Psychedelics and mania in Bipolar Disorder

When I was a child, before I could see or understand myself, I struggled to find a place in the world. I internalized a lot of this struggle and developed in opposition to the world. I started struggling with poor mental health and attachment in pre-adolescence, and it only got worse throughout my education and psychosocial development.

I learned maladaptive coping strategies to get my needs met, but over time I learned better ways to do things. Because I ended up in a supportive community that cared about me, I had a base of stability upon which to build the toolkit I needed to navigate the world. Slowly, slowly, I gained strength and was able to stand on my own. At this point in time, I am whittling the cane that I used to support myself into a toothpick. I am becoming powerful, and peaceful, and whole.

In general, the only things that trigger my mental health episodes now are perceived injustices, being overwhelmed with burdens, vicarious trauma from the work I do, or from fixating too hard on the problems of others and the world. I see now why so many radical psychologists want to diagnose society with the illness, not the individual.

Were there systems in place that helped people instead of blaming them for their failures, people who were paid by the love they gave versus the wealth they hoarded, "mental illness" as we know it would not exist. Would some people still stagger under the weight of their own sensitivities? Would some people's brains still ebb and flow, stutter and blip? Of course. But if people could meet their needs and feel love, if they could feel free of victimization and oppression, if someone was there to stabilize them, they would have a place in the world while they gained strength and built up their resolve to face the world.

When I was 14, a friend of mine offered me some of his ritalin. Adults had taught me that they were not to be trusted, so there was no consideration of not trying the drugs, no moral or ethical dilemmas. I put the line up my nose, and for the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to feel happy.

A close-minded person reading the above will of course take the wrong impression. The drug was the spark I needed to learn what happiness was. After I came down, I started to have that feeling again and again, and I could see avenues for working it into my normal life. If a new experience or person triggered that feeling, I could follow that feeling, learning what was good and what felt good.

It was a liberation from the pre-constructed and imprisoning world of adults, who talked of happiness, of goodness, of love, but seemed to not know any of it. It was a revelation, and of course in utter truth it was also an obliteration of my self, and an estrangement from a world that seemed so complex and sinister by comparison. I went reeling off into my destruction and rebirth, and of course it took fucking forever.

Over that time period, I drug myself towards humanity through service, education, friendship, creation, and love. I kept up a psychedelic practice for most of it, even when I was killing myself with alcohol, failing to succeed, failing to thrive. Those trips were a reprieve from mental illness, a vacation from the prison of the mind.

Like meditation, psychedelics give you a harbor to escape yourself. They teach you about a place beyond yourself, beyond your constructed identity and the shared delusion of humanity. When you were a baby, you lived in a world of pure sensation, and as you grew you assigned meaning and emotions to everything around you. As you learn to speak and read and order the world by language, concept, and idea, you construct a beautiful prison around your mind. This gives you the support you need to develop into an autonomous individual that is able to provide for itself.

The problem is that your cage has been premade for you by an ever-evolving but inherently disordered, sick, and brutal society. The world you live in has its own logic, crafted from millennia of toil, and how well you integrate into is determined part by your willingness to engage it, part by the ease with which you do, and part by the hand that biology dealt you. People who are impoverished, introverted, neurodivergent, disabled, marginalized, or oppressed in any possible develop "mental illness" at a higher rate than the average person, and is it any wonder why?

Most people will never have the experience of pure and absolute love. Most people will never experience spiritual revelation, out of body experiences, synesthesia, ideasthesia, visual and aural and physical hallucinations, or the experience of having all of their brain power diverted into their imaginative faculties at once.

I had never experienced any form of spiritual feeling until I began to use DMT in my late twenties. I immediately began to have classic religious experiences, including several that involved Jesus and other figures from world religions. I saw through my own observer (the eyes of your mind) many, many classic religious experiences, like becoming part of the "pillar" of God, standing at the gates of Heaven, casting my eyes downward because I could not look at God.

Using ketamine at the end of MDMA (and MDA to a lesser but equal extent), I have had just about every kind of "near death experience," from white light to seeing my whole life flash before my eyes. If you have ever seen the TED talk where the woman has a stroke and experiences her mind shutting piece by piece, I have had that exact experience, except that I continued to go back out of my body into a cosmic web, then back out of the web into what was behind that, then back again into a purely abstracted place where I was quite literally shown the totality of everything. Then, everything went dark and I experienced my entire body rebooting and sparking up. I watched and felt every single piece of my human machine turn on, rev up. I could feel my nerves, then my muscles. I could feel my breath, hear the music, move my hands. I became my observer again, then my identity began to fall back into place like armour. I had the feeling that I always do - "This isn't a place for you to stay, but part of you will always be connected to here."

Call me a madman, call me an idiot. I don't care, because I have come to know peace. I have looked at my partner with total love, and forgiven him for everything he will ever do. I have become Christlike, and I understand now what people mean when they talk about the transformative power of Unity, whatever religion you're twisting into a pretzel to justify love.

Drugs are not an escape from reality, they are a test of what your reality is. They are not a flash of happiness, they are the potential to learn what happiness is. There is a reason that you feel better about death after taking psychedelics; it's practicing death so that you can practice life.

On a personal level, I think that the Internet is the tiniest step towards what humanity and life in general has always yearned for: peaceful unity. In order to escape the prisons we are trapped in (that were rightfully build to protect our individual selves), we need to join together to push evolution forward. If we continue to act like each body is separate, each human an island, we will continue to make decisions that destroy the "other" that is actually the self.

This is my response to those who wonder, "Why take the risk?" I do not think that evolution is over. I do not think that the world can survive in its current state. I think that we are in love with fictions, not reality, and that alone we are too stupid to survive. We need to always be pushing forward, deconstructing our identities, testing our reality for better ways. Thousands of years ago, a handful of individuals evolved the ability to see the truth of the world: that we are all one web of life, and we must love each other as one. We have taken small steps towards peace, battle by battle, but there is still so much work to do.

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