Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

"Recent experiments show that 2-Br-LSD, like LSD, relieves depressive behavior in mice."

Haven't been down this road in 25 years, but I don't think I've ever felt as deep of depressive symptoms as the week or so after taking LSD. I have suffered depression my entire life, but LSD certainly never helped, and probably worsened. Buyer beware.

I get very wary of some of the coverage of this stuff, it all seems very reductionist and simplistic.

I suspect that the positive effects people are having from these things ultimately comes down to two things:

1. the revelation that they can feel a different way, as a result of having the emotional and perceptive aspects of their brain all frazzled (in somewhat random ways) for a period of time.

2. the genuine upside that some psychedelic experiences can and do show how beautiful the world can be. Standing in a quiet field in the spring, or in some mountains, or in a forest in the fall is and watching a flock of birds fly by and hearing the insects sing etc is always an amazing experience, but these chemicals can make you far more sensitive to perceiving that, for a time. And in a way that can stick with you your entire life. Being reminded that the world can be beautiful, and experiencing that at a deep emotional level... may be the best antidote to depression for me.

But they can also really mess you up. I've watched a friend lose total contact with reality, start ranting incoherently, and begin trashing my apartment and wrecking my stuff. I've seen people become total anti-social assholes. I've seen it bring out severe paranoia. And, quite often, pronounced arrogance or elitism.

And I worry it's just more "this chemical will quickfix you", while in fact our brains are so social and community driven and that aspect gets ignored rather than dealt with... And on that note I'd argue that's probably one of the aspects of the positive effects seen in MDMA treatment, in that it definitely does encourage an empathetic and social focus from the individual, or at least it feels like it.... for a time. (But also at the same time, some of the most self-focused and shallow behaviours I've ever seen, so ...)

The fact that you've been downvoted to grey text shows that psychedelic user-promoters are in a thought bubble & refuse to acknowledge there are, in fact, potentially severe downsides.

I was involved with some pretty serious psychedelic users & dealers (dmt, lsd, ket, research chems, mushrooms, etc.) 1/3 of them have had irreparable personality changes for the negative, on a spectrum from 'paralysing social anxiety' to 'unable to parse reality in a standard way leading to relationship-ending disagreements with anyone he knows longer than 2 months'.

Or a more recent example, the pilot who suffered from depression having a psychotic break after taking mushrooms, because he thought he was trapped in a dream or hell, and attempting to crash an entire plane full of people as a result.

Mushrooms get this "harmless" reputation because, y'know, they're "natural" etc... There's now a big push to get them legalized somehow here in Canada, and full-on illegal stores popping up around that the police don't seem to be all that interested in shutting down.

But having been down that road... I'd say the side-effects from them were always more paranoia and reality-destructuring to me (and not usually in any kind of pleasant way) than LSD or other things I tried back when I was young and unwise.

The one advantage I suppose would be that they wear off after 4-5 hours. Not so LSD. Takes days to become normal after an LSD event. No thanks.

60 years old - just got back into mushrooms and acid (lsd). After 30 years of only booze, i drink less and regret avoiding the hallucinogenic for so long. YMMV...it's not all doom znd gloom, and the 'out of control-ness', that can happen is nothing compared to getting drunk but a certain amount of time should be allocated for reflection after a sizeable trip. Microdosing, which several of my friends do, seems to work for everyone. I prefer to get fucked up and take a week to think about things.

Yeah thats not what happened, if we are referring to the same incident.

He had had a close friend pass recently and he had, within the last few weeks, used mushrooms to help treat the depression/grief. Ie he did not crash the plane mid psychotic break slash psychadelic trip.

I never claimed that he was mid-trip? But by his own admission, the use of mushrooms induced some form of psychosis that distorted his ability to perceive time or understand what and what is not reality. I fully support decriminalization of psychedelics, but I also don’t think they’re free from harms, especially for those with mental health problems.

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