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My bad trips made me learn to stop tripping. But my good trips made me learn a whole lot more about what might have been possible for myself and my social anxie

My bad trips made me learn to stop tripping. But my good trips made me learn a whole lot more about what might have been possible for myself and my social anxiety after I stopped. I'm still learning lessons related to those insights but compared to the confidence I had on a trip versus the confidence I have now I say I'm 70-80% at that level.

o-__-o 7y ago
Just want to point out you are taking the chemical at recreational doses and not therapeutic doses. This is why a professional administrating the drug is key. Look at it this way, Zoloft may give you a bad experience but not the same bad experience at 5mg vs 100mg. You can recognize the bad experience and work towards something else at 5mg vs 100mg (or replace with your favorite drug/dose) where you may end up in an outpatient hospital.
- bordercases 7y ago
  The point I'm trying to make is that for all the risks I was taking none of the outcomes were psychologically unrecoverable or fatal. Using the word "bad" was just pointing to the class of experiences that people on the psych might consider, "not pleasant", but "not pleasant" doesn't mean "not valuable". Quite the opposite, I learned from basically every experience both through its intrinsic and extrinsic qualities. Giving psychedelics the psychiatric treatment and connoting that there are hard distinctions between "recreational" and "therapeutic" doses for some of these drugs fundamentally misunderstands them. I had therapeutic effects from "recreational" doses.
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    You can say the exact same thing for Zoloft. If you took a single 100mg dose you will notice the effects. But the line that crosses therapeutic to recreational (yes SSRIs are abused recreationally but are very short lived) is somewhere between 0 and 100mg and differs based on your biological makeup. Clinical trials and reports from prescribing psychiatrists helps find that hard distinction..
    - bordercases 7y ago
      They can track and establish the base rate of such effects conditioned on a random population to blur the role of one's "biological makeup", and then apply value judgements as to what doses are useful for their purposes, yes. In that sense if you're allowing whether or not a drug is recreational to depend on a person's makeup, how could you have known I was taking a recreational dose? Could bad trips not also occur at lower doses considered sub-recreational if a person is particularly sensitive? Likewise what happens if the drug only ends up benefiting a person past the point where they also have hallucinations as a "knock-on"?
      - o-__-o 7y ago
        >In that sense if you're allowing whether or not a drug is recreational to depend on a person's makeup, how could you have known I was taking a recreational dose? that is literally the point of a psychiatrist. there is only the law preventing psychiatrists from administering psychedelics like LSD in the same fashion. there are natural practitioners who do this for e.g. marijuana today. if someone has an adverse reaction (bad trip) then the doctor usually alters the administration of the medicine in some manner (Lower dosage, increase dosage, change medication all together etc). but to say that there are only recreational doses for illicit drugs and there is no method to validate potency in human consumption is disingenuous. a drug is a chemical. our body is nothing but a chain of chemical reactions. modern medicine and science has come up with a pretty good method of determining dosage

o-__-o 7y ago

Just want to point out you are taking the chemical at recreational doses and not therapeutic doses. This is why a professional administrating the drug is key. Look at it this way, Zoloft may give you a bad experience but not the same bad experience at 5mg vs 100mg. You can recognize the bad experience and work towards something else at 5mg vs 100mg (or replace with your favorite drug/dose) where you may end up in an outpatient hospital.

bordercases 7y ago
The point I'm trying to make is that for all the risks I was taking none of the outcomes were psychologically unrecoverable or fatal. Using the word "bad" was just pointing to the class of experiences that people on the psych might consider, "not pleasant", but "not pleasant" doesn't mean "not valuable". Quite the opposite, I learned from basically every experience both through its intrinsic and extrinsic qualities. Giving psychedelics the psychiatric treatment and connoting that there are hard distinctions between "recreational" and "therapeutic" doses for some of these drugs fundamentally misunderstands them. I had therapeutic effects from "recreational" doses.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  You can say the exact same thing for Zoloft. If you took a single 100mg dose you will notice the effects. But the line that crosses therapeutic to recreational (yes SSRIs are abused recreationally but are very short lived) is somewhere between 0 and 100mg and differs based on your biological makeup. Clinical trials and reports from prescribing psychiatrists helps find that hard distinction..
  - bordercases 7y ago
    They can track and establish the base rate of such effects conditioned on a random population to blur the role of one's "biological makeup", and then apply value judgements as to what doses are useful for their purposes, yes. In that sense if you're allowing whether or not a drug is recreational to depend on a person's makeup, how could you have known I was taking a recreational dose? Could bad trips not also occur at lower doses considered sub-recreational if a person is particularly sensitive? Likewise what happens if the drug only ends up benefiting a person past the point where they also have hallucinations as a "knock-on"?
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      >In that sense if you're allowing whether or not a drug is recreational to depend on a person's makeup, how could you have known I was taking a recreational dose? that is literally the point of a psychiatrist. there is only the law preventing psychiatrists from administering psychedelics like LSD in the same fashion. there are natural practitioners who do this for e.g. marijuana today. if someone has an adverse reaction (bad trip) then the doctor usually alters the administration of the medicine in some manner (Lower dosage, increase dosage, change medication all together etc). but to say that there are only recreational doses for illicit drugs and there is no method to validate potency in human consumption is disingenuous. a drug is a chemical. our body is nothing but a chain of chemical reactions. modern medicine and science has come up with a pretty good method of determining dosage