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Intrigued by all the headlines about the mental health benefits of psychedelics and thinking of giving them a try? You may want to think twice, according to a new study that found a link between bad psychedelic trips and a more than twofold increased risk of death within five years.
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“There’s a lot of media buzz about how psychedelic-assisted therapy is really promising in clinical trials. However, we wondered how people who aren’t in those trials may react in a more real-world setting,” said lead study author Dr. Daniel Myran, a family, public health and preventative medicine physician and researcher at the University of Ottawa in Ontario.
“We looked at people who’ve had a very severe adverse reaction to a hallucinogen and needed emergency care at a hospital,” Myran said. “We found their risk of death was 2.6 times higher than a similar person without the hallucination emergency.”
Some people fail to find a psychedelic experience beneficial, said Dr. Charles Raison, a professor of psychiatry and human ecology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.
“Maybe one in 20 people report having ongoing difficulties they ascribe to the psychedelic technique,” said Raison, who was not involved in the new research.
“A year later, they say, ‘I had an experience that was so distressing to me that it messed up my ability to function, or alienated me from my family, or gave me post-traumatic stress disorder.’” Bad trips requiring a visit to the hospital may be rare but serious, the study found. FangXiaNuo/E+/Getty Images
However, the new study, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, can only show an association between an earlier death and a bad hallucinogenic trip, said Raison, who is also the director of the […]
Bad psychedelic trips linked to early death for some, study finds
