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Comment by ada1981 | Hacker News Reader

ada1981

I suffered from suicidal depression, anxiety, mania, psychosis, paranoia, panic attacks and more.

I flirted with diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder to bipolar.

My life was pretty out of control.

I didn’t like the outcomes I saw of people who were on meds their entire life and I didn’t buy the story from mainstream psychiatry.

I found MDMA therapy via an underground practice and it transformed my life over the course of a few session.

I was able to get to the root of all symptoms and heal what was beneath.

Combined with Holotropic Breathwork and NARM / somatic therapy for integration, this approach blew anything the psychiatrists were offering out of the water.

I’ve been experimenting with CBD and it seems to offer and even deeper level of clarity and non-anxiety.

No psychiatric meds, no symptoms and my creative and romantic life now has something to grown from - before this everything was in a constant cycle of boom and bust.

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I am very glad this worked for you, but isn't MDMA a psychiatric med?

It started as one but after it found broad use as a recreational drug it was made illegal. It's Schedule I in the US and illegal in most countries (source: wikipedia).

Which is a shame because holy crap the one time I had MDMA sure broke me out of a major depression I'd been in for a couple decades.

It’s currently in Phase 3 for PTSD after spending a couple decades in prohibition.

It’s not a sanctioned medicine yet, and historically has been outside the bounds of western psychiatry.

And when I mean no psychiatric meds I mean nothing ongoing.

Bit late to the thread, but here's a link to where I assume the poster is referring to:

https://maps.org (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies)

Can you point to anything scholarly about Holotropic Breathwork? I'm curious, but my searches turn up very... "crystal woo-woo" stuff. :(

Stan Grof developed it as an alternative to LSD psychotherapy after prohibition.

Basically the framework I formed looked like this:

Depression and other mental illness are very often caused by an adaptive response to trauma.

Trauma heals in the space of non-ordinary states of conciousness in the right set and setting.

There are numerous paths into non-ordinary states, including psychedelics, EDMR and Breathwork.

Breathwork uses loud rythmic music and hyper ventilation in a supported group context to induce a useful non-ordinary state.

I should say, I thought this was woo woo bs. But holy shit, it will take you on a journey- I was blown away. And also it was super useful to integrate the MDMA sessions.

Have you used classical psychedelics therapeutically?

If so how would you compare their efficacy for your issues

A frame that was useful for me has been this: MDMA is useful for integrating existing information and experience (trauma, childhood stuff, etc).

Classic Psychedelics (LSD, DMT, Psilocybin) are useful for generating new information which then needs to be integrated.

MDMA was a much more predictable space to work. Psilocybin tended to take me to deeper as more frightening material - often on the cultural level.

I don’t think I would take psi to work with mania / hypomania; with MDMA it has worked beautiful to create more space to integrate and express the part of myself that was frightening.

That said, I have much more experience w MDMA in a therapeutic setting as an adult, and I could see how Psi could be just as effective.

If there is trauma to be dealt with, I’d personally start with mdma — but again, I’m bias from my personal experience.

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