As I continue more into my college life I'm starting to discover what exactly it is I want to study. I have many different passions and ideas. One thing I am a full supporter of is using alternative medicines such as psychedelics, particularly LSD and psilocybin. It is known that there are no long-term effects that LSD and psilocybin have a negative effect on the brain. I'll post some helpful stories listed below that outline the basic ideas.
My experience has been terrifying and eye-opening at the same time. Having to deal with the symptoms of a personality disorder with no real good medicine, you struggle to find the answers to simple questions throughout your daily life. It's easy to lose focus of who you truly are, what your purpose is in this life. Using LSD in psychotherapy can help the patient be able to open up their mind more so that they are able to think past the depressing thoughts, the fears they have, and the mental walls they have created in their own head. LSD can help those battling with intense depression, high amounts of anxiety, as well as PTSD. For example, one theory is that taking LSD can help alcoholism. In the study listed below, it was found that LSD does have a beneficial effect in helping stop alcohol misuse.
I think there is a lot of stigmas out there seeing psychedelics in general as just "street drugs" and over-looking the medical effects that these substances can have on one's mental health. It can help those such as Rodrigo Nino who suffered from end of life anxiety. He explored the use of psychedelics by visiting the Shipibo people seeing if ayahuasca could help his anxiety.
It helps change your perception on how you view the negative things in the world around us. The prescriptions we take in today's world have side effects list that has more cons than pros on it. Typical anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medicines do nothing for us put numb the feeling. They don't give us the chance to really understand why we feel the way we do. While yes, therapy is a large component you have to be able to break through your own mental walls and let the therapist in. For those struggling with high amounts of depression, PTSD, or any other mental illness this can be very hard and almost impossible to do.
Allowing psychedelics into our therapy sessions can help the patient not only be able to cope with the said triggering event but it lets them be able to expand their mind more freely without all of the mental roadblocks. It allows the patient to be able to freely open up to the therapist to get to the true root of the cause.
My personal experience has been a wonderful and groundbreaking experience. When you're in the middle of a trip, you are solely focused on the ones around you. You don't look at your phone, you don't wonder what time it is, you don't care what the rest of the world is doing for once. You are able to focus on who and what is in front of you right now. You are able to be one with your own thoughts without having to turn to some electrical source that tells you what is wrong and right. For me, I enjoy having fun while tripping and at the same time using it as a way to help me get the negative thoughts out that I've been repressing.
What I normally do is pick a few good colorful movies to watch that get your senses going. Normally I will watch kids animated movies, but most recently I watched the movie "Baby Driver" which was a very good movie. As you watch the movie you are able to respect how much effort the director put into making the music in the movie match every single action that each actor does in the movie.
After the fun is over, at the end of the night is when my break happens. After my friends leave I will burst into tears about every single thing that has been wrong. I'll cry for several minutes and laugh and feel like an exploding time bomb except with tears instead of anger. You get an almost new appreciation for everything around you. It opens up your eyes and shows you what you've been missing all along.
Of course, there are some people who state they experienced LSD and had negative violent effects. That can be due to a couple of different things. The person could have been having a bad trip, they have a lot of demons in their head they need help working through, or it's not real LSD. This is why you always want to make sure you know exactly what you are taking.
I encourage every single person who has negative feelings about psychedelics to do more research. Read the studies done by these researchers, look at what groundwork we can break when it comes to treating mental health, and look at the positive effects. Stop paying attention to the one-off scenarios. There are going to be people who abuse any substance no matter what it is. We can't punish those who have the ability to live a more fulfilling with help from alternative medicines.
**Helpful Links***
Psychedelics and Mental Health: A Population Study
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747247/
Lysergic acid diethylamide for alcoholism: meta-analysis of randomized controlled traits.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0269881112439253
Rodrigo Nino
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/cancer-patient-psychedelic-drugs-ayahuasca-lsd-mdma-mushroom-death-fear-help-end-life-anxiety-a7726611.html
Psychosis improves mental health
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lsd-paradoxical-effects_us_56c1f74de4b0c3c55051f453
