I get that in some people it can be a wonderful thing, nearly a miracle cure. I've done plenty of psychedelics myself, but I always find the insistence by proponents that any harm done is the fault of the user ("poor preparation", "not the right setting", "inexperienced guide", etc, etc) to be really disingenuous and unscientific. Like, there are legit some people that really won't respond well to this as therapy.
Now, conventional pharmaceuticals and therapy have the same issues, but the reality is psychedelic therapies have never been a clear favorite.
I'd taken psychedelics perhaps 50-60 times before I had one out-of-nowhere bad experience that caused more harm than all the good I'd gotten out of them in my life.
I'm not against psychedelics after this either, huge supporter, but people like to pretend traumatic experiences don't have a chance of occuring.
I don't think I can do that much, but what I can do is offer some theories and context.
(Note: I wrote at length about this experience, and my general experiences with both psychedelics + MDMA here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22991744)
I'll write the following under the assumption that you/the reader don't have experience with psychedelics. There are some things you can put into words for those unfamiliar, and a great many other things you cannot.
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Psychedelics are a fundamentally neutral substance. What I mean by that is, that they and the experience, are neither good nor bad. As hippy as it sounds, "they are what you make of them".
This quality, if you ask me, boils down to one property: Psychedelics are enhancers. If you feel beautiful and happy and lively, you feel REALLY beautiful, happy, and lively.
If you start to become frightened/anxious of something, or are in a frightening situation, you become REALLY frightened.
And this becomes further amplified by a second property of psychedelics:
Rather than the usual business of "Some external occurrence or sensation happened, and here is my one thought/reaction to it." IE "Wow, that statement was rude, what a jerk." Or "Man, that dark alleyway looks kind of scary, I think I'll not go that way."
Your subconscious and free-association become stronger respective of dose, to the point where they can become runaway.
No longer is the equation "1 external action = 1 internal processing response", but some small experience can set off a chain reaction of internal association tumbling down a bunch of different paths.
Dark alleyway -> Oh that's scary -> That's the sort of place monsters would be -> Monsters, oh those are terrifying -> Murder is terrifying -> I don't want to be murdered -> There's probably a monster in that dark alleyway -> Dark alleyway, that's so terrifying -> You know what's probably in there, a monster? -> A monster would murder me -> I don't want to die -> Die.. death...
It becomes a looping, inescapable schizophrenic sort of experience where you've also lost enough short-term memory to forget you've been going in loops like this for what feels like years.
And because things are so ENHANCED, the amount of screaming terror, dread, etc you can feel is beyond any thing you can comprehend. Time is slowed to a crawl, this can continue for eternity.
Now, if that all sounds awful -- just imagine this whole scenario, but filled with the most intense happiness and love you can imagine. That's what MOST experiences are like, generally.
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What happened that night is I started getting anxious and fell into a dark place in my mind and got stuck there for an eternity instead of a happy place, to put it shortly.
I also won't pretend I probably didn't have a lot of subconscious trauma from a really messed up childhood and likely other mental issues/insecurities.
Thinking about this further - have bad trips been observed in clinical studies where the the LSD was created in a controlled, ideal lab setting?
Would be interesting to know if this was or wasn't the case; could indicate a bad trip is an unavoidable potential side-effect, or if it is a specific reaction to poorly created LSD.
Its not the substance purity, but some people are a mess, and sometimes they don't realize/admit it. Some become mess with frequent use. Those definitely shouldn't play with stronger stuff, whatever that is for them.
It will. I'll stake my life-savings on it too.
>Thinking about this further - have bad trips been observed in clinical studies where the the LSD was created in a controlled, ideal lab setting?
Yes, actually, the results here are the ones usually criticized by psychonauts for causing bad trips due to "bad settings" or "poor preparation". There's a bit of truth to that, but the bad trips are always going to happen.
What would be nice is that you get the benefits of the drug without any of the "bad trip" experiences, in a controlled way.
Now, I wouldn't wish my own bad trips on anyone, but I've found I learned far, far more from them than I did my good trips, so in that sense they were actually beneficial.
Also, the term "bad trip" may be a misnomer. They might be more fittingly called "difficult trips" or "challenging trips". It is possible to draw meaning and even wisdom from such trips.
For some, maybe even most, but it would be irresponsible to assume that it would be the case for everyone, and this is exactly the sort of blaming the victim of the bad trip for "doing it wrong" that I was talking about. Somehow it's their fault for having a bad trip, or for looking at it wrong and failing to "correctly" integrate it into their worldview.
Humans are a diverse group. That line of thinking just doesn't work from a clinical perspective.
