Australia legalises psychedelics for mental health

Are you sure it was (reasonably) pure MDMA though? It tends to have a ceiling, besides the usual effects of having too much speed such as grinding teeth, rapid heartbeat and the like.

That's almost certainly from contamination from something else in an illegal does.

The mechanism of action of mdma makes anything above normal somewhat redundant.

That's true. But we already have millions of people globally taking long term SSRI medication for depression - many are prescribed it with barely a thought, and little more diagnostic vigour than "oh, they said they're depressed, so here, take these pills for a year".

And in my deep experience of that area, no recreational drug I ever took (which includes quite a few!), had even a shadow of the lasting, foundational changes and effects that SSRIs have. Permanent mood alteration and permanent sexual dysfunction are just two of the common outcomes.

No so-called recreational trip (or series of trips) I ever had, resulted in that kind of monumental systemic effect.

simply, this isn't true. sugar is a strong antidote to psilocybin. anxiety medication will calm you down. vomiting will prevent further uptake

I'd put them both, and their combination, on an equal footing.

Therapists are not infallible and like all people vary in skills and competence. Not everyone is going to benefit from therapy and for some people it will be harmful. Ditto for shrooms.

Given the expense and lack of access to therapists, for many people trying mushrooms first is probably a good option. You could have a bad time but it's very much dose dependent. Most people will just laugh a lot. Taking a massive dose and not being prepared for the things lurking in your subconscious is most definitely not recommended.

It's the usual story: if they were legal you'd have much more control over strength, variety and usage. Less people would be harmed and more people would benefit.

My original point was that the warning from the experts sounds pretty hollow and pointless. I don’t know why they even bothered to print such an empty statement.

I am not the GP but for me it is when therapists strike at the same weaknesses you're still trying to get over, and aren't tolerant of the ensuing negativity or wounds that are reopened. From my understanding the person in therapy has to be at their most vulnerable to receive the most effective care, and if you happen to pick a therapist that disagrees with your state of mind at your most vulnerable moments, then that only validates your existing fears. "You should see a therapist" has been said to me (and I'm sure countless others) without any indication that therapy is only a tool that works on some and not others. It also doesn't encapsulate that you have to have a strategy in place for how you use therapy, you have to do the majority of the work yourself, and if you choose a therapist that doesn't accept your worldview, however flawed it is at the time, you could validate your deepest fears all over again. I thought I at least understood those parts but I wasn't prepared for the rest, namely that therapists (for the time being) are human, and by nature of being human will always be infallible

One of my (many) issues was fear of expressing my own feelings. (For reasons that will become clear it still is) I wasn't in complete denial of this at the time and in fact wrote a fairly long document "outing" myself, my past history and my behavioral tendencies so my therapist wouldn't be fooled by the unconscious things I said or did. It was because therapy has to be based on self-reporting because the therapist can't read your mind, so what you say to them will influence the advice they give. I had unconsciously trained myself to speak in such a way that whatever help they would give would be irrelevant to my actual situation by way of omitting details or blowing up issues out of proportion and I could eternally vent to them without getting over any of my problems. I understand this is wrong. It wasn't productive at all; it was a defense mechanism I put up to avoid talking about my feelings under the guise of being "gifted" like I had been labeled in my early years. This was what I wanted to unroot with my last therapist and though a part of me hated how I was trying to "test" them I was going to have these tendencies anyway so I thought it was better if I tried to be vulnerable about them upfront

In response to that long document of self-reflection my therapist at the time raised his voice at me and the one thing I can remember him saying was that he "was only human." I interpreted this to mean only a super-human was capable of dealing with me; that he was frustrated by something he couldn't understand. I brought this up with him but it seemed to just glance off. In fact, I realized that the entirety of my document where I had for the umpteenth time exposed my darkest feelings to a stranger had been glanced over. And indeed this exact fear of vulnerability was one of the problems I was wanting to work over with him, and now that fear had become a lot more justified in my mind. I hadn't even gotten to talking about that fear because there was still so much about myself that I hadn't written about yet and I was still planning to. Or rather, had yet to expose unjustifiably (at least how I felt in the moment). Certainly I wasn't going to write about myself anymore. I realized my latest therapist was just another person in a long line of people throughout my life, supposed friends and relatives included, for whom trying to be vulnerable only resulted in more harm to my psyche than good. And over the course of my life up to this point, that was a consistent pattern with other therapists, whether or not I was paying the person to listen. It felt like I was preventing my actual voice from being heard, and any attempt at metacognition to point at myself and say "this is the real problem, not any of the gobbledygook I was spouting earlier" was for some reason always stamped out, I guess one too many times. Maybe it's because they do take what I say at face value, and/or I really am that malicious to lead them down all the way that path. And I wasn't even looking for validation that anything in what I wrote was justifiable or didn't need to change, as my assumption was it wasn't and that was exactly what I was seeking treatment for, unconscious frames of mind that I don't normally think about every day that make people turn away

I kept going for a few more weeks but the writing was on the wall; I no longer felt comfortable there. That was after over a decade and a half of seeing dozens of therapists. I was tired of attempting the same thing in a multitude of different styles and variations and seeing the same result unfold each time. I can only conclude I'm not the kind of person that responds well to traditional talk therapy. If anyone is to blame for that it's me, not the therapist. Anything I write isn't an indictment that therapy as a whole is not helpful, because thousands of people say it is and I have no way of disproving them; all I know is that it's not helpful for me alone. I feel like I just don't resonate with anyone else's wavelength, in general, that thought biases me to avoid attempting to fit in where I possibly could have, and the cycle repeats itself. I've now fully internalized that I'm outside of the grain, so to speak, and that my opinions are irrelevant to anyone but myself

After the fact I considered that maybe the people who refused to talk to me and told me to go to therapy before I was "ready" to talk to them again had only suggested that to me because in their minds I had failed them, and I needed corrective action, that talk therapy was the corrective action, and once the specialists had done their work to set my views straight I could rejoin the grown-up league and talk to actual people again. In hindsight maybe I wouldn't have liked talking to the actual people as much as I thought I would, had their scenario come to reality

For what it's worth I still try to believe that most of the billions of people on Earth have good intentions; it's just that those intentions have nothing to do with me, it isn't big deal that they have nothing to do with me, and those people would lead happier lives if I left myself out of them. I don't want to darken anyone's day more than I feel I have to (because I deem the act of writing what's on my mind as selfish, and this entire comment is exemplary of that) so I don't persist in communication anymore; only when I feel like I absolutely have to scream out what's on my mind, and not any longer than I must from the fear of becoming yet another person that dumps their trauma on innocent people for need of validation. Past a certain point I just want to place it somewhere

And to be clear, I really, honestly believe that explanation still isn't enough to justify me writing this in such a public place, and I would still feel the shame even if I lampshaded every single motivation I have for writing it and ensuring I preemptively defended myself against every single counterattack an arbitrary internet commentator could respond to me with. In my mind being so open with my experience is merely an indicator that my ongoing metamorphosis into a person immune to emotion and vain desires has yet to succeed