Define "Psychedelic"

[Sentience]

What is a Psychedelic?
How to define Psychedelic?
Are Dissociatives and delierients also sometimes Psychedelic?

Some proposed titles.

 

[Sentience]

Parsing the different subjective psychedelic effects, mapping them onto user reports, then analyzing those reports for statistically significant correlations of description between different drugs is a good first step toward a more systematic qualitative understanding, though. If a drug such as salvia, which has a different pharmacological mechanism of action than the traditional psychedelics, was found to have statistically significant descriptive overlap with the traditional psychedelics in qualitative reports, it could be called psychedelic in my view, so long as the label was accompanied by a description of salvia's effects that corresponded to effects characteristic of 5-HT psychedelics (e.g. tendency to revisit forgotten childhood memories).

Ok.
If we were to look at the 4 types of experiences I listed above as separate characteristics of an experience (1. Conscious and subconscious merging, 2. External hallucinations, 3. Internal dreamlike visions and 4. Ego dissolution) how would we categorize them based on pharmacology? What separates a drug that produces internal dreamlike visions int he waking state from a drug which produces external visions and spatial distortion? What separates a drug which merges the conscious and subconscious from one which dissolves the ego? What separates a drug which dissolves the ego and produces tangible visions from one which produces a different sort of experience? Is there a common pharmacological trend?

Why does peyote seem to leave your spatial perception clean and sharp while tending to produce more internal dreamlike visions in the third eye so to speak, while shrooms tend to produce external hallucinations and spatial warping in the outside world? They are both 5HT2 agonists but the effects are very different.

Mescaline is chemically more similar to MDMA than it is to acid or any tryptamine.

 

[Sentience]

I have never done the 5meo, but worrying about my heart and survival is about the last thing I want to be doing while losing my grip on reality and being blasted into new dimensions of experience.

 

[ebola?]

On the contrary, we can clearly say that content produced by hallucinogens is a reflection of mind. The drug in and of itself has no content that can be experienced. It is only through its interaction with the brain that it gains any content.

I will give you the second and third statements. However, it could still be possible that the drug-brain interaction produces experiences 'manifesting' something novel, not latent material of 'mind'.

I believe, as do most cognitive psychologists that brain and mind are directly linked. The only debate that remains is about the directionality of it.

I will give you the first statement, depending on what you mean by "directly". However, even conceding so, there remain numerous possibilities for how the two could intertwine, not just direction of causality. I'm rather partial to Lakeoff and Johnsons' model, developed in participation with cognitive psychologists, where the conceptual involves metaphorical extension of embodied sensory-motor experience.

ebola

 

[killo]

Psychedelic to me is mind manifesting.

A psychedelic should dissolve boundaries at most doses and especially dissolve the EGO at higher doses.

I find LSD and mushrooms do that well.

DOX, 2c-X don't really do that. They rather just enhance sensory and cause odd "visual stuff" on walls. Nothing extraodinary because a psychedelic is not defined by visuals or euphoria....both of which DOX and 2x-X can cause.

I need my boundaries to be dissolved or else I get bored with how the drug feels, exactly how I feel about most research chemicals I've tried. Even at higher doses my boundaries weren't dissolved, I was out of mind because it was intense and I was paranoid and seeing the room turn into something else. Even with all that happening I was still aware of my situation and where I was at and in the feelings of pain/misery I could still come up with the thought "wow this drug sucks".

Never have I ever thought that on mushrooms or LSD even when I was at its mercy.

That's why I think the worst psychedelics are DOx and 2c-x......snooooore. I think these drugs need a different name, psychedelic doesn't really fit them well.

Visuals, euphoria, enhanced thinking and stimulation does not = psychedelic. Stimulants can do all that, so yea I find DOX and 2c-x to be more like stimulants with effects that you may confuse with a psychedelic. I've even gotten visuals on amphetamine before.

 

[Mjäll]

Psychedelic to me is mind manifesting.

A psychedelic should dissolve boundaries at most doses and especially dissolve the EGO at higher doses.

I find LSD and mushrooms do that well.

DOX, 2c-X don't really do that. They rather just enhance sensory and cause odd "visual stuff" on walls. Nothing extraodinary because a psychedelic is not defined by visuals or euphoria....both of which DOX and 2x-X can cause.

I need my boundaries to be dissolved or else I get bored with how the drug feels, exactly how I feel about most research chemicals I've tried. Even at higher doses my boundaries weren't dissolved, I was out of mind because it was intense and I was paranoid and seeing the room turn into something else. Even with all that happening I was still aware of my situation and where I was at and in the feelings of pain/misery I could still come up with the thought "wow this drug sucks".

Never have I ever thought that on mushrooms or LSD even when I was at its mercy.

That's why I think the worst psychedelics are DOx and 2c-x......snooooore. I think these drugs need a different name, psychedelic doesn't really fit them well.

Visuals, euphoria, enhanced thinking and stimulation does not = psychedelic. Stimulants can do all that, so yea I find DOX and 2c-x to be more like stimulants with effects that you may confuse with a psychedelic. I've even gotten visuals on amphetamine before.

I respect your point but want to emphasize that the common denominator of the compounts you discuss as "unsatisfying" is their phenethylamine structure rather than their status as "RC's" in the community. Can we agree that RC or tried and tested does not matter in principle when it comes to the psychedelic activity of a chemical? Granted, the old good ones are all good while the RC group may include some odd, uncomfortably stimulating or otherwise undesirable side effects and whatnot.

I personally have had deeply mind manifesting effects from 5-MeO-MiPT as well as 4-HO-MET and 4-AcO-DMT, all so called "RC" tryptamines.

And yes, a split would suit fine

 

[ebola?]

Love to. But as the discussants in this proposed new thread, what would you guys recommend we call it?

Insoluble semantic quibbles: defining psychedelia.


ebola

 

[ungelesene_bettlek]

Psychedelic to me is mind manifesting.

A psychedelic should dissolve boundaries at most doses and especially dissolve the EGO at higher doses.

I find LSD and mushrooms do that well.

DOX, 2c-X don't really do that. They rather just enhance sensory and cause odd "visual stuff" on walls. Nothing extraodinary because a psychedelic is not defined by visuals or euphoria....both of which DOX and 2x-X can cause.

I need my boundaries to be dissolved or else I get bored with how the drug feels, exactly how I feel about most research chemicals I've tried. Even at higher doses my boundaries weren't dissolved, I was out of mind because it was intense and I was paranoid and seeing the room turn into something else. Even with all that happening I was still aware of my situation and where I was at and in the feelings of pain/misery I could still come up with the thought "wow this drug sucks".

Never have I ever thought that on mushrooms or LSD even when I was at its mercy.

That's why I think the worst psychedelics are DOx and 2c-x......snooooore. I think these drugs need a different name, psychedelic doesn't really fit them well.

Visuals, euphoria, enhanced thinking and stimulation does not = psychedelic. Stimulants can do all that, so yea I find DOX and 2c-x to be more like stimulants with effects that you may confuse with a psychedelic. I've even gotten visuals on amphetamine before.

so are there actually other substances besides LSD and mushrooms you consider as psychedelic?

 

[Delsyd]

New thread made by request (to no clutter the worst psychedelic thread with off topic posts)

ill add my opinion in a bit when i can think over my response.

 

[psood0nym]

Ok.
If we were to look at the 4 types of experiences I listed above as separate characteristics of an experience (1. Conscious and subconscious merging, 2. External hallucinations, 3. Internal dreamlike visions and 4. Ego dissolution) how would we categorize them based on pharmacology? What separates a drug that produces internal dreamlike visions int he waking state from a drug which produces external visions and spatial distortion? What separates a drug which merges the conscious and subconscious from one which dissolves the ego? What separates a drug which dissolves the ego and produces tangible visions from one which produces a different sort of experience? Is there a common pharmacological trend?

The experience types you mention don't align uniquely with known pharmacological processes, but that doesn't matter for the goal of reducing the ambiguity of the term "psychedlic" (further defining it). What matters is that there is more qualitative similarity among drugs with psychedelic effects that share similar mechanisms of action, e.g. 5-HT agonism, than there is between those drugs and others with some psychedelic-like effects, e.g. salvia, that do not share the mechanism. It's all about statistical regularities.

Compare Erowid's effects lists for LSD, psilocybe mushrooms, and datura, for instance. Qualitative description alone suggests datura doesn't belong.

It is the shared family of experience types characteristic of a 5-HT agonists that make them psychedelics. 5-HT agonism is the center of gravity around which these shared qualities orbit. If there's overlap on a few types of experiences with other drugs it doesn't make those other drugs psychedelic, it means the other drugs have psychedelic-like effects. If it were the case that a new drug with a seemingly distinctly different mechanism of action consistently produced the same family of experience types across users of the new drug and few other psychological effects there would then be reason to weaken the 5-HT agonism aspect of the definition. But there is no such drug that I know of, and so the property retains strong utility in the description of psychedelic.

Why does peyote seem to leave your spatial perception clean and sharp while tending to produce more internal dreamlike visions in the third eye so to speak, while shrooms tend to produce external hallucinations and spatial warping in the outside world? They are both 5HT2 agonists but the effects are very different.

Idiosyncratic differences shouldn't be brought to bear on the definition. The fact remains that averaged across user reports and compared to drugs of other classes the 5-HT agonist psychedelics have far more in common with each other than they do not.

Above, killo mentions that he does not experience what he considers psychedelic effects from DOx or 2C-x compounds. He's an outlier. Those drugs may not have psychedelic effects to him, but by virtue of their characteristic effects across user reports they are psychedelic drugs. The subjective effects that should count as psychedelic are those that are commonly shared across the 5-HT agonists for reasons already cited.

So, for example, "increased tendency to recall childhood memories" is a psychedelic effect of LSD and a psychedelic-like effect of saliva because the experience is reported often in accounts of 5-HT agonist experiences and is also reported often in salvia experiences. In contrast, believing you ARE some other entity entirely on salvia may be quite an intense psychological and visionary event that you may gain great personal insight from, but it is not a psychedelic effect because it is not commonly part of the family of subjective effects of 5-HT agonists across users (even though such experiences have probably been reported in individual cases).

This is not to say that there are no weird examples. At low doses, the characteristic subjective effects reported across users of aMT more closely resemble a euphoriant. This is not surprising, as no other 5-HT psychedelic except for 5-MeO-aMT has near the monoamine-releasing power of aMT. MDMA and methamphetamine share this characteristic of aMT. Still, aMT is an outlier. It's all about statistical regularities. Not perfect, but still more useful than a more general definition.

 

[Sentience]

Though I respect your opinion I disagree on a few basic grounds.

1. Even if all strong 5HT2 agonists produce psychedelic effects, we dont know if stimulation of these receptors is directly what produces the psychedelic experience or if it is a secondary effect of 5HT2 stimulation, such as flooding portions of the brain with glutamate to over stimulate them (for example). If 5HT2 stimulates something else that produces the psychedelic experience then we cannot be certain that other mechanisms of action will not produce similar results. This would mean that 5HT2 agonists would be a class of psychedelics rather than the defining characteristic of all psychedelics.

2. The dictionary definition is really broad and general and a lot of atypical examples fit the criteria of the dictionary definition. This alone is a decent argument, despite many psychedelics having similarities in affinity that is not shared with all of them.

3. Datura lists hallucinations and interactions with hallucinations as a primary effect of the drug. If it isnt psychedelic it is AT LEAST a hallucinogen. I dont feel the need to shy away from the term. Unless you are trying to argue that your hallucinations are literally real rather than a projection of the mind, I dont see any necessity for avoiding the term. Whle the drug might also be a delerient at lower doses and dissociative, those terms do not imply the full range of effects that are produced such as interacting with hallucinations, so it is not a satisfactory or complete definition even if you dont consider it a typical psychedelic. Hallucinogen is 100% accurate. Calling it a hallucinogen but not a psychedelic seems like a more tolerable explanation than the simply calling it a deleriant which does not manage to imply its hallucinogenic properties.

 

[jamaica0535]

You see things that are not there and talk to people who are not there and walk through strange lands that you are not in, all while you are awake and seem to be walking around but you are in a different reality.

How is that not a psychedelic?

The sum total of the plant cannot be reduced to the effects of a few of its alkaloids. Datura is a true psychedelic.

Most psychedelics act on serotonin receptors in the brain and their effects can vary quite a lot.

Datura is a delirium, not a trip....

I don't call PCP a psychedelic, i call it a dissociative based on its subjective effects and method of action on the brain.

The term psychedelic means "mind-manifesting" which doesn't really put a specific effect in its literal meaning.

 

[Sentience]

Does PCP make you talk to people who are not there and smoke cigarettes that are not there? Datura is at least a hallucinogen if not a psychedelic.

 

[ungelesene_bettlek]

Datura lists hallucinations and interactions with hallucinations as a primary effect of the drug. If it isnt psychedelic it is AT LEAST a hallucinogen.

I agree. in some sense, deliriants are actually more of hallucinogens than 5HT2A-psychedelics, since they cause real hallucinations (as opposed to pseudo-hallucinations).

but I also think that the deliriants really can't be called psychedelics in the strict sense, because they are more mind-narrowing than mind-expanding (unless they are used by a shaman with years of experience, maybe).

Whle the drug might also be a delerient at lower doses and dissociative, those terms do not imply the full range of effects that are produced such as interacting with hallucinations, so it is not a satisfactory or complete definition even if you dont consider it a typical psychedelic. Hallucinogen is 100% accurate. Calling it a hallucinogen but not a psychedelic seems like a more tolerable explanation than the simply calling it a deleriant which does not manage to imply its hallucinogenic properties.

hallucinations are a symptom of delirium. deliriants cause delirium. so deliriant is the most proper term for this kind of drugs.

 

[Sentience]

Are you familiar with high doses of Datura?

Delerium is the symptom I experience when I am still tied to my body before dissociation, but once the dreams and hallucinations start I no longer feel groggy or confused or blurry. All of that passes and I enter into a new state that is nothing like the early stages of the experience, where my visions are as clear as day and feel just as real and pristine as any waking experience I have ever had. It can also be frightening when you wake up from one dream into the next and you have NO idea what is real or fake, and you have similar dreams over and over again waking up from one into the next, but never sure what is real or fake....and this can last for 3 days straight.

In my opinion, there is a difference between just having such blurry and distorted perception that you mistake a lampshade for a human being and start talking to it, vs having full blown vivid and clear hallucinations that you can interact with as you are transported to strange new worlds.

Its not that I dont think that the terms delerient and disassociative dont apply to datura, but I think that delirium and disassociation are possible without experiencing that depth of hallicnation that is common with datura, so I feel pretty comfortable calling datura a true hallucinogen as well as a deleriant and dissassociative drug.

 

[Shakti]

However, it could still be possible that the drug-brain interaction produces experiences 'manifesting' something novel, not latent material of 'mind'.

It's true that the material/experience is novel, but of course it is (this conversation would never happen otherwise). Also, it certainly is 'of mind'. Whether the specific content/material of the experience is producible or accessible by other means, or dependent on the drug is unimportant. Either way it reveals and expresses aspects of mind.

I will give you the first statement, depending on what you mean by "directly". However, even conceding so, there remain numerous possibilities for how the two could intertwine, not just direction of causality.

You're right, I over simplified that statement.

 

[RedRum OG]

the way marijuana effects me i would definitely consider it a psychedelic. i get visuals and some very bizarre thoughts and i can not rely on my sense of touch at all. things feel wet that arent and sometimes i can only feel stuff every other second. i am also pretty sure i have HPPD from it, which i enjoy

 

[psood0nym]

Though I respect your opinion I disagree on a few basic grounds.

1. Even if all strong 5HT2 agonists produce psychedelic effects, we dont know if stimulation of these receptors is directly what produces the psychedelic experience or if it is a secondary effect of 5HT2 stimulation, such as flooding portions of the brain with glutamate to over stimulate them (for example). If 5HT2 stimulates something else that produces the psychedelic experience then we cannot be certain that other mechanisms of action will not produce similar results. This would mean that 5HT2 agonists would be a class of psychedelics rather than the defining characteristic of all psychedelics.

No, we don't know if stimulation of these receptors directly causes psychedelic effects. I doubt anyone thinks that's the be all end all of their effects. We don't know why physical events should give rise to qualia, either. It's irrelevant to the aim of narrowing down the meaning of the term "psychedelic". We can only work with what there is evidence for. Why would we need to be certain? How would we know we were justified in our certainty? If you make your criteria for changing your position unattainable your position is not open to change and debate is pointless. Should it be found that the alternative you mentioned gained more evidential support I would shift my position on what should inform the definition, but I would not think that stimulation of certain parts of the brain by glutamate was a full explanation either, as that explanation opens up innumerable other questions. That's why deferring to statistical regularities, both objective and subjective, is a sensible part of sketching a more specific definition. They don't claim to explain why, for the most part they just are, for now.

2. The dictionary definition is really broad and general and a lot of atypical examples fit the criteria of the dictionary definition. This alone is a decent argument, despite many psychedelics having similarities in affinity that is not shared with all of them.

I'm not sure how to interpret this. Are you saying the fact that atypical examples like salvia and datura fit into a vaguely defined category like "mind manifesting" is an argument? I think this was Jamshyd's point: why not just call every noun "thing"?

3. Datura lists hallucinations and interactions with hallucinations as a primary effect of the drug. If it isnt psychedelic it is AT LEAST a hallucinogen. I dont feel the need to shy away from the term. Unless you are trying to argue that your hallucinations are literally real rather than a projection of the mind, I dont see any necessity for avoiding the term. Whle the drug might also be a delerient at lower doses and dissociative, those terms do not imply the full range of effects that are produced such as interacting with hallucinations, so it is not a satisfactory or complete definition even if you dont consider it a typical psychedelic. Hallucinogen is 100% accurate. Calling it a hallucinogen but not a psychedelic seems like a more tolerable explanation than the simply calling it a deleriant which does not manage to imply its hallucinogenic properties.

I agree, it tends to produce "true hallucinations."

 

[Sentience]

Now that we are at least seeming to agree that these are visionary plants and true hallucinogens, I feel more ok with the narrowing of the term psychedelic.

As to point #1, while 5HT2 agonism seems to produce psychedelic effects and is common among true psychedelics, I think it is fine to use it descriptively, as long as you dont disqualify other drugs from the criteria based solely on lack of evidence of 5HT2 affinity. If you dont know for certain that 5HT2 stimulation directly produces the psychedelic experience or if it merely triggers the release of glutamate which could also occur by other mechanisms, then you really dont have enough evidence to rule out a drug based solely on that one piece of the puzzle if the effects otherwise coincide. We also dont know if stimulation of 5HT2 can be produced indirectly through our own endogenous psychedelics....but I guess I am fine with the term being used descriptively. I am just not 100% convinced that lack of 5HT2 agonism conclusively rules out psychedelic effects, though the presence of it does highly suggest psychedelic activity.

Based on qualitative attributes however, I am convinced that datura is not a psychedelic in the classical sense but is a true hallucinogen....and the association with mental hospitals is in fact probably appropriate for a drug like datura considering that users experience full blown delusions and extreme symptomology of psychosis.

 

[TheElijah]

psyche "mind" and delein, "to manifest" , translating to "mind-manifesting" roughly. lol