From medical trials to magic mushrooms, psychedelics are back in the spotlight. But for those with the little-known condition HPPD, the side effects never end.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.The walls began moving about an hour after Ollie* took the pill. Nothing dramatic, just a gentle pulsing, like a sheet in a breeze. The colours were a bit strange, too. The fluorescent yellow traffic sign on his bedroom wall had turned pink, and the lava lamp in the corner of the room seemed unusually bright. “I realised something was happening that wasn’t what I was expecting,” he tells me.
Ollie fessed up to his parents, who suggested he wait a few days for the effects to wear off. But they didn’t. When he walked, he felt as if he were floating, “like on one of those moving walkways at the airport”. His depth perception went haywire, and he felt increasingly disconnected from reality. His GP gave him antidepressants but they only made things worse, so he stopped taking them.
“It’s pretty intense,” says Professor Paul Sowman, from the KIT-Macquarie Brain Research Laboratory at Macquarie University, who has been looking into HPPD since 2018. “People who have it are in absolute mental anguish. Since I started working, I’ve had people ring me up saying they are suicidal and is there anything I can do for them.”
HPPD is mainly associated with LSD and psilocybin but also MDMA, ketamine and marijuana.There are also cases of people getting the condition after taking part in research. I speak with Joy*, a Canadian woman who was left with HPPD in 2022, after taking part in a clinical trial to test the efficacy of psilocybin in treating depression. In 2017, thereported the case of a 15-year-old boy in the US who developed HPPD after receiving ketamine for chronic pain.
With so much at stake, terms such as HPPD and “adverse events” are unwelcome, to say the least.
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