I highly doubt there'll ever be research in this area, but I'm very curious about whether it'll ever be possible to induce schizophrenia for a time, similar to how psychedelics or dissociatives can induce altered mind states.
My friend in highschool did a solid week on lots of acid and mushrooms, and ended up in the hospital with a schizophrenia diagnosis - this was 20yr ago, but they said he was likely to get it eventually but he triggered something or otherwise sped up the process.
So you're probably right, but on both points sadly. To this day he still sends me complex CAD drawings of nothing.
Mushrooms and LSD have high tolerance from 24-96h where higher doses will not reproduce the same effects w/o abstinence. I find it hard to believe that a week's worth of exposure was the sole cause.
>but they said he was likely to get it eventually but he triggered something or otherwise sped up the process.
OP did address that. But
Lots of folks attribute things like schizophrenia to hallucinogen use, when in reality, people make questionable decisions in their late teens and early twenties; this is the time that these disorders tend to manifest. So a lot of coincidence leads to a casual relationship in popular culture.
I agree, most medications will create/change tolerance to more of the same. In some respect that's the purpose of taking some medications in the first place, but it can lead to poor long term outcomes. Take enough melatonin exogenously and your endogenous production stops completely.
“I took five people, and we locked ourselves in a building for three weeks, and we took 400 micrograms of LSD every four hours. That is 2400 micrograms of LSD a day.… We finally were just drinking out of the bottle.… We were very high.”
From Be Here Now - Ram Dass/Richard Alpert
Interestingly he was the guy involved in giving psilocybin to priests back at Harvard in the 1960's.
On the other hand, one single dose of a psychiatric medication can ruin peoples lives. They get brain shocks, sexual dysfunction or anhedonia for life. One dose of marijuana can effect similar outcomes.
I know immunosuppresants are whole separate part of medicine, but its a playing with fire risk/reward where its too early to establish reasonable probabilities. But at least we can begin the cause-effect discovery process.
I found a copy of Be Here Now in a thrift store that had a pressed marijuana leaf in it. First time I'd ever seen one. Bought the book and read it, pretty hard to digest and hippy trippy stuff but an entertaining read.
It's genetic predisposition to schizophrenia that enables psychedelics to activate it. Without the genetic predisposition you'd be lucky to get psychosis (or unlucky, as it were). That's why people with a family history of schizophrenia or related mental disorders are particularly encouraged to avoid psychedelics.
Psychedelics are known to occasionally activate schizophrenia in genetically predisposed individuals, so this is definitely not unheard of. Given how often I take LSD though, I'm fairly certain I'm not genetically predisposed to schizophrenia, otherwise I probably would've been in the 12th inner circle of schizophrenia by now.
(I've been trying to impact the stability of my brain for years. I just want a way to destroy rational thought but that isn't lethally addictive (benzos), or irreversibly neurotoxic (deliriants), or literal poison (alcohol). Harm reduction is such a drag, I just want to safely explore unsafety!!)
> I highly doubt there'll ever be research in this area, but I'm very curious about whether it'll ever be possible to induce schizophrenia for a time, similar to how psychedelics or dissociatives can induce altered mind states.
It is not possible, by definition; here’s a portion of the DSM 5 definition of schizophrenia:
“ The disturbance is not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a
drug of abuse, a medication) or another medical condition”
Hard to find a publicly accessible DSM link, but here is an excerpt
I use schizophrenia to refer to the experience, not to the diagnosis. I'm not sure what to call the experience of schizophrenia other than schizophrenia, given it's not synonymous with psychosis. (Though, granted, I would also want to try psychosis someday; even if it's a terrible experience and I never want to do it again, I want to truly know what it's like. Hopefully without permanent brain damage though. That stipulation heavily limits my options.)
This is true, but I wonder if GP spoke naively about inducing symptoms that are similar enough that we can learn about what triggers those symptoms in otherwise healthy individuals.
Kind of like how we were "lucky" to get a guy with a railroad spike through his brain to learn about how brain damage affects personality and impulsiveness..
oh it was definitely for selfish reasons, I just want to feel it for myself. But I do have a feeling that it would advance science as well, that'd be a cool bonus I guess.
I actually have done this (not by choice though), and I guess I might've gotten close to something like psychosis. Maybe I'll push it further when I'm in a less stressful environment. I neglect basic needs too much as it is, hah.
If you want to experience another personality and/or view on things the better thing is Ketamine. Don't fuck with your sleep for some burnt out euphoria experience.
Always respect your sleep, it's the only thing keeping you from cooking your brain at 30. Anecdotal but my mate's mom got Alzheimers when shes like 55, an overworked overstressed, never sleeping woman.
Taking ketamine sucks. I actually tried with the nasal sprays before and I literally threw the spray bottle in the garbage because of how miserable that was. I didn't even get a meaningful experience out of it, but I burned the ever living fuck out of my throat from how bitter the stuff was. I heard IM injection works far better, but it's probably gonna take a long time for me to work up the courage for that.
(Also, I have DID so I experience other personalities all the time!)
I'm genuinely surprised, for me it's been doing medative self reflecting work for ages. I buy the shitty powder on $monerosite and systematically prepare a bunch to get into the "pre hole state" with banger ket music in the headphones and closed eyes.
It brings 5d chess into my psychology or something
I don't think the nasal route is good for me. Brain doesn't like it, body doesn't like it, it just feels extremely miserable. I think I tried it before the ketamine spray, but it would just dry out my nose and it was really painful and it just felt so awful that I couldn't manage to dose myself enough to have a good effect before I just couldn't bear to take any more. It's awful and terrible and I hate it.
Which sucks, because I really feel like dissociatives would be nice. I've taken memantine orally and it was nice, although it took really long to wear off, and also after a while it made me throw up all over my expensive tech, which was very not fun. Ketamine though I haven't found an adequate way to take.
I've never had ketamine. I've had memantine, but its half-life is ridiculous.
I self-medicate a variant of what's now available in the USA as 'Auvelity' but is just a ratio'd mixture of dextromethorphan and bupropion. The bupropion is there to slow down the metabolism of the DXM via its CYP2D6 pathway, but bupropion gives me anxiety/insomnia so I use something called berberine phytosome which isn't as effective but still works on CYP2D6 at a lower level, but no side effects.
All the other anti-depressant classes never worked for me but still gave me extremely shitty side effects.
There's a lot of anecdotal reports on DXM/Auvelity for both prescribed (variable outcomes, but for some people its the first thing that's ever worked), and recreationally its been around for ages sometimes referred to as the poor mans ketamine...
Not DID here, but schizo-affective. I've read things like meditation can actually have negative affects on dissociative disorders. Dissociating in order to re-integrate to a better place seems a somewhat reasonable strategy but I think mental-health/medication effects and understanding of how differently the same medications can affect different people is only just beginning to be realised by psychiatry now.
At least now there's even genetic testing for Auvelity - if you're already a poor CYP2D6 metaboliser due to a shortened version of a gene on a specific chromosome, they won't prescribe it to you. On the other hand you could be an ultra-metaboliser.
That’s not the redneck version, that’s the everybody version. You don’t need the LSD even, just pick a stimulant of choice, legal or not (meth, coke, adderral, vyvanse, Ritalin). Ingest it for days, you’ll be in psychosis in no time.
You're absolutely right, I'm quite liberal myself but I've never done more than "two days" for obvious reasons. We're evolutionary designed around earth's rotation so better not fuck too much with it.
I was drunk for almost two days once and at the end I couldn't comprehend conversation!
Definitely seems like the sort of thing that MKUltra would have looked at. Those folks were big into ideas like creating specific mental states in people.
I hope one day there'll be branches of medicine for each neurotype rather than just giving up whenever a drug's effects aren't consistent in trial. there needs to be more studies into everything ever
