Can LSD be therapeutic?

The answer to this question is a resounding yes, despite the cultural stigma associated with psychedelics in the modern day. LSD has a variety of therapeutic effects - so many in fact that I could not explore them all with you today in this one answer, thus I will focus on the most instrumental of all of them and explicate, as clearly as I can, how and why such a substance could help someone in a therapeutic sense.

As this answer is, despite its redeeming qualities, one of the longest I’ve penned, here is a much shorter version for those who haven’t the patience to sit through my admittedly drawn-out prose. I hope this helps :)

Why do drugs such as marijuana, DMT, LSD, and shrooms give so much insight about ideas, life, and who we are?

LSD, though this is not specific to LSD but rather common to psychedelics in general, is responsible for an effective inability to think coherently. The neuro-chemical interaction it induces is confusing, both perceptually and in a mechanical sense - it inhibits the capacity your brain has for high-level processing, yet does so in such a way that the process itself is preserved. This results in the user of the drug feeling more and more excited, as novelty begins to manifest itself in the world around them, approaching a peak which occurs 1–2 hours into the experience, 2–3 hours after first taking the drug.

This excitement, however, is only the precursor response - soon enough, it becomes apparent that your ability to make sense of the world and of yourself is diminishing at a rate which is proportionate to your initial excitement, and you begin to wonder - what exactly is going on? Of course, because your brain’s capacity for high-level processing has been mitigated by the chemical, your propensity to make mistakes as you try to figure it out increases dramatically, hence the inherent predisposition to hallucination and delusion while one is experiencing a psychedelic experience. These negative consequences are related to how susceptible one is to their anxiety, because one of the mistakes you make when you’re tripping is being unable to distinguish your senses and your emotions from the world properly. When you attribute a lot of significance to your anxiety, it gives you something to worry about because your brain is projecting and then perceiving to make up for the lost information; this leads to profound confusion about what the anxiety is - if you feel anxious but it doesn’t feel like you are the anxious thing but rather that the world is a place that is anxious and you’re instantiated within the world, you may very well start to have ‘your own’, relatively well justified anxiety about the situation at hand which just adds to your problem further.

When these anomalies in perceptual or cognitive functionality last beyond the trip, this is often (but not always; see:escapism) the result of an unhealthy attachment to a very positive aspect of the psychedelic experience - the wonder of the world, as it is experienced by a child : the majestic birthplace of virtuous potential and chaotic evil, and a battleground between the two therein. In an even more profound sense, this battlefield, so imagined, is actually psychological in nature and that is what is responsible for its timeless representation in our most ancient stories and parables; this is an extremely informative way to conceptualise the compensation one’s brain performs as the world becomes less comprehensible to them in general. In response to the irreducible complexity of the world, adults produce solutions to specified problems, while children produce their best attempt at a solution in general. Interestingly, in their functional process of learning this meta-process - problem-solving - they are entranced by stories and games which, in some sense, model the correct process of solving a problem.

As a consequence of the way we evolved to know our world, when we don’t know - let’s say ‘enough to feel sufficiently safe sometimes’ - we are exploratory in nature, and this is the space in which wonder can be found. This space is the land of unconscious understanding born of our millions of years playing the meta-game of humankind, and it is our most subconscious and unconscious perceptions which remain when one has taken such a drug, thus these are those which our brain projects onto our world to compensate for its acquired inability to perceive sensibly the experience in which it is ensnared.

This space is most frequently inhabited as a young child, and once the child has become sufficiently comfortable with his particular blend of chaos and order, known and unknown, he forgets how to truly wonder about the world. He occasionally finds himself craving that magic of childhood he can see in our young, and missing the feeling of what could be described in youth as unlimited being but is more properly defined as a justified confidence in the inaccessibility of the limits of your being.

It becomes apparent to us, as we get older and we grow up; we have lost this childlike ability to wonder at the world, because we learnt of ourselves and of it, and we learnt of our limitations, and of all the ways we are insufficient and inadequate compared to the ineffable and unstoppable influence of nature, i.e. everything which is beyond our control. The cruelest part of this realisation is that you do not even have a legitimate claim to the sovereignty of your claims, as you are much less in control of what you think than it is in control of you; these observations can feel damning at times, but perhaps, with the right tools, we can reframe them to better reflect our more objective perspectives, and thus attempt to gain the some of the same pragmatic potency that is reflected in our technology.

LSD is an attempt to explore again your known territory, knowing what you now know. As T.S. Eliot once said;

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

It is this wonder of childhood exploration, of the quest to discover whatever it is that is out there or in here, that becomes available again when the LSD permits you, and then, soon enough, forces you to wonder about everything you have yet left unexamined in the library of experience you’ve filled with tomes in the lifetime you’ve lived since you first went to the land of the unknown.

This journey results in a radical alteration to the perspective you usually inhabit, wherein your biases and predispositions slowly dissolve as your trip becomes more intense and you have more and more trouble remembering how you usually interpret information. This can extend, of course, to the experience which is colloquially known as ‘ego death’, wherein an individual who has taken the drug experiences the expanse of this ignorance encompass even their own identity, and they struggle to remember the most basic details about themselves. This, naturally, can be extremely confronting - especially so if you are not expecting such a result - yet it is also astoundingly useful once you get past the initial horror of not knowing anything about yourself or what is happening.

You see, the utility of such an experience lies in the fact that you are profoundly blind, and not just in a superficial sense wherein your limited perspective means that some truths are not in your line-of-sight, so you can’t perceive all the information available to you appropriately. Though this is true, of course, it is not the limit of your blindness - your blindness extends to the blind spots themselves, such that you are inherently incapable of understanding your own limitations and biases in a way that allows you to functionally compensate for them. You are constituted such that not only do you have a variety of biases that affect the way you perceive the world, but you also have an extraordinarily hard time identifying and accounting for them in your attempts to understand, because they influence your ability to perceive even the biases themselves.

Someone who is blind even to their own blindness can learn something very useful from a more comprehensive, temporarily acquired blindness - they can learn to perceive their own shortcomings. For instance, an inability to comprehend the world or the self can bring to one’s attention the scope of that which is not yet understood - we often tend towards an unconscious exaggeration of our knowledge and a minimization of our ignorance, because the breadth of our ignorance makes us ignorant to how ignorant we really are. In short, an experience which forcefully confronts you with how little you really understand about the world or yourself has the useful benefit of showing you just how little that is, which is something you’d probably prefer to avoid examining too closely in normal circumstances, chiefly because it is unsettling to do so.

In addition, one of the merits of the grueling task of reconstructing one’s perceptions of the world and the self after they’ve been scrambled by the psychedelic experience is that, once reconstituted, there is a fair chance that they are a little less error-ridden than they were before. That is to say, some parts of ourselves and our views are very hard to change because they were established long in the past, and to reconfigure the wealth of accurate and useful knowledge which has been built upon faulty foundations is an immense task. This task is made expedient when we are forced by our circumstance to reconstruct ourselves, because it means we don’t have to deconstruct anything in particular to reach the error in question - it can simply be repaired on the way ‘back up’ after the drug-induced collapse of your interpretive framework.

The key to the therapeutic effect of psychedelics, then, lies in the following observation: you are not everything you could be, and you don’t know what you could be, or what exactly is wrong with what you are and why.

The psychedelic experience offers a unique opportunity: maybe you could figure that out, if you tried - maybe if you dropped yourself in at the deep end you could learn to swim like the best of them, if only you were brave enough to take the leap. Of course, there is always the danger that you’d drown (which, in non-metaphorical terms, would be a lasting psychotic episode), and that is a very rational and, for some, a very prescient anxiety. I would say that if you have any predisposition to mental health issues you should consult a professional before you go dabbling in such things in isolation, as there is an extremely real danger in the wrong kind of exposure to an experience like this for a small subset of the population.

In conclusion, the psychedelic experience, and LSD especially (due to its intensity and focus), allow an individual to more objectively examine who they are and the things they believe to be true, facilitating a sort of reflection which is almost unachievable from a pragmatic perspective. These drugs enable those who wish to explore their selves and their world without being blinded to what might be by what they already think and how they already perceive. In short, they permit, in the proper setting, an expansion of the mind and an elevation of the discourse to a level wherein individual differences of perspective become altogether less significant, and the commonalities among them become decidedly more so. I, for one, think this can be extremely therapeutic, and I have always encouraged those who have the fortitude of mind which is necessary to tolerate such an experience to do so at least once, because you will never be as open-minded as you could be while you’re so unconsciously attached to who you are and the way you see things, especially when you’re unaware that such a state of affairs is even the case for you.

For the record, I am not aware of any evidence that LSD causes lasting psychosis in any individual which simultaneously rules out the important factor of an undiagnosed pre-existing mental illness. With regards to evidence of the positive effects of the drug, here is just one link to such a study, with a positive effect on trait openness that was still observable a year after the experience.

As it turns out, the ironic fact is that if some of the people who so ignorantly condemn psychedelics had ever tried one, maybe they would’ve been open minded enough not to act that way to begin with, even before they tried the drug and saw for themselves the nature of the experience they are so willing to pontificate about. How typical of human beings, to oppose our very chance of salvation. :p

Study on LSD use