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Comment by coderintherye | Hacker News Reader

Erowid is a great resource for these sorts of questions: https://erowid.org

In fact they have an answer specific to your question on mushrooms: https://www.erowid.org/ask/ask.php?ID=1606

In short, there is very little risk but whether or not someone should choose to take something should still be an informed choice. As far as risk to life, there's been few or no reported deaths purely due to ingesting psilocybin. However, there are small risks around operating heavy machinery (e.g. driving) after as well as small risks around ensuring you are actually ingesting a safe psilocybe mushroom as opposed to a different toxic mushroom.

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I think there's a lot more nuance than even that. Many psychedelics can trigger or exacerbate undesirable mental conditions that persist for the rest of your life.

Nah, they don’t cause undesirable mental conditions that persist for the rest of your life. Your “trip” is about 6-8 hours on a typical 3.5g dose.

That’s not what they said, psychedelics can trigger preexisting vulnerabilities to mental disorders. A psychotic break can do enormous damage.

I would recommend reading up on persistent disassociative personality disorders and persistent visual artifacts from psychedelics. Both are rare but well documented side effects of psychedelic usage.

I personally know someone who has suffered visual distortions post trip for 20 years and counting at this point.

they may be interested in this, if they weren't already: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4487243

There is a foundation looking to understand why/how this happens and what we can do to moderate/manage it: https://www.perception.foundation/

Dude I know people who have had their lifelong schizophrenia start at the same time they started using hallucinogens like LSD and mushrooms. It's not a conspiracy or bullshit. People I have loved have changed in ways they couldn't control and was destructive/scary for them.

I don't disagree that these substances are known triggers for those with predispositions, but be careful with your logic - that's exactly the same format as autism/vax conspiracy folks use, when in reality the common cause is age. Symptoms of autism can start to manifest around the time childhood vaccines are being given, just like schizophrenia and related conditions manifest in teenagers and young adults (also groups known to try drugs). In the latter case we do also have evidence that psychedelics are associated with increased risk/earlier onset, but you wouldn't be able to tell from the timing anecdote.

How do you know that it's not the other way around - they started using hallucinogens because their schizophrenia started and the confusion around a drastic change in mental state caused drug seeking behavior?

Schizophrenia commonly starts showing symptoms in the mid to late twenties - so while the two may be linked it's also likely that schizophrenia onset happens to be the age that many people start seriously taking drugs.

What's your agenda? I seriously don't understand why you'd say such things, if HPPD and DP/DR are real.

As someone who is very much in favor of legalizing psychadelics and has enjoyed his experiences with them:

No, there is a lot of strong evidence that psychadelic trips can trigger underlying issues such as schizophrenia, etc.

However, some portion of these people would have it triggered these latent illnesses regardless of the use of these substances. The hard to answer question is how many people would develop these conditions without the drug use, if the drug use significantly accelerated it, etc.

On the subject of HPPD, I am more skeptical. It's very poorly understood, and there's been correlation shown for just about any sort of psychoactive substance, SSRIs, etc. Studies have claimed that anywhere from 5% to 25% of people who have taken recreational psychoactive drugs are impacted by it. Which, well, I have not done and am not qualified to do such a study, but having spoken to hundreds of users of psychadelic drugs over several decades and never encountering a single person who claimed to experience HPPD, it's hard to square up my anecdotal experiences with some of the reports.

Something is going on there - there's enough people that report the symptoms that I don't believe it's made up or anything like that - but it doesn't seem to be nearly as simply as "Anyone that does recreational drugs has a chance of developing HPPD"

Triggers schizophrenia?

Think that through.

Schizophrenia was already there, the trip made it apparent.

Associating “psychedelics” with CAUSATION is absolutely irresponsible

> Schizophrenia was already there, the trip made it apparent.

That is exactly what they are saying.

please top minimizing the real risks of using psychedelics (especially for certain groups of people predisposed to mental health issues). You make normalizing them harder and you do more damage than if you were just honest about it. The war on drugs resulted in a lot of lies being spread about these substances. Don't do the exact same thing just because it's on the other side of the argument.

That might be your experience, but it negates the experience of the 'non-survivors' so to say.

>Answered by murple in 2001

I think I may have read this exact post 10+ years ago. Reminds me of old homes that have since been sold. What links to this Q&A?

This is an example of some of the better sources of info on that site: https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd.shtml

They are not doctors. I would not trust that website as a source of medical advice.

That's fine if you don't trust it and if you want medical advice, you should always talk to your primary care provider for that advice.

However I work with doctors, and through that have had the ability to discuss the site with various medical doctors. In general, they have also noted it as a good resource. They've also noted there is limited ability for them as medical doctors to assess the medical side effects of various drugs due to the illegality of them in their jurisdictions. Thus, the need for resources such as Erowid. If you want your medical doctor to be able to give you medical advice about psychedelic drug use then help push for continued legal reclassification of and access to psychedelics for medical researchers.

That's OK, I don't trust doctors who lack any first hand experience of these substances. I'm deeply skeptical of the push to medicalize their administration, given the parlous state of that industry.

I was explicitly told to read up on several topics from Erowid by my psychiatrist upon starting an antidepressant. Her comment was: "I can't tell you what you'll experience, but if you're willing, here's some resources". I read the comments, including quite a bit of medical research that I would have been otherwise unaware of, and was prepared for some of the weirder effects that can come with it (the drug itself is a dopamine receptor augmenter).

The fact of the matter is that a lot of researchers depend on the folk knowledge that is stuffed into Erowid for their own research because it's one of the higest quality sources of information on the actual effects of various substances that people have been putting into their bodies. Much of the research on these substances cannot be funded easily (federal law in the US bans the use of federal funds to research LSD, marijuana, etc due to their classification by the DEA of "intractably bad for society, useless for medicine, and not worthy of academic study.") This means that researchers have to turn to these contemporaneous accounts.

Nobody calls Erowid "medical advice." It's the tripper's notebook, shared and amalgamated by many a substance user. It's the closest thing we have to a Merck Manual for things that alter your mind.

In my (admittedly limited) experience there's quite an overlap in expertise between the better-informed illicit experimenters and the left side of the bell curve for psychiatric professionals.

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