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You mitigate that risk by going into psychotherapy and finding a therapist who is a good fit for you before trying mind-altering substances. It's fairly obvious

You mitigate that risk by going into psychotherapy and finding a therapist who is a good fit for you before trying mind-altering substances. It's fairly obvious if you think of drugs as an extremely potent medicine for issues you weren't even conscious of. Any protocol for treatment of mental disorders starts with a disclaimer that psychotherapy should be the first step unless your situation is quite unusual. Then, if it so happens that your therapist thinks that there is nothing really wrong with you and that you won't get any real benefits from continuing to attend therapeutic sessions, and if you do not have any family history of inheritable mental disorders, you can try hallucinogens. It might be that most of the stuff written about psychedelics on the Internet doesn't treat them with this amount of respect, but the responsibility for your mental health is ultimately on you, and the information about the benefits of psychotherapy and the dangers of going into a trip with an improper set is out there.

dathinab 3y ago
That's why I said it has potential in health care, where it could be prescribed by a therapist who knows well about this topic and involved risks. I.e. I did not mean self-medicated health care. While there had been limitations for research on this topics because of questionable laws they now are often somewhat relaxed. So by now there are some experimental treatment studies which use psychedelics to treat depression patients which the normal health care system failed to treat. One important factor is that therapy is always the foundation/basis of such treatments while the well controlled psychedelic trip is often the _last_ step in the treatment. I forgot about the details but I think it was something along the line of being depressed long term conditioning you brain to be depressed (even if the original source is gone) and psychedelics helping you overcoming this after you already started working on de-conditioning yourself.

dathinab 3y ago

That's why I said it has potential in health care, where it could be prescribed by a therapist who knows well about this topic and involved risks. I.e. I did not mean self-medicated health care. While there had been limitations for research on this topics because of questionable laws they now are often somewhat relaxed. So by now there are some experimental treatment studies which use psychedelics to treat depression patients which the normal health care system failed to treat. One important factor is that therapy is always the foundation/basis of such treatments while the well controlled psychedelic trip is often the _last_ step in the treatment. I forgot about the details but I think it was something along the line of being depressed long term conditioning you brain to be depressed (even if the original source is gone) and psychedelics helping you overcoming this after you already started working on de-conditioning yourself.