That’s not what they said, psychedelics can trigger preexisting vulnerabilities to mental disorders. A psychotic break can do enormous damage.

I would recommend reading up on persistent disassociative personality disorders and persistent visual artifacts from psychedelics. Both are rare but well documented side effects of psychedelic usage.

I personally know someone who has suffered visual distortions post trip for 20 years and counting at this point.

they may be interested in this, if they weren't already: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4487243

There is a foundation looking to understand why/how this happens and what we can do to moderate/manage it: https://www.perception.foundation/

Dude I know people who have had their lifelong schizophrenia start at the same time they started using hallucinogens like LSD and mushrooms. It's not a conspiracy or bullshit. People I have loved have changed in ways they couldn't control and was destructive/scary for them.

I don't disagree that these substances are known triggers for those with predispositions, but be careful with your logic - that's exactly the same format as autism/vax conspiracy folks use, when in reality the common cause is age. Symptoms of autism can start to manifest around the time childhood vaccines are being given, just like schizophrenia and related conditions manifest in teenagers and young adults (also groups known to try drugs). In the latter case we do also have evidence that psychedelics are associated with increased risk/earlier onset, but you wouldn't be able to tell from the timing anecdote.

How do you know that it's not the other way around - they started using hallucinogens because their schizophrenia started and the confusion around a drastic change in mental state caused drug seeking behavior?

Schizophrenia commonly starts showing symptoms in the mid to late twenties - so while the two may be linked it's also likely that schizophrenia onset happens to be the age that many people start seriously taking drugs.

What's your agenda? I seriously don't understand why you'd say such things, if HPPD and DP/DR are real.

As someone who is very much in favor of legalizing psychadelics and has enjoyed his experiences with them:

No, there is a lot of strong evidence that psychadelic trips can trigger underlying issues such as schizophrenia, etc.

However, some portion of these people would have it triggered these latent illnesses regardless of the use of these substances. The hard to answer question is how many people would develop these conditions without the drug use, if the drug use significantly accelerated it, etc.

On the subject of HPPD, I am more skeptical. It's very poorly understood, and there's been correlation shown for just about any sort of psychoactive substance, SSRIs, etc. Studies have claimed that anywhere from 5% to 25% of people who have taken recreational psychoactive drugs are impacted by it. Which, well, I have not done and am not qualified to do such a study, but having spoken to hundreds of users of psychadelic drugs over several decades and never encountering a single person who claimed to experience HPPD, it's hard to square up my anecdotal experiences with some of the reports.

Something is going on there - there's enough people that report the symptoms that I don't believe it's made up or anything like that - but it doesn't seem to be nearly as simply as "Anyone that does recreational drugs has a chance of developing HPPD"

Triggers schizophrenia?

Think that through.

Schizophrenia was already there, the trip made it apparent.

Associating “psychedelics” with CAUSATION is absolutely irresponsible

> Schizophrenia was already there, the trip made it apparent.

That is exactly what they are saying.

please top minimizing the real risks of using psychedelics (especially for certain groups of people predisposed to mental health issues). You make normalizing them harder and you do more damage than if you were just honest about it. The war on drugs resulted in a lot of lies being spread about these substances. Don't do the exact same thing just because it's on the other side of the argument.

That might be your experience, but it negates the experience of the 'non-survivors' so to say.