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HPPD after one trip?

If you ask me getting it from only one trip is quite uncommon, the chance probably increases with your frequency of use rather than the absolute number of trips you have been on (although your history does count for something).
And some psychedelics seem to cause it more easily than others, 2C-I must be the one I have heard about most often to cause (more or less temporary) HPPD symptoms.

All in all if you want to try a psychedelic I don't think HPPD is initially an extremely real danger to consider. But: if you want zero risk you will have to do zero, besides that your rate of use and dosage are the important thing to watch.

I don't get this info from an educational book, I got it from (mostly second-hand) experience.
 
Well, I firmly believe it's about how you internalize your experience. I believe that HPPD is a form of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, like a war veteran might have. It's all about how a traumatic experience has affected you internally. Using the war example (and speaking as an American), there are people who end up with PTSD from any war. But in a war like World War 2, where people felt they were doing what they had to do to defend the world, it seems there are a lot less cases resulting from it than a war like, say, Vietnam, where so many soldiers ended up believing they were there committing atrocities on behalf of a crooked government. You end up, sadly, with a whole group of people who have flashbacks where they suddenly think they're back in that traumatic experience, and it really impacts their ability to live a happy and productive life. Sometimes people have it so bad that they're constantly at least partially in that state.

When you hear of someone getting HPPD, the symptoms include the same - suddenly, without warning, they'll re-enter into that traumatic experience, and it makes life a lot harder to live. Some people even constantly have lingering visual distortions and depersonalization/derealization, just like the PTSD war example I gave above.

The good news about psychedelics, however, is that it's always up to you how you view an experience and how you choose to internalize it. I think that sometimes people, especially young people who don't necessarily have the tools developed yet to deal with confusing and overwhelming experiences, choose, subconsciously or consciously, to view the result of such an experience as something that has damaged them. Or perhaps a person experiences ego dissolution, which shows them the true nature of their existence and the illusion of individuality and materialistic society, and they were not ready for it at all - they were happy living a life in which they knew all the answers and everything fit into a neat little box of conceptual distinctions, and the experience they had blew that apart, and they try desperately to reconstruct that box, but the experience they had cannot truly be denied. Whatever the case may be, they have chosen to view something that has the potential to be a freeing and beautiful experience as something threatening and perhaps even evil. In this case it has become a traumatic experience that has created a glaring contradiction that affects their life on a very deep, spiritual level.

It's best to live your life open to accepting new experiences and willing to allow your worldview to change. If you can do this, it's unlikely that any experience of that nature is going to give you PTSD, or as we tend to call it with psychedelics, HPPD. Personally I have tripped a great many times, and this includes some experiences that were very difficult and at the time I thought I would never be the same. And perhaps I wasn't. But I used them all as learning experiences and they have made me who I am today - and that is a happier, more well-adjusted person who is deeply comfortable with his understanding of the nature of reality.

The mind is a very powerful thing that can lead you into experiencing pretty much any state of being. Allowing a traumatic experience to get so deeply planted into your sense of self has the potential to produce some very intense depersonalization, derealization, and difficult emotions, and even perceptual changes.

That said, it's still something that a lot of people experience. Psychedelics are not 100% safe, and should always be used with respect and caution.
 
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I think you're talking about flashbacks though which are pretty different from HPPD. In my experience and from what I read HPPD symptoms are something of the PNS while traumatic trips would affect the mind, laying much more central. So flashbacks are a symptom of PTSD, it most often has a detailed memory trigger. Just merely read the first alinea of the wiki page on HPPD and you will see that there is a difference.

I think HPPD comes from something like frequent and intense 5-HT agonism in the visual cortex, influencing the pattern-seeking functions produced by the algorithms of signal transduction. It has got to do with integrating, but not of thoughts and emotions but sensory information. Just like tryptamines tend to let you discover stuff like entities and faces in visual data, others give geometric patterns and persian carpet type stuff.
It seems something like 2C-I is such a hardass on the simple pattern recognition system that there can be persistent changes in signal transduction.

I've had exactly one flashback (of the most intense experience and trip of my life) and it was unmistakeable. I also got increasing HPPD symptoms in the period I did shitloads of acid, they are two different animals. The former is quite psychological while the latter is very physiological. I was never bothered by either, to be honest.

Xorky maybe you aren't necessarily mistaking HPPD for PTSD but your reaction is a product of this being a very commonly made mistake?
 
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Solipsis said:
I think you're talking about flashbacks though which are pretty different from HPPD. In my experience and from what I read HPPD symptoms are something of the PNS while traumatic trips would affect the mind, laying much more central. So flashbacks are a symptom of PTSD, it most often has a detailed memory trigger. Just merely read the first alinea of the wiki page on HPPD and you will see that there is a difference.
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I agree. HPPD presents persistent or intermittent symptoms that are more or less faded and vary greatly depending on which psychedelics triggered them. A very common form being as Solipsis mentioned, the classic persian carpet fractals from use of LSD or a similar Hallucinogen.

They are slightly altered perceptions of the senses mostly with little reports of cognitive dysfunction. The symptoms may last for days to years.

Flashbacks (especially frequent with very potent hallucinogens like LSD) are episodes (much more intense in nature) and are not persistent.
 
So i know there isn’t one answer but what are the main psychedelics that would give you HPPD usually? LSD, Mushrooms?? 5-meo drugs?
 
Without an extensive survey that would be quite impossible to determine.

I only mentioned 2C-I because it stood out being associated with HPPD by a couple of people at different times. That only counts as a statistical anomaly in my subjective experience, also explainable by coincidence. So what data have we?

You'd be best off reading the whole HPPD thread I'm afraid. And even that will probably skew your perception of the subject.

I don't even want to take a guess because I'm afraid you will do something, anything with that guess. I'd better say I don't know.
 
i have never experienced HPPD myself. however from what i've been reading, the psychedelic amphetamines (DOx, dragonflies) are the worst offenders, followed by LSD. These drugs are active in very low doses and their primary effects can last for 12-48 hours depending on dose (the prevalence of DOx being misrepresented as LSD compounds the problem). again, HPPD itself can have different symptoms for different people when triggered by different drugs in different settings. but in general, if you're tripping for 24 hours your brain and body are physically exhausted and won't be back to "normal" without a much longer recovery period.

as for flashbacks, I have personally had a bad trip on syrian rue + mushrooms flashback to a PREVIOUS bad trip on syrian rue + mushrooms. or maybe the first trip was a flashforward to the second trip? and then a year later my brother had a bad trip on mushrooms that sounded to me like an exact flashback of my first bad trip... fuckin time travel is so confusing.
 
Developed HPPD after my first and only psych trip 3 months ago. Let a capsule of M sit on my tongue for about 5 mins. Before I knew it, I collapsed from dehydration with muscle spasms. I could feel my vision fading, hearing drifting away, and a loss of consciousness. I am now plagued with vs, floaters, trails, tracers, halos, tinnitus, light sensititvity, tmj and constant tingling sensations under the scalp. Havent been the same since.
 
Just wanted to revise my statement I made in 2010 (one of the first posts in this thread)... oftentimes HPPD is simply lingering visual/perceptual anomalies, which are different from trauma. I've never had even a touch of HPPD despite many, many trips, but it seems relatively common... though it doesn't seem very common from just a single trip, rather, it seems to happen generally when people trip too much. Also certain substances (2C-I for example) seem to cause it more often than others.
 
I had some lingering visuals after a period of LSD abuse. I was tripping 1-2 times a week for about 3 months or so. Afterwards I had increased awareness of floaters, some soft tracers in certain lighting conditions, and huge halos around lights at night with rainbows at the edges. Those persisted for about 3 months as well and then gradually faded over another 3 months. The more sporadic trips I've had since then have almost always resulted in these mild HPPD symptoms coming back for a few weeks and then disappearing again.

StanleyJobson said:
Are the halos and trails annoying to live with? I would love to live with some cool visual effects.
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At first these visual remains for kind of fun, then it started freaking me out. I figured they'd go away after a few days, but got a bit worried I had "damaged" myself after taking acid too often. After a while I convinced myself I was fine and became somewhat ambivalent towards those visuals as they became normal...
 
Idk what's going on in this thread. People are saying that HPPD after the first time taking a psychedelic is unusual, but according to reports, most HPPD is very early on in hallucinogen usage or after a long time (usually a few years). The first of which is predicted to possibly be genetic (susceptibility) and the latter is just bad luck, or an unknown neurological change.

Another thing I have noticed is the amount of liars or people who misinterpret HPPD. Many people falsely claim it, according the scientific explanation it is a persistent problem (not just some dots in your vision), as in it is strong enough to interfere with daily life, so most people don't have it. It would even make reading this seem very hard, letters swirling or jumbling up, seeing numbers ect. It isn't just visual, also perceptual, people will feel like they are floating or falling. Most people who address the HPPD thing don't know what it is, or the difference between it and a flashback.

What Solipsis wrote about HPPD may be due to severe constant usage of Serotonin drugs that impact on the 5-HT receptors is possible but probably wrong. I don't doubt that they may contribute considerably but I don't think they are even necessary. I know that dissociatives and deliriants can cause HPPD and so can marijuana which effects dopermine receptors heavily not 5-HT.
 
simpleGuy said:
Let a capsule of M sit on my tongue for about 5 mins. Before I knew it, I collapsed from dehydration with muscle spasms. I could feel my vision fading, hearing drifting away, and a loss of consciousness. I am now plagued with vs, floaters, trails, tracers, halos, tinnitus, light sensititvity, tmj and constant tingling sensations under the scalp. Havent been the same since.
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i know its been a while, but I am curious if you could provide more detail about this experience, specifically what substance you took. Call me a noob but I don't know what the single letter "M" refers to. I am currently pursuing a phD studying the effects of psychedelics, including HPPD, and your story is deeply concerning. I cannot imagine, being familiar with the current literature, that a classic psychedelic could cause such profound systemic symptoms acutely. Were you sweating profusely? A drug in and of itself cannot dehydrate you, you must lose the water somehow. Any more information you have would be amazing. Thanks.
 
Hi rightyarble, simpleGuy was last logged in in 2015, he's not coming back. Next time you bump an old thread to ask someone a question check first to see if they're still active, otherwise the already small chance of reply is effectively zero.

Welcome to bluelight :)
 
I have used lsd almost 2 times a month for the past 5 years, the highest dose I've talked myself into was 24 hits on a 2 hit tolerance the night before, and I have never experienced HPPD in any sort. It could very well be possible however. I just kind of put myself in the mindset that I'm going to be fine and things generally end up fine. I have experienced a few people who absolutely couldn't handle the trip and put themselves in a horrible state of mind of being stuck, about 4 out of 5 people I have been around when they have experienced that have said they still didn't feel normal long after the half life left their body (2 to 3 weeks). I feel like it's mainly about the mindset you have going into it however I could very well be wrong. Just things I have noticed from personal experiences.
 
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