It seems every negative psychedelic anecdote on HN is met with commenters that are resistant to the idea that the drug could possibly be negative for someone.
Similar trend for reports on the negative health effects of cannabis
That said, IMHO, there are many things one can do:
1. if one suffers from mental health problems, they should probably avoid any mind altering drugs (OTC, prescription or illicit) without significant guidance from a medical / mental health professional
2. speak to a mental health professional, one that is open to leveraging these types of drugs for mental health purposes
3. Assuming you passed steps 1 & 2 or are confident you don’t need to bother with them…start small and with less intensive options (i.e. if you can’t handle something like marijuana in moderate to high doses, don’t bother [without following steps 1 or 2]). And as condescending as it sounds, if you’re ready for this step, experiment in the best possible environment (and in a good headspace to deal with what is coming) with an individual(s) you trust and do so with a low dose
If you enjoyed your experience after step 3, you could consider slightly increasing the dosage or type of mind altering substances while still adhering to the advice mentioned in the previous steps.
Maybe the problem is people not respecting the complexity of putting such a mind altering substance in their body. One isn’t required to do it and should only do so when they know what they’re getting in to and have a good understanding of the (for lack of a better word) consequences.
Also, maybe individuals who have a very positive experience should be more explicit about providing a disclaimer that what worked for them isn’t guaranteed to work for others.
Edit: and to more directly respond to your comment, IMHO, using something like LSD or any mind altering drug is a bit of rolling the dice.
PiHKAL and TiHKAL reports start with "allergy tests" of low doses around 1/10th of a typical dose.
Erowid and other resources (Psychonaut wiki, etc.) list a starting dose of LSD to be around 25mcg, while the author here took 160mcg as a virgin- over 5x the starting dose.
It's also not clear whether they tested the drugs, which likely means they did not. The report sounds more typical of a DO(x) or NBOMe substance than LSD, which also come on blotters and are sold as LSD relatively frequently.
I think GP’s post has actionable advice in it:
> As a general advice one should be very careful when taking psychedelics with other prescribed medications or having a history of mental illness.
One simple thing a person could do (in the spirit of being careful) is researching the interactions between different drugs. For example, you could Google “psychedelics + SSRIs” if you were on SSRIs, or “psychedelics + social anxiety disorder” if you had social anxiety disorder. It doesn’t seem too difficult if one is already googling “psychedelics + Steve Jobs”
This doesn't matter and is a very misleading IMHO.
Because people having some per-existing conditions they don't know about and hasn't caused anything but supper middle issues is _extremely high_. EDIT (extremely likely to have some condition, not neccessary a condition which interacts with the drug you are about to take)
And the problem with psychedelics is that the chance of both you getting long term problems if you have conditions from even small doses and you not knowing about this conditions and you and people around you not understanding the risk at all is high (at least if compared to some of the legal drugs, like alcohol).
Through I believe they do have high potential in health care (assuming personal being well educated about this topic()), because one one hand this setting allows reducing the number of unknown risk factors, (should be) well educated, and directly know what to do if something goes wrong.
() Except that the handling of pain killers in the US can make you question if that is reliable possible.
I.e. I did not mean self-medicated health care.
While there had been limitations for research on this topics because of questionable laws they now are often somewhat relaxed.
So by now there are some experimental treatment studies which use psychedelics to treat depression patients which the normal health care system failed to treat.
One important factor is that therapy is always the foundation/basis of such treatments while the well controlled psychedelic trip is often the _last_ step in the treatment.
I forgot about the details but I think it was something along the line of being depressed long term conditioning you brain to be depressed (even if the original source is gone) and psychedelics helping you overcoming this after you already started working on de-conditioning yourself.
I have no reason to think it wasn't LSD, but there's also a decent possibility it was something else passed off as LSD, which is a fun consequence of the war on drugs.