Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

Plenty (most?) people take psychedelics without any kind of therapeutic or constructive intention -- they take them to party, to escape, as an antidote for boredom, etc. It's not surprising that such use of these powerful substances could have undesirable or even very negative effects -- though sometimes even such arguably reckless use still produces positive results.

Use of psychedelics in therapeutic and healing contexts tends to be very different. The intention tends to be very different, with a focus on healing or on a specific illness, symptom, or problem that the individual suffers from. There is often serious preparation for the journey, ranging from ways of purifying oneself (for psychedelic use in shamanic or other sacred contexts), to sessions of therapy (when this has been done in Western medical contexts).

The actual trips themselves also tend to be handled quite differently in healing/therapeutic contexts from recreational ones. In recreational contexts, people often do it at parties, with the lights on, or maybe watching movies, or maybe sometimes outside in nature. In therapeutic/healing context, the lights tend to be very low or off, sometimes blindfolds are used, and the focus internal. Music is often carefully selected to guide the journey. Sometimes people are asked to look at photos of loved one they've brought with them for this purpose. If things go wrong, trained support is available, and instructions are given on how to the experience in a constructive way, while in recreational settings the support is minimal and usually untrained, if it exists at all.

After the experience, the recreational user is usually on their own in terms of integrating and making sense of the experience, while in medical contexts there are often followup therapy sessions with trained professionals who can help in making sense of and constructively using whatever was uncovered during the trip, and perhaps the scheduling of further experiences with modified dosage, if needed.

I have no idea how your own psychedelic experiences were, but if they were more of the recreational kind, I am not very surprised that you didn't get much out of them.

I resent bad medical advice offered on a public forum. An absolute position in anything is always bad advice when the facts are not known. Parents let their children down, I'm not suddenly going to eschew all parenting because of it.

> What we need is well-rounded advice that allows patients to make informed decisions about their road to recovery. Medication is one possible path, but it's not the only path and it's not without it's downsides.

I think we're actually on the same page, then. Recovery is complicated and we all need to do our best supporting everyone in whatever unique journey leads to their recovery. Medication and therapy (along with family, meditation etc.) are all critical to the process and you don't always get the choice of one without the other. I'm sorry that medication and mental health professionals let you down.

I grew up a little differently than most. Drug-dealing parents, foster care, hoarding, crime & violence, and much worse. I escaped it during the late 90s because I learned to do things other people couldn't (build websites), but I brought my trauma with me as an adult until - as the VP of a start-up that raised over $300MM - lost my shit and then disappeared for 2 years on a "spiritual journey" that included seeing over three dozen mental health professionals.

If it hadn't been for a chance recreational encounter with MDMA the day before my dad died of a sudden heart attack (which precipitated me losing my shit), I would have withdrew into drugs & alcohol instead of seeking the help I needed. I'm especially glad I didn't listen to all the people around me that offered bad advice ("you're fine, look how successful you are") because they couldn't possibly have known the extent of my problems.

"Now, if your baby dies at 10am, your doctor can diagnose you with a mental illness at 10.01am and start drugging you straight away."

While this is meant as an attack on the modern absence of the “grief exception”, where grief reactions are used to rule out depressive symptoms, it’s at best a staggering exaggeration, at worst an active fabrication to support a narrative. Grief is complex and the medical community is still not agreed on how to deal with it, but the idea that you can be diagnosed with a mental health issue after showing symptoms for one minute is ludicrous. People typically require weeks of symptoms to be officially diagnosed, to suggest otherwise can only damage the perception of medical professionals.

It's a nuanced critique that's worth reading - it's in agreement with a good deal of what Hari writes rather than just being a hatchet job. My take from it (as someone with an MA Honours in experimental psychology and a neuroscience MSc) is that in those parts of the book Hari is criticising outdated practices and opinions in the field that hardly exist any more, if at all.

Having said that, the pharmaceutical industry does have a lot to answer for...

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefazodone

Nefazodone is available as 50 mg, 100 mg, 150 mg, 200 mg, and 250 mg tablets for oral ingestion.

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Why would she take such a big dosage of antidepressants? Could she try to reduce the dosage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html