"...on LSD and mushrooms I've often thought about going mad and being in prison, and had a lot of empathy for those people" The thing is that it's quite common

"...on LSD and mushrooms I've often thought about going mad and being in prison, and had a lot of empathy for those people" The thing is that it's quite common for people in the middle of psychotic episodes to lack what psychologists call "insight" in to their condition. That is, they don't realize that they're mentally ill, and even if they are confronted with the possibility they deny it. So, paradoxically, by your thinking that you may be going mad, you're actually sane in a critical way that a mentally ill person is not. Also, some typical features of schozophrenia (which the "psychotomimetic" view of psychedelics were supposed to evince) turned out not to be present in classical psychedelics (like LSD) -- things such as hearing voices. This is why use of the term "psychotomimetic" for these substances was eventually abandoned.