While we are nowhere near a Transhumanist Morphological Freedom Utopia, people are capable of altering their brains through chemistry. They take stimulants to be more focused and energetic; they take antidepressants to ward off one of the most unpleasant experiences it is possible to have; they take euphoria-inducing drugs to make themselves happier. So far, so good.
What strikes me as interesting is how often people take drugs to become psychotic. LSD, mushrooms, peyote: all induce a state remarkably similar to psychosis.
Probably some of this is that it’s relatively easy to make human brains psychotic and relatively difficult to make humans (say) experience romantic love for a specific individual. The fact that no one takes love potions doesn’t provide any evidence about whether they would be desirable, it just says they don’t exist. So we can’t conclude from this that psychosis is one of the top changes people would want to make in their brains.
On the other hand, a drug that induces depression exists. No one fucking takes it because it’s awful.
Of course, the fact that hallucinogen users can control when they’re psychotic matters: schizophrenics don’t get to be nonschizophrenic during the work week. Psychosis does not seem to solely strike people who want to be psychotic, whereas most hallucinogen use is by consenting individuals. And actually psychotic people have far more than the optimal level of psychosis. LSD lasts for about ten hours; r/drugs seems to have a consensus that once a month is fairly heavy use, and once a week is very heavy. Psychotic episodes are, at minimum, a few days long, and often last indefinitely.
(This lines up pretty well with my own experiences. I experience dissociation, and it is the worst, but I can see where it would be really interesting if it happened consensually, for a few hours, once every few months.)
But it still strikes me as interesting that, by revealed preference, there is an optimal level of psychosis for many people, and it isn’t zero.
Thing of Things 
In the theme of discussing neurodiversity, I’m now wishing there was a pill that would give me a strong gender identity for a day or two, just to see what all the fuss is about.
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I wonder how many people would take a temporary trans-pill…
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*raises hand*
I would be willing to take any such thing with negligible probability of long term damage or addiction, but would especially like to see what it is like to be: an emotional person, allosexual (though I can kinda guess that one)
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+1. If actually offered the chance, I’m unsure if I caution or curiosity would win. But if I could be sure it’s temporary and has no bad side effects, I’d try one for sure – and probably never again; I’m fine with how I am right now, I just want to know what it’s like.
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LSD is the main reason I got involved in Buddhism and therefore ethical altruism. Or at least I think it is. LSD gave me “proof of concept” experience that it was possible to lose one’s ego and see the self as an illusion. Of course LSD did not give me the methods to make this state permanent. But before taking that dose of LSD I had no idea what people could mean by “the self is an illusion.”
I will note I have also had “dissociation” experiences while on Marijuana. They were really horrific. One of them seems to have left me permanently damaged, since I had that experience I have had a much harder time going to sleep without intrusive disturbing thoughts. The LSD experience however was completely pleasant and beautiful.
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: ) let’s be friends
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There are large differences in subjective experience between the various hallucinogens. I doubt any of them map perfectly to clinical “psychosis” of the sort produced by, say, severe schizophrenia, and LSD is among the least congruent. (I have to go by observed behavior on the schizophrenia part — I seriously doubt that would be fun for anyone, even on a short time scale.) The drugs that come closest are probably the deliriants, stuff like nightshade and jimsonweed, which are generally agreed to be very unpleasant, or very high doses of dissociatives like ketamine or DXM.
“Psychosis” is a really broad diagnostic category.
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” The drugs that come closest are probably the deliriants, stuff like nightshade and jimsonweed”
The Chumash groups used jimsonweed in their shamanistic practices. They never managed to get the dosage right for everyone and people died all the time and had been for the 9,000 or so years they were on their territory using it.
The ayahuasca brew is another deliriant, used in shamanism in its area.
Then there is peyote.
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Yep, and shamanistic use is business, not pleasure. Yanomami shamans use long tubes to blow acrid powder into each other’s sinus cavities, but you don’t see college kids doing that.
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You’re mistaken about ayahuasca – it’s not a deliriant. It’s sometimes mixed with a deliriant (maybe jimsonweed, I’m not sure), but the brew itself is DMT and a MAOI. It’s also quite safe, on par with psilocybin mushrooms, although in my experience it’s got a harsher, far less compromising trip than mushrooms.
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The reasons for hallucinogen use being limited to small amounts time are sometimes more to do with side effects, tolerance and other problems with how hard it is to alter the homeostatic equilibrium of the brain for extended periods of time. It’s much easier to bend the mind that occasionally then change the base state it will snap back to, at least without doing substantial damage. Also the three you mentioned (LSD, mushrooms, peyote) and similar chemicals are technically serotoningenic euphorents like MDMA It’s just there more noticeable effect is perception alteration. I would describe hallucinogen as making the brain more flexible and dynamic in it’s methods of operation. An good example is induced synesthesia being changing up the sensory processioning. One of the big draws of hallucinogens is the fact they can effect belief similarly to senses and let a person experience not just different emotions but also a different scene of truth or purpose. It’s like you can take a vacation from your worldview.
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That’s a really good point that I hadn’t thought about previously.
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Mildly related: I think you (and many of your readers) might be interested by this article and the comments about neurodiversity on Why Evolution Is True. Warning: the points of view and focus of the discussion are completely different from the ones we tend to have here. The closest comparison I would have is discussions about Catholicism as a philosophical system on Unequally Yoked vs evaluating the actual practices of ordinary Catholics.
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I have some opinions on this!
I agree with the author that schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and most other mental illnesses are in fact illnesses to be cured, not valid neurotypes that need to be preserved. And most of the suffering they cause is not a result of structural oppression of neurodivergent people. I also think that severely autistic people – the people who can’t communicate in any substantial way and/or have no chance of ever being able to live independently – fall into this category and it’s absolutely fucking absurd to say that a cure for these people shouldn’t exist.
However. I think the author is missing a big part of neurodiversity – that a number of people with personality disorders or less impairing autism spectrum disorders do say that they wouldn’t want to be cured. This is an important thing that actually needs to be considered! But speaking as someone who has Asperger’s and doesn’t particularly enjoy having impaired social skills, self-harming when overwhelmed, or taking eight years to finish undergrad because of executive function problems, I’m not going to buy the idea that most people on the autism spectrum like it until I see some evidence.
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I mean actual bipolar, yes, it sucks, would not choose if I had the option. But I would choose occasional hypomania if I could, especially if I could control when, and I might choose it even if there was a side-effect risk of mild depression? But I guess that would be more like cyclothymia.
Currently I choose to treat my BPII with antidepressants instead of mood stabilisers, which in practice don’t ameliorate the depressive symptoms to my satisfaction, but if I could get it to a point where it treated the depression but left me with my sometimes hypomania I would be happy with that.
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I imagine that if I could temporarily induce hypomania, I could increase productivity to a certain extent (like Erdos did with amphetamines).
(disclaimer: never had any kind of mania or hypomania, my reasoning is based of about an hour or so when I felt kinda hypomanic & had interesting mathematics / engineering problems to solve.)
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Urgh, would it have killed the author of that post to talk about what autistic people want and not what their parents want?
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Yeah. There were earlier comments about shamanistic cultures using hallucinogens, and on the flip side, a number of people have pointed out that what WEIRD culture sees and treats as schizophrenia might be seen and treated as shamanic potential in other cultures.
I’m not sure how accurate that assessment is, knowing nothing about the cultures in question, but at least one research paper I found involved a South African student and an African healer, so it’s not all Exoticising The Other.
But yeah, not saying that all psychotic states are beneficial – and the shaman’s path is traditionally seen as very hard. But at least in some societies there’s a role for it. Even in terms of deliberate hallucinogen use, people in WEIRD societies don’t have a social niche that makes that acceptable or desirable. If you want to experience those states, you have few if any resources, a lot of legal barriers, and the risk of the permanent black mark of Antisocial Bum on your reputation.
I’d like to see a social allowance for these altered states being a meaningful thing, or at least something that people should be allowed to have, whether voluntarily or as a part of their chemical makeup, without being monstrously Othered. But I guess I’m probably preaching to the crowd here.
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I guess almost any quality you can turn on and off easily and without any long-term bad consequences is a good one (or at least neutral if it’s never activated), even if it’s usually somehow debilitating. It’s sometimes good to be deaf if you’re able to stop – that’s why people buy acoustic earmuffs. Blindness may be good – and people who can see can usually just close their eyes to achieve it. The same is probably true about some forms of psychosis and maybe – though I’m really not sure – even about depression. I’m simplifying as making even simple choices is not free, but I believe the main point still stands.
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From the Wikipedia link about the drug that causes depression:
“Rimonabant reduces voluntary wheel running in laboratory mice.”
😦 so much sadness distilled into a simple sentence.
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Isoniazid is another drug that has been known to cause depression. It’s used to treat tuberculosis and a course of treatment lasts for six or nine months. According to my mom the doctor, if you get depression from it when taking it for tuberculosis, they keep giving it to you and try to treat the depression instead…
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Oops, messed up the closing html tag 😦
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