alt Hacker NewsAnecdotally, I know several people who have tried mushrooms and/or ayahuasca for depression in recent years and their results are nothing like the glowing Internet reports.
The worst case is a friend who became disconnected from reality for a very long time. Went from atheistic to believing in mystical ideas. He thought he was able to see and sense things that we could not, like auras and secret messages. He was getting better last time we checked but he’s hard to get in contact with now. No prior hints of psychosis or family history, just a psychedelic induced mental illness.
The other anecdotes were not as dramatic, but also not as positive or free of side effects as studies like this one would make you think. Multiple stories of extended periods of derealization or anxiety attacks that started after the trip. There are similar comments here throughout this comment section.
There was a time when sharing these negative stories was met with disbelief and downvotes. I think as it’s becoming more common people are realizing that the interaction between psychedelics and depression isn’t as great as it seemed for a few years when they were virtually being promoted by podcasters and social media influencers as a novel cure for depression.
Replies
I'm sure it's nothing like a panacea, but I've lost count of the times in which getting some context behind a report of a bad experience shows recklessness or just plain old bad decisions.
It also works the other way around, people even talk about how years of therapy didn't help but psilocybin did, and few seem to consider that maybe it was a combination of both? Perhaps all of that therapy that "didn't help" set the stage for something else.
General problem with anecdata I guess.
I don't know if people have forgotten all the lessons from the 60s, but set and setting are still extremely important for what kind of experience you are going to have.
That's why use should be done in a controlled setting, with an experienced guide (ideally a therapist).
Psychedelics are basically like shock therapy.
The whole ketamine thing though is even crazier at least with psychedelics there is a forced introspection and very little addictive nature.
I think a lot of the negative reception to negative anecdotes were because they were often in the context of legalization. "I know someone who went crazy after trying $foo so we should still lock people into iron cages just for the crime of possessing it." Debate tends to get polarized when doors are being kicked down. Academic studies that are disconnected from culture wars don't tend to provoke such responses, probably because they don't tend to reach the general public in the first place.