[nabla9]

Will psychedelics be ‘a revolution in psychiatry’? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-021-00087-7

The Yale Manual for Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy of Depression (using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a Therapeutic Frame) https://psyarxiv.com/u6v9y

“Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression“, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032994

Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder. A Randomized Clinical Trial, Alan K. Davis et al., 2020 doi : 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.3285

Can Psychedelic Drugs Attenuate Age-Related Changes in Cognition and Affect? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41465-019-00151-6

LSD is one of the safest drugs there are. You may get a bad trip but it ends. Of course people in danger of psychosis should not take it.

People don't get addicted to LSD or psychedelics in general. It's not something you want to take frequently (excluding some who microdose at the levels where you don't feel the psychedelics effects).

[vkomega]

Great, thanks for the objective response. My inquiry was substantially downvoted.

How can one determine if they are at risk of psychosis prior to consuming LSD? I've heard many stories of people who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD trips. It wasn't clear from family history or medical history that they were at-risk for such a reaction.

At least based on these outcomes, it might be a bit inaccurate to claim LSD is safe. I suspect it was outlawed in part due to observed risks decades ago, but am still curious about political motivations. (e.g. "they want to deny us access to knowledge, man." or racial reasons, etc)

Perhaps there will be technology advancements in support of ascertaining propensity for adverse reactions to psychedelics. I suspect there's a strong component related to dosage. Maybe this is related to the microdosing movement?

[mikelevins]

The idea that someone took LSD and "was never the same" is a common trope, but I doubt it's based much on fact. I wrote a paper years ago in college about the difference between what "public education" about LSD said and what the medical literature said (I attended a university with a good medical school and a good medical library), and the short version is that federally-funded "public education" about LSD was mostly a lot of scare stories made up to serve someone's social or political agenda. They had little or no basis in fact.

Things like that get repeated, though. People like to repeat scare stories. I wouldn't be surprised if that's where most of the "never the same" stories come from.

I will admit that I took LSD quite a few times at the end of the 1970s, and that at the peak of that period I spent a month or two in a fairly confused and impressionable state. Someone who had known me before and who encountered me during that period might be forgiven for concluding that I would "never be the same". It was temporary, though.

I gave up on psychedelics and other mind-altering substances by the early 1980s. They were no longer showing me anything new. As the fellow said, once you've gotten the message, it's time to hang up the phone.

The literature that I found in the late 70s made LSD look fairly harmless, as long as you were not already psychotic or close to it. That was peer-reviewed research, though, not news stories. It would have been scandalous at that time for anyone in the mainstream press to suggest that LSD was anything less than the scourge of Western Civilization.

Sometime around the late nineties or early 2000s, respectable researchers began to obtain permission to conduct research with psychedelics again, and have gotten some pretty interesting results, especially in areas like treatment of alcoholism, depression, and anxiety. By the way, they don't seem to be finding a lot of civilization-ending dangers in the process. Judging by the medical literature, they just aren't very dangerous.

As far as I know, based both on personal experience and medical literature, the main dangers from psychedelics are that they can be very disorienting and several of them amplify the experience of emotion. Bad trips mostly seem to be a combination of disorientation and fear, with the disorientation becoming frightening, and the fear amplified by the drug so that it becomes terror.

But bad trips end, just like good ones do.

So if you're going to experiment with them, you want to be in a safe place, in a reasonably sane and calm state of mind, and in the company of trustworthy people who have your best interests in mind--preferably mental-health professionals with some experience with psychedelics, if possible.

[nabla9]

> I've heard many stories of people who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD trips.

This seems to be weird legend with very little fact behind it.

> claim LSD is safe.

Obliviously nothing is perfectly safe, but pharmacologicallly LSD is the safest drug there is. Safer than Aspirin. It's virtually impossible to overdose it, it's not toxic and LD50 is way 10^5 - 10^6 times of what is the usage. It is possible to get into accident during big LSD trip if you are not fully aware of your surroundings. Having trip sitter helps with that.

Frequent use of any drug when you are young is probably always more risky. Brain is fully developed late 20's.

[vkomega]

People who I knew long ago took LSD and wound up going crazy. They weren't the same. It's not weird legend.

Safety in terms of physical overdose isn't the only metric.

[nabla9]

Sigh. I accidentally tried to engage with 15 days old account.

Remember people, check first.

[sammalloy]

> How can one determine if they are at risk of psychosis prior to consuming LSD?

Family history of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia.

> I've heard many stories of people who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD trips.

I think those stories are overblown. People like to have something to blame for when a loved one goes down the wrong path.

[vkomega]

> history

This was addressed in my previous comment. I've known folks who took the stuff and had a horrible reaction, without family history as such.

Also, consuming street drugs of unknown quality in uncontrolled settings with uncontrolled dosages is quite different than controlled medical experiments.

> overblown

I never wanted to try the stuff after personally observing people change after having a "bad trip". If it permanently alters perceptions in unpredictable ways, then ingesting it likely catalyzes alternate life trajectories, also in unpredictable ways.

Seems like a double edged sword. Many report the positive benefits but the supporters seem to downplay risks or point to other factors without supporting evidence.

It's unclear how to determine safety with prospective victims/winners whose family history doesn't include mental illness. Again, I suspect dosage is a critical factor to trip outcome; this being common pharmacological wisdom.

[sammalloy]

All true, of course. I have had great success helping two people who had "bad trips" as a trip sitter. Both people had a troubled adolescence, but are now doing extremely well as adults and are highly successful. Whenever I see them, they always thank me for helping them. The truth of the matter, is that I didn't do anything at all, I just made them feel safe and let them knew that everything was going to be okay.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

Not just schizophrenia. Psychosis overall is the danger- this includes a significantly wider variety of conditions such as bipolar.