HPPD/Flashbacks from Shrooms?

[Phyllis Wagner]

What are the chances of getting HPPD/Flashbacks from shrooms?

I can't find any good studies on it, just anecdotal reports. Sounds awful, I feel like psychedelics here are treated like they have no side effects.

[4201]

There was a time in my life where I worried a lot about HPPD symptoms. I had a big bad trip at the time and I started to believe "I screwed myself" seeing symptoms such as noise in vision, after images, floaters etc. This is long gone and I'm now taking shrooms quite often with no issues at all.

From my experience, everything about HPPD is total bullshit, let me explain. Everything that is considered an "HPPD symptom" is actually a normal part of your biological experience that you already experience right now but might not notice.

Let's take noise in vision:

This noise is the result of your optical nerves picking up random signals and it is a part of being a human being. Does it get worse when you take drugs like shrooms or LSD? No. But you may start to notice those things and if you never noticed them before, you might believe they are new or that they are a result of the drug. 

Then once a person get's paranoid about whether or not they "caused" this phenomena, they keep making it into a problem and focusing on it all the time. It becomes a perpetual proof of "a me that screwed up", at least it was for me. Ultimately by focusing more and more on it as if it was a problem, it becomes "bigger" and more of a problem.

On top of that, by focusing more and more on those symptoms you become "good at spotting them" which ultimately gives them even more place in your field of view.

You can see for yourself that things like tinnitus, after images, floaters, halos around objects are of the same nature. Essentially those things cannot be made into a problem unless you turn them into one. If you just accept the fact that your nervous system picks up noise randomly and it's a normal thing then there's really nothing HPPD can "do" to you.

The reason you can't find good studies on this is because of how subjective it is in its nature. With thoughts we can invent any mental illnesses (depression, psychosis or even HPPD) but then it's not easy for doctors to study those when they happen in our mind.