washingtonbound
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2013
- Messages
- 444
Hi all, this post will be a long one so please bear with me.
I wanted to bring this subject up because it aggravates me that some people deny that LSD can be a big contributor to psychosis. As someone who has had firsthand experience of this let me tell you for certain that it can and will cause certain people psychosis if they are not in the rind mindset. I was one of many who thought "this will never happen to me," and here I am writing this just two months out of a nearly 3 month long hospital stay in the UK. This isn't meant to dissuade anyone from trying it (although if you are already diagnosed bipolar, schizophrenic, or schizoaffective it would not be a very good idea), but rather to provide an honest, first person account of my experience so people can be more informed on this issue.
Background: No history of bipolar/schizophrenia in the family. No formal diagnosis of a mental health issue prior to when usage started. I'm a 21 yr old male (was 18 when I started using it). No history of violence in the family, with the exception of some alcoholism on my mom's side. Poor relationship with father but no physical abuse ever occurred.
I first started taking LSD when I moved to Seattle, WA during my freshman year of college. Needless to say I enjoyed it and felt like it gave me a whole new prospective on life. I felt like I returned to childhood whenever I took it, and although minor anxiety occurred sometimes I never felt like I had a bad trip. There was minimal paranoia, no delusions, and no signs of my health being negatively affected by it. All in all it seemed pretty safe.
Fast forward a few months and I am starting to struggle in school a bit more. My peer relationships are shallow and not holding up very well. I get dumped by a girl I really cared for in a painstakingly casual way. My mental health starts to deteriorate, but I find no correlation between that and the lsd. Keep in mind I only tripped on average once or twice a month, so it's unlikely that it affected me in any way. I will note, however, that chronic marijuana use did not help the situation. Weed made me hyper agitated on the comedown and I ended up smoking more and more of it.
For better or worse, I left Seattle that summer and went home to finish applying to other schools. I was only back for a month before I had psychosis induced by marijuana. It is during this time that I am diagnosed Bipolar type 1 for the first time. I won't go into the details of that right now since I want to focus on my bout with lsd, but hopefully you get the picture that my mind was starting to deteriorate.
I then spent a gap year following an involuntary hospitalization that resulted in my family not having funding for school. I continued to smoke marijuana, although not as heavily, and no mania presented itself. However, I would occasionally hit myself in the head on the comedown as I still had issues with agitation and intrusive thoughts. But all in all, I proved to be stable enough that year to convince my parents to fund my schooling in Brighton, England in the fall.
Here is where things started going downhill fast. Upon enrolling in school, I quickly found myself having a hard time making friends apart from drug dealers. Being in a foreign country was taxing on me, and I found myself having difficulty with executive functioning (cooking, etc.), and it didn't help that the school cafeteria was only open Mon-Fri for breakfast and dinner. I started to become malnourished and began abusing drugs more than usual. Anything I could get my hands on I would take, although initially I only had a connect for weed, mdma, and valium. Then one day out of the blue I decided that I would try to get out of my shell and venture out to this new nightclub in town. Given that I had so few friends I ended up venturing into Brighton myself to get a lay of the land. Little did I know this night would directly effect the course of my life in quite a negative way.
Upon arriving at the nightclub I was overall pleased with the crowd. Instead of a bunch of coked out college kids, this place had a more laid back vibe with older hippies. I've always liked the older crowd at clubs in part because of their maturity but also because of their access to drugs. Sure enough, within an hour of being there I'm offered a dose of liquid LSD. I take it without hesitation, and over the course of the next few hours I experience a profound prospective shift. I go from feeling like I've hit rock bottom to feeling like I've hung the moon. Suddenly everything became positive. If you were my enemy, I forgave you. There seemed to be nothing that could get in the way of my uplifted demeanor; little did I know I was experiencing the first stage of acute hypomania.
Needless to say I went back into town the next day and purchased some more, along with some ketamine, changa, and speed. What followed was what I can only describe as a descent into complete and other chaos. Over the course of three days I had consumed all three doses of the liquid l that was sold to me, nearly a gram of ketamine and a sprinking of speed and changa. NOTE: Please do not assume that the speed or the changa contributed my psychosis. I am one of the rare people that doesn't seem respond to DMT (that or I've just gotten bad batches), and each time I smoked the changa I felt absolutely nothing. It did nothing to exacerbate the symptoms that were already brought on by the lsd, and I took a minimal amount of speed and hardly noticed any effect. It is possible that the ketamine may have played a role; however, I still go back to the notion that the l is what kicked off the hypomania in the first place. It seems significantly less likely to experience acute psychosis from k.
By the end of the week I was fried out of my mind. My bedazzled brain had me convinced that I was responsible for the second coming and implementing NWO. I became convinced that I had god given spiritual powers, and that I could communicate with animals telepathically. I had become so psychotic that I was hardly able to take care of myself. My naivety had led me to submerge myself in the >50 degree water at Brighton pier fully clothed, cut my legs up wading through a thorn bush (which I still have scars from), and nearly kill myself walking in front of traffic because I thought that "gods will would never let me get hit." I became convinced that women were giving me secret eye signals to stay awake to combat the forced of evil and therefore I was up for three days. I essentially lost all touch with reality, believing I was a genius computer scientist and mathematician who was sent to eradicate the royal families. I posted terribly embarrassing content on facebook, to the point that I had friends who I hadn't seen in years message me to ask what the fuck was going on. It didn't take long for security to be called, as I was waking people up in the middle of the night to tell them that I was autistic and proud and that women and gay men were taking over the world. I was assessed over the course of a day and promptly sent to a psych ward where I ended up spending nearly three months of my life. For a solid two months in the hospital I was still convinced that I was responsible for NWO and relentlessly berated innocent people for what I perceived as their connection with the Rothschild family. This obviously had no bearing in reality and was another byproduct of my illness. I even went as far as calling other patients rapists and pedophiles.
Eventually I was brought back through forcible injection of clopixol. I must note that this is one of the nastiest anti psychs out there and I became so irate when I was injected the first time that I smeared feces on the wall while I was in solitary confinement. But after the week of severe depression that hit I was more or less back to normal. The whole experience was a tough price to pay for taking a few drugs to say the least.
Anyway, I guess the whole point of this thread is to make everyone aware that there can be a nasty underbelly to these substances whether we'd like to think so or not. I started out as a happy go lucky 18 year old who liked to experiment and ended up as a 21 year old recluse with drug induced bipolar symptoms. So for those of you who enjoy psychedelics, remember to treat them respectfully. Your life could end up like mine if you don't.
Thanks for reading.
I wanted to bring this subject up because it aggravates me that some people deny that LSD can be a big contributor to psychosis. As someone who has had firsthand experience of this let me tell you for certain that it can and will cause certain people psychosis if they are not in the rind mindset. I was one of many who thought "this will never happen to me," and here I am writing this just two months out of a nearly 3 month long hospital stay in the UK. This isn't meant to dissuade anyone from trying it (although if you are already diagnosed bipolar, schizophrenic, or schizoaffective it would not be a very good idea), but rather to provide an honest, first person account of my experience so people can be more informed on this issue.
Background: No history of bipolar/schizophrenia in the family. No formal diagnosis of a mental health issue prior to when usage started. I'm a 21 yr old male (was 18 when I started using it). No history of violence in the family, with the exception of some alcoholism on my mom's side. Poor relationship with father but no physical abuse ever occurred.
I first started taking LSD when I moved to Seattle, WA during my freshman year of college. Needless to say I enjoyed it and felt like it gave me a whole new prospective on life. I felt like I returned to childhood whenever I took it, and although minor anxiety occurred sometimes I never felt like I had a bad trip. There was minimal paranoia, no delusions, and no signs of my health being negatively affected by it. All in all it seemed pretty safe.
Fast forward a few months and I am starting to struggle in school a bit more. My peer relationships are shallow and not holding up very well. I get dumped by a girl I really cared for in a painstakingly casual way. My mental health starts to deteriorate, but I find no correlation between that and the lsd. Keep in mind I only tripped on average once or twice a month, so it's unlikely that it affected me in any way. I will note, however, that chronic marijuana use did not help the situation. Weed made me hyper agitated on the comedown and I ended up smoking more and more of it.
For better or worse, I left Seattle that summer and went home to finish applying to other schools. I was only back for a month before I had psychosis induced by marijuana. It is during this time that I am diagnosed Bipolar type 1 for the first time. I won't go into the details of that right now since I want to focus on my bout with lsd, but hopefully you get the picture that my mind was starting to deteriorate.
I then spent a gap year following an involuntary hospitalization that resulted in my family not having funding for school. I continued to smoke marijuana, although not as heavily, and no mania presented itself. However, I would occasionally hit myself in the head on the comedown as I still had issues with agitation and intrusive thoughts. But all in all, I proved to be stable enough that year to convince my parents to fund my schooling in Brighton, England in the fall.
Here is where things started going downhill fast. Upon enrolling in school, I quickly found myself having a hard time making friends apart from drug dealers. Being in a foreign country was taxing on me, and I found myself having difficulty with executive functioning (cooking, etc.), and it didn't help that the school cafeteria was only open Mon-Fri for breakfast and dinner. I started to become malnourished and began abusing drugs more than usual. Anything I could get my hands on I would take, although initially I only had a connect for weed, mdma, and valium. Then one day out of the blue I decided that I would try to get out of my shell and venture out to this new nightclub in town. Given that I had so few friends I ended up venturing into Brighton myself to get a lay of the land. Little did I know this night would directly effect the course of my life in quite a negative way.
Upon arriving at the nightclub I was overall pleased with the crowd. Instead of a bunch of coked out college kids, this place had a more laid back vibe with older hippies. I've always liked the older crowd at clubs in part because of their maturity but also because of their access to drugs. Sure enough, within an hour of being there I'm offered a dose of liquid LSD. I take it without hesitation, and over the course of the next few hours I experience a profound prospective shift. I go from feeling like I've hit rock bottom to feeling like I've hung the moon. Suddenly everything became positive. If you were my enemy, I forgave you. There seemed to be nothing that could get in the way of my uplifted demeanor; little did I know I was experiencing the first stage of acute hypomania.
Needless to say I went back into town the next day and purchased some more, along with some ketamine, changa, and speed. What followed was what I can only describe as a descent into complete and other chaos. Over the course of three days I had consumed all three doses of the liquid l that was sold to me, nearly a gram of ketamine and a sprinking of speed and changa. NOTE: Please do not assume that the speed or the changa contributed my psychosis. I am one of the rare people that doesn't seem respond to DMT (that or I've just gotten bad batches), and each time I smoked the changa I felt absolutely nothing. It did nothing to exacerbate the symptoms that were already brought on by the lsd, and I took a minimal amount of speed and hardly noticed any effect. It is possible that the ketamine may have played a role; however, I still go back to the notion that the l is what kicked off the hypomania in the first place. It seems significantly less likely to experience acute psychosis from k.
By the end of the week I was fried out of my mind. My bedazzled brain had me convinced that I was responsible for the second coming and implementing NWO. I became convinced that I had god given spiritual powers, and that I could communicate with animals telepathically. I had become so psychotic that I was hardly able to take care of myself. My naivety had led me to submerge myself in the >50 degree water at Brighton pier fully clothed, cut my legs up wading through a thorn bush (which I still have scars from), and nearly kill myself walking in front of traffic because I thought that "gods will would never let me get hit." I became convinced that women were giving me secret eye signals to stay awake to combat the forced of evil and therefore I was up for three days. I essentially lost all touch with reality, believing I was a genius computer scientist and mathematician who was sent to eradicate the royal families. I posted terribly embarrassing content on facebook, to the point that I had friends who I hadn't seen in years message me to ask what the fuck was going on. It didn't take long for security to be called, as I was waking people up in the middle of the night to tell them that I was autistic and proud and that women and gay men were taking over the world. I was assessed over the course of a day and promptly sent to a psych ward where I ended up spending nearly three months of my life. For a solid two months in the hospital I was still convinced that I was responsible for NWO and relentlessly berated innocent people for what I perceived as their connection with the Rothschild family. This obviously had no bearing in reality and was another byproduct of my illness. I even went as far as calling other patients rapists and pedophiles.
Eventually I was brought back through forcible injection of clopixol. I must note that this is one of the nastiest anti psychs out there and I became so irate when I was injected the first time that I smeared feces on the wall while I was in solitary confinement. But after the week of severe depression that hit I was more or less back to normal. The whole experience was a tough price to pay for taking a few drugs to say the least.
Anyway, I guess the whole point of this thread is to make everyone aware that there can be a nasty underbelly to these substances whether we'd like to think so or not. I started out as a happy go lucky 18 year old who liked to experiment and ended up as a 21 year old recluse with drug induced bipolar symptoms. So for those of you who enjoy psychedelics, remember to treat them respectfully. Your life could end up like mine if you don't.
Thanks for reading.
