It must have been two months ago now since I picked up Michael Pollan’s newest book How To Change Your Mind. I was drawn to it because my therapist and I were back to the drawing board once again, trying to find some alternative way to address my treatment-resistant depression. We were discussing micro-dosing, most specifically using MDMA (better known as the street drug Ecstasy).
The book is, in effect, two travelogues combined: one, a historical trip back through the history of psychedelics since the 1950s by researchers, the CIA, and Timothy Leary et al to the resurgence of interest today in their effectiveness in treating mental illness, addiction, and the anxiety and depression of chronically ill individuals; the second journey includes the personal accounts of Pollan’s own guided ‘trips’ on psilocybin, LSD, and 5-MeO-DMT. (A heart condition counterindicated Pollan’s sampling MDMA.)
From the onset, Pollan stresses the importance of ‘set and setting’ as key determinants in whether or not one has a rewarding experience. His discussion of his fears of losing his mind or dying echoed my own concerns and recalled to me my one and only experience with psychedelics.
I was 19, sitting out on the front lawn on a warm spring day with my ex-boyfriend’s best friend. It was just the two of us, he was playing his guitar and stopped suddenly to ask if I’d like to do a hit of “Sunshine.” I knew Frank tripped frequently and while we hung out with the same group, my girlfriends and I were still only comfortable smoking hash. There was something about the day though, and this hope I harbored about something more developing between Frank and me — I had this idyllic vision of the two of us meandering around for hours stoned on a glorious acid trip. Like something out of those new-age posters. The drug had just started coming on when Frank came back from the phone and said he had to leave; he’d just received an opportunity to play a gig that night. I recall being terrified but didn’t have enough nerve to ask if I could come along, to express my concern about tripping on my own for the first time.
In Pollan’s book, he stresses the importance of having a well-trained person alongside you as a guide on your first experiences. On his first trip, his guide Fritz provided guidance on how to handle the “paranoia, spooky places, the feeling you’re losing your mind or that you are dying.” He took his first trip in an idyllic setting, in a yurt in the wilderness, with Fritz by his side as he lay down on a mattress, his head between two speakers so he could slip along accompanied by expertly curated music, his eyes shaded.
In my case, set and setting did a total 180. I remember watching Frank leave to catch the bus, then getting into my black Firebird convertible and merging onto the Long Island Expressway for the trip from Queens to Hicksville, Long Island. The cars were melting all around me as the traffic inched forward, the sun was evaporating in the mirror on the side of my car, sending out fireworks of brilliant colors. Everything was moving in super slow-mo. This trip was far from a mystical experience. I was trapped in a horror show on the LIE at rush hour. I got off the freeway and pulled into the Mid Island Mall, called my friend Greg. “Come and get me,” I screamed into the phone. “I’m having a bad trip.” Greg lived about 15 minutes away and said to meet him at the car. But where was the car? I walked over to a woman cashier and asked her if she could help me find my car. I actually handed her the keys. She walked with me through the parking lot until we located it. I remember telling her I had vomited all over the front seat but there wasn’t anything there to indicate that I had been sick. “Are you sure?” I kept asking her. “Maybe you’re just not seeing it. I know I was sick. I can see it. ” She left and I waited for Greg.
Greg got behind the wheel and drove us out to the Planting Fields in Old Westbury. He was drinking a six-pack of Colt 45 and smoking Camels. I remember him wanting to make out on a blanket on the grass but his face contorted into a wolf and I ran into the woods, only to come across three large crosses and fall to my knees in awe at witnessing the Crucifixion.
Fast forward fifty years and I’m reading Pollan’s book. He’s writing about the resurgence of interest in psychedelics to treat the terminally ill and the chronically depressed. He talks about how the experience of losing one’s ego via psychedelics is therapeutic in that it resets the mind. It’s like a Control-Alt-Delete. One’s mind, he explains becomes stuck in patterns of ruminating, either looking backward (depression) or anticipating (anxiety). A ‘sick’ brain is one which has become too ordered and the jolt from something like magic mushrooms can be vastly therapeutic.
Quoting Mendel Kaelen of the Imperial Lab: “Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.”
Psychedelics, he says, temporarily flatten the snow so that new pathways can be created.
Pollan’s book is decidedly hard reading, almost academically written, save for the parts when Pollan pulls us into his own psychedelic experiences and those of others he interviews. And I can’t say for certain if I am interested, after reading it, in further exploring the possibility of finding some help through mind-altering medications. After all, it all comes down to set and setting. And I have one bad trip to look back on, which I fear would predispose me to have another bad one.
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