Psychedelic enthusiasm must be more honest about the reality of the risks.

So... a selection bias to feed an inaccurate perspective. You look at one location, as if that says everything you need to know? It seems obvious to me that such clinics will not have clear rules in place, if they can be that sporadic and all over the place.

Stuff being "woo woo" is no indicator of anything, other than that you that is what you believe.


The brain plasticity is perhaps the least important part of the psychedelic healing process ~ that is just a result of psychological processing and healing, not the cause of psychological processing or healing. Talking about "correct neural networks" is meaningless rhetoric because no-one has a single idea what "correct" looks like.

Knowing how they were before and after therapy is also meaningless ~ what matters is psychological health before and after, especially long-term, as healing can take time in conjunction with integration and processing of the experience.


Those that you have personally known... which is an obvious selection bias.

You seem to generalize them as a whole with some odd rhetoric ~ what does "becoming worse" mean? What does "becoming dependent" means? What does "losing the last grip on reality and life" mean? These words mean something to you that they do not mean to me. Yet you almost... seem to assume that I will understand what you mean? Assumptions never go well.


You reference a whole of unrelated stuff that has nothing to do with Psilocybin. I have self-medicated with Ayahuasca and Psilocybin, and in my experience, healing can take weeks and months ~ the experience can take a long time to process and integrate, as it happens unconsciously.


With alcoholism, do we blame the alcohol, or do we blame the underlying mental health issues that led to the alcoholism? The depression, the anxiety?

Here you are, blaming the substance, without any evidence that it is specifically the substance, and not their lifestyle and environment. You seem to conflate lifestyle with "drugs" in a way that shows your lack of comprehension around the subject.


They are not "magic bullets", no. Healing and integration is never one-and-done with psychedelics ~ healing, integration, takes a long time, as it is a process of psychological shifting and reorganization. Any place that may claim to be one-and-done is selling a lie. But that is also strange, because they're essentially killing their own service...


Agreed ~ in the cases such accusations are applicable.

Do you think the psychedelics *alone* can cure someone, or do you think there needs to be a framework for integrating the experience into someone's life? I think, based on past conversation, you'd agree the drugs alone cannot be beneficial unless one gets lucky and avoids the negative but curious as to your thoughts.

Here's an admittedly small, incomplete, sample of people around me who have done psychedelics ->

I feel like there's a middle ground here. I have seen someone saved from suicide because of the psychedelic experience, though this same person had to be held down by ten cops and possibly could have physically injured me as well during that bad trip. This person went on to get a PhD and now works on the study of psychedelics for therapeutic benefit.

Also known someone who turned their life around, going from living in their car to managing property because of a mystic experience on mushrooms....however they were driving while high and lucky they didn't harm themselves or others.

I've had to stop someone from jumping off a balcony because they thought they'd grown wings, and outside of entertainment the psychedelic experience seemed to do little to nothing to improve their life.

I've also seen middling results, where people seem to have some short term gain but their belief in psychedelics also seems to be a barrier to getting more mundane help.

I've never done psychedelics but I've found myself around users for a good bit of my life. I do think there's some potential benefit to them, though like any spiritual practice there are dangers as well. I've longed been convinced that the spirits - which I lean toward existing - are neither all good nor all bad, and even if we are just looking deeper into our own mindscapes dangers abound...