Psychedelic frees up depressed brain, study shows

For me, the experience gave me the realization that everything is a hallucination, that all of your every day experience and thoughts are constructs, and that knowledge becomes as fundamental and intimate as the sensation of breathing or touching. If you're paying attention on psychedelics, you realize that your skull is your very own Plato's cave.

Going from caffeine and occasional marijuana to mushrooms was wild. You'd have a better chance of learning how to fly a helicopter from a book than understanding what psychedelics will feel like by reading or listening. Naive users might get fooled by a niacin flush or placebo, but once you've experienced it (and paid attention) there's no way you'll mistake the real thing.

It also gives you the perspective needed to appreciate music like Shpongle and hippie intellectuals like McKenna and Watts. If you haven't experienced psychedelics, you're like a blind person being told about colors. You literally can't understand it until you live through it. Like orgasms or childbirth or religious ecstasy, some things transcend mere explanation.

Psychedelics are great since they give you a shortcut right into the matrix, and you're confronted with the fact that you are indeed in a simulation, and that your existence in relation to the rest of the universe isn't nearly as distinct and cleanly delineated as you thought.

The radical changes in personality stem from whatever neural machinery that governs openness to experience. I think it makes sense that the change makes people less depressed and anxious. You allow yourself to pay attention to other things, and it becomes easier to avoid fixating and catastrophizing everything wrong in your life.

True, the psilocybin effects might be different than expected, but I think absolutely everyone could tell the difference between psilocybin and a sugar pill.

I don't know how one can reasonably weigh between a medicine with known risks (and plausibly unknown risks!) and the unknown risks of something like psychedelics, which are not yet understood at all but anecdotatlly appear to potentially have a very high reward/risk ratio.

Shrooms is not cocaine, you can't OD on the stuff. That is not to say it can't cause other types of damage.

Not prescribing anything at all might be the safest course of action.

And here you also say that unlike the advice you give your patients you might decide differently when it comes to yourself.

> Not my job to defend conduct of others of decades ago.

I'm not saying this judgmentally, there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to reconcile all these things.

Your predecessors clearly also meant the best and gave the most prudent advice they could at the time. This is something to factor into the risk profile. The most trust worthy thing to do is admit that there are limits to our knowledge. But I understand why you would hesitate to provide this asterisk with your advice as a lot of people will take it poorly and rush to webmd and homeopaths as a result.

There is a lot that can be done: decriminalize the rest of the drugs so people can just be addicts without also being prosecuted. Same as alcoholics.

Yep. 15 years later, still messed up. Not with delusions, but with the constant fear of being in that state again. The descent (is it the correct translation?) was more than particularly rough. I was kinda anxious before, but after it's been a constant hell of anxiety/depression/stress, avoiding anything that can trigger these feelings (yeah, I'm looking at you, sugar).

So be extreeemely careful with this.

Alcohol is not as effective of a treatment for depression as P. Cubensis.

Alcohol is a depressant. It exacerbates depression.

Not everybody can find a seasoned psychonaut, though. The closest they'll have access to is their drug dealer. A therapist with a clean supply and training in trip support is preferable for two reasons: the clean supply, and the legal system. You don't go to the cops if your dealer steals your wallet and car while you're tripping on whatever you bought. If your therapist is a shithead, there's a licensing body you can report that to.

A trained therapist (the definition of which will have to wait) is crucial when you leave the domain of surface psychological work, which can last many years even at above high doses without a correct structure in place and understanding of the phases of psychedelic work (there are two phases: sense tuning, where 99% of journeys end because of lack of attention control and reactive immersion of the attention in sense perception changes such as visual or auditory hallucination which then become full experiences due to the immersion; and the work phase, where you coordinate with the psychedelic on the unfolding of your intent). Once you begin work on root causes of the psychological structure a seasoned psychonaut may not be sufficient, unless they have themselves done root work, because if seasoned means years of experience at high doses at the surface of the structure, they don't have the capacity to hold you and at the same time allow you to continue through root work, when your points of reference framework is taken apart temporarily for the purpose of understanding the pattern of self-judgement that is ingrained in the foundation of your perception of reality, and during that short period of time when your points of reference are suspended, everything within your present environment including empty space reveals a memory that is connected to self-judgement and which triggers self-judgement in the moment. This is happening while the psychedelic is digging out the root of that pattern and until it is dug out, your inner and outer perception becomes a unified experience of self-judgement. Until the root is uncovered, and prior to that day of therapy, the experience of self-judgement in daily life was a series of disconnected nodes in an invisible graph. Depending on your involvement in self contemplation, some patterns within the graph may have become known to you, but that didn't stop the experience of recreating situations that further the self-judgement. Once the root is uncovered in therapy, the whole graph becomes available to your conscious mind and you are able to clearly see the initial experience or set of experiences from which the self-judgement pattern evolved, and are at the same time able to understand every single past experience that had the mildest expression of that pattern and see the aspect of your personal identity that is the growth of those experiences. Most importantly, from that moment onwards integration becomes possible, integration being the recognition of the pattern in the present situation and connection of the present situation to the root of the pattern which enables you to introduce conscious response into what previously was habitual reaction, thus transforming the pattern. Apologies for going off track but it seemed useful to share.

The hell that a therapist has to do with it is the one you are experiencing in the moments just before the root gets uncovered, which hell may seem to last an eternity as the uncountable previous experiences of self-judgement become condensed into the space of now, and not just the experiences, but the very part of your personal identity to which in a way you are fully attached and without which you would feel loss, even though you consider it a pattern that introduces chaos into your daily experience. A good therapist, even one without extensive personal root cause psychedelic experience, will be able to help you navigate that hell, and reach the root. Without the proper structure and guidance you might not reach that experience of even beginning the work on the root, and if you do, a different outcome could be that you do not uncover the root, remain with the memory of a bad trip in which "I got stuck in a loop of self-judgement that seemed to never end", and are potentially further away from coming back to that subject and finishing the work by burying the root due to this experience, because if I went through that and didn't finish it in that sitting, I am for sure gonna take a nice long break from trying to understand self-judgement, and the condensed experience that would have led to uncovering the root will have had at least some temporary impact on my sensitivity, so I'll be fine dealing with self-judgement for a while.

I completely understand your worry though, and have one of my own, because it seems to me very possible that a future awaits where the structure of psychedelic work is not known, and the work will be limited to the surface, curing depression, learning incredible skills, and not realise the possibilities for the deep work. My worry is that psychedelics will be productised before their depth capacity is fully understood, and the product will be so appealing, near limitless in application and well marketed, that the depth work will have to wait for the next disruption opportunity in the product cycle, which in this market seems to be counted in the thousands of years.

From my understanding therapists can help you “integrate” your experience (post trip) into your everyday life. Having someone to help you figure out how you can apply useful feelings/mindsets you may have had during the experience seems (to me) helpful in maintaining any sort of benefit longer term.

I'd call them "intrusive thoughts", like a (silent) voice in my own head that tells me something demeaning about myself (not actually it, but similar to "I'm a racist".)

But when faced with the real world manifestation of these ideas, my emotions play out like these thoughts are indeed false. And I'd expect the reinforcement to correct this over time. But it hasn't. Causes great anxiety in quiet moments, and i'm hyper aware of certain social situations. It also comes up in dreams sometimes.

The idea about myself came up mid-trip, and from it poured out empathy for others (good) but somehow the anxiety inducing parts never left.

I read "it changed my life" so many times on internet, but from personal experiences and many friends I don't know anyone who'd noticeably changed their life for better.

Except for only one friend, who ended up suicidal and delusional beyond repair, frequent mental hospital dweller (although all doctors said drugs could only exacerbate a pre-existing condition, but not create it from scratch).

I wonder why so big discrepancy between internet and real life here.