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Every time I talk about my negative LSD experience with someone in-person (even one who is very pro-psychedelic and enjoys positive or growth experiences from it), I receive great empathy and we discuss it, they are genuinely curious and perhaps even recalibrate their own compass.

However, bringing it up online (reddit, HN) I either get others chiming in with their negative experiences or I get blamed as if I have never done drugs before (i have, lots) or am inexperienced with LSD (I've tripped a half dozen times with good results), or didn't read this book or that online guide (I have)..

Anyway.. when I recommend LSD to new friends, it's to stay in the fun domain (50-150micrograms, go have fun at a music festival) and consider the myriad of other forms of therapy first.

> Anyway.. when I recommend LSD to new friends, it's to stay in the fun domain (50-150micrograms, go have fun at a music festival) and consider the myriad of other forms of therapy first.

This is what I do as well. People are gonna take drugs, I’m not trying to talk anyone out of that, so I recommend staying safe and sticking with low doses. But curiosity often comes calling anyway and people naturally want to delve deeper, and I worry a lot of people justify massive doses without proper preparation because they see so many people saying “oh, there’s no such thing as a bad trip!”.

I go to a lot of psychedelic festival, and I see those kind of recommandations quite frequently around me and my friends. I've grown to find those irresponsible.

I don't think we should prevent people from having those experiences of they really want to. But I've frequently noticed the people providing those recommandationa don't have any idea of the care that is required or the risks that are associated with that kind of experience.

Those risks are extremely frequently dismissed but sadly, they're real. The author of that article is one example, but they're many others and the consequences are very long lasting

People online are basically parrots, they're just repeating what they've read regardless of who stated it.

Big subreddits are the worst for this. People will repeat poor quality comments they've seen upvoted in other posts because they know it will be upvoted by others who recognise it. Even though the original may have only been noticed because they got in early and confidently.

Psychedelic drugs have an exponential effect as dosage increases, that's one issue. Complete dissociation from reality due to overloading of the visual perception receptors (the 5-HT2A serotonin receptors involved in translating the optic nerve signals to the brain's map of reality) is not entirely unlike a blackout drunk except that the motor nerves are relatively unaffected, so you can have people running around with no conception of their surroundings (leading to all kinds of unfortunate effects, like falling off cliffs etc.).

Culturally, people raised in a 'more is better' consumer mentality are most at risk for this, or if they don't know what kind of dosage they're dealing with. One thing about the original post here is that they state they know the amount of LSD they took in terms of ug, but how would they? Also, how would they know the purity? Is it possible that some unreacted side product of a low-quality LSD synthesis damaged their visual nervous system, perhaps, leading to long-term effects, or was it due to a kind of neuronal rewiring process?

Bottom line: these drugs need attention from full-scale carefully managed scientific investigation, which has mostly been banned since the 1960s.

> That it’s absurd how much suffering the human mind is capable of experiencing.

When I was 8 or 9 I had a night terror that involved some sort of life-sized game of Tetris that was moving terribly fast. My brain wholly adopted the belief that if I were to lose, everyone I loved would die horribly. I was trapped in this night terror for what felt like forever. Afterwards I refused to sleep voluntarily for weeks.

To this date, nothing has come close. I would describe the feeling as “dread.” Just complete, pure dread.

I think I know the feeling exactly. I had recurrent dreams like that as a kid, that somehow always involved a large yellow sphere / ball. For some unknown reason I HAD to move that sphere, but I also knew it was impossible. It evoked this odd and terrible sensation emerging from two opposing mental forces: there was something I HAD to do at all costs but I also knew it was entirely impossible at the same time.

My “bad trips” brought back that same feeling, but magnified by a thousand.

Yeah, “HAD to” is how it felt, yet those words, and any other words, always feel insufficient.

Fascinating. When I had fever dreams as a kid, I would have a sensation that was similar. It was the need to do find/choose something infinitesimally unlikely. Like finding a single coin dropped anywhere in the Pacific ocean. And if I failed the universe would cease to exist.

Yes! This is the feeling. And I've also experienced while sick. It happened sometimes while I was not sick as a kid though. Then I didn't feel it for decades until I tried certain drugs.

Fascinating. I experienced something very similar as a kid, with huge grey spheres in a black void. They felt implacable, indifferent, yet malicious. And I had a sense of futility and utter insufficiency.

I also experienced these feelings later on psychedelics and in some other circumstances of adult duress.

I really do wonder what to make of the similarities.

There’s a very reassuring feeling I’m having right now seeing so many people write about the same kinds of sensation.

Insufficiency. Futility. Infinitesimally unlikely. HAD to. Indifferent, malicious. Having to move things in a way that conflicted with the established physics of the situation.

Count me in the camp of people experiencing this, I associate it with childhood fever dreams. And much later, I encountered the exact same feeling through psychedelic experimenting. Never knew it was such a common experience either, and as you say it's very reassuring.

Also count me in. Excited to see others with the same experience.

I got to the point of rationalizing this as actually being some kind of memory of being born / memory of that trauma. The lack of all proportion to the sensation, along with the incredible stakes, feeling of pressure (literal and figurative) etc…

I've also wondered before if it was somehow related to the trauma of childbirth...not a memory per se, but a trauma imprint. But who knows...

So interesting reading all these reports of the same type of thing!

I’m incredibly skeptical of psychology nutty stuff like this but I’ll add that my brain immediately considered some sort of common trauma like being born.

I wonder if this is a universal feeling that everyone experiences at some point. I feel like it's most common as a child (from reading other's experiences) and may have something to do with the developing brain.

I remember lying in bed with fever, as a kid, and there was a big CRT TV in the room.

The TV looked huge to me, and for some reason, it looked as if it would never be able to fit through the door again. Thinking that the TV was stuck in this room forever gave me the deepest sense of dread. Something had gone really wrong with the world. What would my family do when they realized that the TV was stuck? Would they cry desperately? Would they run away and leave me there? I just felt like life would never be the same again.

Something like that kept happening when I was 8-9 years old. The closest I can explain is with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome . I kept feeling like Gulliver as either in Lilliput land or in giant land. It filled me with dread and I felt that I couldn't talk. When opening my mouth I felt the motions really slow and it took forever to create words.

Rarely, now in my adulthood I start feeling similar but I realize what is happening and I can control how the objects turn big /small.

I've had this as a kid when I had a fever, and also get it reliably as an adult when I'm exhausted and too warm and trying to sleep. I have to get up and cool down and do something calming like staring out the window for a while, which usually does the trick.

Yellow/beige/brown spheres for me as well. Other commenter had spheres also. I never even thought that this might be something others experienced. Sadly, trying to find more information on this only delivers "dream interpretation" BS content.

For me, the feeling of dread did not come from me "having to move spheres but not being able to" however. It came from "knowing that these spheres will be moving no matter what I do", but they would be moving "infinitely slowly", like one of those optical illusions [1] where things seem to move but they're not actually.

[1] https://twitter.com/sebjwallace/status/1384773017717420034

That optical illusion gave me a hint of the original feeling. On my drug trips it was also highly correlated with a spinning or vibrating sensation, which also seems somewhat present in that illusion.

There's something really interesting here about this shared type of experience that many people are reporting. All a bit different, but a very similar feeling.

I feel like others online must have discussed this type of thing before, but I've also come up short when searching it. How do you even describe it or name it in such a way that is searchable? Has anyone come up with a name for it?

Now I kind of want to post this on Reddit or something to find more people with this experience, and maybe see if anyone has a name for it.

I've never done Salvia, but the descriptions I read about it from people remind me of this feeling as well. They often talk about a wheel and spinning movement and dread.

I was a lucid dreamer. Many things mentioned in this thread overlap with my experience, especially hypnagogia [0] (tingling, vibrations, spinning etc.) while attempting to lucid dream with a WILD (Wake-Induced Lucid Dream) technique.

Lucid dreaming is totally learnable but internet is full of clickbait scammers. I can recommend reliable sources to learn if anyone wants.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

Similar to others, mine was moving incredibly slowly trying to escape a monster in childhood fever dreams.

it seems like the worst kind of terror is an impersonal, rapid, universal, automated death/loss of control. This opposed to some kind of a personal boogie man.

I think this is the “uncanny”. Cormac McCarthy is a writer I’ve always appreciated for revealing this terror under the thin veneer of civilization.

I've experienced this unique "dread" twice. Once when I was around the same age as in your story, but I had a fever. I saw a dot moving from one corner of the ceiling to the opposite corner, and somehow I knew that if it got there, the world would end. Not in a dreamy way - I knew.

The second time I experienced it was during a weed "overdose". I will never do edibles again, nor will I ever do any stronger psychedelics. These two times were among the worst of my life.

This is also why I have a strong reaction when people are kind of dismissive of bad drug experiences. It was very much like a kind of torture.

I had a similar experience.

I was around ten years old, and experiencing sleep walking mixed with nightmares once every few weeks.

My bedroom was on the attic floor, as was my brothers room and a play area by the stair case.

There was a gray and white “queen of solar mathematics” who was like a ghost, following me. She would not let me go back to sleep or leave me alone unless I could trace the floor plan of the attic into squares. I had to walk on the perimeters of the squares only, and if I messed up I had to start over from the corner. It felt like forever, I was more and more tired and making mistakes. I could see my body from above at the same time as being in it, like it was a video game.

Eventually I think I collapsed and woke up at a random spot early in the morning. My brother asked me what the hell I was doing.

This is basically OCD distilled, from an obsession and the intense dread it causes like nothing else can, that might be able to be temporarily relieved via compulsion/avoidance/etc.

Not saying you have it, I'm just drawing parallels between the way people's brains seem to suffer.

> That it’s absurd how much suffering the human mind is capable of experiencing.

Not only that, but the different "qualities" of pain one can experience. I never believed that grief would feel the way it felt when I first experienced it, and I was completely ignorant of it, until I went through it (I thought I understood grief through empathy, but I was wrong). How many subjective experiences are we ignorant of?

> Currently I feel that there’s nothing about life or myself that I can learn on drugs that I can’t learn in other (safer) ways.

Absolutely. I think the best way to look at the psychedelic experience is as something that shows you a different way of perceiving reality that you should then seek to translate into long term change via spiritual practice.

For those who gets the most out of it, I don't hear them talking about taking it continually, all the time. Usually it shows them something that leads them to other things.

“Once you get the message, hang up the phone.”

I think it's an overreaction to fear mongering stories about psychedelics that are much less common now than a decade or two ago. But it would be crazy to dismiss the danger in taking psychedelics or to bill them as being suitable for everyone, I agree. An underground and recreational drug culture is prone to dismissing risk and ill equipped to create safe and supportive environments, or to respond to medical/psychological emergencies. And that's kinda the better case scenario, there are also cults that abuse psychedelics and it's incredibly harmful.

Hopefully over the next few decades this stuff can be decriminalized and can move towards more therapeutic environments. I believe that in the right circumstances they can improve/save lives.

I'm the living counter example. I've experienced it multiple times in settings that would be very closed to ideal for psy-heads, hence one random day, something very similar to what's described in this article happened. Took me about a decade to recover. I was very close friends with lots of people in the psychedelic harm reduction associations and had a lot of theoritical and practical knowledge...

I'm really sorry that happened to you. I think it's clear that for some people it's just inappropriate, and that preparedness is necessary but not sufficient. I don't think it's clear when it is or isn't appropriate, which is obviously super dangerous and deserving of further study. I think it's important for stories like yours, the top level comment, and the article to be shared & taken seriously.

(To be clear, that's not what I meant about fear mongering stories. I mean fictitious boogy man stories, like https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/orange-juice-lsd/ . You can see the same thing with fentanyl today - fentanyl is deadly, but people still feel the need to exaggerate and attribute impossible characteristics to it, leading to panic attacks in cops that so much as touch it. In the same way, psychedelics are dangerous, but there was a time when people felt compelled to invent fictitious ways for them to be dangerous.)

in retrospect, do you feel you had the correct set before your experience?

reading others online experiences, and the responses, there is often a lot of emphasis put on setting, ignoring set comes first. were you in a good place, internally, when you had your experience? were you depressed? i don't think it is victim blaming per se to expect that a person in a bad head space can enhance that bad into trauma with drug consumption.

there is huge risk for someone who is in a bad set, but also in denial, looking to drugs to "fix" what is wrong. some good people who had bad trips can do, is to describe to others what a bad set was, so others know what to look out for.

> That it’s absurd how much suffering the human mind is capable of experiencing. A few years later and I can no longer feel much of the trauma of the experience, but there were months were I would just lay there feeling the aftershocks of the seemingly unending emotional pain I had experienced.

Sorry to say it, but that's the same what can happen when you're falling in love with someone. And if your love breaks, yes, most time you will find someone who will say 'You choosed the wrong person', like the wrong set&setting. But this is one of the more or less good endings, what when your partner dies? But would you ever warn someone to falling in love?

And that I say, who thinks LSD is not a drug for everyone.

This comparison doesn’t really work for me. The pain I felt was more like the worst heartbreak imaginable, but magnified 100 fold, then spread across infinite time and space, all while having the knowledge that this pain was my eternal state and would NEVER end.

This isn’t to discount the immense pain people feel from heartbreak or losing a loved one. Just that the human mind seems to have an incredibly large capacity for suffering, moreso than we’re aware even during the most painful moments of our lives.

I agree with you on this. This can also be experienced from meditatieve practises and journeys into "spiritual enlightenment". Drugs and mind altering behaviors like meditation are a way of hacking the mind. If you hack stupidly or are really unlucky, you can brick your mind. Doesnt mean you shouldnt do it. Adventures are adventures.

Does any of this justify making the substances illegal?

> but I worry that we’re underselling the risks

Anyone with an ounce of sense knows exactly what bans and prohibition lead to.

I don't mean to take away any of the "I had a bad time" stories, my point is prohibiting leads to worse times, mandatory paranoia, decreased likelihood to reach out for help in even medical emergencies, and that's without going into how areas which attempt to maintain a market for prohibited substances are turned into no-go war zones.

I would say the hand wavers are alluding to this reality.

I am a proponent of licensing of therapists and subject for their suitability to the psychedelic experience.

Not only is it not for everyone, it's suitable for a rare few who can take the whole thing seriously and understand the gravity of the experience.

At best, anxiety and communication between participants in a therapeutic setting can override any positive value. At worst participants can experience long term negative effects, as OP outlines, or end up like Syd Barret. (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/07/the-psychedelic-...)

That said, for those who do experience life-changing positive experiences, they are among the most valuable in their lives, and diminishing them as "fast" or "easy" is dishonorable.

One of the greatest issues with the human race is the idea of "if I think it's bad, then it's bad for you, too." (yes, indeed, switch the polarity, it's the same issue.) We seem to be addicted to saying what is best or worst for everyone.

In this age of ridiculous political polarization, driven primarily by complete imbeciles on both sides of the aisle. Psychedelics _can_ help some people see outside of their bubbles and reduce limitations in thinking.

If only we can treat such substances with respect and stop wrapping them up in cheerleading or doom mongering, we could probably benefit from them more routinely.

I'm totally in favor of legalization, that wasn't my point at all. I'm not even trying to tell people they shouldn't take psychedelics.

> Anyone with an ounce of sense knows exactly what bans and prohibition lead to.

Just a counter example, muslims have been very successfull in prohibiton of all kinds of drugs and alcohol since 15 centuries.

cough ... so cannabis and opium are not drugs now. Don't fall for propaganda friend.

Nocebo effect can be also pretty bad, question is, has LSD significantly more bad side effects?!

Is their a way to mitigate the nocebo effect of LSD? Setting helps? If you believe LDSD is bad or can be bad, then don't take it!

Set and setting, low doses, good trip sitters, “trip killers” (as an emergency “off switch”). These all help with pretty much any mind altering drugs. But sometimes things still go sideways even when you do everything “right”, and it can be very very destabilizing.

+10 for having some lorazepam handy