What do psychedelics like shrooms do to people with ASD

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For those of you that have trouble with heightened sensory perception what do psychedelics do to you? Do they make your sensory perception even more intense? If so is that hard to deal with? I'm the other way around I'm numb to sensory input and emotions but when I take psychedelics that all changes and the extreme sensory input gets pretty hard to handle. I wasn't always numb though I saw a family video from when I was 4 and I clearly had trouble with sunlight and loud noises. I think psychedelics make me revert back to the way I was as a kid. Everythings way more intense.

The last time I did them was long before I knew I was Autistic, so its hard to make a comparison now. I don't remember it having any effect on my auditory intake in the sense of things seeming louder, or more or less intense in any mundane way; I do remember significant effects on my visual perception, in giving objects halos tinged with color (not 'tracers'), a sort of aura that made them seem more than three-dimensional, It did in fact give television images a third dimension.

Mostly I remember having a sense of bonding with conceptual information like music, through what occultists or a shaman might call 'elementals' - the very literal feeling that say a specific piece of music had a conscious spirit or muse associated with it, and in a third-eye perception I could see these creatures dancing - they presented themselves and communicated with me in an almost visual sense. It was the sensation of actually 'seeing' something that I'd had some subliminal awareness of all my life, but never before been able to actually witness.

I've never really had a breakthrough experience on sensory heightening psychedelics, except for loss of inhibition and giddiness or deep appreciation of everything in general. I've have my best experiences with the sensory depriving substances.

I didn't find either LSD or 'shrooms much of a problem, but then I don't have a problem with stairs turning to rubber, your mate turning into a parrot or the walls melting.

Watching Hellraiser was a bit touch and go.

But I don't think I'd recommend psychedelics to anyone, let alone Autistics...

I don't really think that I really want to find out, what they do to us. I make a point of staying away, from that stuff. There are better things to elevate my mood with, like music and tea.

Are you thinking of experimenting?

You could always take them and then lock yourself in your room with the lights out and disconnect all electronics and phones, except maybe a music player. Or if you really want a sensory overload, drop during a trip to the Las Vegas strip.

Interesting. I've never perceived any entities other than myself and the world itself on shrooms or LSD. Salvia on the other hand I've had chairs staring me down and battled my way out of the belly of a hyperdimensional venus fly trap which I later discovered was myself. A reoccuring lesson which I seem to still learning is the fact that what we see as the external world is actually ourselves. Our brains make a representation of something for us but the representation and whats being represented may be 2 very different things.



Its not about elevating your mood its about seeing things through a different lense.


With what? If you mean psychedelics, I've done mushrooms, LSD, salvia and DOM. I'd like to try DMT. The idea of doing ayahuasca scares me a bit but I'm gonna go for it one of these days. Ibogaine sounds pretty extreme too but I'll give it a shot some day.

LSD made me more normal, except at very high doses when it affected me more or less like it does everyone else (except less intensely). I've speculated that this is a combination of it helping what may be a constant migraine aura that affects my senses, and also the fact that my natural mode of perceiving the world is in some ways the opposite of LSD. (LSD tends to make the idea-based thinking in people's heads become so much more active that ideas can completely overshadow the world. Whereas my natural mode of being is closer to one where ideas haven't been thought of yet -- something some people mistake LSD for doing, but that I don't think it actually does. I think LSD can just make people so hyperintellectualized that words were useless, whereas I tend to be hypointellectualized (except in short cognitive sprints) and words are useless in that direction too.) LSD also made me calmer and more able to function and understand language and my environment in more typical ways. It got rid of suicidal feelings that I had had before I started taking it. But once I stopped taking it, those impulses came back. They weren't amplified or anything when they came back, but clearly it only helped me in the short term in that sense, it didn't cause long-term changes for the better (but also none for the worse). The negative effects I noticed were that it seemed to cause mild cognitive distortions (possibly the same cognitive distortions most people have already, possibly effects of the drug). It also had an effect of messing up some boundaries.

Shrooms simply made me feel strange and floaty. I felt a little like a hobbit. It was sort of an interesting adventure, but I never felt the need to repeat it. (But then I was an emetophobe, if I hadn't been afraid that one day it might make me puke, maybe I'd have been more interested. No interest anymore though. But it didn't make me puke when I took it, and thus I wasn't afraid during the trip.)

Note that there are many forms of autism. I know another autistic person who has a similar way of perceiving the world to how I do, who had the same effects on LSD that I did. But for an autistic person who finds ideas and thought easy, or has other cognitive or neurological/chemical differences from me and that person, it might have a very different effect. Some autistic people might even find it catapults them into something they can't handle. There have been studies done showing similar effects to the effect on me in some autistic people, but I doubt it's all. I know people who've had their lives very messed up by these things, both autistic and nonautistic people. (Read the book version of Mozart and the Whale if you want to read an account of an autistic woman whose mind was very badly affected by LSD and other psychedelics.) So this isn't a recommendation, just a description.

could not speak or move on shrooms. total shutdown, and not at all a common reaction.

LSD: mixed bag. i had an experience once (LSD + pot) where i could not make sense of objects, communication, location or movement. ensuing panic could have been disastrous but i was actually too confused to panic. other experiences with it were relaxing, like a sanctioned retreat into a world of only sensory (visual, auditory) experience with no pressure to create meaning out of any of it. heightened feeling of connectedness with objects / animals.

would not recommend though, to anyone with sensitive emotional / psychological sensibilities or anxiety problems of any sort. i was young and trying to make sense of my experience w/ the world and looking for answers. (didn't find any then, just made anxiety problems worse)

was a long time ago, and i wouldn't attempt it now. no lasting regrets, but all in all it's an experience i didn't need to have. LSD is deliberate sensory overload (in addition to changing your thought process, which could be confusing). seriously, i would say very much not recommended for those on the spectrum, to be safe. as with anything, the effects could vary dramatically from one person to the next.

and - this should probably be in the adult section.

I imagine that this type of stuff, would damage our brains, just like it would damage the brains, of the general population of humans. There are better ways to get high. Meditate, go for a walk or a run, or listen to some music. Have a cup of tea, or coffee. That works.

There's no evidence that it damages your brain. And how are these things "better" than shrooms or acid? Because they're drruuuugggggssss and being gratified by things outside of some norm or prudish comfort zone is wrong?

I see no relevance to prudishness or social norms. No one is going to have a bad trip on a cup of green tea.

Yeah as to not damaging people's brains... tell that to the girl I knew who was totally neurotypical before she did acid, and afterwards she had to face the fact that she would never learn to drive. When I knew her, she was trying to figure out how to break it to her dad that she wasn't just stalling on driving lessons, but that the real problem was that everything that moved had huge streaking trails behind it that made her a hazard if she were to ever get behind the wheel.

No, generally the long-term problems psychedelics cause aren't generally like the worst of the horror stories you've heard (and most of the real horror stories aren't as bad as those either). They're generally perceptual problems rather than permanent hallucinations or delusions, and the "guy who thinks he's an orange" story is an urban legend. But they're still perceptual problems that some people would rather not have the rest of their life, and that can and do impair people. And for people with pre-existing neurological conditions, it's a crapshoot as to what will happen, and that's a crapshoot a lot of people would rather not take for good reason.

(Why do I know about these particular perceptual after-effects? Because not only do I know people who've experienced them. But I also was pretty extensively evaluated for them before they agreed that my own perceptual oddities were autism-related (and later than that also found to be migraine-related) and not the after-effect of hallucinogen use. I could have told them that, but they needed (and got) far more than my word before they were sure. Read up on HPPD here. The migraine part is particularly important in understanding some of my responses to LSD, where a drug known to cause such perceptions seemed to alleviate such perceptions in my case. This is because migraines also cause such perceptions, and LSD treats migraines and was originally studied as a migraine treatment along with other ergot derivatives which are still occasionally in use. But trust me, there are far better migraine drugs than that.)

I have no moral objection to the use of such drugs, and in some cases they can be safer than some legal drugs generally are (in some cases it's the opposite, of course). But they're not harmless either. And even a bad trip can be more than some people ever want to experience in their life.

Although the "Just take a walk, meditate, etc." is a bit far of the mark. Most people don't take this class of drugs to relax or even to get high as most people understand "high". They take them most often because they are curious about having a form of perceptual and cognitive experience that is otherwise not possible, or not easily possible. Some people find this worth the risk and some don't, but even as someone who doesn't find it worth the negative effects, and would never recommend these things (because of the negative effects and the unpredictability of these effects, as much as anything), I would also never pretend that a person can easily experience similar things by exercise, meditation, or mild and legal stimulants. It's just that if you take these drugs, you can end up with anything from a pleasant experience to a waking nightmare, and even the pleasanter experiences can have effects you weren't looking for, and you never know how it's going to affect you long-term, and that's a lot of "ifs" to trade for curiosity.

What happens? This. http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt134539.html

To be serious, though, I've never tried hallucinogens of any sort. I don't know if my mind is strong enough to handle it, going by what I've heard from those who have tried it. I even found high quality reefer to be ever so slightly unnerving at times during a brief period experimenting with it, since I'm normally pretty concrete in my perspective of things.