OTOH a significant amount of (seemingly sane) people credit psychedelics for important personal insights and mental health/trauma healing. Psychedelics seem to be showing enough promise for that for the psychiatric establishment to be getting interested in them again [1, 2] despite them having been stigmatized for decades, and AFAIK the existing medical literature generally finds them to be low-risk [3, 4].
It’s interesting that a lot of the discussion about psychedelics here is arguing from intuitions and personal experience, rather than from the trial results that have been coming out.
I do think that psychedelic experiences vary a lot from person-to-person and trip-to-trip, and that psychedelics aren’t for everyone. (This variability probably isn’t fully captured by the trial results because study participants are carefully screened for lots of factors that may be contraindicated.)
Psilocybin-based psychedelics are indeed considered low-risk both in terms of addiction and overdose. This chart sums things up nicely, and is a good thing to ‘pin on your mental fridge’:
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.
OTOH a significant amount of (seemingly sane) people credit psychedelics for important personal insights and mental health/trauma healing. Psychedelics seem to be showing enough promise for that for the psychiatric establishment to be getting interested in them again [1, 2] despite them having been stigmatized for decades, and AFAIK the existing medical literature generally finds them to be low-risk [3, 4].
It’s interesting that a lot of the discussion about psychedelics here is arguing from intuitions and personal experience, rather than from the trial results that have been coming out.
I do think that psychedelic experiences vary a lot from person-to-person and trip-to-trip, and that psychedelics aren’t for everyone. (This variability probably isn’t fully captured by the trial results because study participants are carefully screened for lots of factors that may be contraindicated.)
Psilocybin-based psychedelics are indeed considered low-risk both in terms of addiction and overdose. This chart sums things up nicely, and is a good thing to ‘pin on your mental fridge’:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Drug_danger_and_dependence.svg/1920px-Drug_danger_and_dependence.svg.png
You want to stay as close as possible to the bottom left corner of that graph!
This graph shows death and addiction potential but it doesn’t say anything about sanity
Correct—but they are low-risk for those factors (addiction and/or overdose).
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.