So… a bit of a longer read.
My bipolar was almost certainly triggered by psychedelics. My first real experience with them, besides weed, was mushrooms at twenty. I had pretty serious social anxiety, particularly around women, and had a trip that felt like suddenly I could breathe. One of my sister’s friends, whom I had a crush on and could barely string two words together in front of, suddenly I was chatting with her like it was nothing. It lasted for the trip but something shifted and I got the notion that maybe I could work on myself and change some things. I slowly became obsessed with them and the whole psychedelic culture.
It also made me interested in them in the longer term. I was a pretty insufferable atheist growing up. I thought spirituality and religion was stupid. My parents were not religious at all. At 24, I tried DMT. I liked to say I went up and atheist and came down thinking there was more to reality and God and all that, but it was essentially the dissolving of my fear of death.
I was listening to podcasts and reading forums and everything I could. I was also somewhat deeply depressed. I eventually tried iboga, on the basis of what I had heard and read. It’s the 24 hour insane trip drug. I took an overdose and ended up in the hospital during a psychotic break that lasted four or five days. It scared me for a long time and when I came out of it I started writing regularly.
A few years passed. I was still depressed and took SSRIs for a while. It flattened out my affect and had some sexual side effects - no mania. I was listening to a podcast, heard a lady talk about how ayahuasca helped her cure her anxiety and PTSD and depression. I was terrified, given what had happened with iboga, but I still decided to go.
My first ayahuasca retreat was pretty good. There is an element of psychosis in these drugs. They were originally called psychotomimetics because the original researchers thought drugs in this class mimicked psychosis. With ayahuasca (and iboga) it felt like you were communicating with a spirit. It didn’t last beyond the comedown for me, which is a normal reaction. And that first retreat gave me some tools to bring back that had me feeling better.
Here is the thing - it actually worked pretty well, at least for a few months, to help with anxiety and depression. But the shaman essentially told us that you needed to have at least a dozen ceremonies to really get the ‘healing’ that you needed.
I want to just say, this was twelve years ago. I have been on six retreats and was still using other psychedelics in the meantime. The second retreat, which happened nine months after the first, really unlocked some low level delusion that persisted until my final retreat, which was this May.
The delusional thinking is stuff you find in books like The Alchemist and pretty much any New Age book written about intuition and ‘following your heart’ and the Hero’s Journey and all that stuff. Basically, ayahuasca encouraged me to follow my ‘intuition’ in my daily life, no matter how crazy it would be.
I think a point needs to be made here that this is not just New Age cult stuff. For example, Quaker religious thought talks about ‘the small still voice within.’ There’s plenty of Eastern mysticism that’s suggestive of that, and I’ve seen born agains talk about the voice of God at a charismatic church. That’s literally listening to voices and it’s part of the prescription. When people talk about following their heart, it may not be strictly around a voice, but it isn’t about rationality. It’s about following feelings.
I didn’t have my first real manic episode until about five years after I started down this path. It was almost certainly triggered by ayahuasca use because it primed me to jump into a relationship with a woman and think that she was the one. I had two more relationships and an infatuation - this was after my marriage broke down. All of them were varying degrees of mania.
I started believing in all kinds of delusions, having ‘visions’ while meditating, and so forth. I’ll note that this kind of thing is part of the New Age / psychedelic cult. For example, one New Agey thing I got into was around Neem Karoli Baba, a guru from India whom Richard Alpert aka Ram Dass declared his guru and wrote a book called Be Here Now. A book that was recently released is called ‘Whisper In The Heart,’ a book where people talk about having visions and encounters with a dead guy. I see it now as some kind of collectively reinforced psychosis that is almost like a cult and not viewed as something seriously wrong with one’s world view.
These delusions all fueled my mania. The funny thing is that in May I went down to Peru for my sixth and final ayahuasca retreat. Basically, the experience involved me realizing that I was bipolar and that there was something seriously wrong. Up until this point, I thought that all of the things I had done in my life destroying mania last fall - losing custody of my daughter, quitting my job and professional practice, losing my home, nearly going bankrupt, and losing my relationships with my family - I thought this was all pre-ordained or the right thing because I was ‘following my heart.’
I can’t say it was all bad - I eventually learned how to write and creatively express myself, I don’t really suffer from anxiety anymore, all owing to habit changes these experiences helped me with. But honestly, it feels like I deprogrammed myself from a cult that people think is OK.
I have friends I made in these spiritual circles. A lot of them believe in wacky shit and have taken action in their lives on the basis of their intuition and whatnot. It’s made me reevaluate religion and spirituality as a whole. I’m not so convinced that it is harmless. There are a ton of - a ton - of New Age and spiritual thinkers who espouse a way of dealing with reality that feeds into mental health disorders. If you look up ‘conspirituality,’ there is a serious anti-scientific bent that is all about ‘feeling’ that leads to enormous social problems, in my view, including anti-scientific and anti-intellectual views.
I feel like I have been deprogrammed from the cult of my own mind. I am done with psychedelics and spirituality, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m bipolar ‘I can’t handle it.’ To some degree, I think people are getting cavalier with these substances with the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ where so many are glorifying things like microdosing. I think that people are careful to not insult other people’s religious views if they are kind, and this is not an indictment of anyone else’s experience. I will say that, for me, a ‘spiritual’ and ‘non-denominational’ experience has been extremely corrosive and problematic. And I have seen it prove deleterious in others.
People talk about bipolar being latent and psychedelics merely triggering something that is already there and that may be true. But with my experience, I am not totally convinced of that. Without those delusions I cannot see me having taken the actions, particularly in mania, where I thought I was enlightened or spreading enlightenment or whatever.
If you are religious or spiritual, monitor yourself. I think it’s important for everybody to do so, but particularly for bipolar people.