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LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

nytimes.com

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Re: LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

#61

Post by tothepixel »

munkle wrote: post #38
spinlock wrote: post #19

I had a friend in college -- really smart physics major -- drop acid one summer and lose the ability to do math. He needed to take a year off and finally finished his degree but was never on top of his game again. I'm not saying that always or even usually happens. But, acid is no joke and I just wanted to make sure that the inexperience reading this know that trips can go really wrong. Especially when you aren't usi…

It is true that LSD can mess you up if taken under certain circumstances, however, you shouldn't intimidate the inexperience. If all you ever heard about LSD is that it could mess you up, then there is a higher probably that it will harm you. Instead, I would recommend the following to all those who are inexperienced: Make sure you understand it's effects and try to find someone who has experience with LSD to guide y…

The paradoxical thing about LSD is that you simply cannot understand its effects until you've already tried it.

Re: LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

#62

Post by junto »

sar9 wrote: post #34
debt wrote: post #14

I gotta say if you're an expert at something or at least consider yourself an expert at something: take LSD. LSD really dislodges how you view the world; it cleans out your mental system, like moving a fridge and cleaning all the crap that's been swept under there over the years. I would love if some of these prominent intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or any of the nobel prize winners did LSD. I saw a really intense m…

I wish more experienced DMT. It's like the ultimate Oculus Rift. The resolution, colors and sense of intelligence communicating with you is beyond anything any other psychedelic can produce. It is literally like opening a door to another dimension, one full of overwhelming love. Maybe it's just a biological trick but it is one of the most fascinating and unbelievable things in nature. Not everyone should try it but I…

I know what you mean. DMT is something I recommend everyone and nobody should try.

The experience was extremely weird. It was like the filters that my brain uses so that it can adequately process the 'live stream' from all my senses got switched off. I was subjected to to the 'live stream' in its full bit rate. I revelled in it for a while but eventually the wave was so huge that my brain shut down. No ego whilst I was in there surrounded by millions of video images almost to fast to process (memories maybe).

I have to admit though that it wasn't a pleasant experience, but for me it was an experience I wouldn't change.

Re: LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

#63

Post by aaronem »

Nursie wrote: post #41
benched wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem particularly motivated to discount the awakening effects of LSD. I never mentioned seeing problems in society, so as far as I'm concerned that's a strawman. Are people wrong to feel profundity in the mundane? Is there another way to interpret the belief that LSD or access to altered states could change society?

I have no evidence such awakenings exist, and nobody can ever really define what they mean by them. What do you mean, exactly? Nobody is wrong to feel profundity in the mundane, but LSD can have you feeling a profound connection to a piece of cheese, or suddenly realising that all humanity's problems would go away if we just wore more purple. As for the problems with society, it very relevant to people who talk about…

Does it happen that you've ever read Flatland?

Re: LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

#64

Post by benched »

Nursie wrote: post #57
munchhausen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The effects of LSD in freeing peoples minds or somehow waking them up to reality are exaggerated IMHO. > I mean, do you need LSD to know the government is wasting your money and making insane legislation? Nice red herring. Indeed, you do not need to take LSD to know that the government is wasting money and making insane legislation. It's really pretty obvious and in the midst of a breakthrough LSD trip, you would p…

>> The effects of LSD on freeing people's minds lie elsewhere, not in making people aware of the governmental abuses of power. So please describe what these effects would be? And please don't think when I talk about it inducing a false sense of the profound that I speak from ignorance or inexperience.

Yes, we'll compress it into a few sentences in a Hacker News comment, to make it as easy as possible to trivialize via verbal argument.

The very idea that you can discriminate true and "false" senses of the cosmic, for anybody, says a lot about where you're speaking from.

Re: LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

#65

Post by scott_karana »

spinlock wrote: post #19

I had a friend in college -- really smart physics major -- drop acid one summer and lose the ability to do math. He needed to take a year off and finally finished his degree but was never on top of his game again. I'm not saying that always or even usually happens. But, acid is no joke and I just wanted to make sure that the inexperience reading this know that trips can go really wrong. Especially when you aren't usi…

> Especially when you aren't using medical grade LSD but whatever you can buy from a stranger on SilkRoad/wherever

Ironically, in the heyday of Silk Road, you likely were buying medical-grade LSD if you were careful.

http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road#lsd-case-study

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/14/4828448/silk-road-lsd-ave...

Re: LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

#66

Post by grmarcil »

epsylon wrote: post #56
Nursie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"LSD - My Problem Child" is also well worth a read IMHO. It's by Hoffman and it tells the story of its discovery, also giving a few of his thoughts on what happened afterwards. Personally I'm not a huge fan of the "wonder drug that will cure all ills and open your EYES man" theories that abound around psychedelics. They can certainly induce a sense of the profound but I'm not sure they actually produce profundity. Th…

They can certainly induce a sense of the profound but I'm not sure they actually produce profundity. What's the difference?

One of the classic effects of LSD (happens to many but by no means all users) is a sensation of ego death - ie, your sense of identity and who you are in the world is either eliminated or greatly changed. This, as you might imagine, is an extremely profound feeling ('a sense of the profound').

But, after coming down, does this experience have any grounding in reality? Did it 'actually produce profundity' or was it a hallucination, pure and simple?

Hope that helps capture the difference.

Re: LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

#67

Post by makmanalp »

today wrote: post #20
EC1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before entering the corporate work place I never touched anything. Once my one coworker started talking about it, the whole chain revealed itself, now it's super social to go smoke a joint with my bosses after work and have a beer, I love it. I wonder how much I'm actually destroying my health by smoking weed every day, drinking coffee, and having some alcohol at least in a minor capacity. I feel as if the emotional/…

I thought I had things under control with weed. Gradually I realised I was using it to cope with chronic depression due to an earlier personal tragedy. Weed probably is great when things are actually in order in your life, but you may be losing contact with reality precisely because it makes it possible to enjoy yourself the entire time. I think you have to be very mindful of that. It's a painful processes, turning t…

Thank you for this - I'm always concerned that people miss this. I recall someone I know noticing that they just didn't enjoy smoking anymore, and it was actually making them more anxious. Without going into a discussion about why this happened, it took them a long time to realize this because they were rationalizing their use, and using more to counter the fact that they were feeling "off" after the regular amount.

As a non-smoker, it's one of my fears that if this happens again, I won't be able to convince one of my smoking friends that this is happening to them. Mental dependence seems insidious in that way. Any pointers? Experiences to share?

Re: LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

#68

Post by benched »

yogi123 wrote: post #52

The most prominent researcher in LSD therapy was Stan Grof. Look up his books - they are the definitive material for psychiatric work using psychedelics. There are experiences in the books that will blow your mind. I believe he was head of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins, before this research was shut down. However, it is interesting that he now appears to be a proponent of meditation and other methods, as…

Stan Grof's books are some of the best I've found on the topic of consciousness and 'reality' in general. He is so committed to learning about consciousness, he kept exploring the subject by whatever means he could find or invent, even after he could no longer work with psychedelics. I was lucky to attend a talk he gave on LSD just a few months ago.

Re: LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

#69

Post by Crito »

EC1 wrote: post #15
GuiA wrote: post #9

I'm glad the taboos around psychedelics research, especially as tools for therapy, are slowly falling down- there's some fascinating stuff in there. To people who have never experienced drugs, grown up in a culture that demonizes them all indiscriminately, have a hard time wrapping their head around what they are/do exactly but are curious about them, I recommend this article by Sam Harris, a great neuroscientist[0]…

Before entering the corporate work place I never touched anything. Once my one coworker started talking about it, the whole chain revealed itself, now it's super social to go smoke a joint with my bosses after work and have a beer, I love it. I wonder how much I'm actually destroying my health by smoking weed every day, drinking coffee, and having some alcohol at least in a minor capacity. I feel as if the emotional/…

A vaporizer is perhaps a bit less social, but I find that it is much easier on my lungs than smoking. I'd recommend looking into them. I'm turned off by the pen-form factor/vapor liquid/nicotine scene, but a small vaporizer for ground plant matter is great.

One problem with vaporizers is that there isn't a great word to use to describe the action of using one. "Vap" sounds lame or maybe even show-offy, so I just use the word "smoke". ;)

Alcohol is what I truly appreciate though. The reason I smoke is so that when I want to unwind and tune out, I have options other than alcohol every time. Heavy long term alcohol use can be very bad for you, but by giving myself other healthier options I've managed to get my drinking back to 4-8 times a month (always Wednesdays, sometimes Fridays). Alcohol is what I love/fear, weed is what I entertain myself with between flings with booze.

I am starting to suspect that caffeine is a net-negative force in my life, as it constantly jostles my sleep schedule.

Re: LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

#70

Post by Lambdanaut »

I'm all for LSD being considered for certain therapeutic cases.

I took it at a time of my life when I'd been having a sustained identity crisis for years on end, something I'd made known to friends and family. I had no idea who I was supposed to be and I felt like I was just running on auto-pilot, idly guessing at how I should react to situations and being surprised when things turned out okay. I read tons of self-help books and "know-thy-self" pamphlets, but I was still clueless.

After the LSD, I completely knew who I was again, and I've been on that steady path ever since.

It's a good thing to try when you need to do some introspection that you've been having substantial trouble coming to a solution over.

I seriously believe it skipped over a decades worth of introspection for me. I mean, I was already on year "3" of my crisis, and I had made zilch headway. It gets you through things that are nigh impossible to do without it. That of course combined with the low-toxicity and lack of a potential for addiction makes it a no-brainer.

Like somebody else commented, it's like it shakes your brain up like a snowglobe breaking all of those strongly held pathways in your brain that you would normally be unable to even see. It destroys false pre-conceptions about yourself like a steamroller, and then it helps you build the correct notions back up.

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