It seems paradox when I read about e.g. LSD or Magic Mushrooms and it says on one side they can be used to treat mental illnesses but on the other side you have to be in a ‘healthy’ state of mind
In: Biology
First of all let’s draw a big fat line between depression and a bad trip. There’s not much overlap here, other than that they both have to do with negative emotions (though depression can be numbness as well).
A bad trip can be bad for your mental health. A bad trip can traumatize you or make old wounds worse. Psychedelic drugs aren’t an automatic positive for your mental health.
How you handle your trip is a big factor in terms of how it affects your mental health, and when it helps people with their depression that’s something that they’re doing to themselves, instead of something the drugs are doing to them. Like if you drank alcohol and it make your hands stop shaking enough for you to practice the piano, so drinking helped you figure out the piano, the skill is coming from your practice, not from the alcohol.
Something like acid is doing a similar thing: it puts you in the room where you can do interesting things but you’ve still got to do the things yourself if you want them to happen.
Basically psychedelics make you smarter for a while, and during that period when your brain is enhanced you can solve problems that you normally can’t solve, just because you can see more sides of it at once. If you doubt that psychedelics make you smarter, try playing some poker or chess against someone who’s on a moderate dose and see if they’ve gotten easier or harder to beat.
You want a good set and setting because you want to exercise fun parts of your mind. You have parts of your mind specialized to keep you safe when people are being immoral around you, and parts of your mind specialized to deal with physical danger like predators and whatnot. Any parts of your mind you exercise will get amplified by the drugs, so if you’re having to actively defend yourself then your warlike, defensive, prey circuits will be the ones dancing in the psychedelic spotlight and your trip will be dark and scary.
You get less of the smartness boost when you’re in defensive mode because stress narrows your working memory and reduces creativity.
This is the reason why, if you’d like to work on your depression, it’s probably best to start with a good set and setting. You want a place where you don’t have to defend yourself, even psychologically. A trip is like surgery, and you don’t do surgery on the bus.
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