1. read Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind
2. Look into the process of cultivating your own mushrooms at home - it’s ultimately very easy to produce your own medicine
But it did not fix my depression or make me feel less alone. I might feel connected to the universe -- for a time. But it eventually fades, and the old demons come back.
Sooner or later, you need to deal with the issues at hand. The reason you feel this way.
For me, going to therapy allowed me to address some of the root issues -- generational trauma, a lack of affection, perhaps chemicals in my brain -- and allowed me to start rewriting my story of myself.
I enjoyed my experiments with psychedelics, and I would not discourage anyone from using them. But they are not the cure-all many claim, either.
"Set and setting" is a frequent quip of the psychonaut that doesn't get enough respect. You must have intention. Psychedelics are like removing the bumpers from the side of a bowling lane - without intention you will just fall into the gutter (figuratively).
Therapy is vitally important, either externally or internally. One can certainly perform self-therapy, which is sometimes only enabled with the help of a mind-altering substance like Psilocybin.
I think you would be surprised to try them again. You have a lot more lived experiences under your belt, new perspectives, new/fewer biases, etc...
Defining or, rather, roughly sketching out, a mission might be one way to approach psychedelics. You don't want to follow it to the letter, to avoid self-limits, but at least define your attitude: are you looking for a master, an answer, a resolution? Do you want to feel what's inside of something, i.e. how your reactions are built, where this or that comes from? Just mildly keeping your goal in mind may set you to achieve the right result.
As a quick example of the outcome, at some point I felt my body telling me "man, what are you doing with this e-cigarette? Just stop putting this in me." In a few months I quit for good. Understand this might not be a demon as big as the one causing depression, but maybe this will help? Where did that guy came from?
A challenge in these conversations is that there’s still no real standardized way of speaking of these experiences. What you’re describing sounds like detachment to me which can vary to different degrees of course but what I would call “ego death” is the actual death of your ego, the dissolution of yourself: you stop existing and with it also any consciousness. In my experience there was really nothing left to witness in that situation as I was no more.
Talk therapy, becoming estranged from abusers in my family, and SSRIs helped me long term conquer my PTSD and depression.
I liken doing psychedelics in late adolescence to reading philosophy in late adolescence. Unfortunately late adolescence is the period where the majority of both psychedelic and philosophical experimentation happen, when both of these are much more useful after gaining some life experience.
If you haven't even spent time working on or struggling with your own depression and isolation, and are in fact still quite tangled up in the formation of these issues, psychedelics don't have much to offer you other than "fun". Likewise reading Nietzsche as an adolescent, you miss many of the subtleties that make his work truly revolutionary, for example misreading "god is dead" a proclamation of some sort of victory against religion, when Nietzsche is much more concerned about our loss of meaning. You can't really get at what Nietzsche is worried about until you've had your own, serious struggle with meaning as you get older and the reality of death hits you much harder than any adolescent can imagine.
As an adolescence you're still rapidly formulating your world view, there's not a whole lot to shake up that isn't all ready rapidly changing. An adolescent will learn far more by interacting closely with a group of people they normally wouldn't, or wandering around parts of a city they normally never go to, than doing any psychedelics. It's not to say they shouldn't experiment with psychedelics and read lots of philosophy, but these won't be really impactful until later.
I highly recommend everyone in their thirties and later revisit both psychedelics and philosophy. There's a lot more there than when you where younger.
What have you gained by trying them again as an adult?
I can understand your concerns about a "terrible trip", especially since these type of worries typically make me paranoid and anxious when I'm on cannabis. However, I've found that when I do shrooms the psychedelic experience always side steps these anxieties completely and reminds me that these concerns are not the core concerns I have.
What's different about doing shrooms as an adult is that I'm not like "whoa, all this stuff isn't real!", I already know that. It's for those times when I feel daily stresses slowly crushing down, am fully intellectually aware that these things are ultimately not important, but can't quite find the emotional release. Shrooms aren't a miracle cure, but typically I'll feel a bit refreshed for quite awhile. As a teenager shrooms are about changing your perspective of big, metaphysical things "whoa man!", as an adult they're about changing perspective on those small things "oh right, performance reviews really don't matter." The insights are the things you, for the most part, already knew, but have been too distracted by daily life to really realize.
I had bad trips when I was younger, but being older and knowing both myself and psychedelics better I find I am much better at keeping myself from spiraling out of control too easily, and much more deeply feel the wisdom of "there are no bad trips". The other nice thing about tripping as an adult is you have much better control over the scene portion of it.
The "insights" I gained certainly felt profound at the time, but they were kind of silly in retrospect. I'm actually cringing a bit right now remembering what I was like back then. I remember going on a first date with a girl the day after a particularly intense mushroom trip and trying to share my "wisdom" with her. She must have thought I was completely insane haha.
Sitting here now almost a decade since my last trip, I can't say it permanently changed my outlook on anything. I still dealt with a lot of depression and confusion in my 20s, just like anyone else. The things that really ended up moving the needle for my depression and anxiety were: quitting alcohol, lifting three times a week, therapy, getting married, and having a kid.
Managed ketamine therapy starts as low as $1200 for 6 sessions I believe.
This is terrible advice that needs to stop being perpetuated.
This system is not perfect but practically as close as it can get to a fully guided affordable session.
Never change HN. Even for many people in tech, this is not a trivial sum.
Nitrous is also a dissociative, with psychedelic properties.
Alcohol can even push this boundary.
this is irresponsible advice for people who have mental illneses
Self medicating with cannabis and alcohol are bad news bears too. I wouldn't advise doing anything without your doctor being in the loop.
One would just pour the liquid on china plate and put it on smallest temperature on a kitchener. Liquid would soon evaporate, leaving crystals ready for snorting.
Fun times. I'm glad they are over for me. I guess I'm cured :)
I've looked. We tried shrooms once on a whim, in Amsterdam, and while it wasn't that interesting a trip, it did have the side effect of eliminating my wife's OCD for almost a full year. I wish they were easily available. I've even considered driving to that "church" in Oakland to get her something. I don't otherwise have the right kind of friends (or they are quite discrete about it despite my having mentioned it).
Or just drive up to Oregon where you can buy them (the fruits) legally.
Aside from 5-HTP, I started taking oral ketamine for chronic neuropathic pain around 1-2 years back, and it's been absolutely transformational - I've suffered with depression for my entire life, even when I was a kid, and now for the first time ever I feel... like it's maybe not an issue! The dark feelings of sadness and loneliness, the random tears, the pointless futility of existence... those just aren't there anymore.
there's only 3 states where it is illegal to have those mushroom spores and I'm in one of them....