[hattmall]

Are you saying that speaking to external beings while tripping is potentially a treatment for mental health?

I mean yeah, that's what it feels like when you really trip and sometimes it can be really exciting, sometimes it's interesting and feels informative, and sometimes it's completely terrible.

The best feeling in the world is when you remember that you took drugs and the people telling you that you are stuck on a foreign planet in cold and darkness away from everyone you know for eternity aren't real, that the sun is in fact coming up and you are just on earth in your friends backyard.

I have a really hard time thinking anyone that proposes tripping as a viable solution to true mental health problems is a serious person.

There's basically two camps of people in that arena, and it's people that haven't done many drugs, and people that did too many drugs.

[cthalupa]

The vast majority of people report their experiences with the DMT "Machine Elves" as being positive. Very few report the experience as being negative, and I have very very very rarely heard of a bad trip in the same vein that you see occur a significant amount of the time with shrooms and LSD.

Not all of my DMT trips involved these other entities, but when they did, they frequently had something to show me or say to me. These things weren't "new" knowledge - how could it be? I don't believe these are actually external entities - but instead things that on some level I knew to be true, but had trouble internalizing and operating on. These experiences helped integrate that knowledge from something I understood on a conceptual basis to something I could actually put in practice. One of my first serious long-term relationships ended when I was cheated on, and it resulted in me having some serious trust issues in relationships after that. I "knew" that this is a risk in relationships, but that people CAN be faithful, and that allowing these trust issues to fester would almost certainly directly result in relationships failing because of them. That didn't stop me from doing the things that I knew I shouldn't. A DMT trip with some experiences related to this didn't teach me anything new, but after I found it significantly easier to move past those trust issues and become a much better partner in relationships.

If I had to guess, something about being exposed to this information in such an altered state of conscious can allow for you internalize it when you otherwise struggle in your normal state of being.

> I have a really hard time thinking anyone that proposes tripping as a viable solution to true mental health problems is a serious person.

This seems likely to be a personal bias. There is a lot of real-deal research from serious people showing promising results.

[TeMPOraL]

> Are you saying that speaking to external beings while tripping is potentially a treatment for mental health?

"External" but really just products of your brain, and yes, I could see how this would be helpful. Taking such drugs seem like giving a whack to the brain to the point you enter a kind of "debug mode"; perhaps some issues that you can't normally untangle are accessible directly in that mode. At the very least, you get to poke at your internal state from angles normally not available to you, so some of your mental blocks could shake loose and fall back into place.

(I wouldn't know, I never took anything like it or had any similar experiences, but that's what I gather from reading countless stories and reports of those who did.)

[joquarky]

"Debug mode" is also my favorite way of putting it, and yes it does seem to give me greater access to retrieve memories and discover, re-evaluate, and re-program heuristics I thought were just background constants.

I've also read that some who are quite experienced in lucid dreaming can have conversations with their subconscious by embodiment into a character in their dream. I bet there is a lot of potential utility to be discovered there.

[StanislavPetrov]

As someone who did a far amount of psychedelics decades ago I can state for certain that not all "tripping" is the same, depending on a variety of factors. LSD is completely different than psilocybin which is completely different than peyote. All of these trips are completely different based on your mental state, your surroundings and the size of your dose (among other things). Given the wide array of mental health problems people suffer, I find it absurd to assert that there it is impossible that psychedelics offer no potential treatment for some of these problems. That isn't to say they are a cure-all, are suitable for treating all patients, or all conditions, but it is to say that there has been very promising research done to suggest that some psychedelics do improve some mental health problems. There has been convincing research done on the treatment of PTSD and alcoholism, and research in this field has really only begun to get off the ground.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9577917/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9710723/

[micromacrofoot]

if we were to dramatically oversimplify it, we could say that these drugs grant someone a perspective that they were unable or unwilling to achieve through their typical thought processes

it's not hard to imagine why sometimes that can be helpful, and we can try to optimize towards "usually helpful" — but sure they could also be harmful or plain useless