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.
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. “I thought, ‘This isn’t what I signed up for.
Ollie had been a gifted student with plenty of friends, but he now spent weeks in his room. “The end of year 10 was horrible,” he says. He started kinesiology, which made him feel more grounded, and went back to school the following year. But reading was almost impossible, and his dissociation became unbearable. Halfway through year 12, with the support of his parents and school counsellor, he dropped out. “I caught a train to Byron Bay and got a job in bush regeneration,” he says.
Abraham, who is 81, has a bald head, large, owlish glasses and an empathetic manner. “These weren’t bad kids. Lots of them were just adventurers of the mind. They wanted to know something about themselves, or expand their consciousness, and they ended up damaging themselves very badly.” Still, no one seemed particularly interested in them.
Research was suppressed for decades, until 1990, when the University of New Mexico School of Medicine began testing the effects of DMT, a hallucinogen closely related to psilocybin, on 60 people. The trial, which was conducted by Rick Strassman, an associate professor of psychiatry, showed that you could give DMT safely to humans.
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When Ollie took a pill, he didn’t realise it would be a ‘never-ending trip’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.
Read more »
When Ollie took a pill, he didn’t realise it would be a ‘never-ending trip’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.
Read more »