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> e.g. do you friends think you're acting kinda weird now

Obviously there are bad/maladaptive versions of this, but also it would be odd if you healed a major psychological ailment and your friends didn’t notice a change in your behavior.

A common, very sad meme among artists, for example, is that they ought not get better psychologically because their art will suffer. Do people say they’re “acting kinda weird” as they heal? Yep. Is that worth putting any weight into at all? Nope.

In my experience psychedelics changed my outlook so thoroughly that I needed to get different friends.

> but perhaps had other negative side-effects that a study like this wouldn't measure (e.g. do you friends think you're acting kinda weird now?).

I have a couple friends who got in early on the microdosing and psychedelics-for-depression trend. One of them has become progressively more detached from reality over the years. Previously a rational person, he started picking up various pseudo-religious ideas over time.

At one point he believed he was capable of a type of telepathic communication, for example.

Every time I tell this story people try to discount it, downplay it, or explain it away as an underlying medical condition, but the changes were clearly triggered and worsened by psychedelics.

I don’t think it should be all that surprising, anyway. The history of psychedelic research is full of stories of people who started out with a curiosity and then descended into psychedelic-induced irrationality as their lives went on. Maybe the effects are negligible for someone taking a single or couple trips under the guidance of a therapist, but I think the internet psychedelic fans have taken these isolated studies as a license to ignore some of the risks of extended use or accumulating a lot of trips over a lifetime.

A therapist should be able to spot an undiagnosed case of something like bipolar or BPD from a mile away though. Young adults messing around with psychedelics for fun may not be so wise. It's not fun when you and your friends are all coming down except for the one person in the group whose been launched into the mother of all manic episodes.

> A therapist should be able to spot an undiagnosed case of something like bipolar or BPD from a mile away though.

These are very difficult to diagnose. At the very least, they’re inconsistent between therapists. Latent schizophrenia is also, by definition, not something you can see from a mile away.

One sentence in and this already completely ignores that the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time rely on a trust system instead of “reading the paper” for medical treatment they receive. Hell, “reading the paper” is itself almost entirely a trust exercise of its own. Most people, including most of this hellsite, aren’t capable of making sense of this stuff. It’s just that this site probably has a higher incidence of people that falsely assume that they can.

>uncertain of their objectivity.

How do you deal with something that is objectively therapeutic?

If you ask me about the benefits of isometric exercises, you're going to get something that will make you question my objectivity, because I'm not at all objective about it. I had chronic upper back pain for a decade, that got so bad at one point I could barely get out of bed. An osteopath gave me "super ibuprofen" and isometric exercises, and the isometrics literally, over night, cured my back pain. In the 25 years since, whenever I've started getting a little sore, I've done them again and been back to normal.

People with depression probably don't care about headaches.

Studies say they feel them more intensely.

Some of the RC psychedelics can be brutal, I remember 2C-E being super fun and visual, but it also felt like having a dammed ice pic jammed into your head.

> do you friends think you're acting kinda weird now?

From psilocybin mushrooms? I have never met anyone that's encountered this

I've adopted a personal faith due to mushrooms. We're all just dreams of soil made manifest. All of life is connected in a giant network of consciousness. It's truly wild.

Any details about this personal faith of yours? Is it like pantheism?

For me it is almost exactly this. I was not a heavy indulger, but that’s what I came away with. It has stuck with me for nearly 20 years since.

I don't share that faith, but I appreciate you sharing your experience. I imagine you've found your faith an overall very positive force in your life (like most people do with most faiths), no?

One thing I'm curious about - what happens when lovers/friends/family hear about your faith? Do they laugh it off? Or just accept as valid as any faith? Or do you not feel the need to tell them?

For context, I was not raised religious at all and kind of thought a bunch of it was hokum.

But then I did a heroic dose, and I went to the church of engineering where I saw the entire construction of the machines use from the transistor all the way up to the platform I'm building.

My faith is more a faith that humanity is worth it, and I've come to see "The Lord" as an appropriate metaphor for the collective conciseness of several billion people living their lives.

At core, I'm rejecting nihilism as a valid way to live, and I'm writing an essay to outline the way.

In this, I also reject cynicism, and this is because it offers nothing.

The way forward is to embrace the responsibility that comes with great knowledge and to build an organization that helps push technology forward. This is why my platform is open source ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ ), and I'm working very hard to get my handful of clients in a good place.

>Some of these people seemed overly invested in convincing me in a way that made me uncomfortable and uncertain of their objectivity.

What am I supposed to say? Psychedelics have the biggest gulf between how effective they are vs how effective people think they are in mental health. Going both by the scientific evidence and anecdotes they’re nothing but net (abliet with a significant backfire risk). Psychadelics also get you high which further biases one towards advocating them, enjoyable drugs are more viral than boring drugs.

Most people overestimate how effective pretty much every mental health treatment is except for psychadelics. It encourages one to proselytize even if psychadelics are moderately dangerous drugs.

This paper also mentioned that other studies checking after 12 weeks found greater reduction of benefits, so subsequent treatment looks to be somewhere between those two time frames.