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Something similar happened to me, but with weed. I was experienced with LSD, mushrooms, and marijuana, but one night, after watching Fight Club while high, I couldn't get the thought out of my head that my buddy (also high, who had suggested we watch the film) was merely a projection of my alternate personality. At first I found this odd thought funny and I brushed it aside; but it kept recurring and it turned into a multi-hour panic attack. Like you said, I used to think there was a "before" me, and an "after" me. It truly changed my life. I struggled with severe anxiety and panic attacks for many years afterward. To some degree, I still do.

I used to think of that night as the cause, but I later noticed that I had been building up to some kind of "breakdown" for months. I had always been a bit more tense, a bit more worried, and more sensitive than most. I had a deep belief that, if I tried hard enough, I could prevent bad things from happening. This sense of control is at the root of anxiety disorders. Most people don't think bad things will happen to them, so they lose no sleep about it. Those of us with anxiety issues are just the opposite: we're constantly trying to prevent and prepare for the worst, even though the majority of those feared events will never materialize.

Anyway, if you haven't already done so, I suggest that you not think about the mushrooms as being the cause but rather the trigger. Once anxiety attacks begin, they are very difficult to control. It wasn't the mushrooms specifically; rather, it was the anxiety that caused the downward spiral, as the conditioned fear response gains strength through repetition. (There's a load of good publications about this.) In short, there aren't two versions of you ("pre-mushroom you" and "post-mushroom you"); you just had a serious transformative experience.

Marijuana, yep, been there, heart constriction, crucifixion level pain, feeling like I was dying. This happened several times in my early 20s -- solution, stopped smoking ;-)

and started meditating. That alone stripped loads of baggage. Urban areas have plenty of zen centers and the like. A lot of crap is self created, bad habit oriented behavior, like sitting hunched before the screens.

Speaking of, signing off ;-)

Cheers

I think a lot of the paranoia and other negative effects from pot use are symptoms of overdose, and are the result of either smoking too much or too frequently.

Taking fewer hits, smoking weaker weed, and/or smoking less often can help.

I'm sorry to hear of your similarly terrifying experience. The mental model you use to describe it is interesting though, and makes me consider that the narratives we (in the general sense) formulate to represent our lives are an important tool in processing them. Will definitely have to think about this a bit more.

Out of curiosity, may I ask how you dealt with your experience in the following months afterward?

At first, I didn't deal with it very well because I didn't realize what was happening. I thought I had gone crazy, or was in the process of going crazy. Back then, the Internet wasn't as helpful as it is today (or harmful, depending upon how you want to look at it), or I would have Googled it; but I had heard about panic attacks through film and TV (The Sopranos, for example) and I eventually dragged myself into a bookstore to browse the self-help section (something the "before" me never would have done), and there I stumbled across books about anxiety disorders. After a few months of suffering, this was enough to motivate me to see a doctor. Of course, the doctor was familiar with anxiety, and suggested that I see a psychiatrist. This totally blew my mind. A psychiatrist? I was "normal" just a few months before. I had never even considered seeing a psychiatrist for any reason, so I brushed it off, thinking that I just needed to get it under control by myself.

So I spent the next year reading about anxiety, going through workbooks, taking supplements (another thing I had never done before), and trying to "gain control." Turns out, trying to wrest control is a bad way to approach anxiety; it imposes impossible expectations upon yourself--"If only I were smarter and stronger I wouldn't have these panic attacks. I just need to get it together." This kind of thinking makes anxiety worse. And it got worse.

Eventually though, I was able to find a better approach that involved accepting anxiety as a part of my life. I was inspired by something I had read about Zen Buddhism, so I began trying to view my anxiety as an old friend, my old torturer, my own brand of human suffering. Believe it or not, this worked. I began to intentionally do things that made me anxious. Axiety is much less powerful once you acknowledge that its roots lie in the brain, in the evolutionary drive to protect oneself from danger, and you can't consciously control it. All you can do is acknowledge it and move on, or "Feel the fear and do it anyway." I forced myself to reengage in life. I never stayed home when feeling anxious (I found this was the worst possible thing I could do); I accepted invitations to parties, I traveled, I enrolled in college, I moved.

But I continued having recurring episodes of severe anxiety that would leave me crippled for weeks: I couldn't sleep, I could barely eat, I had difficulty doing simple things like grocery shopping. So, at the urging of my family, I saw a psychiatrist (who was not helpful at all, as all she wanted to do was find out whether someone had touched my peepee when I was a boy. Hint: no one had), a neurologist (who was very helpful and very knowledgeable about anxiety), and a new primary doctor. My doctors coordinated to find a suitable medication, an SSRI. With this, coupled with my learned coping skills, I eventually began to feel "normal" again. A few years later, after experiencing no severe anxiety, I dropped the medication and was able to move on with my life.

Unfortunately, way too many people who use psychedelics are both unprepared for the experience and don't know how to use them constructively.

Many, if not most people go through their lives mostly unconsciously, with very little introspection or understanding of their subconscious. Many of them have serious issues and demons from their childhood or other trauma that they've never dealt with and do everything within their power to avoid thinking about.

Is it really a surprise that when they take a substance which has the effect of powerfully bringing subconscious content to consciousness, a substance they've never been taught how to use properly, that some of them are unable to deal with and are frightened of what they find?

Too many people take psychedelics with little clue as to what to expect, or with intention to just "party" or "see some trippy colors", not realizing just how powerful these substances are, and not realizing that they should be treated with respect and prepared for properly (we could say a lot about set and setting here).

Furthermore, psychedelic users rarely know what to do with or how to integrate what they learn after the experience is over. This lack of integration and refusal to deal with negative as well as positive emotions and subconscious content can also cause many problems.

This is why psychedelic use is best done under the guidance of experienced therapists or in a shamanic context where the tripper can get help both during and after the trip.

I'm not saying that doing or not doing any of the above is what led to the bad trip you experienced, or to the anxiety attacks afterwards. I don't know you or anything about how you approached the experience to hazard a guess. However, it would not surprise me if some of these issues were at play here.

"At the time, I thought that was it: a bad trip but glad it was over. But over the following months I developed a chronic anxiety triggered by all sorts of things."

That is just a bad trip. The problem is that if it brings up a lot of issues and you can't properly integrate them then you will have chronic anxiety issues, and any resulting physical brain changes would be from the chronic anxiety rather than from the psilocybin itself.

The normal advice when this happens is to do the drug again and to try to resolve whatever issues came up. But if you're on anti-depressants right now then that's not really an option, and you also probably wouldn't want to do that without a more experience guide.

Nice to know that several years of chronic anxiety problems and panic attacks was "just" a bad trip.

I'm not on anti-depressants and haven't been for years, but your advice seems completely bizarre. Why on earth would I risk taking the mushrooms again after it fucked me up so much the first time? There's no way I'm ever touching them again.

"Nice to know that several years of chronic anxiety problems and panic attacks was 'just' a bad trip."

It's roughly analogous to if you get PTSD after getting raped. That doesn't mean that rape causes chronic anxiety per se, even though it's a common outcome. I'm not trying to say that mushrooms didn't have an adverse effect on your life, only that it wasn't due to psilocybin directly altering your brain.

"I'm not on anti-depressants and haven't been for years, but your advice seems completely bizarre."

That advice wasn't for you specifically, I'm just saying that it's the standard advice. But it normally applies for people who have had a bad trip a week or two ago, not several years ago. The idea is that the only way to come out of it is to follow whatever you were going through until you get to the logical conclusion.

Here are a few guides in general to dealing with 'bad trips':

http://vimeo.com/16702478

http://www.maps.org/videos/source4/video9.html

http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/faqs/psychedelic_crisis_...

Sorry, I was a bit abrasive in my last reply. Thanks for the information, it was interesting to read and watch.

No problem. If your interested in psychedelics as a catalyst for personal development, Neal Goldsmith's book Psychedelic Healing is pretty good. If you ever wanted to go back and revisit the experience it's one of the books you'd want to read first, along with James Fadiman's book is called the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide. These substances are reasonably safe and even beneficial, but only if you have a few books worth of knowledge before partaking and actually follow best practices.

For what it's worth, you'd probably be a good candidate for this Johns Hopkins research survey:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1795sk/the_psilocybin...

^ It happens, but it is rare. I'm really sorry about that. Psychedelics, and Mushrooms in particular, have a very long folk history of helping with these sorts of problems, and there are many emerging studies that are now being carried out at NYU to better understand why. They have certainly helped me, and continue to do so during troublesome moments in life.

hmmmm, yes, have been there, a couple of "hell" trips on shrooms. The worst was the realization that not only was I in hell at that moment, but that I had been all along in hell, from the beginning of time, without realizing it. Tough night to say the least; my girlfriend meanwhile was in great spirits -- everyone is on their own trip.

Anyway, sounds like you've found some ways to address the anxiety. Life isn't easy, had you never taken shrooms, well it wouldn't be your life. There may be some transformation that comes from the anxiety -- Eckhart Tolle, for example, suffered from severe anxiety and depression for years, and then, one night the weight of the world was gone. If we could all be so lucky.

"sometimes seemingly apropos of nothing."

Most panic attacks are that way.

To give your misery some company, even without drugs it is common enough that people come upon "broken" mental states chronic recurring severe anxiety that are triggered by otherwise mundane reminders (such as a creepy icon of a video game).

These conditions can be initiated by using books or movies to reach dark ideas, or even aimless or subconscious thinking (too much thinking time or idleness).

That is very interesting. Do you have any pointers as to where one can read more about the psychogenesis of such things?