Anatomy of a Bad Trip: On the Less-Than-Magical Side of Magic Mushrooms

The clinical literature describes bad trips as experiences that include fear or panic, paranoia, sadness or depressed mood, anger, confusion, and dissociation. Laypeople describe bad trips as experiences that include encountering terrifying entities and places, experiencing anguish, grief, and despair, revisiting traumatic childhood experiences, having painful insights, upsetting realizations, or an anxiety attack, and thinking you have gone mad. Even a nonexperience can be a bad trip. Folks hoping to have a mystical experience but don’t may question their worthiness. For others, a bad trip is characterized by intense frustration from failure to “go deep.” Some bad trips fade once the psilocybin is out of your system. Others leave the tripper disturbed—sometimes for a long time. Sean O’Carroll has treated many people who have suffered from “non-ordinary state trauma,” the trauma caused by a bad trip, and it can leave someone in a “very wobbly or fragile place.” His framework for understanding and helping these folks is informed by data he’s gleaned from hundreds of firsthand client experiences. “In each case,” he said in a conversation with me, “I’d hear about the trip experience, their ongoing difficulties, and the context in which the trip took place.” After a decade of listening to these stories, he noticed bad trips tend to cluster into categories. The severest category he has observed includes “existential” themes relating to the person’s fundamental sense of themselves or reality. “In these instances, the integrity of the self is often felt to be fragile or under persistent threat,” he said. In an existentially themed bad trip, the individual resists the drift toward ego dissolution, that aspect of a trip where the boundary between the self and the world disintegrates. The tension between the psychedelic’s pull toward dissolution and the ego’s struggle to maintain its integrity can lead to persistent feelings of fragmentation—the sense that nothing is real, that no one else really exists. The tripper may think, I am fundamentally alone, I am not me. That’s in line with data collected by the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, which quantified the experiences of over six hundred people who […]

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