EDIT: while I still think this is true for most people, I want to contextualize this by saying that people should always practice harm-reduction when taking psychedelics, do their own research, consider their own history and risk profile, start with a low dose. I don’t mean to make anyone feel threatened by arguing in favor of psychedelic use. Your boundaries are sacred and my opinion is just an opinion.
Psychedelics don’t have any inherent positive or negative effect, they just make you more open to suggestion. They increase your learning rate. New evidence (i.e. your current lifestyle) will start weighing more on you than your prior (i.e. everything you’ve learned since you were a child).
If you are in a context that promotes healthy ideas, then psychedelics will help you absorb them faster. If you are in a cult, they’ll make you go off the rails faster.
I take them all the time and I’m better for it, but I would never take them in Berkeley.
This is not true. Some people are significantly less robust to the effects of psychedelics. Even a meditation retreat was enough to make me go off the rails— I would never take psychedelics. But some people can’t feel anything at those retreats and seem like psychedelics just open them up a bit. The same predispositions that lead people to develop schizophrenia and bipolar make them vulnerable to destabilization from psychedelics.
I wanted to dig up some numbers that put your claim in context. I have also seen a small minority of people that respond badly to psychedelics and even to meditation retreats (especially vipassana). But the first few studies did not find a connection between psychedelic use and mental health issues. I still feel this needs to be investigated.
However, I insist that my claim is true for a large majority, and an overcorrection of universally recommending against psychedelics would be net-negative (yes really). Instead we should be investigating how to ensure that these negative responses don’t happen.
I’ll make my model more precise: besides increasing your learning rate, psychedelics open you up to negative emotional stimuli that are being habitually suppressed because they would otherwise destabilize you. Naturally this opening up brings some destabilization along with it, which requires some skill to navigate. A good shaman or teacher will be able to teach you those skills, but a bunch of videos (like in vipassana) or just drinking the kool-aid with a bunch of friends won’t do.
If I may ask (you don’t have to answer): what retreat did you go to and how did you go off the rails?
It’s definitely overconfident. Source: twenty years of listening to a wide range of stories from my mother’s experiences as a mental health nurse in a psychiatric emergency room. Some of those psychedelic-related cases involved all sorts of confounding factors, and some of them just didn’t.
EDIT: while I still think this is true for most people, I want to contextualize this by saying that people should always practice harm-reduction when taking psychedelics, do their own research, consider their own history and risk profile, start with a low dose. I don’t mean to make anyone feel threatened by arguing in favor of psychedelic use. Your boundaries are sacred and my opinion is just an opinion.
Psychedelics don’t have any inherent positive or negative effect, they just make you more open to suggestion. They increase your learning rate. New evidence (i.e. your current lifestyle) will start weighing more on you than your prior (i.e. everything you’ve learned since you were a child).
If you are in a context that promotes healthy ideas, then psychedelics will help you absorb them faster. If you are in a cult, they’ll make you go off the rails faster.
I take them all the time and I’m better for it, but I would never take them in Berkeley.
This is not true. Some people are significantly less robust to the effects of psychedelics. Even a meditation retreat was enough to make me go off the rails— I would never take psychedelics. But some people can’t feel anything at those retreats and seem like psychedelics just open them up a bit. The same predispositions that lead people to develop schizophrenia and bipolar make them vulnerable to destabilization from psychedelics.
I wanted to dig up some numbers that put your claim in context. I have also seen a small minority of people that respond badly to psychedelics and even to meditation retreats (especially vipassana). But the first few studies did not find a connection between psychedelic use and mental health issues. I still feel this needs to be investigated.
However, I insist that my claim is true for a large majority, and an overcorrection of universally recommending against psychedelics would be net-negative (yes really). Instead we should be investigating how to ensure that these negative responses don’t happen.
I’ll make my model more precise: besides increasing your learning rate, psychedelics open you up to negative emotional stimuli that are being habitually suppressed because they would otherwise destabilize you. Naturally this opening up brings some destabilization along with it, which requires some skill to navigate. A good shaman or teacher will be able to teach you those skills, but a bunch of videos (like in vipassana) or just drinking the kool-aid with a bunch of friends won’t do.
If I may ask (you don’t have to answer): what retreat did you go to and how did you go off the rails?
This may be slightly overconfident. My guess is that the effects can vary wildly depending on the individual.
It’s definitely overconfident. Source: twenty years of listening to a wide range of stories from my mother’s experiences as a mental health nurse in a psychiatric emergency room. Some of those psychedelic-related cases involved all sorts of confounding factors, and some of them just didn’t.