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There's a rather worrying trend of psychedelics being "sold" as a safe panacea. If you believe the cheerleaders, psychedelics are powerful enough to rapidly cur

There's a rather worrying trend of psychedelics being "sold" as a safe panacea. If you believe the cheerleaders, psychedelics are powerful enough to rapidly cure mental illness and facilitate profoundly positive personality changes, but have only trivial side-effects. That doesn't seem particularly plausible to me - there aren't many medicines that are both very potent and very safe. The stereotype of the burned-out hippie exists for a reason. I personally know people who took way too much acid and never quite came back to earth; some are diagnosed schizophrenics, while others are just a bit eccentric and vague. There are a lot of really harrowing reports in the Erowid archive. HPPD is almost certainly a real disorder. I'm not advocating for DARE-style scaremongering, but I think that any honest conversation has to give serious consideration to potential risks as well as potential benefits.

throwaway98371 8y ago
I grew up in a really conservative, deeply religious (Protestant Christian) family. My parents loved me and did their best to raise me according to their beliefs, but their beliefs were both absurdly strict and also ridiculously unsupportable by the scientific evidence that, as a book- and science-obsessed teenager, I was absorbing at a rapid pace. Given that I was quickly disbelieving everything I had been raised to believe, and given that I was also doing teenager things like partying with friends and experimenting with various substances, there was an incredible amount of tension and arguing taking place in my home. My relationship with my parents was appalling. We fought constantly. I hated their beliefs. I hated my upbringing. They had no idea how to deal with a son who had always really been a good kid - a fun companion for my dad and a really loving child with my mom (who is still one of the most adorable, kind, caring and wonderful people I've ever known). One night, when I was perhaps 16 years old, I came home quite late. I was high on LSD - probably the latter part of the trip. I was walking around the side of my house to get to the back door, and I paused. I started thinking about my parents. And suddenly it all became clear to me - the reasons for why they were they way they were, and the centrality of love to it all. The fact that their strictness was rooted in their deeply felt fear that I could end up doomed to spend eternity in hell. That, and a dozen other insights about them and our relationship washed over me. This moment completely transformed our relationship. It was like a fever had broken. I still utterly disbelieved in their Christian faith - but I no longer raged against it, or felt the need to argue with them about it. I accepted them. I realized they had grown up in an environment similar to mine, but had never been able to break free of it. Instead of anger at them for this, I felt compassion for them. I recognized that I loved them, and they loved me. I know I could have gotten there without the acid trip, but I firmly believe that it would have taken several more years at least. That moment of insight when I was 15 or 16 years old was the kind that sometimes doesn't dawn on people until they're 30. Sometimes it never does. Incidentally, this is just one of many moments of change that are rooted in some of the experiences I've had with psychedelics. I also, for example, shed my existentialist fear of death. But that's a different story. ;)
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  I didn’t excuse my parents behavior just because it came from “love”. They didn’t know any better, but they also refused my attempts to educate them multiple times. To me, that says their ego and need to assume things about their “afterlife” was more important than pursuing valid data and analysis, not a good trait in my opinion.
  - Matticus_Rex 8y ago
    So who had a better experience? You or the guy who learned about acceptance and transcendence?
    - NikolaeVarius 8y ago
      Can't really compare them. How do you compare which experience is better given they are both personal?
      - Matticus_Rex 8y ago
        Would you rather have peace about something or not? Seems pretty clear to me (which is why I'm a proponent of Stoic practice and CBT).
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      I'm not sure how one could compare, or how it was implied that I didn't "accept" my parents? I have a good relationship with them, I just don't agree with excusing bad parenting because it came from "love". I'm still happy to have them as parents, and since I'm financially independent, it doesn't matter to me what my parents' assumptions about afterlives is as they have no way to waste my time with it.
  - throwaway413 8y ago
    What about your ego telling you that you’re any more right than they are? How do you know you’re right and your kids won’t be saying the same thing? Just some food for thought.
dqv 8y ago
> HPPD is almost certainly a real disorder. I just looked that up and have assumed it was normal for most of my life. Sometime around when I was 3-5 years old, I was laying in bed, looking up up at the wall and noticed this visual noise. I wondered about it and resolved that "that's just how it is." I would also close my eyes and let that fuzz "set in" and see beautiful fire works and replay music in my head. Maybe just developmental hallucination or whatever. In rooms with no lights, that visual noise actually forms into spacial "estimators", I think somewhat formed by memory of what the room actually looks like in full light. I've always noticed it, it's always been present, and I thought it was a normal function of human vision. I'm in a dark room right now and almost everything has that visual noise on it. The less light the object reflects, the more visual noise it has. > There's a rather worrying trend of psychedelics being "sold" as a safe panacea. I guess I missed that trend. Every time I've ever talked about psychedelics with people, it's always been "psychedelics, with disclaimer" - the disclaimer being that things can go very wrong and to be careful; read erowid for facts and contraindications; read recent "safe drug" reports; always have at least one sober person to steer things in the right direction; and have a safe place to go. > If you believe the cheerleaders, psychedelics are powerful enough to rapidly cure mental illness and facilitate profoundly positive personality changes, but have only trivial side-effects. I don't think I've heard it posited this way - I hear people say in some form that the effective administration of a safe dose of certain psychedelic drugs can be medically efficacious. I feel like I'm way more likely to hear drug side effects trivialized in a drug commercial. >any honest conversation has to give serious consideration to potential risks Agreed. It should be the hallmark of any "let's try some drugs" discussion.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  I am no neurologist, but what you're describing sounds more like Prisoner's cinema[1] or some sort of entoptic phenomenon[2] rather than HPPD. HPPD happens with the eyes open, in the light, and is usually more pronounced than something like a floater[3] (which can also be seen in the lights, with the eyes open). [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_cinema https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_cinema [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entoptic_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entoptic_phenomenon [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater
empath75 8y ago
Fwiw, I’ve done mdma a hundred times and lsd and mushrooms a few dozen times, haven’t don’t either in over a decade, and don’t drink, and I’m a perfectly well adjusted software engineer with a wife and two kids and a house in the suburbs. And I attribute the fact that I am a well adjusted person today to having done psychedelics in my 20s, because I was an absolute disaster as a human being coming out of high school with a lot of childhood trauma that I needed help dealing with.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  How do you know the psychedelics are what fixed you?
  - empath75 8y ago
    Because my experience matches the results decribed in all the studies that report similar results. It’s not like it’s possible to have a placebo effect here. I was an isolated depressed, angry young man at 24 who had never had a relationship and all of my interpersonal relationships were completely toxic and was afraid of being touched, working at a minimum wage job. Within three years of using ecstasy, I had hundreds of friends, learned how to DJ, was promoting parties, networked my way into a well paying it job, had a long term relationship, and eventually was djing for crowds of 1000+ people. I’m not sure how I’d have gotten from a to b without using mdma and acid. I still had some work to do to integrate all of that and learn how to do it while sober but man, just being able to experience happiness and love and having open conversations with people amd talk about my feelings and just being hugged by strangers was so instantaneously life changing for me it was almost miraculous. That said— I did mdma waaaay too much and don’t recommend doing it as much as I did. I think I got everything valuable I was going to get out of it the first 4 or 5 times. Everything after than that was just partying.
AngryData 8y ago
We have done studies on psychedelics and mental health disorders, especially schizophrenia. Most of them say they don't cause mental illness but can allow the symptoms to express themselves, or atleast be noticeable, a bit earlier. Part of the problem is many mental illnesses don't show heavy symptoms until people's early 20s, the same time period when someone is likely to try a psychedelic drug for the first time. So someone is schizophrenic, doesn't know it, tries acid or shrooms in college which allows the symptoms to express themselves to noticeable levels for the first time, now they think acid caused their schizophrenia. But in reality they were likely only a year or a stressful event away from the same thing happening. And once you notice the symptoms for the first time, it becomes easier to identify those symptoms later even if in the past they would have been small enough to easily ignore.

throwaway98371 8y ago

I grew up in a really conservative, deeply religious (Protestant Christian) family. My parents loved me and did their best to raise me according to their beliefs, but their beliefs were both absurdly strict and also ridiculously unsupportable by the scientific evidence that, as a book- and science-obsessed teenager, I was absorbing at a rapid pace. Given that I was quickly disbelieving everything I had been raised to believe, and given that I was also doing teenager things like partying with friends and experimenting with various substances, there was an incredible amount of tension and arguing taking place in my home. My relationship with my parents was appalling. We fought constantly. I hated their beliefs. I hated my upbringing. They had no idea how to deal with a son who had always really been a good kid - a fun companion for my dad and a really loving child with my mom (who is still one of the most adorable, kind, caring and wonderful people I've ever known). One night, when I was perhaps 16 years old, I came home quite late. I was high on LSD - probably the latter part of the trip. I was walking around the side of my house to get to the back door, and I paused. I started thinking about my parents. And suddenly it all became clear to me - the reasons for why they were they way they were, and the centrality of love to it all. The fact that their strictness was rooted in their deeply felt fear that I could end up doomed to spend eternity in hell. That, and a dozen other insights about them and our relationship washed over me. This moment completely transformed our relationship. It was like a fever had broken. I still utterly disbelieved in their Christian faith - but I no longer raged against it, or felt the need to argue with them about it. I accepted them. I realized they had grown up in an environment similar to mine, but had never been able to break free of it. Instead of anger at them for this, I felt compassion for them. I recognized that I loved them, and they loved me. I know I could have gotten there without the acid trip, but I firmly believe that it would have taken several more years at least. That moment of insight when I was 15 or 16 years old was the kind that sometimes doesn't dawn on people until they're 30. Sometimes it never does. Incidentally, this is just one of many moments of change that are rooted in some of the experiences I've had with psychedelics. I also, for example, shed my existentialist fear of death. But that's a different story. ;)

lotsofpulp 8y ago
I didn’t excuse my parents behavior just because it came from “love”. They didn’t know any better, but they also refused my attempts to educate them multiple times. To me, that says their ego and need to assume things about their “afterlife” was more important than pursuing valid data and analysis, not a good trait in my opinion.
- Matticus_Rex 8y ago
  So who had a better experience? You or the guy who learned about acceptance and transcendence?
  - NikolaeVarius 8y ago
    Can't really compare them. How do you compare which experience is better given they are both personal?
    - Matticus_Rex 8y ago
      Would you rather have peace about something or not? Seems pretty clear to me (which is why I'm a proponent of Stoic practice and CBT).
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    I'm not sure how one could compare, or how it was implied that I didn't "accept" my parents? I have a good relationship with them, I just don't agree with excusing bad parenting because it came from "love". I'm still happy to have them as parents, and since I'm financially independent, it doesn't matter to me what my parents' assumptions about afterlives is as they have no way to waste my time with it.
- throwaway413 8y ago
  What about your ego telling you that you’re any more right than they are? How do you know you’re right and your kids won’t be saying the same thing? Just some food for thought.

dqv 8y ago

> HPPD is almost certainly a real disorder. I just looked that up and have assumed it was normal for most of my life. Sometime around when I was 3-5 years old, I was laying in bed, looking up up at the wall and noticed this visual noise. I wondered about it and resolved that "that's just how it is." I would also close my eyes and let that fuzz "set in" and see beautiful fire works and replay music in my head. Maybe just developmental hallucination or whatever. In rooms with no lights, that visual noise actually forms into spacial "estimators", I think somewhat formed by memory of what the room actually looks like in full light. I've always noticed it, it's always been present, and I thought it was a normal function of human vision. I'm in a dark room right now and almost everything has that visual noise on it. The less light the object reflects, the more visual noise it has. > There's a rather worrying trend of psychedelics being "sold" as a safe panacea. I guess I missed that trend. Every time I've ever talked about psychedelics with people, it's always been "psychedelics, with disclaimer" - the disclaimer being that things can go very wrong and to be careful; read erowid for facts and contraindications; read recent "safe drug" reports; always have at least one sober person to steer things in the right direction; and have a safe place to go. > If you believe the cheerleaders, psychedelics are powerful enough to rapidly cure mental illness and facilitate profoundly positive personality changes, but have only trivial side-effects. I don't think I've heard it posited this way - I hear people say in some form that the effective administration of a safe dose of certain psychedelic drugs can be medically efficacious. I feel like I'm way more likely to hear drug side effects trivialized in a drug commercial. >any honest conversation has to give serious consideration to potential risks Agreed. It should be the hallmark of any "let's try some drugs" discussion.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pmoriarty 8y ago
I am no neurologist, but what you're describing sounds more like Prisoner's cinema[1] or some sort of entoptic phenomenon[2] rather than HPPD. HPPD happens with the eyes open, in the light, and is usually more pronounced than something like a floater[3] (which can also be seen in the lights, with the eyes open). [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_cinema https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_cinema [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entoptic_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entoptic_phenomenon [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater

empath75 8y ago

Fwiw, I’ve done mdma a hundred times and lsd and mushrooms a few dozen times, haven’t don’t either in over a decade, and don’t drink, and I’m a perfectly well adjusted software engineer with a wife and two kids and a house in the suburbs. And I attribute the fact that I am a well adjusted person today to having done psychedelics in my 20s, because I was an absolute disaster as a human being coming out of high school with a lot of childhood trauma that I needed help dealing with.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
How do you know the psychedelics are what fixed you?
- empath75 8y ago
  Because my experience matches the results decribed in all the studies that report similar results. It’s not like it’s possible to have a placebo effect here. I was an isolated depressed, angry young man at 24 who had never had a relationship and all of my interpersonal relationships were completely toxic and was afraid of being touched, working at a minimum wage job. Within three years of using ecstasy, I had hundreds of friends, learned how to DJ, was promoting parties, networked my way into a well paying it job, had a long term relationship, and eventually was djing for crowds of 1000+ people. I’m not sure how I’d have gotten from a to b without using mdma and acid. I still had some work to do to integrate all of that and learn how to do it while sober but man, just being able to experience happiness and love and having open conversations with people amd talk about my feelings and just being hugged by strangers was so instantaneously life changing for me it was almost miraculous. That said— I did mdma waaaay too much and don’t recommend doing it as much as I did. I think I got everything valuable I was going to get out of it the first 4 or 5 times. Everything after than that was just partying.

AngryData 8y ago

We have done studies on psychedelics and mental health disorders, especially schizophrenia. Most of them say they don't cause mental illness but can allow the symptoms to express themselves, or atleast be noticeable, a bit earlier. Part of the problem is many mental illnesses don't show heavy symptoms until people's early 20s, the same time period when someone is likely to try a psychedelic drug for the first time. So someone is schizophrenic, doesn't know it, tries acid or shrooms in college which allows the symptoms to express themselves to noticeable levels for the first time, now they think acid caused their schizophrenia. But in reality they were likely only a year or a stressful event away from the same thing happening. And once you notice the symptoms for the first time, it becomes easier to identify those symptoms later even if in the past they would have been small enough to easily ignore.