Comment by bjourne
8 months ago
I read in a forum about psychedelics about a guy who had been carving up his whole arm while tripping on LSD. The response befuddled me and wasn't what I expected: "Classic newbie mistake", "Your own fault for tripping alone", and "You should put knifes and weapons away when you trip." It made me realize these people are like adopters of niche programming languages. To outsiders they tell everyone how great their language is and how you'll become 10x more productive switching to it. Only on bug trackers will you find out about lack of tooling support, stochastic compiler bugs, and bad api designs.
These are not normal reactions to being under the influence of psychedelics but latent mental illness being activated.
That they can activate latent mental illnesses that wouldn't be activated otherwise is the main risk of psychedelics, and is absolutely a real problem
Activating latent mental illness is a risk of psychedelics, and yet they are still safer in that regard than alcohol and cannabis. There is a lower rate of psychosis being triggered with LSD and psilocybin. This is an education problem: we are (at least sort of) taught in school the risks of drinking too much, and in younger generations, smoking too much weed, but we are taught nothing about when it's appropriate to take psychedelics.
Some recent studies suggest that there is no increase in risk of psychosis from psychedelic use, and at worst, it causes symptoms which would have surfaced anyways to surface sooner. This isn't a reason to take psychedelics of course, it's better that one goes as long as they can without experiencing some sort of schizo-affective disorder.
My point is that people are misunderstanding the risks when they look at psychedelics and go "No way I'm taking that, I don't want to make myself schizophrenic", and then don't bat an eye when they drink a glass (or two) of wine or smoke a joint.
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It happened with someone I know. He tried psychedelics in a weekend at the beach house scenario for the first time as a middle aged man. He liked the experience and then started reading about LSD microdosing, so he decided to try that.
Over the course of a few weeks he began to slide into what was clearly schizophrenic delusions. He became obsessed with what he presumed was a vast conspiracy to murder him and take his money, interpreting ordinary events like someone cutting him off on the highway as being part of this.
Thankfully he's got a good partner and support network, got into therapy, and now is doing fine.
I have a pretty live and let live attitude over psychedelics, but I do hate when aficionados pretend there aren't risks or downsides.
On a less dramatic scale I know people who've tried it and hated it, and that's very much a possible outcome as well. It's crappy when aficionados flip that around into somehow being a square or whatever.
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My one experience with psilocybin was the only time in my life I've ever confronted the fragility of my mental and emotional wellbeing in such a sudden way. Drastically different from other psychedelics I've experienced. MDMA is pure bliss - psilocybin is something I won't go near without professional guidance.
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It's also a marked risk of "social media", "being in a crowd", "being alone" ... you don't understand mental illness, don't use it as a crutch for your ill informed prohibitionist memespreading.
Consuming any substance really comes down to one thing:
Do you want to "feel" yourself more, or do you want to feel yourself less?
Many people are not interested (or ready) to feel themselves more. And when they do, they might not like what they find.
That's pretty simplistic, and doesn't come close to explaining the complex interactions of drugs. Caffeine, Zoloft, LSD, Meth, Heroin, and PCP all have wildly different effects that can't be boiled down to "feeling yourself".
"latent mental illness" sounds like a tagline for the human condition.
It also sounds like blaming its risks on "user error"
They are 'classic newbie mistakes', but they are not normal? The drug messing with your neural pathways, messing with those particular neural pathways, is not normal, but rather just activates 'latent' messed-with-ness? This sounds like words without meaning.
Or just someone who is mentally ill taking psychedelics.
Bath Salts. If rabies was a medicine. LSD lets you keep your marbles, they just become more colorful and roll around for awhile. It is disassociative though in a way that pain can be experienced differently. Solitary is okay, but don't go into it alone with self-harm in your history.
Ask your doctor if placebo is right for you.
Just be careful with metaphors. It's useful for conveying ideas, but it's easy to mistake the original idea by the substitution. Psychedelics are not programming languages. It doesn't matter if you or I write the same piece of code in gleam, they will work the same if the environment is the same. The same cannot be said by psychedelics.
I see it as an unfortunate byproduct of the war on drugs forcing advocates to become boosters beyond what they otherwise would as a means to counteract the many years of bad-faith negative press. It was especially prevalent (still is to a certain extent) for weed, though I think that's dying down a bit now that it's been decriminalized in a lot of places.
I would have said that was both horrific and unusual, rather than ‘classic’.
Let’s not pretend it’s perfectly safe (what is?) but this is hardly ‘normal’.
While it might not be normal, that type of thing is not unknown and alone is enough to mean everyone should avoid those drugs.
I disagree, I think it is effectively unknown, vanishingly rare considering how many millions of doses have been consumed over decades.
Let’s not pretend it’s 100% safe and foolproof, but that’s very far out of the ordinary.
That kind of thing occurs far more often when someone has not used drugs.
Logically, drug use should be mandatory to reduce the prevalence of such self-harm.
By your own logic you are fine with all alcohol being avoided, right? Psychedelics kill infinitely fewer people than alcohol, after all.
> I read in a forum about...
...something that likely never happened (and if it did, it wasn't the LSD)
People jump out of windows/off roofs all the time on psychedelics.
No they do not, the instances of this are incredibly small, and every one of them involved the use of alcohol or other drugs.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21256914/
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The AI overlords call bullshit on that.
The nutshell quote: "Jumping from heights under psychedelics is possible but statistically extraordinary—orders of magnitude rarer than popular mythology suggests."
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Sounds like AI should guide us. (maybe an uncensored version)
This should've been horrifying I guess, but I found it rather amusing. And as a niche-programming-language-enthusiast: well done with the analogy!