Psychiatric risks for worsened mental health after psychedelic use

Steve Jobs stated LSD was “one of the two or three most important things I ever did in my life”

Francis Crick saw the double helix of DNA on LSD

Kary Banks Mullis, the biochemist who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his improvements to the polymerase chain reaction technique: “It [LSD] was certainly much more important than any courses I ever took.”

Ralph Abraham claimed the insights he had while on psychedelics such as LSD profoundly influenced the development of his mathematical theories.

And there's more and I am not even mentioning that most artists are using something.

So yeah, if you can get Nobel prize you can definitely get PhD. You do you, I don't know what you have achieved but don't claim you posses some universal truth.

Definitely, those few experiences will be with me till my last breath.

I'll probably travel a little within the US but in the space of therapy stuff, I'd much rather accept that I'm simply not a travel person, than actually bother traveling.

I first tried LSD about 10 years ago and have taken various forms of psychedelics once or twice a year since. Some of them were, without a doubt, the most profound experiences of my life. You're right about the vague transcendentalist nonsense. The problem is there are no words to describe it adequately.

Despite only having pleasant experiences myself, I would never encourage any friend or stranger to try them. That is something only they can decide with their own research and risk appetite. There are absolutely serious potential consequences.

I think the worst consequence for me is that I have started to like weird music like psytrance even when sober.

I'm not saying that psychedelics are for everyone, or that anyone should take them on a whim and without preparation. However, it's just incorrect to equate their ability to change people's lives for the better to crystal healing or similar.

After all, asking someone what it was like to stand at the top of a mountain they'd just climbed, admiring the view, you're likely to get similar "hand-waving" answers about connection to something bigger than them, but you probably wouldn't argue that climbing a mountain and taking in the view is a worthless experience that amounts to nonsense.

Her suicide is very sad but I can relate. Rest in peace.

Personally it took me at least a month to feel functional again and then probably a year to start feeling better. Prior to that I struggled immensely with depression most of my life and abusing substances was my attempt to pull out of it, so to bottom out intensely like that feels extremely hopeless.

Once again giant disclaimer that I’m not authority, but I learned more about how psychedelics work from neuroscientists who research them and it was very illuminating. They are extremely potent in regards to neuroplasticity which seems like why they can be heaven or hell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoplastogen). My best take away from the scientists was to space trips out by several months similar to what you should do for MDMA. Frequently redosing keeps your brain activity from stabilizing. That’s not their advice or strong statements (they were avoiding advice-giving entirely), of course, just what I took away.

Years later and I have done a lot introspection and learning and I have taken psychedelics again. I can identify my own anxiety, paranoia, or bad patterned thoughts creeping up and talk myself back. I don’t attribute that traumatic experience or drug use in general to improving my circumstance and I sure as hell don’t recommend it but it does seem like my life going to total shit was a step I needed to take to get it back together. Therapy would’ve been easier.

Whereas in other groups a cascade effect sometimes happens and many people in such groups can experience mental health issues, and trauma.

There's that common call to examine "set and setting" but it's often a crap-shoot, due to the chaotic number of variables.

It's a murky subject due to the traditional way being far removed from clinical environments. Anything artificial like therapy props would stand out under the influence of psychedelics, but I guess they've thought of that. Good luck to them.

Although while under the influence of psychedelics you're unlikely to arrange your sock drawer with compulsive order. You're more likely to free the socks from captivity.

He’s been working in the field for quite a while, and many of the drug harmfulness diagrams that pop up every now and then are from one of his papers.

just like this study is trying to chisel at

while psychedelic communities are uniquely dismissive

"Although duloxetine reduced the symptoms of stress urinary incontinence and improved women’s quality of life, the harms related to suicidality and violence were 4 to 5 times more common with duloxetine than with a placebo, a meta analysis using patient level data by researchers from the Nordic Cochrane Centre showed." https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6103

SSRIs can cause some individuals to become disinhibited, impulsive. It is a particularly common symptom in children and adolescents (which is why many paediatricians and child psychiatrists hesitate to prescribe them), but more rarely can happen in adults too. Probably some people have a genetic susceptibility to it. It isn’t purely about ameliorating depression, since the same side effect has been observed in non-depressed children administered SSRIs (which aren’t solely used to treat depression, sometimes they are used to treat anxiety too, plus some children can end up being prescribed them when they have neither, due to misprescribing or off-label use.)

Disinhibition and increased impulsivity can increase the risks of suicidality/homicidality/etc

The particularly heavy-handed enforcement from 1970s onwards that spawned the term itself broadened into a war against the social and cultural opposition to the status quo - still partly racial in nature as various black civil rights and black power movements were a significant part of that, but also targeting anti-war protesters, "pinkos" etc.

That condition has a name, and it is "Engineer's Disease" or "Engineer's Syndrome."

> A line I often hear from programmers is that programming is like "having to build a plane while it's flying", implicitly making the case that programming is harder than designing and building a plane since people who design and build planes can do so before the plane is flying1. But, of course, someone who designs airplanes could just as easily say "gosh, my job would be very easy if I could build planes with 4 9s of uptime and my plane were allowed to crash and kill all of the passengers for 1 minute every week".

We tend to think that some problems are only as complex as our understanding of them.