As such, if you are "surfing" thoughts and find an association of something, that association can become very prominent. If you don't have the context to understand why you are making that association, especially after the trip, you can get stuck with beliefs about yourself that could be non optimal.
On the flip side this hyperconnectivity also allows you to see things like a completely different person would see them, which is where the true healing power lies. Its like you can be disugsted with a particular food when you are sober, but on shrooms you can truly feel what it would be like to enjoy that food. Once you have that context, you are able to move forward after the trip into right directions.
This is why set and setting are EXTREMELY important for significant trips. You want to be with someone who a) has done psychedelics, b) is in a very good mental state, and c) has a low ego not to project their own personality onto you. The best trip sitters are those that encourage exploration - they take everything you communicate to them and ask you questions about it without imparting any bias.
Along with two other blokes, I got interested in psychedelics in high school. Took one medium high dose and wasn't right for a few months. Never in my life did i ever experienced paranoia, delusions, or hallucinations that are genuinely hard to separate from reality, but I did after that.
Intense psychedelic experiences can fracture what you once knew as "reality" allows all sorts of ideas to float into your mind, with equal possibility. This might be helpful and give you more flexible thinking (helpful for depression) but it also leaves you incredible vulnerable to all sorts of garbage ideas that you never would have considered otherwise. ie conspiracy theories or straight up delusions about the supernatural. Remember: It's not paranoia if you genuinely believe they really are out to get you!
Fighting these garbage ideas is a lot of work once they take hold, but you'll only know too late if you were vulnerable, and worse, if you can successfully align your understanding of reality with most other people.
I got extremely lucky that I stabilized. I'm convinced part of this was only doing it one time. My two co-experimenters took many trips with various doses are still in and out of mental hospitals years later. Psychedelics are incredibly potent and nobody really understands them very well. A lot of what is written on the internet ignores, downplays, or denies the very serious risks to your philosophy of mind and mental function. Its like playing with fire when you don't have heat sensation in your hands.
Several other comments on this page echo these warnings. One even claims there is an 18% chance you could go from depressed to schizophrenic. I have no idea where that figure came from, but the risk is certainly not 0%
And obviously, start low and see how it goes.
You may have saved 20 years in an unhappy marriage.
Maybe a better example would be my friend who took psychedelics and then believed he was in communication with Elon Musk. This one is more obviously a false idea, but nevertheless he was convinced it was real for a period after the psychedelic experience.
There’s a mystical concept that psychedelics open your third eye to see the world as it really is or something, but psychedelics are notorious for giving false ideas and making them seem like revelations. It’s obvious when it’s nonsense (like telepathy with Elon Musk) but it’s less obvious when the implanted idea is something like “your husband secretly doesn’t love you”. Another strangely common report is the belief that people around you have been replaced by clones, which can get scary very fast if the person can’t separate the idea from reality.
In the referenced anecdote it could be as simple as an excuse needed for someone who's been thinking about it for years. Though maybe that's enough to be a benefit
Anyway I like your example and look forward to what is learned about using psychedelics to help people :)
No prior history of any mental illness in him nor any of his family.
This is a common excuse: Blame some hidden susceptibility, not the drug. It doesn’t matter what it was, though. The drug caused it and there were no warning signs. Fine before the drug. Not fine after the drug.
It's the interaction between that person and the drug.
I have a crustacean allergy. That doesn't mean crustaceans are bad, or other people shouldn't eat shrimp. It just means it's a bad mix for me.
One of the benefits of administering psychedelics in a clinical setting is that telepathic nonsense is more likely to be noticed early and corrected for, whether by reducing dosage or suspending treatement. (And treating it as medicine allows us to study those people who react negatively to it, further reducing harm.)
Now that is scary.-
PS. We used to trip to contact our wise, the Spirit, spirits, our gods, the beyond, our higher selves ...
... now we just get ketamine kid.-
That said, I _do_ recommend mushrooms to everyone I know with depression or anger issues.
I think these risks are more common than was previously discussed on the internet. For a long time reports of very negative experiences were dismissed, laughed at, downplayed, waved away as symptoms of something else, or excused as something positive but mysterious.
It’s becoming more acceptable for people to discuss their negative experiences and not get downvoted or attacked for sharing them.
This is the type of dismissal and downplaying I’m referring to.
My friend descended into psychosis after taking psychedelics. It was not “half the point” and not helpful to his life in any way.
How do you think psychedelics work? They activate the serotonin 2a receptor. It’s nothing but a different drug that effects serotonin. Except it does it more intensely but like all these drugs that act on receptors they wear off because of something what’s called receptor density changes.
For 70 years, we’ve been trying to manipulate receptors into making people feel good. It’s a losing proposition and it’s time to. We changed our thinking. For instance, if these people do have serotonin deficiencies, which is still possibly the case, what is it? That’s causing these deficiencies? Is it low, zinc, low B6, genetics, infection? There’s so many other things that we know that this could be, but we don’t try it.
Nobody other than crazy micro-dosers is taking mushrooms often enough to cause a change in receptor density and those people are putting themselves at risk of valvopathy due to 5HT2a restructuring of the heart valves (which, as an aside, is turning out to be a problem for people on prozac and other long-term SSRIs).
A drug that is very occasional, point use, with no ongoing use, which has long term treatment results, is absolutely, utterly unlike prozac.
That aside, let's say for the sake of argument that the mechanism is similar for prozac; I think that's wrong (one additional explanation may actually be: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15675... ) but whatever. If so, then psilocin is vastly superior to prozac because you are not required to have continuous exposure for the benefits, as the corresponding cost, withdrawal, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, heart issues, etc. are removed.
This is so frustrating to me. Why not just google it before you think you know more about this than someone studying it for ten years? Two things can change receptor density: time and dose.
A Single Dose of Psilocybin Increases Synaptic Density and Decreases 5-HT2A Receptor Density in the Pig Brain
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33467676/
This is exactly why psychedelics last longer than prozac. It has less to do with half life and more to do with dose.
How is the mechanism not at least comparative to prozac since it is well know they both effect serotonin? The risk with psilocin is exactly the dose, as many people find out. And you thing there are not cardiac side effects from psychedelics?
A Case of Prolonged Mania, Psychosis, and Severe Depression After Psilocybin Use: Implications of Increased Psychedelic Drug Availability
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.22010...
Worsening suicidal ideation and prolonged adverse event following psilocybin administration in a clinical setting: case report and thematic analysis of one participant's experience
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11698204/
Safety First: Potential Heart Health Risks of Microdosing
https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/04/13/safety-first-p...
I have previously read that study. You should put it in context: for example, how quickly does the brain add A1 and A2 receptors for caffeine? (I already know the answer, but you might want to use it to contextualize that study).
The study about the woman co-administering venlafaxine (Effexor) which is an SNRI might be worth considering as non-representative.
Worsening suicidal ideation .. is not unique to _any_ antidepressant. Are you trying to suggest that this is somehow unique to psilocin? We were discussing prozac which is _well known to have this problem_. They got black box warnings for this reason.
As for the heart study, I mentioned this myself elsewhere, and SSRIs are showing the same issue: https://columbiasurgery.org/news/columbia-surgery-researcher... - much worse, however, because people take these drugs every day for decades.