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My experience suggests you don’t need to go that far to get good results. I was at the lowest point in my life, very depressed and just generally lost. I was li

My experience suggests you don’t need to go that far to get good results. I was at the lowest point in my life, very depressed and just generally lost. I was likely clinically depressed but didn’t have enough money to get a proper diagnosis. I everything short of prescription drugs to deal with it and nothing worked. Then I took some LSD and had a mild trip with a friend and literally the next morning I felt happy and energetic. From that point on I have not been anywhere near the depression I had before. Now I just have the normal ups and down of life abs feel perfectly capable of dealing with the world.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
Some people just need a little acute upregulation of neuroplasticity to break out of their funk. For others it's a much deeper and more entangled and multi-dimensional problem. But just to agree with you, not everybody needs a heroic dose, and as the name implies, it's a dose where there is the possibility of stuff going very wrong - but one of the morals of psychedelics, (and indeed life itself because reality is "the strongest tab I never took"), is that you have to get to that place of completely surrendering and offering yourself up in order for you to be really transformed. And the funny thing is so many of us go into our trips with the idea that we're taking it to improve our lives, and then when you're actually deep in the peak of the trip and you've got a whole universe inside of you suddenly you realize not just how unprepared you really were but more accurately, how fundamentally incapable of being prepared for the experience we really are)
- Syzygies 6y ago
  > Some people just need a little acute upregulation of neuroplasticity to break out of their funk. That's the best sentence I've read all year on HN.
subsubsub 6y ago
If we're sharing unverifiable anecdotes about LSD, then I have one... A friends mother took LSD in the 80s and still gets nightmare flashbacks. Stay safe kids.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Maybe if you have a particularly bad trip but everyone seems to have these horror stories and yet no one is one e.g. it's like the teacher saying about how the kid who leant too far back on his chair fell over and cracked his head open
  - jordan_curve 6y ago
    Huh? Obviously if you dismiss all of the bad anecdotes and none of the good ones, you’re only going to have good anecdotes My mom’s brother went into psychosis during an acid trip and eventually schizophrenia. He killed himself when he was 24. I think hallucinagens are fun recreationally and clearly have the potential for positive therapeutic use, but let’s not pretend that it’s always positive, especially in uncontrolled settings.
    - eurasiantiger 6y ago
      These anecdotes are always sad, but you have no way of confirming whether they took a normal sized dose of actual LSD, or whether they took a shitload of some unknown research chemical. Also, as you wrote, set and setting are important and those are not described.
    - Talanes 6y ago
      Even in the realm of unverifiable anecdotes, there is still a difference between a first party anecdote and a third-party anecdote. In the first party anecdote I only have to put my trust in one person, where in a third party anecdote I have to trust 2-to-infinity people. For whatever reason, negative anecdotes seem to be overwhelmingly third person, at the very least all the ones in this thread have been.
      - generalizations 6y ago
        > negative anecdotes seem to be overwhelmingly third person Based on the anecdotes in this thread, I'm getting the impression that when you have a really bad trip, you don't make it back to tell the story in the first person. The only people left to tell are the observers.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago

Some people just need a little acute upregulation of neuroplasticity to break out of their funk. For others it's a much deeper and more entangled and multi-dimensional problem. But just to agree with you, not everybody needs a heroic dose, and as the name implies, it's a dose where there is the possibility of stuff going very wrong - but one of the morals of psychedelics, (and indeed life itself because reality is "the strongest tab I never took"), is that you have to get to that place of completely surrendering and offering yourself up in order for you to be really transformed. And the funny thing is so many of us go into our trips with the idea that we're taking it to improve our lives, and then when you're actually deep in the peak of the trip and you've got a whole universe inside of you suddenly you realize not just how unprepared you really were but more accurately, how fundamentally incapable of being prepared for the experience we really are)

Syzygies 6y ago
> Some people just need a little acute upregulation of neuroplasticity to break out of their funk. That's the best sentence I've read all year on HN.

subsubsub 6y ago

If we're sharing unverifiable anecdotes about LSD, then I have one... A friends mother took LSD in the 80s and still gets nightmare flashbacks. Stay safe kids.

mhh__ 6y ago
Maybe if you have a particularly bad trip but everyone seems to have these horror stories and yet no one is one e.g. it's like the teacher saying about how the kid who leant too far back on his chair fell over and cracked his head open
- jordan_curve 6y ago
  Huh? Obviously if you dismiss all of the bad anecdotes and none of the good ones, you’re only going to have good anecdotes My mom’s brother went into psychosis during an acid trip and eventually schizophrenia. He killed himself when he was 24. I think hallucinagens are fun recreationally and clearly have the potential for positive therapeutic use, but let’s not pretend that it’s always positive, especially in uncontrolled settings.
  - eurasiantiger 6y ago
    These anecdotes are always sad, but you have no way of confirming whether they took a normal sized dose of actual LSD, or whether they took a shitload of some unknown research chemical. Also, as you wrote, set and setting are important and those are not described.
  - Talanes 6y ago
    Even in the realm of unverifiable anecdotes, there is still a difference between a first party anecdote and a third-party anecdote. In the first party anecdote I only have to put my trust in one person, where in a third party anecdote I have to trust 2-to-infinity people. For whatever reason, negative anecdotes seem to be overwhelmingly third person, at the very least all the ones in this thread have been.
    - generalizations 6y ago
      > negative anecdotes seem to be overwhelmingly third person Based on the anecdotes in this thread, I'm getting the impression that when you have a really bad trip, you don't make it back to tell the story in the first person. The only people left to tell are the observers.