In 1982 I took a part time job in the out-patient clinic of the New York VA Hospital. Most of the patients were Vietnam era veterans with primary drug and alcohol dependency and/or chronic psychosis. The VA system was set up in such a way that the demands of reality dictated that these veterans maintain their disability in order to support themselves financially. The patients typically were poor, poorly educated, and poorly equipped to make a living in the real world. By maintinaing a service-connected diasablity they could ensure themsleves of a tax-free income far superior to the minimum wage jobs they would otherwise be qualified to take. It was a system guaranteed to maximize the cynicism of patients and doctors.
Unfortunately, such patients were often used by opponents of the war to tarnish the war effort and by extension, the reputations of all Vietnam vets. The meme was that the military turned normal men into killers whose only recourse was drug abuse and/or insanity. Luckily, that is a meme of the past that has not been repeated (although there have been efforts to do just that) with our present generation of soldiers fighting in the Middle Eadst.
Occassionally, an unusual patient would arrive in the clinic.
Mr. A presented to the clinic as an enigma. He reported that since Vietnam, he had been living on the streets of New York City. He had made a vow that since money was the root of all evil, he would refrain from ever again touching money. He had held to this vow for five years.
He knew which restaurants would give him free food, what foods were served at various soup kitchesn, where he could go for shelter at night. He had only come to the VA clinci because the streets were getting more dangerous (in the days of the "crack epodemic") and he was seeking safety. He had heard that the VA could help find housing for patients.
Mr. A was not diagnosable as psychotic under any of the usual categories in the DSM. He denied hearing voices and did not seem to have a thought disorder, though his speech was stilted, with odd pauses and breaks in the flow. He did not have any other complaints, beyond his feeling of decreased safety on the streets (which was a real problem at the time) and did not want medicine. He was not depressed and denied using drugs or drinking.
I followed him for several months and after some time, discoverd Mr. A's secret.
[I might add this did not all come out during a single session, but over the course of several sessions, in which he tried to describe his experience.]
He told me that in Vietnam he had begun to use drugs. He started with Marijuana, which was plentiful there, and eventually tried every other recreational drug available. He didn't particularly like Heroin and didn't become addicted. He didn't like pills, ups or downs. But he did find hallucinogens to be exceedingly rewarding. He began to "trip" regularly. He probably "tripped a hundred" times in Vietnam. When he returned from Vietnam it didn't take long before he found a source of hallucinogens in the states and continued his use, approximately once or twice a week. While his "trips" varied in intesnity, with some offering more interesting visual hallucinations and others offering more interesting sonic experiences, all had a predicatlable course... until the last time he "tripped". He had taken the drug, as usual, with a friend, and after almost 2 hours had not yet started to "trip". He was puzzled because he usually "got off" in an hour or less, but it wasn't unprecedented, and he responded by smoking some pot which always worked to start the "tripping". Of note, his friend had a more normal experience with the drug. It still took almost another hour, and a lot more Marijuana before he finally started to "trip". Two hours later, when he should have been peaking (the peak intensity of a trip is usually between 2-5 hours after ingestion) he still felt like things were intensifying. He finally reached a point he had never reached before. He had, to hear him tell it, a lifetime worth of insights and recognized the opening of whole new realms of experience. One of his insights was about the evils of money; at that point he made his vow to never again touch money.
He noticed a vast distance opening up from the concensual world of reality. His vision seemed to be fragmented, as if he saw the individual, isolated points of view (I believe he was trying to describe what would today be thought of as seeing the individual pixels which make up a video image); his vision had become discontinuous. His hearing, too, had become discontinuous; moments seemed to be disconnected from each other as if he were no longer within the flow of time. The strangest thing was that as the day turned into night, he continued to "trip". This was unusual but, again, not completely unprecedented; in the past he had always eventually been able to fall asleep and would wake up back in his usual frame of mind. He stayed up "tripping" for over 24 hours and finally fell asleep. When he awoke he was surprised to discover he was still "tripping". That was over five years before he had come to the clinic and met me. He never followed through on plans that were set up for him to obtain an apartment and left the clinic shortly thereafter, still saying that his trip had not ended.
Anoyone who came of age during the 1960s knew people who seemed to become lost in the world of hallucinogenic drugs. We had all heard apocryphal stories of friends and acquaintances having psychotic episodes while under the influence of hallucinogens; there were stories of people "tripping" and never coming back, but I had never seen anyone who fit the picture and hadn't read any detailed accounts of such deteriorated patients. Mr. A, to my limited experience, fit the picture of someone who either triggered a latent atypical psychosis or precipitated a drug-induced atypical psychosis by his drug use, and at least for the five years after the episode began never recovered. His state was what I referred to in my previous post about Syd Barrett, a state of "autistic enlightenment"; this was a state of false enlightenment which only he recognized and inhabited; it made him unable to function in the real world. While not a traditional psychiatric disorder, he was as disabled as the most impaired schizophrenic.
Johns Hopkins last week poublished the results of a recent study:
HOPKINS SCIENTISTS SHOW HALLUCINOGEN IN MUSHROOMS CREATES UNIVERSAL “MYSTICAL” EXPERIENCE
Using unusually rigorous scientific conditions and measures, Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that the active agent in “sacred mushrooms” can induce mystical/spiritual experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries.
The resulting experiences apparently prompt positive changes in behavior and attitude that last several months, at least.
The agent, a plant alkaloid called psilocybin, mimics the effect of serotonin on brain receptors-as do some other hallucinogens-but precisely where in the brain and in what manner are unknown.
....
All of the study’s authors caution about substantial risks of taking psilocybin under conditions not appropriately supervised. “Even in this study, where we greatly controlled conditions to minimize adverse effects, about a third of subjects reported significant fear, with some also reporting transient feelings of paranoia,” says Griffiths. “Under unmonitored conditions, it’s not hard to imagine those emotions escalating to panic and dangerous behavior.”
The researchers’ message isn’t just that psilocybin can produce mystical experiences. “I had a healthy skepticism going into this,” says Griffiths, “and that finding alone was a surprise.” But, as important, he says, “is that, under very defined conditions, with careful preparation, you can safely and fairly reliably occasion what’s called a primary mystical experience that may lead to positive changes in a person. It’s an early step in what we hope will be a large body of scientific work that will ultimately help people.”
....
In the study, more than 60 percent of subjects described the effects of psilocybin in ways that met criteria for a “full mystical experience” as measured by established psychological scales. One third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes; and more than two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful and spiritually significant. Griffiths says subjects liken it to the importance of the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.
Two months later, 79 percent of subjects reported moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction compared with those given a placebo at the same test session. A majority said their mood, attitudes and behaviors had changed for the better. Structured interviews with family members, friends and co-workers generally confirmed the subjects’ remarks. Results of a year-long followup are being readied for publication.
Psychological tests and subjects’ own reports showed no harm to study participants, though some admitted extreme anxiety or other unpleasant effects in the hours following the psilocybin capsule. The drug has not been observed to be addictive or physically toxic in animal studies or human populations. “In this regard,” says Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist, “it contrasts with MDMA (ecstasy), amphetamines or alcohol.”
In the 60s, many people did the experiment using themselves as the subjects; needless to say, the lack of controls and the unpredictable nature of the drug and the setting was problematic. The behavior of so many seeking shortcuts to enlightenment, and especially the indefensible behavior of the pied piper of hallucinogens, Timothy Leary, discredited those serious researchers who wished to study the utility of such drugs in understanding the workings of the mind.
Since ancient times man has been interested in understanding what goes on within the confines of his own mind. There is also a long tradition of trying to find ways to expand one's consciousness and escape the confines of one's own mind. Looking for shortcuts to enlightenment has a long history. Freud used Cocaine in his early work; Leary and Alpert used LSD and Psylocibin. Syd Barrett and Mr. A used various hallucinogens. Dr. Edward Morbius used technology, to tragic effect:
Doc Ostrow: Monsters. Monsters from the id.
The line between normalcy, mystical enlightenment, and the "monsters from the Id" may be finer than we wish to know.
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