If you ever get the chance of taking LSD on a good set and setting (don't even try otherwise) and your family has no history of mental ilness, go ahead and take it. It's gonna be one of the most interesting experiences in your life, to say the least. There's nothing like a psychedelic experience, I can't even put it to words.
Relative of mine got schizophrenia and bipolar disorder after taking psychedelics. No family history before then. Now he has to be continually drugged up and is a shell of his former self.
Unless you are trying to treat some other illness it isn’t worth the risk until we better understand the mechanisms behind why psychedelics can trigger mental disorders.
> Unless you are trying to treat some other illness it isn’t worth the risk until we better understand the mechanisms behind why psychedelics can trigger mental disorders.
Speak for yourself. Risk tolerance is highly subjective.
It's true that a small percentage of individuals who try psychedelics will develop otherwise unexplained mental illness. It's also true that a small percentage of individuals who try skydiving will break their legs and that a small percentage of individuals who try scuba diving will drown. However, ultimately, it's up to individuals to decide for themselves whether it's worth bearing such risks for the sake of experiencing something new and exciting.
Personally, I'd recommend that healthy people try all three of those activities. Life's short, after all, and you're more likely to get hurt in a car accident on your way there than you are to suffer injury from any of those particular activities in and of themselves. In every endeavor, it's up to you to do your own research and make as rational and informed a decision as you can given the available evidence.
Do you have statistics to back up the relative safety of those activities? Lots of people get in trouble with car accidents because lots of people drive cars. But I would think that if you both drive and skydive, the latter is far more likely to hurt you.
As with many complicated analyses, we can introduce hypothetical artifacts or simplifications to serve almost any hypothesis!
For example, most skydiving is done in a guided and controlled way, with participants paying a professional instructor to help them through the process on a flight where everyone involved knows that people will be jumping out of this plane, in areas chosen by said flights for this to be done in. The risk of injury or death would be much higher if you were to, say, bowl over a flight attendant on a commercial plane flying over, say, the Rocky Mountains, steal a backpack from a supply area that you assume is a parachute, shove open the emergency exit, and jump out. However, that risk might be significantly lower if you happened to have prior training as a military paratrooper
Lifetime risk of death in a car accident might come down to frequency. But it could also be affected by such factors as road conditions, weather, your own physical and mental health, the condition of your car, and whether you're being pursued by a military helicopter
Broad statistics tend to be a poor substitute for understanding one's own situation in assessing the risks one is willing to take. They are used in science because science tends to aim to draw broad conclusions over large aggregates. Your own individual risk assessment may take such aggregate measures into account, but it's unlikely that this is adequate to make such assessments wisely, and either way only informs your assessment of risk rather than your tolerance for it
I wouldn't necessarily recommend psychedelics to everyone, regardless of health. I'd love for it to be made a legal option though, for those that do want to try it of their own volition.
Legalization also opens crucial gateways to clinical research and market regulation. These effects can be better communicated and consumers have legal advocacy if they are harmed.
Absolutely. One of the big dangers of obtaining LSD right now isn't just the effects of LSD itself, it's the risk of getting something else like NBOMe that could flat-out kill you. A regulated market would allow the purchase of real, clean LSD, without the risk of more dangerous substitutes.
People have taken less than a few doses of NBOMe and died. Meanwhile there are no known deaths by LSD overdose, people have taken thousands of doses of LSD and lived.
There is speculation that an elephant suffered a seizure and died in 1962 after it was given a "god" dose which is kinda fun. The wiki page also suggests they tried to help it and accidentally killed it that way. Definitely something to consider if your friend Jake goes catatonic while staring at Yugioh cards and the EMTs misdiagnose.
I think giving LSD to an elephant (especially 300mg, holy crap) is a very very bad idea, animals can't really be informed of its effects. You can tell a person what to expect and not to panic, but you can't do that with an animal. I wonder if that would be animal abuse also.
Oh for sure. The implication is that it would be nice to have the Healthcare infrastructure and research to safely industrialize psychedelia. Animals deserve better treatment in pharma dev anyways, but so does Jake who can consult a specialist psych if they want to. Similar to consulting a physician or experienced trainer before body building.
There is no proven causality between psychedelics and mental illnesses. We have so far only hypothesis.
But sure, you're doing something not well researched when you take psychedelics, and various people have very different experiences with them from getting a revelation to having the worst experiences of their lives.
So yeah, there are unknown risks and unknown benefits, thread carefully and take that into account.
AFAIK psychedelics cause the brain to become more interconnected for the duration of their effect, which can activate parts that aren't normally active. What we don't know is exactly what parts can just be activated in this way to trigger schizophrenia (or other disorders), and how to detect how much at risk someone may be.
While there is evidence to support some of what you're saying, the physical mechanism backing the causal relationship between psychedelic use and psychological disorders is far more complicated and nowhere near as well understood as you seem to believe. Heck, the physical mechanism behind nearly all psychological disorders in isolation remains poorly understood, let alone their interaction with any particular psychedelic.
> the physical mechanism behind nearly all psychological disorders in isolation remains poorly understood, let alone their interaction with any particular psychedelic.
That's what I'm saying, though. There's no way to know how susceptible one is to a particular disorder in general, let alone while on psychedelics.
There is evidence of psychedelic use connecting parts of the brain that aren't normally connected, AFAIK the white matter becomes much more interconnected during a psychedelic trip.
I like saying that it is an S4 - set, setting, substance, and soul.
And the substance (as long as it is a tryptamine) is less important, save for personal preferences. (I have heard a lot about LSD for fun and shrooms for insights - for me, there is no such distinction; if anything, LSD, even in lower doses, produces more profound associations, ones that words cannot capture. At higher doses, well, as you said, the distinction becomes mood.)
At the same time, the soul (overall personality, mind, motivations, desires, approach, will, and goals) is crucial.
> I feel like LSD is way more visual (basically a fun rollercoaster ride) and the actual introspection happens on stuff like shrooms.
Funny, I usually have the opposite experience :) LSD for deep, not-so-much visual, inwards journeys and mushrooms for very visual, laugh-y and social experiences.
When I'm on LSD, one of my favorite things to do is talk to friends over text. It results in me saying stuff that I could never say otherwise. Here is something Emily (a headmate of mine) once said:
> ....there must always be sadness... because all that is good will always end.... and it will never stop being sad that it is this way~
For me, thinking like that just does not happen without LSD, it was a complete accident but it's so pretty!
It's a lot more like... abstractions and associations become more malleable. This can inform perception even if you don't visualize, which can parse as visual distortions even in your "actual" vision, but might not. I think probably the biggest difference is going to be whether you experience "closed-eye visuals", which a lot of people report being pretty interesting on adequate doses of psychadelics, but they're far from the only interesting way in which that sort of altered state can manifest
> The visual aspect makes me wonder if the LSD experience in people with aphantasia is substantially different?
I'd love to tell you, but I don't know how people without aphantasia experience LSD. What I do know is that my inner experience is only (mostly) blind; it has fully developed senses of hearing, touch, smell and taste. I get visual distortions, apparently within normal parameters. Thus far in the few experiences I've had with synesthesia, it's never involved my sense of sight.
I honestly don't wish its use were more universal. I wish it were available to me over the counter, so I wouldn't have to get it from the dark net and possibly get scammed, but I don't think it's a universally good thing. Not everyone would benefit from using LSD.
I think the specific type of mental illness to worry about is schizophrenia/psychosis. I have DID, but am autistic and have never been able to cause psychosis or anything like it, so LSD has turned out to be really safe for me so far. I have other friends who react much differently, so maybe it has something to do with neurotype.
It's gonna be one of the most interesting experiences in your life, to say the least.
I am always fascinated by this conundrum. A lot of people say it's a life-altering experience, yet it generally doesn't seem to make them a worse, better, or even different person (unless they have a mental illness ).
>yet it generally doesn't seem to make them a worse, better, or even different person
I think there's a vague consensus that one must 'integrate' the experiences you have on psychedelics in order to meaningfully impact your life, if that's your goal. Those profound experiences and feelings you can have on psychedelics are certainly incredible and moving in their own right, but in order to make that have an effect on who you are (increased empathy and better framing of life events are often mentioned), you the taker of those drugs has to put some work in to learn from it. It always bothers me when I'll see statements like 'this drug changed my life', especially when talking about psychedelics. The drug didn't do it alone.
This is also seen in the early work using MDMA by psychiatrists - the drug itself was just one part of the treatment.
> It always bothers me when I'll see statements like 'this drug changed my life', especially when talking about psychedelics. The drug didn't do it alone.
Yeah, I never liked that phrasing either. It makes psychedelics seem like some magical mental health panacea.
Often people who seek out these drugs are already taking the first steps to change their life (this can mean many things, even if "only"[1] changing their outlook) before ever taking the drug. They changed their life on their own, the drug was just a means to an end.
[1] I put only in quotes, because anyone who's struggled with any mental health issues knows this can be a gargantuan hurdle
> It always bothers me when I'll see statements like 'this drug changed my life', especially when talking about psychedelics. The drug didn't do it alone.
Are you always this precise when causality is being assigned though? Take geopolitical matters for example, when you hear a story about what caused some event on the geopolitical stage being attributed to one variable/entity do your spider senses perk up and realize you're being told a tall tale?
>> life-altering experience ... doesn't seem to make them a worse, better, or even different person
The best insight you will get, without taking the trip yourself is going to come from reading Huxley's "Doors of Perception". A large enough dose will give you all sorts of interesting insights into your own thinking.
The closest your going to come to this, is the first time you watch the film "The Game", assuming you pay close enough attention and are tuned into it as a film and the characters in it. However it pales in comparison to the real thing.
Culture is a more powerful drug but it is spread out over vast periods of time so we don't notice it. It also defines reality, which is more than a little helpful during disagreements.
For decades now, whenever I've tried to make a street deal, the vendor has sidled away, saying "I think you're a cop". I don't have much hair nowadays.
Our friend group occasionally dropped acid in high school.
There were a couple kids we didn't know well that went schizophrenic/psychotic break.
My closest friend got too much in his early twenties at an early burning man, went schizophrenic/psychotic and after a year or so in and out of jail, committed suicide by cop. There was nothing that could be done for him as he was an adult and didn't want help.
This was a college educated, elementary school teacher.
I haven't touched the stuff since.
You do you, but don't tell people there aren't risks.
I loved acid as a late-teen. I took a lot. I didn't take the view that it should be legalized; I was OK with it, but it wasn't hard to imagine someone getting seriously screwed-up by it. Two of my friends were hospitalized for psychiatric disorders after taking it, but I suspect they were both latent schizophrenics.
So I'd talk about it enthusistically (like any acid-head!), but I'd never recommend itto anyone.
