Why Psilocybin Isn't Studied for Depression & Bipolar Disorder (Dr. David Gard) 🍄

Psychologist and psilocybin researcher Dr. David Gard reveals why researchers and academia have been hesitant to investigate the potential for magic mushrooms to treat depression, bipolar disorder, and other mental health conditions.
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[@dmtdreamz7706]

This happened about a decade ago but the trip was so impactful that I'll never forget it. I'll go to my death contemplating it. I haven't shared this trip online before so here we go. The trip is atypical because it's a positive one, whereas most Salvia trip reports tend to be quite dramatically negative. This trip profoundly increased my overall positivity and outlook on life since that day. It's also the reason why until very recently I haven't done any psychedelics at all, I felt I've had enough for a lifetime after this.
This was Salvia 60x or 80x, I can't remember which but it was powerful stuff. I smoked it a few times prior, about 10 times altogether, but I always took very gentle hits and what seemed to happen was that reality shifted into something else for a brief moment, and then back again. For example, one time I smoked it around a table with some friends, and suddenly the entire scene transformed into something where we were all on some kind of beach near the ocean, I looked to the right at one of my friends and he was wearing one of those old marine captain hats, and he kinda winked at me like a cartoon character. Then reality morphed back to normal as quickly as it transformed. I had a couple of this kind of trips with short but still potent changes in perception.
The last time I smoked it, it was different. I was alone this time, and I had enough for 2-3 strong hits. I packed my pipe to the brim and lit up my torch lighter, really dedicated that this time I'll feel something stronger than just a little tease of an effect. So I somehow managed to take about 3 gigantic hits and put the pipe down.
What happened next is hard to convey into words, because words don't do it justice and never will. A very powerful voice, which seemed to be coming from the back, and the power of which seemed to make the entire world vibrate with enormous force, basically said to me, "hi, I'm Salvia". I don't think it happened in spoken language but I could understand everything being said with crystal clarity. It felt like telepathic download. There was absolutely no ambiguity in what was being said and even though the transmission was an alien experience to me and I struggled to get to grips with it, I still understood everything with extreme lucidity. The voice said something like this. "Well, you know, every single thing has a spirit. At the core of everything is a specific spirit whose natural expression is that certain thing." This "voice" then went on to provide me with a very specific example (I know all this because after the trip I wrote all of it down). It said, "if you eat an orange, the taste that you feel in your mouth, is the communication with the spirit of the orange!" This was very specific, I thought. Then the voice went on to say "well, you just smoked me, and I'm the spirit of Salvia, so this is what communication with me is like!"
What happened after this is impossible to describe and I only really have a very shaky mental picture of it because my ego simply cannot even formulate or begin to formulate any kind of description that would fit the experience or uncover even the surface layers of just how unbelievably alien it felt. What happened was I felt as if two enormous hands lifted me from my body, and I went up, up, up through the stratosphere, through the layers of the multiverse, through some kind of membrane and some type of superdimensional, non-euclidean hyperbolic weirdness of hard to describe proportions, until I basically landed in nothing, and there was nothing but love and nothing there. Love and nothing was the content of this place, and there wasn't even me, I didn't exist there, I just somehow was part of this love and this nothing. And what's more is it lasted forever, as far as I can tell. I don't know how I ever got back to my body, because from what I could tell, this was forever and this is just how things are and always were - there's love, infinite love of unconditional and deeply profound nature, and there's absolutely nothing, and those are the only two things that exist. I know this sounds paradoxical because how can "nothing" exist as a thing but that's how it felt. It was infinite nothing and infinite love in every direction. When I did get back to my body, it felt like I was slowly descending back into my body and I remember I had some kind of an energetic parachute that attached to my front rather than my back, and was made of what I can describe as two enormous rings on each side of me that extended through another reality back into our own. If you've ever played MDK games, it was kind of like that parachute, except it was glowing red, and it was on the front of me, and there were only two circles instead of four. I remember specifically looking at how the two rings at the far ends poked through some kind of membrane that separated this world and the one I just came from.
This experience radically transformed my life. It permanently erased my depression and inspired me to be extremely creative. I've never taken Salvia since because I'm afraid it might modulate my life in a different way, or that I might experience the horrors that I keep reading about Salvia. I'm not sure it's worth the risk.
That's my trip report. Regardless or not if you believe in the spirit world and the spirits or everything described here, you have to at least agree that the orange analogy is spot on. I've never thought before that the spirit of orange might express itself to you through the experience of eating it. Next time you taste an orange, remember you're communicating with its spirit. :)

[@queenie5486]

That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing.

[@CRESTBD]

Thank you for tuning in Queenie!