I'm sorry you had to go through that,
@Sadlysergic. Luckily I've never had to deal with internment or threats thereof, but my first shroom trip was an absolute train wreck. I don't talk about it for various reasons, one of which is the stigmatization of predestination to insanity that people attach to it. Superficial psychiatric pragmatism suddenly becomes palatable when it serves as a convenient line drawn behind one's heels. But declaring something happened because it was bound to happen doesn't actually explain anything. There aren't sufficiently valid measurements available to consistently verify postulation of concrete, reliable causes. And then there are indeed even the unmistakable mental cases where the effect is exactly the opposite, where psychedelics work as medicine. Moreover, declaring predisposition and ending the conversation there only helps to enlarge regret, doesn't it. I think it's a much more fruitful starting point to acknowledge that we all come with baggage, that our stories differ qualitatively and can be very hard and even impossible to quantify into a scale of mental illness, and that, considering such complexity, we all are or have been at risk to be sucked into extended negative spirals. Such assumption fosters a more compassionate approach than going from the social-psychological outgroups created primarily for the convenience of state administration.
It wasn't really an option not to return to psychedelics. I took the initial risk in the first place because I was not content just repressing experience to the point of rendering life empty, and absurd. Though perhaps I could have concluded the alternative was worse, could have instead adapted to a comparatively superficial life, and sorted out things later in life, hopefully without fetishizing misery to any large degree during. What makes this a hard call to make is that you never really know how life pans out. Have I lost multiple careers because of drugs? Or did drugs set me free from the mental taxidermy of bureaucracy, as to find my way on my own terms? That's not something one can predict.
DXM worked for me to patch things up, both to force peace with the expanded state, and as a launch pad for revisiting the psychedelics, and, in time, to sort out that shroom trip. It's dangerous to declare that there aren't bad trips. It quickly amounts to turning a cold heart to heaps of destruction reaped from one dubious decision. It's just that there isn't really anything else to do with it, anything other than to investigate why the mind did what it did. You can postpone investigation. But that is standing still on the side of the same, inevitable road. You've already dearly paid for the lesson, whether you heed it or not. So you might as well heed it, eventually. We are psychologically biased towards valuing that which we pay for. Incidentally that's also why free services tend to garner little respect, heh. So in that way we can eventually come to let go of the overbearing negative. If you've lost an arm and a leg over it, then you're gonna tend to take the insights to heart in a proportionate manner. (That's a psychological take on Dazu Huike's enlightenment, heh, if you like Eastern legends.) And in the end there won't have been a bad trip. But no sooner. Mere denial won't do.
I found my way to riskier dissociatives afterwards, which I'm sure fuels some suspicion towards DXM around here. But there was a quite separate series of events hitting my life around that time. Grave misfortune struck, and I lost the ability to care, about life, about anything. So I indulged in unresearched chemicals, something I would have never done before. DXM has been around for over half a century, and disincentives abuse to a reasonable degree. But the novelty and the "black hole" feel around arylcyclohexylamines suddenly looked perversely exciting. I managed to take them as a challenge for a long time, but they were indeed an incredible bitch to get rid of, and am paying off the metaphorical debt as we speak. Granted, this all would have been less likely to happen if I hadn't known of any reliable way to disconnect and reset/stabilize the mind to begin with. But the point is that it wasn't a natural spiraling out of control from DXM onwards. If life's hardship wouldn't have so unkindly converged into one ruthless squeeze, I don't know why I wouldn't have kept to DXM only. It worked just fine, it was a sufficiently effective shroom antidote. And I hadn't even explored LSD + DXM yet.. just sayin', there was no shortage of relatively safe yet mindblowing experiences to be had.
So all mentioned approaches are potentially valid. In these still early stages of psychedelic medicine, you are the expert on what's most likely to work for you.
