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Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

First, are you saying you had social anxiety previously and that it was improved for the long term, without continued MDMA use?

Secondly, what evidence is there that psychedelics cause schizophrenia?

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First, yes, I had lots of problems navigating the social sphere, it was like there was some minor detail I just didn't understand, but which was crucial, it felt like it made me look and feel like a idiot. MDMA took all that away, it showed me that no, no one cares, just do your thing and don't bother. I did MDMA a few times during a year period.

Second, NO, psychedelics absolutely do NOT cause schizophrenia in my opinion, BUT people who have underlying symptoms or are prone to it, for them it can very much act like a trigger.

What evidence is there that it can even be a trigger?

Not sure why you were downvoted. I haven't seen much research on any other drug other than cannabis. Correlation(not causation) between its overuse and psychosis has been documented on several occasions[1][2]. But its good evidence only for people with already some form of genetic predisposition to get diseases like schizophrenia. So its 'triggering' in that sense. Of course more work is needed on such an important topic because there are contradictory studies like this one[3].

[1]http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/09209964940...

[2]http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/17007222

[3]http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/2...

Note that [3] seems to be using historical data from patients correlating episodes with cannabis use (doesn't seem to include trials), so it's of course very susceptible to "correlation vs causaution" problems.

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