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lsd = schizophrenia

There are some similarities; but overall they're quite different things. LSD may allow someone to experience some of what a schizophrenic may go through; but it can also take one to places that are the complete opposite of schizophrenia.
 
i know two people who have changed mentally in their heads for the worst after spending a summer tripping on cid and all that. one of them recovered, the other is real bugged out. schizo? no. mentally unstable? yes.
 
A CNS stimulant binge creates a state a lot more like schizophrenia. Some atypical antipsychotics are antagonists of 5HT2a receptors so it may contribute to some of its symptoms.
5HT2a is excitatory and increases the chance that a cell will depolarize (and fire an action potential) given an input. I like to think that the effects of psychedelics are produced by running the normal human processing system on data not filtered for noise (small amplitude, high frequency noise gets through). They appear to be most expressed in the regions of the brain that are responsible for language based thought and the visual processing regions where some memory lookup is involved. So 5HT2a activation may enhance some of the symptoms of schizophrenia.
I'm curious to see what a hit of LSD after a massive binge on meth looks like.
 
interleukin said:
A CNS stimulant binge creates a state a lot more like schizophrenia. Some atypical antipsychotics are antagonists of 5HT2a receptors so it may contribute to some of its symptoms.
5HT2a is excitatory and increases the chance that a cell will depolarize (and fire an action potential) given an input. I like to think that the effects of psychedelics are produced by running the normal human processing system on data not filtered for noise (small amplitude, high frequency noise gets through). They appear to be most expressed in the regions of the brain that are responsible for language based thought and the visual processing regions where some memory lookup is involved. So 5HT2a activation may enhance some of the symptoms of schizophrenia.
I'm curious to see what a hit of LSD after a massive binge on meth looks like.
Click to expand...

Denounce your curiosity, that shit is in fact not shit, it's much worse. I'd rather have my balls pounded with a sledge hammer then to go through something like that again.
 
I do recall reading that (in the fifties) people with schizophrenia were given LSD and were able to differentiate between their normal psychosis and the LSD psychedelia. That would suggest that in many ways the two are very very different.
 
interleukin said:
A CNS stimulant binge creates a state a lot more like schizophrenia. Some atypical antipsychotics are antagonists of 5HT2a receptors so it may contribute to some of its symptoms.
5HT2a is excitatory and increases the chance that a cell will depolarize (and fire an action potential) given an input. I like to think that the effects of psychedelics are produced by running the normal human processing system on data not filtered for noise (small amplitude, high frequency noise gets through). They appear to be most expressed in the regions of the brain that are responsible for language based thought and the visual processing regions where some memory lookup is involved. So 5HT2a activation may enhance some of the symptoms of schizophrenia.
I'm curious to see what a hit of LSD after a massive binge on meth looks like.
Click to expand...

I was about to say something to this effect, but likely not put nearly as accurately or succinctly. Drug psychoses aren't terribly dissimilar from non-drug psychoses, but the former are far more frequently caused by stimulants than psychedelics, though i'm sure if one was bound & determined they could get there with psyches, but why? I wouldn't recommend it.

Also, I've tripped on the end of a few different types of stimulant binges, total break with reality... Granted that's what i was going for though. I used to have some fucked up concepts of fun back in the early 2000s.

Furthermore, the original term for psychedelics, in western medicine, was psychotomimetics, as they were thought to mimic psychoses. When it was determined that they did not mimic psychoses, the terminology was changed. This was over 40yrs ago, so i think this question is pretty well answered.
 
I don't really agree with the way many people here seem to look at this, anyway with schizophrenia there is a fragmented or better yet desintegrated personality or ego. Multiple personality disorder (while being a different animal) doesn't seem to get confused with schizophrenia without any reason whatsoever: in extreme cases of desintegration parts of the personality become so separate and situation-dependent that we can witness clearly noticeable the separation of these fragment entity personalities.
However we should always remind ourselves that it is very normal and human to be a slightly different person in different situations! Even so most people are reasonably integrated.

Experiencing LSD for me feels like a catalyzed version of the process described by 'the theory of positive desintegration', the aspects and fragments of your ego peel off and dissolve but at some point during the trip when everything having friction (normally preventing proper integration) is processed everything is pieced back together again. IME that is when visuals get less and you feel very clear and pure, much like a low dose of acid but more so.

What makes sense to me is that through this positive desintegration everything gets loosened, your sense of boundaries but also the pieces that make you you. But when a dose of acid is too much for someone's 'comfort' or ability to go through that process there is more incoherency in one's being and one's manifestations of the mind including the sensory data that is used to help do that. Hence the confusion, alien feelings, visual disturbances and other distortion of yourself.
Later in the trip you can catch up with the process and piece everything back together again, which is not to say you can do some extraordinarily free and loosened thinking in the meantime!
This also explains for me why it can be interesting to start off with a normal dose of LSD that you know is not a chore to cope with in realtime, and when you are really in that flow well enough you take a heavy dose of LSD having already been through the process of breaking down and feeling how you fit together it makes the heavy dose very transparent and pure is what I found out. Actually my best friend did, after consistent results and I could only agree.
It is possible though to get a secondary cycle that is still interesting and intense but confusing, weird and trippy. It's more likely if you smoke weed or drink alcohol at that point for instance.

So if schizophrenia, especially the progressive type, is a loss of coherency and integration then it is only partially similar to the LSD experience.
I don't try to sell truth or anything but to me this all makes sense. People with a tendency to lose coherency, who lack forms of introspection and psychological self-analysis, who lack the ability to distinguish fantasy and delusion from the world can more easily get detached. That is why it is risky for them to take LSD: they follow the process of desintegration but do not integrate well again afterwards.

There are many opinions about who is crazy and who is not and there is often such a fine line between less-limited thought that only appears to be unhealthy at first and actual mental illness. When I say reintegration I don't mean you end up exactly the way you were. The fact that you become familiar with the sense of being one and also the sum of parts (however you experience and analyse them) and the way that you are an integrated (id)entity stays with you and I believe that going there and coming back can make you into a person with more understanding than someone who wishes to know it all but remain a spectator - the old scientific approach.

I'm interested to hear how others think about the relationship between psychedelia, schizophrenia, psychosis!
 
any major dude said:
I was about to say something to this effect, but likely not put nearly as accurately or succinctly. Drug psychoses aren't terribly dissimilar from non-drug psychoses, but the former are far more frequently caused by stimulants than psychedelics, though i'm sure if one was bound & determined they could get there with psyches, but why? I wouldn't recommend it.

Also, I've tripped on the end of a few different types of stimulant binges, total break with reality... Granted that's what i was going for though. I used to have some fucked up concepts of fun back in the early 2000s.

Furthermore, the original term for psychedelics, in western medicine, was psychotomimetics, as they were thought to mimic psychoses. When it was determined that they did not mimic psychoses, the terminology was changed. This was over 40yrs ago, so i think this question is pretty well answered.
Click to expand...

I was thinking about psychedelics after a stimulant binge as an experiment to explore the role of 5HT2a activation in psychosis. Using the stimulant binge as a model for producing psychosis, someone supporting the psychedelic = psychosis theory would expect the symptoms to get progressively worse after taking the psychedelic and then get much better on the comedown due to receptor downregulation.
Because you didn’t mention it I’m guessing that your symptoms did not dramatically improve after the psychedelic wore out suggesting at that 5HT2a activation is not essential for producing stimulant psychosis although it may increase its severity. The same thing is probably true for schizophrenia and the action of atypical antipsychotics that target 5HT2a.

Of course this is assuming (incorrectly) that the only thing classical psychedelics do is act as 5HT2a agonists or that the other 5HT receptors they hit don't matter too much in the maintenance of psychosis.
 
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Tripping on LSD is nothing like suffering from schizophrenia. It's as fucking stupid to say they are as saying being asleep is the same as being dead.

Anyone on LSD is aware they've taken a drug - that's a fundamental and enormous difference to someone suffering from a real mental illness.
 
^ Re: your second statement, I don't think it's that simple. I've had a couple of experiences with LSD where I forgot that I'd even taken a drug, and plenty of trip reports suggest that this is not an uncommon reaction. For me it was sometimes fun, but mostly it was just confusing. Not in any way that I would compare to what I imagine schizophrenic confusion must be like, however.
 
Yeah ive seen people totally wig out on L forgetting who everyone was, calling people another name, or thinking dudes in the room were chics. Didnt know this dude, we finnally manage to get him in my car to take him home cus he was starting to get violent and the girls at the apartment were getting freaked out......and he cant remember where he lives. That was a long night. He took 2 hits btw.
 
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