Nice to read your journey. Glad you found a way through.
I had a similar experience to the first half of your story. Was so unfulfilled in tech that I ended up quitting and took time off not working, trying lots of different things, getting very frustrated and depressed along the way.
I did try LSD (ok, a lot of LSD) and instead of it helping me process/sort through/integrate some of my troubles it added new ones and created recurring intrusive thoughts. Overall, bad experience & wish I didn't do that.
After ~2y outside of full time employment (i did some contract work eventually), I found myself more depressed than when I left. I had tried a lot of things (hobbies for joy, tech in non-FTE ways, entrepreneurship, travel, classes, intimate relationships..) but found no grander meaning or goals at the end of it, just some isolated interesting experiences (some were peak positive, others a pit). So back to tech. I don't love it, but having an external demand of me was sufficient to lift me out of the pit of despair i was in.
I'm glad to hear from someone else who's honest about their negative experience.
Psychedelics seem to somehow have simply amazing PR: plentiful testimonies of their life-changing abilities, encouraging us to try them, but very little acknowledgement of their dark side. The subculture is very quick to brush away anything that goes against the narrative of the "mind-opening wonder drugs that big pharma doesn't want you to know about."
My experiences with psilocybin over a few months started with awe and wonder and spiritual awakening (or what seemed to be at the time), and ended with horrifying lasting harm. Insomnia, constant vivid nightmares, sleep paralysis, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, tics, and all kinds of weirdness at the periphery of conscious experience that I can't really explain.
It feels like I flashed my brain's firmware with no way to undo it. I took all the precautions I thought I was supposed to. I wish someone had warned me.
I had a similar experience. I took psylocibin a few times, but after the last one I started getting panic attacks and feeling derealization quite often. This led to negative recurring thoughts and I felt really bad for a while. Got better after a year of cognitive behavioral therapy and six months taking a light dosage of antidepressants. Routine exercises and zen meditation helped tremendously as well. Get help, it is possible. Your brain can heal itself with your help.
People seem to think they can just take a load of mushies and it can solve all lives problems. The great art requires a lot of hard heart work and suffering.
Well, its like people who describe Ketamine therapy. The process itself can be deeply traumatizing, even if the after-effects make up for it. I've heard it described as deep hallucinations, often touching on dark places in your psyche, while you can't get up or do much or get away from it. On the plus side, it can make you face some difficult internal issues, but on the downside, not everyone actually responds well to that. Some people this can cause a psychological break.
Anyone who has been in the hallucinogens scene long enough knows someone who either did too much over the years and is a basket case or just had one really bad trip and never recovered or were the same after.
It's certainly not as dangerous as other drugs, but I'm fairly tired of people acting like it is inert or can only produce positive experiences.
I did two sessions of psychedelic IM Ketamine four months ago. The place I went requires a therapist sitter during the experience, followed by an hour of integration therapy, and a few days after the final session a follow up integration.
I cannot imagine doing this substance without someone else there. There were multiple times I simply needed a hand to hold as I was… descending, and my second trip was a “bad” one. The therapist was absolutely critical for helping me frame what happened in a positive light.
Geese. I occasionally get the sleep paralysis and I hate it. It makes me feel like I'm being pinned down to my bed. Never tried any psychedelics though, and sometimes I think I should stop being so stiff when it's around/available. Reading this is helpful and I genuinely appreciate the warning.
> The subculture is very quick to brush away anything that goes against the narrative of...
Oh here we go again. Give me three comments below (in direct links) that "brush away" the obvious risks. I think you just made stuff up. Of course there are risks.
Maybe the reason a whole lot of people are not complaining about bad experiences is that they are maybe, maybe, not as common as you want them to be.
If you want rational drug discussion then you should probably start with yourself – not everyone suffers from significant harm in drug use.
> I wish someone had warned me.
A little bit of reading around would have shown you there are risks. Either you didn't do your due diligence or you ignored them.
He claims things get brushed away by a certain subculture but can't or won't give examples.
He provides his bad experience but seems to believe that must overshadow any good experiences of others' like mine. It doesn't because my experience with drugs has been generally positive and MDMA actually turned my life around. Without it my life would not be worth living now (and I assure you it's not much fun even now) after a childhood you could not imagine.
He laments that nobody told him the risks but clearly didn't make sufficient effort to determine them. Two words and one click on the web and he would have found plenty.
Respond to what I said, not what you want me to have said.
I wish more people spoke about their negative experiences with psychedelics. It's a sobering and necessary counterpoint to most of what floods these threads of how it changed someone's life, but the "how" is largely ambiguous.
As studies continue, it seems that a key component is a safe and therapeutic environment and a trained guide who can help the person navigate what they experience. People most often get in trouble when they bring a recreational drug mindset, or are predisposed to certain conditions, or have not worked with a therapist to have foundational tools to manage the experience.
The risks are absolutely real and should not be taken lightly, but there’s a huge difference between going on a personal journey of experimentation without the tools to navigate that journey, and going through a careful screening process with counseling during and after each trip.
Michael Pollan’s work (book and documentary) explores this somewhat. I don’t think most people would describe the experience as ambiguous. That is not to say that the experience can be sufficiently described with language.
Interestingly, my recent bad experience was in what I expected to be the safest and most therapeutic environment available to me. What I discovered instead was an irrational culture with an immature fascination for shamanism. My individual experiences, informed by my research, were more beneficial (and cheaper as well). Knowing the topic and a trip-sitter you know might prove a better choice than trusting self-proclaimed guides.
I have heard a lot of similar tales regarding the shamanism and rejection of science and reasoning, making all kinds of outrageous claims about what it can "cure", which just isn't physically possible.
The biggest claim is that psychedelics are a tool to access a profound truth about the nature of life, the universe, etc. The scientific literature shows there’s a correlation between the intensity of the mysticism experience and its therapeutic benefits. The problem is truth. If experiencing religious visions and feelings is followed by getting better, it doesn’t mean God actually exists, or that your “soul” left your body.
> What I discovered instead was an irrational culture with an immature fascination for shamanism
Hilarious revelation to have from a trip. I never put it like that in my mind, but I feel kind of similar.
My take is.. people want an external locus of control and/or instructions on how to live so bad that in the modern bent towards Atheism/Agnosticism, they transfer that responsibility elsewhere (star signs, tarot cards, psychedelics, their political party, some 'expert'..)
I think the medical community is still catching up to the knowledge that experienced users have - even today, I'd still recommend newbies read up on the stuff themselves, and do it with someone experienced that they trust.
The research will eventually catch up, and within a decade or two tripping in a doctor's office will be much more responsible and fruitful. Doctors can already provide a lot of pharmacological advantages: they have access to consistent, predictable, controlled dosages, and access to prescription antipsychotics to end a trip if it is not going well, which is obviously a much better situation than eating a few mushrooms with an unknown amount of psilocybin then hanging on and hoping for the best.
> I wish more people spoke about their negative experiences with psychedelics
people do. But just maybe 'negative' doesn't mean catastrophically bad, and just maybe bad experiences are in the minority hence the flood of positives. What your post comes across as, to me anyway, is that you want drugs to be a bad thing.
> but the "how" is largely ambiguous
Does it matter? Or are people just not allowed to have a positive thing happen from psychedelics?
You seem to be bringing a mindset to this discussion without apparently considering maybe drugs aren't always that bad. And you may be right, and you may be wrong, but you do seem determined to look on the darker side of things.
It's not at all clear to me that those statements are promoting a "drugs are bad" narrative. Discussing negative experiences is inherent to an honest conversation.
I don't think drugs are good or bad. The intent behind why and how people use them is what counts. However, if people want these things to see progress in acceptance and safe use, hearing anecdata from all demographics is important, including those with negative experiences.
One thing that people didn't want to talk about with the cannabis legalization boom was how common paranoid schizophrenia is. My step-father has marijuana-induced paranoid schizophrenia, I have a few other friends also diagnosed with the same thing. For all the good that it has done for x demographics, it has damaged y demographics irreparably. A future of powerful and debilitating prescription drugs to treat their schizophrenia is what they have to look forward to now, they are objectively worse off for it and classified as legally disabled.
Nobody is hiding negative experiences. Again, you come across as wanting more badness than perhaps there actually is.
<A paragraph about personal knowledge of drug damage >
Yes, we know about this kind of thing . I personally know of alcohol deaths, permanent damage from amphetamines, addiction to cannabis, and second-hand reports of mental illness from cannabis abuse (note: abuse not use), anecdotal but reliable reports about mental damage from LSD. These conversations are happening.
You seem only receptive to the negative side of things.
Yeah, the people doing all the writeups tend to have the info and support network in place to manage the experience in a way that maximizes the possibility of success. Not everyone reading the latest article about mushrooms in the NYT has that.
I think this kind of misses the bigger reason that there isn't a lot of formal discussion on psychedelics; people are worried/nervous to talk about it too openly because psychedelics are "hard" drugs. Even for research purposes, they're tightly controlled which ends up suppressing a lot of practical research and you _have_ to rely on hearsay and anecdata to make a decision.
Edit: Also, as another commenter noted, because very few places allow you to get psychedelics legally, dosage and purity is always questionable; naturally you're going to have a bad time with something that is cut with really nasty drugs if you aren't aware of it and prepared for it, but this is pretty true of most things in life, even those not related to drugs.
Search engines, well, Google at least, are pretty complicit in this too, as it seems that sites discouraging drug use are brought to the top when searching for relatively reasonable things like "safe dosage $drug" or "$drug interaction with $other_drug". Even between different countries, the same search query on google will give quite different results.
I don't think among the people I've talked to that enjoy psychedelics have ever introduced a newbie to any drug without a safety warning and a fair amount of preparation, and in Amsterdam where mushrooms are legal, the shops are quite careful to ensure they are giving you the rundown on what to prepare for, dosages, finding a comfortable and reliable setting, safety, etc.
> but the "how" is largely ambiguous.
Honest question, have you taken any drugs that weren't prescription or alcohol/caffeine/nicotine? Because it's very easy to pinpoint how drugs (especially psychedelics) are life changing, at least for me.
Ecstasy - For a few brief hours, I not only felt good, but thought good thoughts about myself. It was a complete reset after many years of extremely low and dark times in my life, and after that I had a baseline of "hey, I actually _can_ feel good and think good things about myself; I am capable of it." And it was basically all I needed, a single time to break me out of years of depression
Psychedelics - It is an immense spark of creativity and just fascinating to see what your mind can invent and how everything has additional "perspectives", like the color of music, visualizing a world or scene in your imagination that you probably never thought of before, and the good sensations you have amplified by 1000x. Your mind makes connections and associations which sure, with time you could maybe reach sober, but it happens rapidly, effortlessly, and repeatedly on psychedelics, and the experience stays with you. If you've never had a moment of clarity, be it academic, problem solving, etc, then I'm not sure that psychedelics are the biggest concern for you :). These experiences _can_ happen sober, but at least for me, only with guided meditation over many sessions could I reach such an experience.
I'm not sure it's possible to be more specific than this with simple descriptive words, and I think the art and other drug-inspired pieces more than speak for themselves as to how it can be life changing.
> in Amsterdam where mushrooms are legal, the shops are quite careful to ensure they are giving you the rundown on what to prepare for, dosages, finding a comfortable and reliable setting, safety, etc.
Last time I was in Amsterdam was quite a few years ago but... magic mushrooms were illegal. Instead they sell psilocybin truffles so roughly the same thing. When I've bought them, from a few different popular shops, no words of caution or safety were exchanged.
LSD also gave me recurring intrusive thoughts for about 5 years after taking it. I’m better now but I wish more people knew about the potential risks because it wasn’t worth feeling “enlightened” for a few hours while on the drug
Based on my experiences I think MDMA likely has much more therapeutic value. To me regular psychedelics merely give the illusion of profoundness rather than actual profoundness, though I’ve heard they are the best treatment for cluster headaches and I’m not against people with treatment resistant depression giving it a shot
"LSD also gave me recurring intrusive thoughts for about 5 years after taking it."
There are definitely risks, but also ways to minimize the chance of negative effects and to constructively handle them afterwards.
All too many people go in strong psychedelic sessions with little preparation, in very poor settings, without experienced people they respect and trust around, and often even without knowing the substance or the dose of what they're taking.
If there are negative effects during the trip they don't know how to handle them, and many are lost as to what to do afterwards, and don't take advantage of support offered by trained psychedelic therapists or even ordinary psychologists.
It's a formula for increasing the odds of trauma and subsequent PTSD.
If anyone is considering taking psychedelics, please, please educate yourself thoroughly on them and how to use them constructively, test them, and know with certainty the dose you are taking, and take them only with experienced people you like and trust.
James Fadiman's Psychedelics Explorers Guide*[1] is a great resource for this.
Would you mind explaining what you mean by intrusive thoughts please? What type of things and when? Specific triggers? How do you know they are LSD based?
I'm not sure how many of my thoughts are not intrusive!
Are you in contact with a therapist you enjoy talking to? They're phenomenal when it comes to helping tackle ruminating and intrusive/impulsive thoughts. If you don't, you'll want to go through the (unfortunately tedious) process of finding one that deals with CBT or ACT.
I suggest this to people even when they feel they are out of a pit primarily because being out of the pit is the perfect time to get help, as they don't have the usual struggles that makes reaching out feel impossible.
I've seen 5-6 therapists over the past decade. I'd love to find the right one, but so far my experience is between neutral and strongly negative. My closest friends are far more empathic and life-experienced people, a few quite capable of removing themselves from a conversation for my benefit.
From reports of therapists themselves - a huge part of their value is essentially a friend for hire - human contact with someone that will take the time to listen to you and take an interest. Lots of people don't have that but you sound like you do.
IMHO things like CBT and ACT can be self-studied successfully from books. Writing can achieve much of the effect of talking therapy - both expressing difficult thoughts and obtaining objectivity. Maybe not for everyone but I think nerdy autodidacts can cover a huge amount of ground without paying a professional. Such individuals might also be in need of supportive human contact though!
Yeah that's understandable, and that's a low number relatively speaking as this is a problem that really hasn't been solved. There are places like psychologytoday that provide a decent database to finding potential therapists (with good enough filters to really narrow down what you want to get into and feel safe around), but it can still be very tough. Especially when you consider how many people go so long without being diagnosed with issues like OCD as long as they are "productive" enough for nobody to care.
It's fantastic you have really great empathetic friends to help you out, sometimes you really do just need someone to listen to you.
Each one of those therapists I saw for at least 6 months, at least one for 2y. There's probably 4-5 more I saw for 2-3 sessions before abandoning.
With all this experience, I still don't know how I would filter a list of therapists except maybe remove ones that seem married to a particular method/style. Like a real relationship (that you don't pay for), it takes time to get to know eachother. And at anywhere from $100-400 (nyc.. sigh) per session, it's not free to keep trying (ignoring the emotional costs..).
And my experiences have taught me that like any regular person, therapists can be deeply wounded individuals or struggling with their own demons. Maybe they've conquered them, maybe they're hiding behind a facade of being able to 'help' others. It's messy. I think there's something weird/wrong about our current zeitgeist putting therapists on a pedestal or that everyone should go to one. They aren't doctors, and you aren't necessarily sick.
I find therapists are fantastic outlets to vent to, without having to worry about being judged or putting too much on the other person. But my experience is similar with therapists who feel they need to help people, or are trying to "make up for" their own issues. It's hard to take advice from someone who seems as messed up as you do.
I had a similar experience to the first half of your story. Was so unfulfilled in tech that I ended up quitting and took time off not working, trying lots of different things, getting very frustrated and depressed along the way.
I did try LSD (ok, a lot of LSD) and instead of it helping me process/sort through/integrate some of my troubles it added new ones and created recurring intrusive thoughts. Overall, bad experience & wish I didn't do that.
After ~2y outside of full time employment (i did some contract work eventually), I found myself more depressed than when I left. I had tried a lot of things (hobbies for joy, tech in non-FTE ways, entrepreneurship, travel, classes, intimate relationships..) but found no grander meaning or goals at the end of it, just some isolated interesting experiences (some were peak positive, others a pit). So back to tech. I don't love it, but having an external demand of me was sufficient to lift me out of the pit of despair i was in.