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

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.

My friend had a very similar episode with a psychosis, but turned out to be bipolar, not schizophrenic. Sounds very similar though!

He was smoking a lot of weed leading up to and during the psychosis.

Ended up in psychiatric ward for a month, which was followed by a couple of years of depression/introspection/therapy, but is now doing great with lithium.

It’s why I profoundly dislike the line of thinking that easier access to drugs means social progress.

It’s rather a shedding off of an inconvenience for those that have no (direct) problems of functioning (eg risk of developing addiction, psychosis, etc) at the heavy costs payed by those that are more vulnerable.