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.
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.