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Comment by WalterSear | Hacker News Reader

IME and opinion, their potential to elicit empathy and mental growth is overrated, and not imediately related to their antidepressant and trauma integrative effects.

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Strictly anecdotal obviously, but having spent a majority of my 20s in and about the Ayahuasca "peace and love let's dance with flowers in our hair" crowd, I can tell you that a lot of the empathy and mental growth is very superficial. At least seemed that way to me.

I've been working with ayahuasca for about a decade now, off and on, myself, have done a number of dietas, and been the guy blowing smoke on people who are falling apart in ceremony or helping them to and from the bathroom or whatever. While there is absolutely a lot of what you describe and worse (like blatant predation) in that world, there's also just a lot of superficiality everywhere. Some people just won't see through their own bullshit well enough to offer anything but superficial, and that's probably going to come across particularly sharply once you can see it.

My own experience, since we're swapping anecdotes and beyond confirming that stuff exists, is that the people I've kept in touch with from that world aren't like that, whether they went to Peru once, or a dozen times, or never. They have reliably grown in ways they can't imagine themselves having done, without their work with the medicine. Since you can't A/B test someone's life, you can never say, but having seen however much of these people's lives, they all seem better off, in so many ways.

But selection bias is a thing, obviously. And dueling anecdata is interesting. Just probably not very useful.

EDIT: Phrasing

You sure it's not just being around young people. The prefrontal cortex doesn't mature until late 20s, so people are more impulsive and selfish.

The 30+ crowd in Ayahuasca/Psychedelics have been some of the kindest, most giving people I have ever met in my life.

MDMA boosts empathy: https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/mdma http://theconversation.com/ecstasy-users-are-more-empathetic...

LSD on Empathy (Increasing altruism): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5813062/

LSD enhances emotional empathy: https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201682

Lifetime usage of psychedelics correlates to increase in nature relatedness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28631526

Anecdotally, 3 of my friends and myself (sample=4) all have self-reported significant improvements in empathy, as well as verified confirmation by our romantic partners. This has also led to objective changes such as volunteering, random acts of kindness, increased gratitude and altruism, and more.

There are also studies on terminally ill showing dramatic decreases in anxiety and depression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5367557/

I don't know if you've ever suffered from either of these, but I can assure you, severely depressed or anxious people are not overly empathetic as they are ruminating and caught in their own minds more than being interested in others (overactive default mode network).

In short... there are numerous scientific studies confirming the benefits of these drugs. I fail to see any "overrated" potential after studying these molecules myself for years for experientially and academically.

Their effects are largely a result of what you're trying to get out of them, and how earnestly you pursue those ends. People who want those things, and mean it, tend more often to find them, in my own experience.

That hasn't been my experience - either my directly, or in regards to what I've seen in others.

I don't think dueling anecdotes are very useful without some context management. I won't ask after the particulars of your background with this stuff, because that might be asking you to admit to a crime. Please consider reading my reply to a sibling comment of yours for some context on where I'm coming from, if you'd like.

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