sold by the Inner Center at Hermosa Beach:[3][4][5][6][7]
"The San Francisco-based Church of the Tree of Life aimed to be to the still-legal psychoactive substances what the Native American Church was for peyote. Incorporated in 1971 by life-extension expert John Mann, it existed largely as a legal entity to protect the use of the drugs mentioned in Legal Highs. If any of these materials became illegal, it was reasoned, a religious-use exemption for Church members could be grandfathered in with the new statutes, much as the peyote exemption had been for American Indians."
"One of the Church's prime sacramental sources was the Inner Center of Hermosa Beach. A popular item in its mail-order catalog was 5-MeO-DMT, a legal variant of the short-acting tryptamine DMT, which produced a brief yet powerful psychedelic trip. The chemical was sprayed onto parsley or oregano leaves, which would then be smoked like marijuana to produce an intense, almost otherworldly state."
According to [7]:
"...a 1973 booklet Legal Highs: A Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Herbs and Chemicals with Psychoactive Properties included 5-MeO-DMT, noting that "the Church of the Tree of Life has declared as its religious sacraments most substances in this book."
"Since the first scientific paper that publicized the fact that the Bufo Alvarius was a walking 5-MeO-DMT factory was not widely circulated until 1967, it is quite possible that smoking toad venom is a completely modern invention. It has also been pointed out to me that our modern civilization is probably the first one which has realized that it is possible to smoke DMT or 5-MeO-DMT - until this time we have either taken it as a snuff, a potion, or, most recently, injecting it. Whatever the case, the Legal Highs booklet in 1973 now listed the Karma Kem Ko. in Yatesboro, PA and Terrestrial Materials in San Francisco, CA as suppliers of 5-MeO-DMT.
"In a 1977 Head magazine article titled "DMT" authors Jeremy Bigwood and Jonathan Ott noted that 5-MeO-DMT "has been sold on the illicit market," they also commented that it was not a controlled substance. Nevertheless, Bigwood and Ott did little to promote the drug, when they quoted a description from M.V. Smith's 1976 book Psychedelic Chemistry that described the effects of 5-MeO-DMT as being similar to "having a large elephant sit on one's head," and they concluded by stating that they felt the drug "has little recreational value." (The exact quote from Smith is, "The effects of 5-methoxy-DMT are unpleasant for most people (smoking it gives me nausea plus the feeling that I'm being sat on by an elephant)" (Smith 1981).)*
"The 1978 High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs remarks that 5-MeO-DMT "has been synthesized and was occasionally available in the California underground market a few years ago. The effects are practically identical to laboratory DMT available in the 1960s."
So human use of 5-MeO-DMT seems to go back to at least the early 1970's, though it's not clear who its first user was. It would be great to interview all the different people and whoever ran the companies mentioned in the above quotes about this.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoE7u6mgS7E
[2] - https://www.psychedelictoadofthesonorandesert.com/preface
[3] - http://califias.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-church-of-tree-of-l...
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Tree_of_Life
[5] - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002204268801800...
[6] - http://www.textfiles.com/drugs/addresse
[7] - http://www.dmtsite.com/5-meo-dmt/information/modern_usage.ht...
I once took mdma, went to a random toastmasters meetup solo, and gave two presentations. Twas effective in reframing my relationship to social anxiety to a non-trivial degree.
That’s in now way comparable to having treated your social anxiety. Recreational drugs obviously produce short-lived mental changes.
It is comparable, actually. There is something in psychology called "exposure therapy"[1] where one is exposed to whatever causes your anxiety or phobia (sometimes with positive reinforcement) and one gradually gets used to it until you're no longer afraid of it.
Similarly, I've heard MDMA therapists theorize that using MDMA to treat depression, PTSD, and other mental issues where there might be repressed or uncomfortable experiences that one couldn't face in ordinary waking consciousness allows the patient to be comfortable with them while under the effects of the medicine, and this allows them to not be as reactive to that same stimulus even after the medication wears off.
By the way, speaking of social anxiety, here's an interesting video of someone with asperger's and how a single MDMA experience helped him: [2]
It's like being challenged to climb a mountain but we just take a helicopter up instead. Sure we get to the top and see the view, but we still didn't learn to climb it. The unshakable personal growth is missed, and there will be many future mountains with the same challenges.
Do the real work, find a good psychologist, build a relationship, and the healing can be life changing on levels you only dream of. It took me about 3 years(!) before I finally got brave enough to truly open up to my therapist which finally lead to identifying that I have OCD. That has been an enormous mental burden lifted from my psyche. The journey was well worth the milestone, and it's just the start of the work.
Extremely inefficient.
Psychedelics blow the door to the mind-psyche apart and place you right at the center of the cyclone (to paraphrase John Lilly). For a smart, introspective/reflective individual there is nothing more direct and arguably better: No filters, no go-betweens, an aspect of one's self is placed inside one's own mind, free to observe and experience.
Also: there's a 'feeling is understanding' component to psychs that can be unattainably difficult to replicate without this tool.
Ultimately there's nuance some other commenters here seem to overlook: once you have a taste of this guiding understanding, it remains up to the individual to put in the work - psychological, physical etc. - to reach & maintain their desired state.
This is where medication can sometimes break through ingrained bad habits and attitudes, and make looking squarely at and dealing with our problems possible. Psychedelics (when combined with therapy) seem to be very effective at this.. more effective than any other medicines, for some conditions.
It's not a panacea, and it's not guaranteed to help everyone -- nothing is. However, it has helped many people when nothing else has.
Read about the studies on severe, treatment-resistant depression or treatment-resistant PTSD. Many of these people have tried literally dozens of medications and therapies, including electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and nothing's worked for them, leading some of them to suicide attempts. One to three therapy sessions with MDMA has moved them to a place where many of them no longer even register as having PTSD or depression.
Though not everyone is helped, the fact that some of these people are is amazing, and that's why MDMA therapy is being approved by the FDA despite MDMA being a schedule 1 drug.
Social anxiety is an opinion you have of yourself. That can change. Or at least, you can decide how you feel about it.
Did I say I 'treated my social anxiety'? No.
This event & exposure was a major step forward for me - I had never felt less socially self-conscious & more self-love while presenting.
My outlook / frame on social anxiety was never the same.
I find your comment interestingly dismissive & defensive. Any reason why this might be?
I now have remarkably low social anxiety.
Objectively: I approach unfamiliar groups, women etc. in ways that baffle others I'm with.
It could just be marketing for all I know. And it most likely is.
This is a blatant promotional article for a mystical cure associated with a sponsor of the website it’s posted on (the article admits they referred him to the retreat center, a subtle invitation to other readers to also reach out to get similar referrals to this miracle cure).
Replace psychedelics with any other substance and the comment section would be full of criticisms about this being an n=1 anecdote and the obvious conflict of interest with the source.
I used to be good with people, but somewhere along the way I became a jerk. Any tools in my tool belt would be appreciated.
"debilitating social anxiety" is when you pace through your living room for 15 minutes to work up the courage to make a call to order pizza. And then afterwards, ruminate on every awkward detail in that one minute conversation, forever.
I can order a pizza and travel to foreign countries alone, but I have nearly been fired for my inability to initiate friendly conversation with leaders of other teams at work. I have agonized for 30 minutes to write three sentences for friendly ‘let’s have coffee’ emails. Maybe that’s not debilitating per se, but with the right timing it could have destroyed my career, ability to afford living expenses etc.