This study at least didn’t ask about the length of the psychotic episode, so it seems compatible with the users having had short-term psychotic episodes that didn’t cause long-term damage.
Speculatively, a short-term psychosis could even be part of what causes long-term mental health benefits, if e.g. psychedelics do it via a relaxing of priors and the psychotic episode is the moment when they are the most relaxed before stabilizing again, in line with the neural annealing analogy:
The hypothesized flattening of the brain’s (variational free) energy landscape under psychedelics can be seen as analogous to the phenomenon of simulated annealing in computer science—which itself is analogous to annealing in metallurgy, whereby a system is heated (i.e., instantiated by increased neural excitability), such that it attains a state of heightened plasticity, in which the discovery of new energy minima (relatively stable places/trajectories for the system to visit/reside in for a period of time) is accelerated (Wang and Smith, 1998). Subsequently, as the drug is metabolized and the system cools, its dynamics begin to stabilize—and attractor basins begin to steepen again (Carhart-Harris et al., 2017). This process may result in the emergence of a new energy landscape with revised properties.
A relevant-seeming comparison is that there are meditation traditions that basically hold that you are expected to go through what are something like psychotic episodes before you get better, on the theory that reconfiguring your brain to more clearly see reality will break some existing setups and require time to find a new workable configuration.
Alternatively, the psychotic episodes themselves may be part of what helps convey useful information to your brain: they are a very visceral indication of the fact that your experience is internally constructed. If something totally crazy may seem like an absolute truth during the trip/meditation experience, then that helps highlight the fact that even things that feel like absolute truths to you can be false. “Getting a visceral understanding of how your mind creates your subjective reality” is sometimes understood to be one of the goals of enlightenment, and it can also make it easier to discard incorrect emotional schemas that some part of your mind has so far taken as absolute ttruths and which have caused what we would ordinarily call mental health problems.
At the same time this also risks some craziness if you don’t already have good epistemology. One with the right background may end up thinking “okay so that was a really visceral indication of my mind being generated by a piece of fallible software, I’ll be much less sure about all of my beliefs now and try extra hard to test them against reality”. But someone else could interpret exactly the same experiences to imply “well apparently everything I took to be certain is bunk, that includes all that previous stuff about science that I once thought to be true, now I know that my mind creates reality so this has to mean that there’s no objective reality and I can make anything true just by believing in it!”.
This study at least didn’t ask about the length of the psychotic episode, so it seems compatible with the users having had short-term psychotic episodes that didn’t cause long-term damage.
Speculatively, a short-term psychosis could even be part of what causes long-term mental health benefits, if e.g. psychedelics do it via a relaxing of priors and the psychotic episode is the moment when they are the most relaxed before stabilizing again, in line with the neural annealing analogy:
A relevant-seeming comparison is that there are meditation traditions that basically hold that you are expected to go through what are something like psychotic episodes before you get better, on the theory that reconfiguring your brain to more clearly see reality will break some existing setups and require time to find a new workable configuration.
Alternatively, the psychotic episodes themselves may be part of what helps convey useful information to your brain: they are a very visceral indication of the fact that your experience is internally constructed. If something totally crazy may seem like an absolute truth during the trip/meditation experience, then that helps highlight the fact that even things that feel like absolute truths to you can be false. “Getting a visceral understanding of how your mind creates your subjective reality” is sometimes understood to be one of the goals of enlightenment, and it can also make it easier to discard incorrect emotional schemas that some part of your mind has so far taken as absolute ttruths and which have caused what we would ordinarily call mental health problems.
At the same time this also risks some craziness if you don’t already have good epistemology. One with the right background may end up thinking “okay so that was a really visceral indication of my mind being generated by a piece of fallible software, I’ll be much less sure about all of my beliefs now and try extra hard to test them against reality”. But someone else could interpret exactly the same experiences to imply “well apparently everything I took to be certain is bunk, that includes all that previous stuff about science that I once thought to be true, now I know that my mind creates reality so this has to mean that there’s no objective reality and I can make anything true just by believing in it!”.