If you are considering using psychedelics in a non-clinical setting, you might want to hold off for a while. A recently published study has found that individuals who have bad psychedelic trips have a much higher risk of dying within 5 years.
Doctor Daniel Myran, a researcher and preventive medicine specialist based at Ontario’s University of Ottawa, was the lead author of that study. He revealed that he was intrigued by all the hype about the mental health benefits of psychedelics but wondered about the real-world experiences of individuals who use these hallucinogens outside a clinical setting. For their study, they focused on individuals that had bad trips that resulted in emergency room visits.
They discovered that the fatality risk of these people who required emergency room care after a bad trip was 2.6 times more elevated in comparison to individuals that never had a bad psychedelic trip that necessitated a visit to an emergency room.
The study draws attention to the reality that not everyone will benefit from using psychedelics, and for a fraction of those who experience bad trips, the consequences could be dire.
It should be noted that the study didn’t establish a causal relationship between the bad trip and the increased mortality risk. It only showed a correlation. It is possible that some of the individuals who experience bad trips had other factors that predisposed them to early mortality, and those factors could explain why that fraction of psychedelic users had a bad experience.
For example, someone who has been having suicidal thoughts and has a bad psychedelic trip may not be helped by the psychedelic and they end up committing suicide. In such a case, it cannot be claimed that psychedelic use triggered their suicide.
The researchers analyzed the medical records captured by the universal health system in Canada. Their analysis showed that approximately 97% of the individuals who use psychedelics never have a need to seek medical attention at an emergency room. That small fraction that makes a hospital visit often displays severe adverse reactions like psychosis, intense hallucinations, panic attacks and other such forms of mental distress.
The data revealed that death by suicide was the most common cause of death among people who have bad hallucinogenic trips. Other causes included cancer, respiratory disease, and unintended drug poisoning.
As more Americans and residents in the developed world increasingly take to psychedelic microdosing, the study is a sobering reminder that there is a lot that isn’t yet known about hallucinogens and that care must be taken to avoid causing oneself unintentional harm resulting from non-clinical psychedelic use.
Entities like atai Life Sciences N.V. (NASDAQ: ATAI) need to ramp up their psychedelic drug development programs so that upon regulatory approval, these tested treatments can be available through the mainstream medical system. In this way, the risks associated with self-prescribed psychedelic use could be minimized.
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