Tripping over ourselves to get free

By Al Hayman

I’m lying on the floor by a roaring fire, alone in a cosy cottage I found on Airbnb. It’s the middle of winter and 150 micrograms of LSD is coursing through my veins.

For the last few hours, I’ve been wrestling with the gripping, pulsing snakes of anxiety that slither through my body. The tightly clenched muscles I usually am constricted by have been freed to run wild, so instead their energy runs rampant in my chest and stomach. A racing heart, a writhing gut; these are the signs that the constant fear that lives in my body is not in its usual state of dullness, repressed by my mind’s powerful attempts to keep it out of sight.

I’m here because I’m trying to get better and nothing else seems to have worked. I went to therapy for years and talked until I became sick of my own words, but all the while this constant fear continued to grow inside me.

Running out of hope, I stumbled across articles on psychedelic-assisted therapy, and I decided to try something that seemed to have so much promise. The problem was, there was no one around to show me how to make this work. So, I took on the task alone.

LSD, MDMA, ketamine, ibogaine: for years I tried any potentially therapeutic substance I could get my hands on. I found my way to empty rooms in quiet places and would take these drugs while listening to music, hoping to find a path to peace. Now, here in this Airbnb, I’m once again confronted with the knowledge that today has not been the day. I will wake up tomorrow with the same dreaded darkness that has been my constant companion for the last few years. It is disheartening but it’s one I’ve come to expect.

Later, sitting in the bathtub, I call my best friend and cry to her about how intensely hard this experience has been for me. This isn’t the first time she’s received a call like this, nor will it be the last. I tell her that I love her and think about her every single day. As we speak, I look around the room, from the perfectly even white tiles to the sheen of the bronze taps. The beauty of it all is more intense than I could ever possibly expect to feel during my life now. Usually, anything beautiful is choked out by my anxiety.

As well as the hope of healing, being able to feel that beauty again is what I am seeking when I take these drugs. Despite how hard it is to go through what confronts me when my fear roars to life, there is also something that makes me feel enraptured, something that makes me know that – despite all I have lost touch with – I am still alive.

It took me many years to accept that psychedelics wouldn’t be the thing that heals me alone, although they have played a role. Particularly in those early days, when I was becoming more and more disturbed by the growing lack of feeling and connection, they allowed me to have glimpses of being able to feel again. I clung to those glimpses like a life raft. I needed them, even if it was just as a rare reminder that I hadn’t always felt this empty and awful.

Over the years I began to reframe the role of psychedelics in my healing. They didn’t do for me what I hoped they would, but I still believe they were important. For one thing, they helped me to have a certain kind of catharsis that I needed to generate insight. Even though the catharsis wasn’t lasting, it gave me a strong sense that things could be different. The psychedelic state is profoundly different from most people's ordinary waking consciousness and day-to-day reality. It was a reminder that I could feel intensely about the world and connect powerfully with life, despite every day feeling the exact opposite. So, in some way, it helped to keep me sane. It gave me some faith and hope that I didn’t need to be this way forever, and that a more meaningful life was possible.

One of the worst ways mental health issues can affect your thinking is to convince you that feeling positively about life must be a hoax. You begin to doubt whether it’s true that people can feel joy from good news, the subtleties of listening to music, eating a really good meal or even just at being alive. If you walk far enough down this path of darkness, even a glimpse of how you might feel joy again can become a matter of life and death importance.

I’m not sure that intensity of feeling is something only people with a complete deficit of it should use psychedelics to experience either. Psychedelics can and should be used to offer more than this, in my opinion. For many people they can spark creativity, promote insight, reveal meaning, and allow for profound joy and peace. These aren’t experiences that only the most miserable need.

Of course, sometimes people do not enjoy a psychedelic experience or feel it has left them worse off, and the relationship between psychedelic use and psychosis is still the subject of scientific debate. However, I believe many people could enrich their world through a well-guided psychedelic experience.

I would even suggest that psychedelics are more than just medicines for the individual, they can be medicines for our social ills too. It seems increasingly accepted that we are ailing from a lack of connection to each other, our bodies, and nature; to a greater purpose and meaning; and to spirituality. I believe that psychedelics could offer the possibility of not just fleeting glimpses of reconnection, but also an opening to a connection that lasts beyond a four-to-eight-hour trip. The psychedelic state alone is not enough to heal us, as I learned from my years of experimentation, but could discerningly integrating what they offer into our culture increase the well-being of individuals and society? Many indigenous cultures use psychedelics as an important tool.

Healing requires more than just psychedelics, but psychedelics have the potential for more than just healing. People who have been given a mental health diagnosis are not the only people can benefit from their use. I believe that mainstream psychology exaggerates the divide between the “healthy” average person and the “mentally unwell” other and that mental health is better understood as existing on a spectrum.

Looking through this lens, I believe that not only might psychedelics help those suffering, but they might also help avoid some instances of that suffering in the first place. I believe it’s very possible that if I had been guided to use psychedelics effectively before I became unwell, I would have avoided the decline I went through. There is already some research that suggests people who use psychedelics recreationally are less likely to experience mental illness. It is not yet determined whether the nature of this relationship is causative, but it seems to me like a missed opportunity to restrict research to those diagnosed with mental health conditions. Instead, we should also be exploring what value they might have in other contexts. Perhaps, if we did so, we would find something of benefit to us all.