[hristov]

That is a very good example, and thank you for sharing your experience. It should be noted that in the original article the test subjects (1) take Psilocybin only once and (2) are followed from this dose by hours of therapy by a professional psychologist.

If that is what you did you probably would have been more grounded. But it is absolutely crazy to deduce from this very controlled experiment with a very limited single dose of Psilocybin and a lot of therapy after that, that recreational use is ok. This experiment was designed to allow for further controlled experiments to check for Psilocybin potential for treatment of depression and the like. That is all it should be used for.

[PragmaticPulp]

> It should be noted that in the original article the test subjects (1) take Psilocybin only once and (2) are followed from this dose by hours of therapy by a professional psychologist.

Virtually every modern psychedelic study includes huge amounts of therapy. I actually don’t know if review boards would even approve a study which didn’t have a significant therapy component right now.

This makes the study results non-portable to recreational use. Many of the depression studies use upwards of 20 therapy sessions around the 1 or 2 psychedelic sessions, which is nothing like what happens when taking psychedelics recreationally.

[notch656a]

But I think you'd also be quite hard pressed to find any peer-reviewed study that shows a professional therapist yields better results regarding long-term detriment after exposure to psychedelics than mere access to health care when needed along with friends or whatever circumstance people find most enjoyable to take psychedelics in.

There's scant evidence that mandatory therapy sessions are the determining factor of whether or not psychedelics can be taken safely.

This is simply a poorly understood area, scientifically, due in part to government restriction on research. The intertwining of the therapy could mean psychedelics counteracted bad therapy, or the inverse, or neither.

I am going to offer a piece of opinion here that will offend the psychiatrists, psychedelics enthusiasts, and many of those with more conservative views about drug use: what if psychedelic drugs are just another form of entertainment for the mind, like television. What if our ancestors in places like indigenous communities in present-day Mexico actually first started taking them because it GAVE THEM SOMETHING TO DO and a reprieve from boredom, and the spiritual interpretations later just added to the entertainment. What if therapists and psychiatrists, lawmakers, doctors, parents, shaman are making much ado about nothing while injecting their own influence into the mix, particularly for the relatively low risk drugs.

[notch656a]

I'm glad they've taken precautions and first of all it seems they went very far to make sure everyone was safe. That is paramount.

That said, the obsession with profession psychologist or psychiatrist as some sort of necessary therapy or guidance in use with psychedelics is just baffling to me. I've tripped a lot, the first several of times of which were completely on my own with no one else around. I'm sure there are people out there who would benefit from these sort of professional guidance but it borders on naive gate-keeping to believe these people are somehow necessary for experiencing altered mental states. I fear some suffered not being able to have the chance to explore psychedelics on their own, but instead influenced by the long traditioned history that medical/mental professionals introduce. It's like they're forcing their own color on the experience.

[whilestanding]

You're welcome. I was not being treated for anything it was just for recreation and I was under no supervision. I'm all for studying the medicinal effects of it.