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Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

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262 points Anon84 | 4 comments | 28 Jun 25 21:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.643s | source
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suzzer99 ◴[28 Jun 25 22:20 UTC] No.44408657[source]▶
I've lost one of my best friends to what I think is schizophrenia. We don't know because she's cut off all contact with friends and family and refuses to see a doctor. It's definitely psychosis. She thinks she's in some kind of Truman show that she calls "the game". Since none of her friends or family are willing to admit to it, then we must be in on it.

We don't know her full family medical history because her dad was adopted. I do know that she was "microdosing" and macro-dosing hallucinogens for years. Mostly acid and shrooms as far as I know. She followed the band Phish around with a group of friends. I can't imagine most of those shows were sober.

We've also seen a few incidents of paranoia when she was under the influence of drugs/alcohol going back decades. So it feels like this was always there in some form, but maybe the estrogen was holding it back before menopause hit. I read an article about women who get schizophrenia after menopause that suggested this could be the case.

Anyway, whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside. We don't know that all of her hallucinogen use over the years contributed to this. But it's certainly a possibility.

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1. roarcher ◴[29 Jun 25 19:28 UTC] No.44415642[source]▶
> whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside

Anecdotally, I had a friend once who was very into psilocybin for its mind-expanding properties. He certainly thought he was enlightened and loved to brag about the great understanding he'd gained from his trips, but he was one of the more selfish and un-curious people I've ever known. It seems to me that these drugs create a feeling of having accessed great knowledge, but the "knowledge" is just whatever nonsense your brain conjures up on the fly, like a dream world that makes sense while you're asleep but whose logic falls apart the moment you wake up.

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2. 1propionyl ◴[29 Jun 25 19:38 UTC] No.44415728[source]▶
As someone who has gotten a lot out of psychedelics therapeutically, you are correct. Psychedelics do not in of themselves grant any insight or wisdom beyond perhaps raw experiential evidence that our senses are fallible and our perception of the world is an artifact of cognition.

Past that, psychedelics are (kaleidoscopic, funhouse) mirrors. In the hands of a curious and humble person they can (in addition to being a lot of fun shared with like-minded others) be valuable therapeutic tools for approaching firmly rooted hangups, attitudes, etc. In the hands of someone like your friend, you get what you observed.

Both are commonly occurring patterns, and if you know a person's character even a little well you can usually predict how they'll engage with and come out of the experience.

To quote Shulgin,

> The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche.

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3. roarcher ◴[29 Jun 25 19:59 UTC] No.44415905[source]▶
That tracks with what I've heard about people getting genuine therapeutic benefits from it, like with PTSD. Thanks.
4. suzzer99 ◴[29 Jun 25 22:37 UTC] No.44417231[source]▶
Yeah the main great insight I got out of doing that stuff was to see reality from a different perspective for a while. Kind of like travelling and realizing that things you take for granted aren't the same in every culture.

But I never felt like I was getting at some deeper meaning, and it wasn't something I wanted to keep doing throughout my life.