here is an uh, warning, based on experiences i have had in the past with multiple versions of this if you have intrusive thoughts and OCD, taking psychadelics runs a risk of making these much worse, potentially in the medium-long term. the reason being here that the salience-amplification and plasticty and thoughts-unbound-from-self can be not great things to be running while having these badly now, in my understanding, psychedelics are sometimes noted as benefiting, rather than making worse, OCD. i can buy that, it might be YMMV. but speculatively, maybe a distinction is: if the fears here are more "internal" rather than "external", that is, less that you are afraid you will suddenly do something sudden and concrete and more that say, you are afraid of adopting certain worldviews, believing certain things, or having certain like orders of priorities in life or caring about some things more or less, then that might be more reason for psychadelics to harm rather than help: because the plasticity and salience boosting seems like its actually directly having the feared outcome, and honestly to some extent might even actually move things in the direction of it for real (by attaching negative feelings to something, by salience not being fully isolated from subconscious belief or feeling, etc.). which is uh, worrying
ideologically i am pretty pro-psychadelics, i dont think psychadelics are bad, but i have never seen anyone really describe... how bad this can get and i felt i should write something
this post tbh is probably one of the few things i wrote here on this iteration of my blog that actually has a chance of mattering so im gonna make it my pin. like i do wanna emphasize that the risk here IME is both a really severe worsening of intrusive thoughts and, to some extent, genuinely shifting your basic instincts/emotions/epistemic inclinations in ways that are actively worse in whatever direction youd find particularly upsetting such that youd fixate on it in the first place
