Cary Grant's LSD Therapy in the 1950s
I think we&#x27;re approaching the peak of the hype cycle for psychedelics. Articles like this one glorify LSD as a wonder drug without exploring any of the associated risks.<p>Readers skim over the details of the associated intensive guided therapy sessions. They assume that they can get the same exaggerated results by dosing darknet-sourced LSD at home, alone, without the concomitant therapy sessions used in clinical research studies. The articles are so focused on the drug that the associated therapy sessions feel like a neglected footnote.<p>Meanwhile, journalists and internet commenters both ignore the very real risks of framing psychedelics as a DIY miracle cure for people with difficult to treat mental health issues. Before this current phase, the universally accepted advice for psychedelic experimenters was to never use psychedelics if you had underlying mental health issues and to always have a sitter present to monitor and guide your trip. The reframing of psychedelics as a miracle cure has triggered a wave of people ignoring that advice, dosing alone at home without any form of supporting therapy to frame their trips.<p>If you spend some time browsing Reddit, it&#x27;s not hard to find bizarre stories of people triggering week, month, or even year long episodes of worsened depression, derealization, PTSD-like symptoms, or HPPD from psychedelic experimentation. If &quot;big pharma&quot; produced a drug with possible side effects like that, we&#x27;d be hearing a very different story. Yet LSD and other underground treatments get a free pass in the media at this point in the hype cycle.<p>Psychedelic research is very interesting and potentially promising, but I hope the current wave of one-sided glorification comes to an end soon. If we want to see proper psychedelic research continue and for the field to be taken seriously, it&#x27;s important that we stay grounded in our reporting of the topic.