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Data from population surveys in the United States challenge public fears that psychedelic drugs such as LSD can lead to psychosis and other mental-health conditions and to increased risk of suicide, two studies have found.

In the first study, clinical psychologists Pål-Ørjan Johansen and Teri Suzanne Krebs, both at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, scoured data from the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), an annual random sample of the general population, and analysed answers from more than 135,000 people who took part in surveys from 2008 to 2011.

Of those, 14% described themselves as having used at any point in their lives any of the three ‘classic’ psychedelics: LSD, psilocybin (the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms) and mescaline (found in the peyote and San Pedro cacti). The researchers found that individuals in this group were not at increased risk of developing 11 indicators of mental-health problems such as schizophrenia, psychosis, depression, anxiety disorders and suicide attempts. Their paper appears in the March issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology

The findings are likely to raise eyebrows. Fears that psychedelics can lead to psychosis date to the 1960s, with widespread reports of “acid casualties” in the mainstream news. But Krebs says that because psychotic disorders are relatively prevalent, affecting about one in 50 people, correlations can often be mistaken for causations. “Psychedelics are psychologically intense, and many people will blame anything that happens for the rest of their lives on a psychedelic experience.”

The three substances Johansen and Krebs looked at all act through the brain’s serotonin 2A receptor. The authors did not include ketamine, PCP, MDMA, fly agaric mushrooms, DMT or other drugs that fall broadly into the category of hallucinogens, because they act on other receptors and have different modes of biochemical action. Ketamine and PCP, for example, act on the NMDA receptor and are both known to be addictive and to cause severe physical harms, such as damage to the bladder.

“Absolutely, people can become addicted to drugs like ketamine or PCP, and the effects can be very destructive. We restricted our study to the ‘classic psychedelics’ to clarify the findings,” says Johansen.

The 'acid casualty' myth
“This study assures us that there were not widespread ‘acid casualties’ in the 1960s,” says Charles Grob, a paediatric psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has long has advocated the therapeutic use of psychedelics, such as administering psilocybin to treat anxiety in terminal-stage cancer. But he has concerns about Krebs and Johansen’s overall conclusions, he says, because individual cases of adverse effects use can and do occur.

For example, people may develop hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), a ‘trip’ that never seems to end, involving incessant distortions in the visual field, shimmering lights and coloured dots. “I’ve seen a number of people with these symptoms following a psychedelic experience, and it can be a very serious condition,” says Grob.

Krebs and Johansen, however, point to studies that have found symptoms of HPPD in people who have never used psychedelics.

The second of the new two studies, also published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, looked at 190,000 NSDUH respondents from 2008 to 2012. It also found that the classic psychedelics were not associated with adverse mental-health outcomes. In addition, it found that people who had used LSD and psilocybin had lower lifetime rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

“We are not claiming that no individuals have ever been harmed by psychedelics,” says author Matthew Johnson, an associate professor in the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “Anecdotes about acid casualties can be very powerful — but these instances are rare,” he says. At the population level, he says, the data suggest that the harms of psychedelics “have been overstated”.

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Psychedelic mushrooms are notorious for producing dazzling hallucinations.  But they can do a lot more than provide you with a trip.  New research shows that they actually have long-last positive effects on the brain.

In fact, a mind-altering compound found in some 200 species of mushroom is already being explored as a potential medical treatment for depression and anxiety. People who consume these mushrooms consistently reported feeling more optimistic, euphoric, and clear-minded years after their experience. Imagine being able to receive a prescription for mushrooms!

An interested study sought to understand why it is the human brain experiences permanent transformation after mushrooms. According to a study published today in Human Brain Mapping, the mushroom compounds could be unlocking brain states usually only experienced when we dream, changes in activity that could help unlock permanent shifts in perspective.

The study examined brain activity in those who’d received injections of psilocybin, which is the active psychedelic compound within the mushrooms. Despite a long history of mushroom use in spiritual practice, this was the first real study done to investigating the biological changes that occurred during and after a psilocybin trip.

According to Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, a post-doctoral researcher in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and co-author of the study, the 15 participants were found to have increased brain function in areas associated with emotion and memory after receiving their injections. The effect was strikingly similar to a brain in a deep dream sleep state.

“You’re seeing these areas getting louder, and more active,” he said. “It’s like someone’s turned up the volume there, in these regions that are considered part of an emotional system in the brain. When you look at a brain during dream sleep, you see the same hyperactive emotion centers.”

The brain may literally be slipping into these dream states while the user of the substance is still awake.

Areas of the brain involved in high-order thinking and refined cognitive operations were less active during the trip. “These are the most recent parts of our brain, in an evolutionary sense,” Carhart-Harris said. “And we see them getting quieter and less organized.”

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“Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” — Unknown

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” –George Orwell
Every single word originated from the fallibility of the human mind. Our skulls are like little cul-de-sacs of thought just waiting to spring into words. Our brains are tiny galaxies going through the motion of creating a multitude of thoughts through the firing of billions of synapses. The only way we can share these thoughts with each other is through words. But first our thoughts need to be clear enough to become words.

This seems simple, but sometimes it’s the little things, the basics, that prevent us from being clear with each other. Sometimes getting the horse back in front of the cart is as simple as clearing our minds (the art of no-mind) so that our thoughts are clear enough to become words, while also being okay with the fact that we will never be completely clear on anything — quite the existential gamble.

“No philosophy,” William James asserted, “can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird’s-eye view of the perspective of events.” So it goes also with our thoughts. Our thoughts can only ever be rough drafts of what we’re perceiving, terse outlines of an unfathomably huge cosmos.

We must first be okay with being tiny cosmonauts in a giant cosmos, both literally and figuratively, so that we can eventually be okay with our words being fallible constructs springing from fallible thoughts. Like Aldous Huxley said, “It is only by taking the fact of eternity into account that we can deliver thought from its slavery of life. And it is only by deliberately paying our attention and our primary allegiance to eternity that we can prevent time from turning our lives into a pointless or diabolical foolery.”

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What is visualization and why is it important to your life? Visualization is the practice in which a person intentionally focuses mental energy on a specific idea, image, or desired outcome for a prescribed amount of time. This is done for the purpose of sending the focused energy out into the quantum field where it can then synchronistically manifest into the life of the visualizer. 

How does this work? First let’s start with the physics perspective of a thought. A thought is a frequency, a vibration. It is ultimately a form with structure. The only reason that the average person cannot ‘see’ a thought wave is because it is too fine of a frequency and our range of vision, the perceptual capability of our eyes cannot pick up on it. This does not mean it is not real. A thought is a thing. Pull up the image in your mind’s eye of a plastic sandwich bag. It is translucent, right? When it’s only one bag, you can easily see through it. Ok now in your mind stack a few more plastic bags on top of that one. Still see through? Yes, but getting a little more opaque. Ok now put 5 more,…10 more…100 bags. Is this stack of bags translucent anymore? No. Why? This is because although it is thin and translucent, it does have structure and eventually, when bound together, the density accumulates and forms something more massive. This is a simple way of explaining how thoughts work in our dimensional reality. So, if you are visualizing, and you spend, say, 15minutes really honing in on one thought or idea and you add emotions to it, pictures, sounds, stories, you are literally building density and next thing you know you have created a real thought structure- a blueprint construction in the template reality. Now this part of your visualization practice is complete and you let it go, you send it out in the universe and allow the quantum field to do its work through synchronicity, allowing it to manifest unto you.

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View your dissatisfaction with life as a message from your inner self: When an aspect of your life is not in alignment with your soul’s desires and your core beliefs and you continuously ignore it, your soul will often rise up in opposition and manifest itself as a debilitating condition such as depression, leaving you with no choice but to spend time in solitude. Isolation from debilitating depression demands you to explore every corner of inner turmoil, inevitably bringing to light the behaviors, actions, hobbies, or habits which are not in alignment with your fundamental beliefs. In solitude, you begin to explore the deepest parts of your inner self, which inevitably leads to the unveiling of the inner conflicts hindering your life. You may find you are unbearably miserable with your mind numbing job that has stripped you of your appetite for wonder, a romantic or platonic relationship, familial discord, the way you allow people to treat you, or a plethora of other things. Whatever it is, inner child work via hypnosis, meditation, and journaling can help you identify it.

Once you identify the root cause of conflict within, it is incredibly important to then take swift and immediate action to dissolve it. Otherwise, if you do not act, you risk worsening your depression by sending a message to your subconscious that although you know what is wrong and therefore what steps you need to take to take to begin healing, you do not think you are worth the effort to take them. Your subconscious is always eavesdropping on your thoughts, and responds accordingly.

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