Comments on: Harms After Psychedelic Use Can Persist for Years https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/06/harms-after-psychedelic-use-can-persist-for-years/ Science, Psychiatry & Social Justice Thu, 13 Jun 2024 02:54:30 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 By: out https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/06/harms-after-psychedelic-use-can-persist-for-years/#comment-283119 Thu, 13 Jun 2024 02:54:30 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=257083#comment-283119 This study sought negative experiences from psychedelic trips across 49 countries. The researchers found just this number of such subjects.

It pays to include how many continued to experience negative effects in the longer rather the shorter term. It also pays to mention those who were abused during the negative trip.

There is at least one ultra-slow release of such a product chasing patent right now. What luck to have such research on the side of those intending to make $$$millions – researchers are so concerned to remove the trip from their products because they care soooo much about possible negative trip effects. No mention of the optimal set and setting effects to mitigate bad trips.

Another interesting question is the number of ordinary medical treatments that lead to damaging results. Who wants to continue to be unable to walk because potential surgery can always carry the risk of worse outcomes including death – and that’s all surgery.

People would like to have their lives back *from* the hell of PTSD.

There is much else to say.

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By: Archaic Earthling https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/06/harms-after-psychedelic-use-can-persist-for-years/#comment-283116 Thu, 13 Jun 2024 02:16:55 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=257083#comment-283116 Many people’s psychedelic experiences are wonderful for them. How many have ‘bad trips,’ and what causes those to happen, merits further inquiry.
For some, a psychedelic adventure that goes awry can put them in psychiatric treatment for the rest of their lives. I have seen one person to whom this happened. I liked the person very much, and was quite sad, because, being stuck in the mental health system is not always fun.

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By: Jules Evans https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/06/harms-after-psychedelic-use-can-persist-for-years/#comment-283088 Wed, 12 Jun 2024 16:44:04 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=257083#comment-283088 Thanks for covering our research Peter. We’re doing a follow up survey, asking what specific coping techniques helped people with specific post-psychedelic difficulties. If people would like to take part, here is the survey. Everyone who completes it gets a free book. https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5jaIEQerq5wwZx4

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By: Karl Wick, NP https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/06/harms-after-psychedelic-use-can-persist-for-years/#comment-283071 Wed, 12 Jun 2024 13:45:20 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=257083#comment-283071 Harms persist for years, yet “Despite these issues, 89.7% of the participants [who had suffered significant, protracted and often very severe side effects] agreed with the statement, “I believe that the insights and healings gained from psychedelics, when taken in a supportive setting, are worth the risks involved.””

I wonder how that would compare to other psychoactive substances, such as commonly prescribed psych meds. I doubt that many harmed psych-drug takers would have anywhere close to as positive view of risk vs benefits for antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, or other common meds.

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By: Juliano https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/06/harms-after-psychedelic-use-can-persist-for-years/#comment-282975 Tue, 11 Jun 2024 15:19:16 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=257083#comment-282975 In reply to Juliano.

I would really like to go deeper into the mythical aspects and how they connect with psychedelics. I was inspired to do all this because of my early psychedelic experiences, and ongoing experiences.
It is a case of seeing connections, patterns. Our ‘education’ system does not really encourage this, and rather enforces ‘left brain’ thinking on generations of children so as to ‘fit’ them into a mechanstic culture with established roles, and the most pernicious social-controlling myth being the mental illness myth. A myth which claims we are machines, and if we ‘go wrong’ which can simply mean feeling sad, it means we are ‘chemically imbalanced’ and need their drugs. As people here should know there is no actual medical science supporting this at all.

As I said in my previous post, my LSD experience was profound in how it helped me reconnect with nature whereas before I had become dulled to it, it bored me and I was obsessed with big cities. In years ongoing I am seeing what I was becoming all around me. And a big reason I have found for this deadness is that the stories people have been told from ancient to now , the myths, have been anti nature. I can give examples:

We could begin with the ancient mystery school of Orphism in Greece (the first mystical school which wrote down its dogma). The myth was that the body had been created from ashes of the ‘evil Titans’ the chief of the gods Zeus had destroyed them because they attacked and eat his only son, Dionysos. Hence, so the story went, although the body was evil, inside was a divine spark of Dionysos and the goal was to become pure and eventually escape nature.
In Eastern philosophy was the idea nature and the body were illusionary, ‘Maya’, and again the goal was to escape nature and achieve ‘Oneness’.

In the Christian myth the so-called Original Sin was eating the ‘FORBIDDEN FRUIT’ and thus disobeying the ‘God’. In my research I have found that this fruit was covertly referring to psychedelic fruit. So according to this myth disobeying ‘God’ caused the ‘Fall’ of nature. So again we can see how believers in this story are being distanced from nature and also having to feel guilt and shame for being the cause of it. This is the first myth ever to blame humans for causing death!

Then we come into the age of ‘Reason and Science’ and now nature is supposed to be mechanical and insentient, and animals and humans are machines. So my point is that I see a pattern whereby in the history of the patriarchy there have come lineage of stories whose intent has been to divide generations of people from a spiritual connection with nature, and to make sure of this comes the forbidding of psychedelic inspiration which can GREATLY undermine such deep propaganda

So then what about the so-called ‘psychedelic resurgence’ of our more recent times? I have thought a lot about this, and first important thing to know is that much of the lingo the therapists use is still upholding the mental illness myth and hence will come promises that eg psilocybin therapy can ‘heal treatment-reistant depression’ etc . And the rituals are again cutting the individual off from not only nature, but the external, by blindfolding them and putting earphones on. No doubt this way can have healing potential, but I am still seeing this ongoing pattern of distancing people from nature and interaction, and the general opinion of therapists is that ‘recreational tripping’ is inferior to this method.

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By: No-one https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/06/harms-after-psychedelic-use-can-persist-for-years/#comment-282887 Mon, 10 Jun 2024 18:59:39 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=257083#comment-282887 A bad trip causing psychological harm? How does this harm compare to the conditioning of the brain and the life activity by a social process that captured us in infancy and is destroying the Earth through us and all our children’s futures and there is nothing any of us can do? There is an ENORMOUS opportunity cost to NOT taking psychadelics, and that is to wriggle free from your socially conditioned factory consciousness that destroys the integrity and clarity of perception and conditions that perception with distorting and perverting judgements, and all judgements are social judgements. We learn the form ‘judgement’ from the social miiue but no judgement is a fact – it is a social invention, a tool of social violence, the way individuals regulate each other through judgement and negation. Psychadelics dissolve the default mode network in the brain, dissolve the factory consciousness, leaving this consciousness to creatively try and heal itself. Without this healing, your brain is as good as chopped liver, and it’s been chopped by society, and not even an anarchist in this state can claim to have even the remotest degree of freedom from society. To call yourself an anarchist is total social unfreedom because it is merely an intellectual statement, drawn from the social milliue, and we are defining ourself according to this piece of social conditioning, and our description of anarchism would be wholly socially conditioned.

All thought and identity is socially conditioned. By what power did total human beings, did the complex phenomena of a human mind and heart and body, come to believe it WAS it’s skin colour or it’s sexual behaviour? By the power of our social conditioning which is normative and based on deviance from the white heterosexual man, who was once a human being, as were all people, until one group called another man ‘a black man’ and in doing so became a ‘white man’, therefore no longer human beings, therefore no longer brothers, but divided, different ‘kinds’ of people. But it is only a concept and a superficial detail. Hair colour doesn’t divide – why should skin colour? And why am I who I want to have sex with? Who decided that? Our conditioning. See how it perverts everything we are and interfears and destroys all clarity, sanity and understanding. Perception is immune to all these problems but thought is nothing but these problems, this idiocy, this disease of the hearts and minds of each one of us.

What is it that is not socially conditioned? A life that is not controlled by thought, and a mind that does not try to find its identity in thought, for example calling themselves gay, black, an anarchist or a feminist, because these are, unarguably and manifestly, intellectual statements that we mistake for BEING WHO WE ARE, thus who we think we are is mere socially conditioned thought. We are not socially conditioned words, statements, are we, because that is 100% social in origin and content. So what are you actually? You are not even the body – that is an idea or a pattern of sensation. You are CONSCIOUSNESS, which is to say, awareness and the various happenings in awareness. That is the only fact that is. We call the various happenings in awareness sensation, emotion, thought, imagination, feeling, and non-ordinary psychological experiences. The sensation is then conceptualized by thought as the outside world, me, my body, my feelings, car, train, river etc, but this labelling process is the social historical process conditioning the brain and through that conditioning of the brain, conditioning and prejudicing what you see. This is the social process conditioning your brain and all your thinking and life activity, and you think finding an identity within that conditioning called ‘anarchist’ is somehow related to real, actual freedom. Mother Nature is already instinctive freedom. We are Mother Nature burdened with thought and other social structures. We need to free her from those structures, and free ourselves from them, because we are Mother Nature enslaved by thought and society. Anarchist and feminism and all other isms and identities are mere thought. Be free consciousness and liberate the nature that you are and that is, all around you. Destroy the system that’s destroyed the Earth and all our children’s futures, and which destroys and conditions you day in, day out, until you reach the grave. If you die an anarchist or feminist then it has won.

Demons and idiocies march out of the mouths of all our politicians. They are unconscious vampires, and along with the business and cultural and spiritual vampires like Eckhart Tolle who has over $80 million in the bank from desperate people like you, they are the living dead we warned ourselves about through culture. What isn’t the living dead? The baby, the animal, the free human being. Which of these can you be now?

Let’s be raindrops shattering into the ground. Beautiful why they last but part of the eternal water cycle. Cuz that’s what we are, a falling bit of sea. Eclipse!

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By: Someone Else https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/06/harms-after-psychedelic-use-can-persist-for-years/#comment-282877 Mon, 10 Jun 2024 17:19:34 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=257083#comment-282877 So is it now legal for psychiatrists to force drug people with these dangerous psychedelics … Ayahuasca, DMT, and LSD?

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By: Juliano https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/06/harms-after-psychedelic-use-can-persist-for-years/#comment-282873 Mon, 10 Jun 2024 16:47:09 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=257083#comment-282873 I am all for free speech, and so altough I do not want articles like this banned, I am VERY angry about this article!!! It goes against my very life story which I will explain a bit now: I was turned onto LSD when I was 15. My dream was to become a dancer, and things fell into place and I got the opportunity to go and live in London, and take lessons at Covent Garden Dance Studios. I was having to get jobs though to support myself, and THE fateful one was riight in the heart of Piccadilly Circus. And it was here one day when I was leaning over the road railings on a break breathing in the car fumes that I felt a tap on my shoulder, and one of the people who were working on a clothing stall near me invited me to a party and I accepted.
On the way I was offered a tiny tiny blue pill, and being rather naive I assumed it was ‘speed’ because an amphetamive known as ‘bluies’ was talked about in the news. So I took it, and then found myself say on a couch observiing people at the party who were mostly stoned on cannabis. The trip began when the door to my left seemed to blow into the room like a psychedelic balloon. I then began to see people’s body language, and how it conflicted with the social personas they were hiding behind. I found this SO hysterially funny I thought I would die laughing. Towards the end thre was an element of ‘bad trip’ because people started looking green and I freaked out a bit.
However in the year I was in London I went onto have a series of powerful trips. I was utterly amazed how solid matter, walls etc NOW seems to breath and ripple and wave, and how everything seemed so connected with my consciousness. I saw ‘notes’ fly off played guitar strings like multi-coloured sparks. Seeing music……………. But the most tranformative parts of the trips for me was on their ‘come down’ when we would leave the place we had taken the acid, and then at dawn went walkabout, past gardens (this was in Spring and Summer) and into parks, and this is where I saw nature as UTTERLY magical, alive, intelligent, creative, and I felt DEEPLY connected with it…….Now this was a profound thing, because from being about 8/9 I had become totally dulled to nature. I lived near a lovely park, and could have walked through it to and from school but always chose the main road. I would throw litter in parks and countryside.
My main obsession was with big cities, and the promises of future technology. I was also getting a sadistic streak. The experience which encapsulated this amazing change for me was my memeory of coming down when reclining by a lake in Hyde park called The Serpentine.
I was watching the rising sun’s reflections on the rippling water, and it was like a zillion golden stars, and I knew that it was ALL connected, and I could see how I would have usually observed it–eg., the-light-is-reflecting-off-the-water. You know in a mechanical linear way we are all drilled in schools . Because we ARE indoctrinated via a mechansitic philosophy which totally disenchants nature and our being. Nature is made out to be mechansitic and insentient, be also animals and humans are said to be machines. But here in front of/part of this lake I experiencing the deeply magical experience of it all.
There is also something significantly synchronistic this happened in front of the lake called the SERPENTINE. Mythically so, because these experiences encouraged a lifelong interest in looking into mythology, and the one that really resonates with me is Goddess mythos in which serpents and serpentine energy is VERY sacred; however I found that ALL patriarchal myths are anti nature, and so we see how the West’s most important ‘creation myth’ in the Bible totally trres to defame and demonize the Serpent.

I see THE main problem of humankind is losing access to the human right to experience ecstasy incpired with psychedelics, and how this rightful freedom can dissolve the chasm between them and nature and this is why I am very angry with this fear-mongering article which adds to all the propaganda against psychedelics going way back. This fear-mongering didn’t just begin in the 1960s but is right at beginning of the rise of the patriarchy.

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