What are the low-but-life-changing risks?
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.