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Comment by 173throwaway | Hacker News Reader

LSD saved my life. I suffered chronic depression and anxiety with suicidal ideation, had tried multiple psychiatric drugs and forms of therapy, and nothing had improved (the failure of these officially-approved modes of treatment actually left me feeling much more hopeless). Taking LSD gave me the insight that this wasn't fundamental the the nature of being me, that there was hope that one day I could love my life. The road to get there has been difficult, and has involved intense (non-LSD) psychedelic-assisted therapy to deal with very deep childhood trauma, but that first fundamental glimmer that there's a reason to have hope came from an experience with LSD.

If I had listened to stern authority figures telling me that there's never a good reason to try it and it could only do me harm, I would in all likelihood be dead today.

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Similar experience here. Historically traditional talk therapy only retraumatized me and was not going to be compatible with my personality. I had ran out of other treatment options (stimulants, SSRIs, EMDR, ECT, meditation/mindfulness...) before finally reaching for psilocybin purely out of desperation.

Combined with intensive integration therapy it has been the only treatment that had any positive effect. A lot of treatments have a risk profile in whether they will confirm my existing beliefs and only aggravate my situation (similar to above, failing to find "go to therapy" useful advice and opening myself to blame/unlovability from givers of the advice), but I hope I can go back sometime for a similar treatment if it's psychoactive.

It was no cure, and today I'm largely the person I was before treatment moodwise, but one thing I learned was for a condition such as mine, there is unlikely to ever be a cure. I had just the right amount of trauma that I can expect to manage my condition for the rest of my life. But what opinion do I choose to attach to this belief? That I'm okay with it. It wasn't my fault so there's not any sense in shaming myself for not finding what I can't have. At least one thing I can say is I found something that had an effect, and no matter how pessimistic I get, not even I can deny that with some depressive retort. This is not a sensation I'm familiar with. Before taking the drug I had lost all hope from believing my incompatibility with doctor-approved methods made me an untouchable, on top of already being depressed. It was clear my path forward would have to be paved away from the one society prescribes for me from then on.

Strangely I have no strong desire to take the drug again yet even though I am still depressed. I accept my life will be one of sometimes violent mood swings and I will have to be more patient with myself than in the past. I have made it my life's goal not to foist my malfunctioning brain's irrationality onto others at all costs. My condition is not my fault, but it is my responsibility to manage it. If I'm depressed now I just try to sit with it instead of fighting for things I know are unrealistic to have. I'm just not like most people, and I'm okay with that now, more or less.

hey thank you for posting this. I'm sorry to hear about your condition but happy LSD was able to help a bit.

One unsolicited idea from a stranger: consider trying it again! I was in a similar situation for a long time (found it helpful but no strong desire to try it again), but multiple trips over time ended up being very helpful - for me at least.

Agree, I read research (unsure which) that stated people with my circumstance benefited more from repeated sessions, sometimes as high as 5x. I intend to go back at a later date but I see no rush.

That last paragraph just about knocked me out and is something I'll be thinking about for a long time. Thanks for sharing.

I wish you all the best. You have a lot of weight to carry.

It’s always risk vs reward. It turned you around, it can push healthy folks into a long lasting depression. Happy for you, but it isn’t a magical cure, it’s a chemical for twisting your synapses. As you’ve noted, having a guide through the experience and a purpose is vital.

> it’s a chemical for twisting your synapses

Thats an oversimplification to be polite. For most people it can bring the most intense and beautiful experiences their live can ever produce. Then there is (non-trivial) minority which has something broken in their core (which is a statement that can mean many things). Yes, its not for them, or only at great risk (and potentially great reward as OP wrote).

But man, I never ever came close to the simple pure beauty that I experienced repeatedly on mushrooms (for the sake of argument cca 1:1 to LSD), never with any sort of guide, just let my mind wander to places it wants to go.

And I've got married, have 2 beautiful healthy kids, was there to cut umbilical cord for both, climbed extreme peaks like Matterhorn, hiked for weeks and months in himalaya and other places around the world, all very intense.

Psychedelics changed permanently perspective on life and important matters quite a bit. Experienced very intense spiritual moments, despite being cca agnostic (and it just confirmed and enforced my views to be clear). For all the bad it can do and does, it adds so much good to mankind. Its a very powerful tool.

Your post actually makes me sad. You have such a wonderful life: kids, wife, privilege and wealth to travel to Europe. But the most beautiful experience in your mind wasn’t any of that, it was tripping on shrooms? If you are trying to make me not want to try psychedelics you did well.

The glass is half full of half empty? Did GP have reduced intensity of experiences related to his family, or they were of "normal" intensity, just intensity of shrooms experiences were above it?

The person you reply to sounds like someone who kknocks it without having tried it. I base this on the full comment, and more specifically on the fragment "tripping on shrooms". Drugs all enhance and alter what's inside you, for better and for worse, controllable or not. If climbing Mt Everest was your most eye opening and amazing experience, does that somehow reduce the value of your wife and kids? Such a strange premise...

I mean I hear former junkies say the same thing about heroin after they kick. “It was the greatest pleasure I’ll ever know,” they’ll tell you with utmost sincerity. More a bug than feature, to me, YMMV

LSD and heroin are pretty uncomparable. And those people were right: heroin is the greatest pleasure, that's its whole thing.

Hmm, an interesting reaction, I think I get it but I view topic from different perspective.

I am not anyhow lowering value of all other things I ever achieved in life, those are some hard won victories that didn't come without pain (and lets check in 20 years whether that stood the test of time). I gave them as a mere comparison.

Those mushrooms were that intense, it would be a lie to say otherwise. Cutting first umbilical cord was second, but then every hard peak I've climbed brought me to my knees and brought tears of joy and released emotions, those were some powerful emotions too (I guess when you struggle very hard and risk life for some specific goal and then reaching it this happens, at least to me).

But don't judge before knowing, there is nothing in this world that can prepare you for that intensity, if dose is enough (milder stuff, full stomach etc may result in different experience). Few words of description - laying in bed with eyes closed, losing gradually all the senses, dissolving what remained into mist of atoms that swirled and danced to shamanic music playing in the background. Then after a long time, very slowly starting to climb down that 'hill' by putting those atoms back together one by one, piecing together my personality, and then sense by sense, very slowly. Pure happiness afterwards, grin for an hour or two. Massive mental exhaustion from 'expanded mind', worst headache I ever had (but basic stuff like paracetamol helped a lot). Long lasting effects on life perspective.

But thats me, other folks may put the umbilical cord as #1, others those mountains or other endeavors.

Why must the items in his list of great moments share ordinality with the items in your list?

I personally know some whose life was destroyed by it. LSD totally shattered them.

10 years later and this person still isn't right.

Pink Floyd’s man who recently passed away may be an example. Brian Wilson another, I heard him say his one regret was psychedelics as they scrambled his brain… I’m all for them when used with respect and correct (mind)set and setting. Lots of human progress has came off the back of psychedelics but they not for the common people. It takes a brave and worthy (shaman) to guide someone through the collective conscious

Those folks had serious psychiatric mental issues to begin with. Then they threw tens of truckloads of hard drugs in various mixes on top of that, often for decades.

This could break even the most healthy person and tells nothing about therapeutic potential of these substances with right approach. Its like judging how healthy salt is to humans by watching some maniac consume 200g of it daily.

Ironically, many in this thread are advocating for that! Take someone with mental problems, throw a truckload of psychedelics on top. That’ll fix em gud! And, if that doesn’t work, up the dosage, or maybe do the 3000 dollar ketamine sessions twice a week to really really fix the problem.

Literally no one has suggested anything like that.

Wilson was taking a lot of different sorts of drugs iirc. Part of the problem is people take psychedelics in youth, when schizophrenia, bipolar and other mental disorders tend to arise making it hard to quantify true risk.

Those guys were using a shit ton of drugs of all forms, so I'm not sure a single hit of LSD (which I'm sure was many) was the culprit.

For me, I've used LSD a few times, both alone, and with a few trusted people. It's an incredibly intense drug, and if administered correctly, can really help.

Of course it has the potential to really fuck with someone permanently, but so does alcohol, Ozempic, etc, yet we say nothing of those.

Was that person a well-balanced cca normal happy person without any childhood traumas or in-borne mental issues before?

no but I believe he was trying to treat some mental problems by using it

Neither psych drugs nor therapy nor LSD is a cure for depression. I too have had chronic depression and anxiety. Maybe I have had a more severe cocktail of mental conditions. Psych drug informed me where the irritation came from, caused me to rebel, but then it proceeded to give me suicidal ideation. Therapy was like a person talking a language I didn’t understand. alcohol was the most addicting experience as an escape from problems. I imagine lsd was an escape from reality.

The ultimate cure for depression: call this new line of sadness and hopelessness and despair as the baseline for what life is. And any ounce of hope, happiness, bloom is a gift and blessing that you appreciate without taking for granted. And then you structure yourself to live for those fleeting moments. And suicide is a world of persistent misery many times worse than what you are experiencing.

But instead you took LSD, and found yourself hope yet the message can be a complete deception. What will you do when you realize that? All you have done is separated yourself from ever understanding your reality because of that hope.

People who suffer from depression are those who are unable to connect with their world. Either trauma, anger, or confusion will cause them separation and difficulty of integration. There is this book called feeling good I think which goes into CBT. The first few pages repeats one thing relentlessly: you have exaggerated the negatives in your world in order to cope with it.

Some people adopt supremacy complexes to give themselves new meaning and curse out all irritations. This is a temporary solution because it swings them into the other side of disconnect eventually

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