happy about your recovery both physical and psychological. How did you come across psylo and Could you share how you learned and planned your dosing ?

Low-dosage testosterone is already prescribed to despondent older adults in "cosmetic psychopharmacology" circles.

One friend of mine had it for 6months and was lucky that it passed away, the two others are in a living hell and will never have a normal life again.

I know its supposed to be rare, but the amount of people i read of having some form of it is too many for me to believe that there are a hidden majority of users that has gotten it and wont report for various reasons.

With that degree of seriousness it can be not HPPD but underlying psychosis or schizophrenia that has been activated by the drug. It happens with cannabis too. I hope they are followed by a psychiatrist and on proper medication.

I agree with you. I believe psychedelics open a door in in the brain that can never close back. A lot of people have psychiatric fragilities and have no business trying these substances. Hppd occurence is closely related to past psychiatric symptoms like anxiety or depression.

One heavy dose of mushrooms significantly & permanently altered my visual perception: I see colors a lot brighter, a lot more saturated, and with tones & hues I wasn't really perceiving before. It's not technically an hallucination I don't think it's hppd, but it's something.

This is crucial part - tons of folks are a mess inside, and either it will never manifest fully (but they won't be perfectly normal balanced happy human beings either, just some grey zone), or it will with some shock - be it car crash, heavy alcohol use, tough breakup, death in close family or psychedelics for example.

My first GF's father had permanent paranoid schizophrenia triggered just by episode of heavy drinking during mandatory military service. Fucked up for rest of his life, on heavy medications.

Its not as rare in the population as we would like to think, still carries a heavy stigma with it so folks don't talk about it unless they have to.

Combine that with only doing "allergy" doses first (think, peanut dust that would trigger your throat to swell, but not close as if you had taken a spoonfull of peanut butter), and you really will be okay.

As a pro tip I tell everyone exploring lsd/shrooms - always have a benzo on handy. If you need to end the trip NOW, it'll almost for sure do the trick. If you may be susecptible to mental trauma, you will be doing no one a favor by "pushing through" it.

Message me if you want :)

During a trip I lived what people describe as an "ego death", where I saw myself disappearing and dying, and it was the most frightening experience of my life. Not only was I completely unable to take a benzo at this point, but it is very much a death and rebirth movement as described by Leary in the psychedelic experience. If I was pulled out from that movement without completing it, I don't know what would have happened. I think I would have been left seriously shaken and disturbed. It was crucial perceiving myself coming back to existence in order to feel "me" again.

Sometimes "bad trips" aren't "bad", they're learning experiences meant to be completed, even if it is tough.

I think you just learend to pay attention to nuance in color and color combinations. I had similiar experience without psychedelics after taking a course on color and color composition by a graphic artist. The course was a combination of traditional color and composition theory with art therapy.

My perception was never the same after, i learned to find joy in stopping for a moment and contemplating the things i see. Even if it is a trashcan with peeling layers of fading paint.

I just took edibles daily for ~5 weeks. I haven't taken them for ~1.5 weeks and my perception has completely changed. They pulled me out of my head and thoughts, I am now much more aware of my body sensations and visually aware of the things around me, colors, angles, layouts. It feels like a completely different world.

In my early 20's I had similar experience that I would have absolutely described has hppd. I smoked heavily for ~6 months and when I stopped it was so unsettling and caused me extreme anxiety and mental anguish; my visual perception of the world was completely different. There was a 'before' and 'after' perception and my mind couldn't accept it. I had crippling anxiety, would avoid people, couldn't hold a job, would have panic attacks and believed I was going crazy. It was literally hell.

But it is not the same with the effects of the mushrooms. My visual perception has significantly changed. The day after, the tree I see from my kitchen was not the same.

My other friend also have visual snow and a constant dulling of his mind.

They did not take big doses and never had major problems before this.

There is also the fact that both LSD and psilocybin activate the 5-HT2B receptor, which is linked to the formation of 'valvular strands', which can lead to valvular heart disease, potentially. And almost nobody is talking about this!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17950805/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19505264/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21440001/

- Night vision changed and became impaired by 'visual noise'

- 'Auras' or 'halos' around lights became extremely exaggerated

- Letters were occasionally harder to read as switching to a new sentence would leave a burned-in impression of the previous sentence overlapping on the new text

I honestly find these changes fascinating but it would probably be quite frightening for people not expecting possible perceptual changes. If it was me and I didn't know any better I'd think I was 'stuck in a trip' or 'permanently broken.' I wonder if people have ever lost it from having thoughts like that before. Definitely not a toy.

The intensity oscillates, and I definitely have the thoughts that I am stuck in an endless trip and have definitely considered the possibility of having caused irreparable harm to myself to the tune of being 'permanently broken'.

The cheerier side of this is that the anxiety caused by most of these effects improved considerably simply by improving my diet. One important thing to keep in mind is that the perceptive changes themselves are absolutely harmless and only serve to exacerbate existing anxieties, if allowed to do so. If I am feeling good, they only serve as additional spice to my daily experience.

[1] If you already have the symptoms can you get HPPD?

I have ingested numerous hallucinogenic drugs, most of them when I was very young. I can only assume that I suffer from HPPD due to the eerily similar symptoms that I experience on a daily basis. However, it appears to me that marijuana had much more of an impact on my daily perception and I experienced it as the catalyst that causes my aberrant perception to be considered a disability. Today I consume no psychoactive drugs other than my prescribed antidepressants.

That said, no one can be sure. There is no reliable way to diagnose HPPD since the change in perception could be caused by any number of confounding factors, and "a change" is not enough to cause discomfort, the effect needs to cause anxiety or disability to be considered a medical condition.

Even with this I really wish countries would fund psilocybin research because the number of unknown factors are too large for people to be self-medicating with substances that cause temporary insanity. "Increased entropy of the brain" is absolutely what it causes, but there is no reason to assume that the change caused is entirely beneficial.

Edit:

I feel like I didn't get my point across well enough or communicate all that I wanted to.

A component of a psychedelic experience is that you feel like nothing is ever "quite the same" afterwards. If you are prone to mental illness in any way, it is very easy to attribute it to the drug. It is hard to know whether the drug caused your change in perception, or it just made a pre-existing condition more noticeable. That however just gets us kind of into a chicken-egg situation of whether the mental condition would have had much impact without the ingestion of the drug. In any case, this is understandably an incredibly grey area.

That said, psilocybin definitely has an effect that lasts at least a few months after ingestion and some effects that last a lifetime as far as I can tell. In my case the shorter-acting effect is overwhelmingly positive, and the longer-lasting effect is mixed, but I don't really regret it. I can easily imagine this having a large contributing factor to my current condition and is one of the reasons why I warn people before taking psychedelic drugs. It has the potential for impacting your life and perspective in ways you can not even begin to predict, and I cannot emphasize enough how much you can not assume that all the changes will be positive. I suffer from an anxiety disorder that seems to be passed genetically, and this has caused some after effects of hallucinogens, especially the ones affecting my perception, to become VERY uncomfortable.

The problem that I have though is that psilocybin is also, in my experience, an incredibly effective countermeasure against anxiety and depression. It gives you the ability especially to change your behavior in very radical ways which can be essential in breaking the vicious cycle that anxiety and depression often is.

My opinion on the matter is that there is definitely great potential here, but it is not to be taken lightly. I believe psilocybin has amazing potential, but it needs to be researched and its effects observed as scientifically as possible before we have uninformed people (like younger me) ingesting it without taking the proper precautions and being aware of the possible negative effects.

Marijauna, while often a "light" drug, has quite the ability to pull mental difficulties currently just under the surface in to the top. People often stop dreaming/having REM sleep the same if they smoke before bed, which can't be good long term.

This is yet another reason we should be pushing for full legalization of all substances. Being able to go buy Xmg of pure psilocybin with no contamination and a constant dose is so very imporatant (defunding the cartels is just a fun side benefit to citizens safety.)

It does appear that Psilocybin has some therapeutic potential, but all of the good studies are performed in conjunction with professional-guided therapy sessions. DIY unguided experimentation is a different animal and shouldn't be confused with what's being reported in studies.

What you describe is pretty much the opposite of what this thread was like.

Negative comments (including your own) got upvoted, and there are hardly any positive comments in this thread at all.

Yes, there were some who talked of negative experiences being due to set and setting or exacerbating pre-existing underlying conditions, but plenty of other comments did not.

Which isn't to say that those explanations are wrong.

You say explaining negative experiences as being the result of set and setting is "victim blaming". Do you deny the enormous role that set and setting play in what experiences one has on psychedelics? If so, you're flying in the face of pretty much all research done on psychedelics for many decades -- which is huge amount of research, especially in the early years, before they were made illegal, and the more recent research supports it.

If you take psychedelics with the wrong set and setting you are pretty much guaranteeing you'll have a bad experience. That is as close to an incontrovertible fact as anything we know about psychedelics.

Educating people on the role of set and setting should be encouraged, because it can help lead to better outcomes. Trying to silence it by branding simple education "victim blaming" would just lead to more people having negative experiences due to ignorance, which we really don't need any more of.

I suppose a combination of quarantine with cold and dark outside ... (in the northern hemisphere, where probably most of HN users come from)

And about trying it out:

Make sure about the right set and setting, though. You need to feel save in the place and stable in the mind. Horrortrips are not so pleaseant.

Ideally, have not anything scheduled the day(s) after, to have time to process it.

At least where I live it's also the season where you can just go outside and harvest them.

If you are going to try it for the first time, and for most I feel you should at least consider it. Please first do it in the comfort of your own home before venturing to r/Outside.

This way if you're not familiar with the experience, and you get to a place of discomfort. You can sit yourself on your couch and watch mindless television while you revisit parts of your psych that you didn't know existed and slowly succumb to the fact, you are, actually an arsehole more often than you would like...

Source: I've tripped dozens and dozens of times over many, many years. And some times. You just get sad. And being cuddled up on the couch is of much greater comfort than a tent in the humid Australian bush when you wish you had a cold beer with air conditioning.

I wouldn't do it around other people who aren't part of your adventure though.

Strangers and, as you say, people who just aren't in to it will just raise the likelihood of having a bummer.

...using boring old yeast, not GMO kombucha!

Has this sort of thing ever been done with anything outside of tight lab conditions?

They are different uses, but psychedelics will never be "unanimously enjoyable" as it depends too much on the person and how they feel as a person when they decide to trip.

https://thedea.org/mdma-risks-science-and-statistics-technic...

Nature is the way to go.

Oakland volcanic preserve. Go at 6am and hike to the top. You won’t be able to see anything because of the fog.

When the fog disappears and you see the world.... it’s like 4K oled meets virtual reality. Except the your peripheral bounds span beyond imax.

That + color. There are so many micro world vibes that will blow your mind. The different shades of green based on where you are the park will lead to different emotions.

Unforgettable.

For another trip; Berkeley’s botanical preserves (if you can get access) are a completely different vibe. As I’m sure you can imagine. Access can be a little tough.

Anyways, as one who always ‘yeah yeah yeah’d those who appreciated nature around me.

I finally learned to shut the fuck up and appreciate nature.

First time psychedelic use should be done in a safe, familiar, controlled environment with someone that can help if something go wrong.

Legality is weird. In the Netherlands, over 100 species of psilocybin-containing mushrooms were banned. But the law there bans only the fruiting bodies, it does not ban other parts of the organism. A few species form truffles—a sterile mycelia mass for energy storage, kind of like its version of a potato—that still contain psilocybin. Those can still be legally bought, probably because of a similar oversight in the law.

At least here in germany, there are lots of products proudly claiming to be GMO free.

(which they actually are not, as a certain percentage is allowed by law but to still have that label)

I know there is a lot of propaganda that goes into it, mostly to paint the opposition as uneducated irrational village idiots so you can dismiss anyone who brings this up... or you feel the urge to educate them about the basics, so let me frame it another way which may be easier to understand:

Are you familiar with the problem of invasive species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species)? It's when certain species of plants or animals are introduced into a different eco-system that hasn't evolved with that particular animal or plant... and the whole eco-system goes out of whack. All GMOs are potential invasive species to all eco-systems. This problem does not exist (or is negligible) with artificial selection.

This would apply to artificial selection as well - perhaps even more so since you've no real control over what mutations are happening. Every new evolutionary competition edge a species receives is followed by an "invasion" phase where their newfound superpower allows them to take over for a few hundred thousand generations.

> If taking a species to a different island where it is not native to is bad enough, creating specific ones which have never existed anywhere ever is a major ecological disaster waiting to happen. This should not even be a discussion...

Actually, it should be a discussion, because the above argument is a false analogy. Invasive species are problematic because the surrounding ecosystem cannot curb their spread and out-competition of preexisting species. Modern crops don't have the capability of surviving outside of a human cultivated environment. Left to their own, they'd be choked out by weeds and changing soil conditions. Now if someone were to attempt to make a weed-proof AND bug-proof crop that can ALSO survive and thrive in non-cultivated terrain, THEN I'd be worried.

Me too, but most industrial farmers would probably celebrate.

But I doubt this can happen any time soon. Ecology is complex.

We can feel cool and eat grass-finished beef or whatever we fancy, but the reality is we can't feed the whole planet on it.