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Comment by petee | Hacker News Reader

My friend in highschool did a solid week on lots of acid and mushrooms, and ended up in the hospital with a schizophrenia diagnosis - this was 20yr ago, but they said he was likely to get it eventually but he triggered something or otherwise sped up the process.

So you're probably right, but on both points sadly. To this day he still sends me complex CAD drawings of nothing.

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Mushrooms and LSD have high tolerance from 24-96h where higher doses will not reproduce the same effects w/o abstinence. I find it hard to believe that a week's worth of exposure was the sole cause.

[s]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...

>but they said he was likely to get it eventually but he triggered something or otherwise sped up the process.

OP did address that. But

Lots of folks attribute things like schizophrenia to hallucinogen use, when in reality, people make questionable decisions in their late teens and early twenties; this is the time that these disorders tend to manifest. So a lot of coincidence leads to a casual relationship in popular culture.

It's genetic predisposition to schizophrenia that enables psychedelics to activate it. Without the genetic predisposition you'd be lucky to get psychosis (or unlucky, as it were). That's why people with a family history of schizophrenia or related mental disorders are particularly encouraged to avoid psychedelics.

I agree, most medications will create/change tolerance to more of the same. In some respect that's the purpose of taking some medications in the first place, but it can lead to poor long term outcomes. Take enough melatonin exogenously and your endogenous production stops completely.

“I took five people, and we locked ourselves in a building for three weeks, and we took 400 micrograms of LSD every four hours. That is 2400 micrograms of LSD a day.… We finally were just drinking out of the bottle.… We were very high.”

From Be Here Now - Ram Dass/Richard Alpert

Interestingly he was the guy involved in giving psilocybin to priests back at Harvard in the 1960's.

Recent source: https://tripsitter.substack.com/p/ram-dass

On the other hand, one single dose of a psychiatric medication can ruin peoples lives. They get brain shocks, sexual dysfunction or anhedonia for life. One dose of marijuana can effect similar outcomes.

I know immunosuppresants are whole separate part of medicine, but its a playing with fire risk/reward where its too early to establish reasonable probabilities. But at least we can begin the cause-effect discovery process.

I found a copy of Be Here Now in a thrift store that had a pressed marijuana leaf in it. First time I'd ever seen one. Bought the book and read it, pretty hard to digest and hippy trippy stuff but an entertaining read.

Psychedelics are known to occasionally activate schizophrenia in genetically predisposed individuals, so this is definitely not unheard of. Given how often I take LSD though, I'm fairly certain I'm not genetically predisposed to schizophrenia, otherwise I probably would've been in the 12th inner circle of schizophrenia by now.

(I've been trying to impact the stability of my brain for years. I just want a way to destroy rational thought but that isn't lethally addictive (benzos), or irreversibly neurotoxic (deliriants), or literal poison (alcohol). Harm reduction is such a drag, I just want to safely explore unsafety!!)

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