Ask a psychiatrist why depression is so prevalent in people eighteen to twenty-five years old. The likely response is that college is a time of academic pressure, life transitions, and brain development.
This is a non-answer. It fails to explain why, if these factors are true of nearly everyone at twenty-one, most are unaffected by depression. ‘Genetics’ is especially unhelpful as an answer. A person is depressed, visits a doctor, and is told they must have the genes. So far, so good. But it gets kind of weird when the doctor is asked, how did he know that, and he says “Well you came to me depressed didn’t you?” But it’s a pseudo-scientific bluff. “The ones with depression have the genes. How do I know this? Because here you are depressed! Your genes are why you are here. And you obviously have the genes, otherwise why else would you be here?” Like the wave of a magician’s wand, we’ve gone in a circle, ending exactly where we started.
But if we can take off the gown of the mad scientist, and look to psychological causes, we’re likely to find an answer that really means something.
When I interview a depressed college-aged patient, and ask them what they think of themselves, they invariably have a lot of harsh things to say. “I’m a failure. Worthless. It’s a waste… pointless.” For some depressives, this kind of self-talk goes on 24/7. But then, if I ask the same young adult about their parents, they draw a blank. What I often notice, and what is striking to me, is how bland their response is to the parent question. Their opinion of themselves is anything but neutral: they are a spectacular ruin, quite tragic… one of the worst human specimens… but their parents? They’re just regular people. Dull as dishwater.
Something about the formula doesn’t add up. Families are like spiderwebs: tug on one strand and you affect the entire web. The renowned family therapist Carl Whitaker once remarked, “There are no individuals… only fragments of families.”
So dig a little with a depressed person on their parents and you’ll find there is indeed, plenty of material to work with. It may not be outright cruelty; it may just be coldness, or parental distraction, neglect, or careerism. It may be merely an academic fixation, or an insistence on material success, but on some level, one or both parents have insecurities or other flaws. And yet, in most cases the grown up child is curiously blind to parental flaws. It is as if something has obscured them entirely.
Follow me for a minute. There is a worse thing than being a failure. It is to be neglected. To have one’s need for love ignored. A failure, at least, gets attention. An object of scorn gets lots of it: internet trolls are very social creatures. They enjoy the hate. Marvel villains are quite talkative, and seem to relish attention. That is why their attacks are always in public spots, e.g. subways. But to be ignored? It is to not exist at all. To be ignored is a fate worse than death. To be neglected is worse than being hated, and a form of suffering more grim than failure. In Dante’s Inferno, the Italian poet described the bottommost layer of hell not as a fire, but as a frozen lake. He may have had something like our truth in mind.
Now, follow me further on a hypothesis: consider, whether a depressed young adult has— some deficiency in parental love— insufficiently detached from their family of origin. Consider whether, by some parental failing, they are stunted, and carry a sense of rejection. On this theory, the experience of leaving for college would be cold, meaningless. Smiling for graduation photos, they prepare to enter into a void. They might as well have been shipped off to the moon. “We’re so proud of her… I hear Lunar Tech has a really good reputation.”
On this theory, the self-hatred of depression has meaning. It has an aim. It is trying to both say something, and accomplish something. Although, its aim may not be a conscious aim. As with the internet troll who enjoys hate, the depressed person is soothed by negativity. The negative self-talk has a social quality, as if two people are present in the mind. “I’ll never stop saying it. I’ll always be here to remind you that you’re a failure.” And in this strange way, negative self-talk alleviates loneliness. When depressed people mentally berate themselves, we call the repetitive thoughts ruminations. They are a kind of repetitive, soothing, hypnotic activity that can occur anywhere, e.g. while staring out the window of a bus or brushing one’s teeth. Just as a cow chews on its cud, the depressed person self-soothes with thoughts of self-hatred, as if to pacify… as if sucking on one’s thumb.
Cruelty is a kind of attention, and so, paradoxically even cruel attention may be preferable to neglect. We are all familiar with the girlfriend who stays with an abusive man, as any attention is preferable to none. Sexual masochism and BDSM arise from the same phenomenon. There are many people who are not only comforted but even aroused by harsh treatment. Some enjoy verbal degradation. C. S. Lewis, the famous Christian author, wrote an essay on erotic love where he commented on sexual kinks: “Masochism says… ‘I am so enthralled that I welcome even pain at your hands.’ ” He was explaining that cruelty can be, when sexualized, a weird proof of love.
That a human would prefer pain, or simulate cruelty, is odd. But if weird things happen in the privacy of the bedroom, so too can weird things happen in the privacy of the mind. And if we can accept what is odd in human nature, depression begins to make sense.
Having moved out of their parents house, some vulnerable young adults are like a hermit crab with no shell. So they retreat, like the hermit crab, into their own mind to keep themselves company. There is a soothing pleasure in keeping yourself company in that way, as if sucking one’s thumb.
Should we call it, sucking on one’s own thoughts? Masturbation engenders a separation from the real outside world in the same way that inner monologues do. And if lowered libido is one of the cardinal signs of depression, it is not surprising why. Depression is a form of self-stimulation that separates a person from the outside world.
In their minds depressed people keep themselves company. But it is the company of a merciless critic. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once remarked “If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.” But at least the depressed know their own bad company will never leave them. And perhaps that is the whole point. “I’ll never leave you alone” can be interpreted in two ways, 1) “I’ll never leave you alone,” i.e. I’m your life-long tormentor, and 2) “I’ll never leave you alone,” i.e. you’ll never be ignored. The ambiguity between these two meanings is perhaps the very essence of depression.
We have all played with sock puppets. You may have noticed how hard it is to do two different voices. With a sock on the left hand, it is difficult to animate the sock on the right. You must rapidly flip your perspective. You have to stop being yourself and start being another self.
In the human mind, all self-talk is like that; a sort of puppet show of imaginary conversations. But the depressed person does this in a particularly morbid way: they combine in one person the emotions of the one being demeaned, and the voice of the one doing the demeaning. As if the same sock puppeteer is belittling, and belittled.
Sock puppets are a good analogy for how self-talk works because, according to Freud, the superego (the inner critic) originally came from outside the psyche. Little children do not yet possess an inner critic. They respond to shame, but not guilt. The inner critic is not yet absorbed into their psyche. On Freud’s theory, the process begins as a reaction to something outside the psyche: a fear of the father. Later this fear turns into an interior impersonation of him. In other words the father becomes a Jiminy Cricket or a sock puppet. Fear of a father’s harsh critique is exchanged for self-critique, and fear is transformed internally into guilt. The fear of the father becomes irrelevant since “I and the father are one,” to use the words of Christ in the Trinitarian formula.
The same can be said of the mother. Little children don’t get depressed and certainly don’t get caught in loops of guilt and self-talk. They cannot, as they have not internalized their mother. This process doesn’t fully and finally happen until college. Paradoxically, a child must be far enough away from his mother to internalize her. When she is nearby, she is there. And you yourself are not there: She is. But when she cannot be seen in your visual field and is far off, she can transform into you, for the simple psychological reason that you cannot see yourself either. And perhaps the fact that you cannot see yourself, and also cannot see her, means she is you. Or, inhabits you like the protagonist of the film Being John Malkovich, who appears to inhabit Malkovich’s head, and peer out from behind his very eyes.
I am aware this process is based on the confusion of logical predicates and is thoroughly illogical. It is in fact the fallacy of the Undistributed Middle, but it is how psychological identification works, and it is how the unconscious works. Just as trees allow themselves to be grafted onto one another — Aristotle regarded this as a power of the vegetative part of all souls— so too it appears that human souls can psychotically identify with one another.
Psychoanalysts do have a specific name for this process: introjection. Most people aren’t familiar with the word, but do know the related word projection, a word that is part of pop culture. We’ve all heard the phrase “You’re projecting,” e.g. someone at work believes their boss hates them, but there is scant evidence for it other than a vague feeling. “I feel like she hates me.” Well of course you feel that. The hatred originates internally. A person who hates herself is always supposing other people hate her. This is well known, but the opposite process— introjection— is not. E.g. when a child who suffers from bullying at school becomes aggressive himself, we can say introjection has occurred. He has taken on himself the voice, persona, or values of another. This process is the basis of depressive self-talk. The mental sock puppet show I have described is a good picture of it.
Introjection is a powerful idea. It not only explains the psychological cause of depression, but also why a bad psychedelic trip provides relief to depression.
A bad trip is a kind of temporary psychosis, and the reason it can heal depression is that depression and psychosis are opposites. Their mental mechanisms are contrary to one another.
In depression, what is ‘outside’ the psyche is taken inside.
This is, as I have said, introjection. But in psychosis, what is ‘inside’ is placed outside. This is projection. This is ordinarily pathological, when someone falsely sees in others or ‘out there’ what isn’t ‘out there’ at all. But in depression we have a reverse: someone takes what was truly and originally ‘out there’ and puts it falsely inside themselves. When a depressed person has a bad trip, whatever was falsely put inside them is sent back outside, in the form of a hallucination. Falsely internalized contents are projected back out.
Vomit doesn’t look like food anymore, but it is food. We identify it as such. Likewise, the hallucinations of a bad trip may not appear like anything that comes from our real experience. But hallucinations may be based on memories that were internalized years prior. What people call a ‘bad trip’ is the purging of previously ingested material.
Hallucinations are based on real experience, and that is why they seem and feel objective.
This connection between hallucinating, and purging of emotions and memories may be why Ayahuasca, and all bad trips, are associated with actual, physical vomiting. The vomiting may be a psychosomatic expression of a psychological process: the purging of introjected material. The regurgitation of contents from the psyche, a psychological process, may itself necessitate a physical manifestation which corresponds to it. Consider that many anti-nausea drugs are in fact antipsychotics… e.g. Compazine and droperidol are two antipsychotics that are commonly used to treat nausea. The nausea system is as psychological as it is physical: it is bound up with memory and emotion. So it’s no surprise vomiting from an ayahuasca trip can be interpreted in a psychological way. This is important because some doctors who are skeptical of psychedelics see vomiting merely as a sign of toxicity or harm without understanding the psychological importance.
When you swallow a thing, you no longer see it. You take it inside your body and forget about it. It becomes a part of you. Your gut is both inside, and also partially outside. The gut is a tunnel: it is ‘inside’ but it retains a connection with the outside. That is why burps and farts are embarrassing. They seem to come from within, as if they originated with a person. And yet, as vomiting proves, nothing in the gut originates within. But the human psyche is just like the gut. The psyche can take things in, and cast them out. The gut and the brain are very closely related, and the first food we take in is our mother’s milk. It should be no surprise that we internalize our mother.
So: a depressed young man moves away from his mother and he needs her, misses her, but he also resents her, and so to solve the dilemma he impersonates her, swallowing her into himself like Tamatoa the giant villain crab in Moana who “ate my grandma.” But the depressed young adult, having internalized his mother, speaks to himself cruelly and harshly, to make the illusion believable. (All illusions are made believable by pain.) If after this, he has a bad trip on ayahuasca, it’s no wonder he vomits, hallucinates, and feels that he is alone or dying. This is an verbal expression of his having hallucinated and regurgitated his mother, and put her back outside. His mother is back outside where she can be lost to him forever.
Although it may be a horrible experience, most people report long term benefits after such bad trips. Technically a psychosis has taken place, but emotionally speaking, what happens is a powerful shift towards reality. Depression, by contrast, seems sane but involves a tangle of distortions.
To review, a depressed person isn’t honest with himself about a number of things:
a) whether he suffered parental neglect
b) whether he resents that
c) whether because of that he’s more immature than his peers and needs his parents more than they do
d) whether his losing them by moving away to college has made him conflicted over his own resentment, as resentment could threaten any unmet need for love
e) whether as a consequence he has impersonated their negative traits, turning his resentment toward them against himself
f) whether this process keeps them in an imaginary place so he never loses their company
g) whether like any teenager he’s embarrassed by needing them, and wishes to be independent, so he preserves an appearance of independence by keeping them internal and imaginary through self-talk
The conflicts described here, while theoretical, explain a lot.
The ambivalence noted in (d) explains why depressed young adults give dull descriptions of their parents. If you’ve been freshly kicked out the nest, resentment is risky. There is the fear that if you complain, you are kicked further.
Regarding (g), consider that in the teenage years, dependency on a mother is embarrassing. You can see this in the awkward behavior of middle schoolers when their parents pick them up from school. Take this a step further and it’s not surprising a college student would miss his mother and also be embarrassed by missing her.
These theoretical conflicts also explain why a depressed person is blind to his parent’s flaws and has nothing but bland things to say about them. If he is to impersonate her internally, of course he must be blind. As with any magic trick, there must be some misdirection for the illusion to work. The mother becomes a blind spot in the child’s own awareness as she is introjected and internalized. The human eyeball has a scotoma, a shadow area or blind spot where it is impossible to see. So, too, is the human psyche blind to its own introjects. When it engages in self-talk, it conceals the real origins of that self-talk. The mother is scotomized— hidden— in the very process of being taken in.
Reverse hallucination is another term describing this process. Like scotomization, a term Rene Laforgue borrowed from ocular pathology in 1928, the term reverse hallucination was borrowed from French neurology in 1884 by Hippolyte Bernheim. Some of Bernheim’s hypnotized patients could be induced to ignore what was in front of them. Unlike a hallucination which pretends that what is unreal is real, a reverse hallucination pretends that what is real, isn’t. For our purposes here, the term is useful, for it describes how self-talk originates outside the psyche. It explains why depressed young adults are indifferent to their parents, pretending to neither need, nor resent them. It also explains why self-talk is associated with a withdrawal from the world. For, self-talk is a reverse hallucination: it is an unreal substitute for the outside world. Finally, and most importantly, it explains— rather elegantly I think— why hallucinations heal depressive self-talk. The undoing of a reverse hallucination is a hallucination.
A bad trip turns cruel self-talk into something external: it takes inner turmoil, and turns it into fearful experience. All of a sudden, a person isn’t critiquing themselves but is merely afraid of critique. A bad trip transforms self-talk and selfcritique into hallucinations, and in so doing it restores a person to sanity. Depression— the equivalent of an ingrown toenail— is cured as it is pointed outwards, and externalized. This helps to restore a more accurate and compassionate view of the self. In depression, ordinary perception is intact, but a person’s self-perception is seriously flawed. They tell themselves over and over again how bad they are. They are trapped in subjectivity, as if lost in a hall of mirrors in a carnival maze. “I’m a screw up… my life is a failure…” Such depressive cognitions aren’t crazy in the way schizophrenia is perceptually crazy. But they are crazy in a subtler sense: crazy in what is not perceived, in what is missed, in what is emotionally denied.
To be kind to yourself, to really love yourself, you have to see yourself accurately. And ironically when we are alone we cannot see ourselves. We’re too close to ourselves. Especially when we are alone. When you watch a movie in a theater, you see the movie, but you don’t see the projector. Likewise any eyeball can see but cannot see itself. So too, with the human soul. We see ourselves best through the eyes of another. In the sci-film by J.J. Abrams Super 8, a boy’s mother had died in a factory accident. Reminiscing of her, he describes how it felt to be seen by her: “She used to look at me this way… like really look, and I just knew I was there, that I existed.” We paradoxically have to get far enough away from ourselves in order to see ourselves. To see ourselves accurately, we must must leave ourselves, and even leave our own minds. Because again, we are too close to ourselves to see ourselves. This is even more true of the lonely and depressed person, who enters into their own blind spot.
“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift.” — Alduous Huxley
But surely this is all nonsense. It sounds like an impossibility. Or like psychotic jibberish. It sounds like going out of one’s mind. And the ordinary phrase— going out of one’s mind— really is in fact an excellent description. To go out of one’s mind does have the connotation of going crazy, but there is a more common, everyday way in which we leave our minds. It is when we see ourselves through the eyes of another person. In relationship the eyes of another are a kind of looking-glass in which we can see ourselves. Through the minds of others, we see ourselves in the third person. It is not unlike having a vision.
This is not a sober or scientific form of thought. That is why sober minded scientists are always forgetting, and having to remember, the bias they introduce in their experiments. They are lonely observers and cannot see themselves. As with depression, the scientific method relies on placing the observer— i.e. the self — into a massive blind spot. A scientist must pretend he or she doesn’t exist, otherwise they will spoil the data. But to really see oneself, takes not science but imagination. We have to use imagination in order to see what is there. That is why D.W. Winnicott, a renowned British child psychoanalyst said, “Imagination is necessary for a full appreciation of reality.”
Depressed people make themselves invisible like a scientist does. The depressed are known to be hyper-analytical, using Reason, but not Imagination, to see themselves. They restrict themselves to a strict first- person point of view: me, myself, I. “I’m unlovable.” They will not go out of their minds to see themselves from the outside, to see themselves in the third-person. They have withdrawn from their parents, and from friends, and they can no longer see themselves, much less love themselves.
There is a question I ask nearly every depressed patient I see: “Let’s say you had a friend with this same depression problem. What would you tell them?” The answer is invariably “I’d tell them to go easy on themselves.” To which I respond “Can you say that to yourself right now?” This will sometimes cause tears, or releases of emotion, because I have given them permission to see themselves. They had lost themselves in subjectivity, and even a mild acknowledgement of their suffering helps them find themselves.
Nearly all psychedelics— from ketamine to psilocybin— help achieve this 3rd person effect. Some of my patients have told me that ketamine gave them a vision of themselves as a precious little child, as an innocent child, deserving of kindness.
I have, for many years, been fascinated by this effect. What fascinates me is that it appears also to be a feature of psychosis. Regarding yourself in the 3rd person, is a well known and enduring feature of schizophrenia. The Schneiderian rule in the diagnosis of schizophrenia holds that an auditory hallucination is specific to schizophrenia when it occurs as a running commentary of voices talking about the person. The voices talk among themselves about the patient who is in the 3rd person. We see the same 3rd person effect in other forms of psychosis too, such as deliurium: altruistic hallucinations are sometimes seen in postoperative delirium, or fever. These were first described by Charles Féré, a contemporary of Charcot. Dr. Féré first coined the term, altruistic hallucination which described: “A young man having a typhoid fever, [who] being awake… repeats ‘give him something to drink, he is very thirsty, he is not comfortable in his bed…’ ” Such a man is admittedly out of his mind, and yet, he perceives himself and is kind to himself.
Psychedelics are known to increase empathy both for oneself and for others. The effect appears to be intrinsic to psychosis, and to all psychedelics. To be empathic, one must go out of one’s mind and enter the mind of another. And so again, in this one special sense hallucinations restore a depressed person to reality.
Sober, analytical thinking by contrast not only isn’t beneficial but may actually worsen depression. In a landmark paper in 1990, the psychologist and researcher Lauren Alloy took issue with the prevailing idea that depressed people need to be reasoned with, and to be reasoned out of their depression. Dr. Aaron Beck, the father of cognitive therapy, had parted ways with the Freudians to found his own school of psychotherapy and focus on identifying distortions in thought patterns, and then rationally correct them. Dr. Lauren Alloy, however, discovered that a depressed person’s perceptions were surprisingly more literal and accurate than a happy person’s. She found that happy people aren’t necessarily accurate, but show a self-serving bias or “succumb to optimistic biases and illusions.” In other words happy people cut themselves slack. In her landmark paper Lauren Alloy remarked that Goethe the German poet seemed to understand this when he wrote, “To measure up to all that is demanded of him, a man must overestimate his capacities.”
I am not saying to be happy is to be crazy. But it appears that to be truly happy, is not to be exactly sane, either. In fact being thoroughly sober and rational may work against happiness. As G.K. Chesterton said “A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.” The depressed person isn’t unreasonable in what he despises in himself. He finds real things to hate. His self-hatred is eminently based on reason. He hasn’t lost his reason, any more than an anti-natalist has lost his reason: I am referring to those who say that bringing any child into the world is an act of cruelty. These persons aren’t unreasonable. But that is their problem. Like the madman, they’ve lost everything but their reason.
Are you a lovable person?
It’s not exactly a rational, scientific question. What experiment would you run to test such a question? To answer it, most draw from childhood experience. But a child starved for love by self-absorbed parents won’t have experience to draw from. On what does he rely to answer the question? He cannot rely on thinking alone. Can he reason his way into a discovery that life is worth living?
As Dr. Lauren Alloy has shown, he must rely on self-serving biases. To love oneself is to go beyond the limits of reason. I am not trying to sound mystical or shamanistic. There is really nothing exotic, or woo woo about this. It is found in everyday interactions if you know where to look. E.g. “You brought the good weather” is a common way of welcoming a visitor. Many of us have said it. And yet it implies that a person has the meteorological influence of a pagan deity. Take another example. A patient with unremitting back pain complains to his doctor. “Woah. I’m sorry,” says the doctor. “It’s okay,” says the patient. It’s a common interaction, but when you think about it it really makes no sense. It make no sense at all unless the doctor a) is somehow responsible for everyone’s pain, or b) is omnipotent, capable of healing every boo-boo in the world.
Normal, happy thinking is slightly unhinged. It exceeds the limits of what can be rationally known, at least in the value it places on human life.
Even as rational a scientist as Charles Darwin realized something like this, when he realized that science cannot exactly justify itself. And that science is a sort of grandiose exercise: “But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the [scientific] convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value, or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” Left to its own devices, sober, rational thought begins to gnaw on itself. Reason turns on itself when nothing exists beyond it, to provide support. And the self esteem of children and young adults is just like that. “My life is worth living” is not a rational statement. It is a common, everyday sentiment. But it is not a product of reasoning.
Depressed people retreat into themselves, cocooning themselves in their own minds, and like hermit crabs, try to be mentally self-reliant. But they only turn their intellect against itself. “Am I lovable?” isn’t a question the intellect can answer on its own steam.
It cannot, unless it goes beyond itself. Love, for example, goes well beyond what the sober intellect can prove. Does that mean love is crazy? Perhaps. Love may not be reasonable, but it is not unreasonable either. We may speak of love the way faith was spoken of in the middle ages. In the 13th century St. Thomas Aquinas’s core preoccupation was to show how faith does not oppose the intellect, but serves as a kind of scaffolding for it. The church in Paris had forbidden the reading of Aristotle, but Aquinas read Aristotle anyway, and proved that because of church teaching, he understood old Aristotle better than Aristotle even understood himself. On the view of Aquinas, reason does the best it can, follows its own trajectory, and then hits a wall. Faith picks up where Reason left off, carries that same trajectory but goes way further. Faith is an extrapolation of Reason. It takes philosophy a lot further than it can go on its own.
Psychedelic experiences have a lot in common with Aquinas’s point of view. Ketamine visions don’t contradict Reason, but happily enhance it. Psilocybin hallucinations don’t violate Reason, but supplement it. Many people report psychedelic experiences to be meaningful, and yet indescribable. They are quite sure the experience had meaning, but the meaning is ineffable: it cannot be expressed in words. For example, a young woman and close friend of mine was abandoned at a bus stop as a baby. Although she was adopted into a wonderful family in Colorado, in her twenties she was haunted by the question “why would my mom do that?” She did attempt to find her birth mother in Thailand— but without success. The question “Am I lovable?” continued to haunt her until she decided to take a large dose of psilocybin. After hallucinating, it was dusk in Hawaii and she walked by a large monkeypod tree. The tree was full of starling birds, squawking loudly. She was struck by a powerful intuition that the starling birds knew something she didn’t know. Perhaps about her mother, perhaps about her adoption story. She couldn’t tell. The squawking was unintelligible, and yet like a foreign language it sounded to her internally meaningful, and consistent. This is a wonderful example of the everyday mysticism of psychedelics. The whole world is pervaded with meaning, but no sober mind will detect it.
Psychedelics are known to cause a ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon. The German psychologist Heinrich Klüver wrote a treatise on hallucinations in 1928 and in it he described the effects of mescaline. A typical effect of mescaline is the presque vu or ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon where meaning is sensed, but not fully understood. It’s location is extracampine: always outside the visual field. Just beyond the mind’s grasp. Presque vu is French for ‘almost seen.’ Many people who use psilocybin have reported almost understanding something incredibly profound, but without an ability to say exactly what it is.
Is this all just foolish mysticism? Surely the feeling of profundity is not the same thing as real profundity.
The requirement of a proof is itself a refusal to love oneself and others. It often stems from a phony, intellectual self-reliance, and an ambivalence towards one’s parents. To love yourself unconditionally— to answer the question, “am I lovable?” does not require a proof. We aren’t fully capable of understanding if and how our life is worth living. The attempt to understand creates a fragile self esteem that tends towards casting itself rigidly in fixed phony roles, like self-righteous hero or villain. The despair of depression is one such phony version of self. But again: to require yourself a proof of whether you are lovable, is to doom yourself. It is to starve yourself of love. It is unique to the human experience to love first, and understand later. “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” —Isaiah 7:9.
Mysticism, as it turns out, isn’t odd or eccentric, but quite practical. Nor does it require the use of any drugs, although psychedelics are a useful tool. All that is required is to stop being afraid of being crazy. And to admit you need love, like crazy. To stop living in a mental cocoon.
Again, after a difficult childhood, any young man may wonder, “Am I lovable?” How can he answer the question?
In Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, the character Alyosha tells his older brother Ivan: “I think every one should love life, above everything in the world… love it, regardless of logic… it’s only then one will understand the meaning of it.” To be happy and love yourself requires stepping outside your mind, even going out of your mind, so to speak. Going past the limits of Reason.
This sort of things bothers many people, however. Let us call them rationalists. These hyper-rational people refuse to accommodate a crazy love for themselves or a crazy love for life itself, if that love goes well beyond what they can understand. Not only does religious mysticism bother them, but even nonsense verse makes them uncomfortable. “And the dish ran away with the spoon” was enjoyable in the early days of their childhood. But they’re all grown up now, and have lost any taste for nonsense. “Fantasy is a rational, not an irrational activity.” The statement from J.R.R. Tolkien may likewise bother them. If they identify with science and with scientific progress, they may dislike folk medicine. If they are atheists, they may scoff at the fact that people all over the world use poetic, inaccurate language to describe God. But if they are conservative Christians, they may scoff at psychedelics and be wary of them. “Not going to lose my powers of Reason.” This sort of Christian is leery that even a micro-dose could permanently alter his mind. He is less familiar with the mystical side of his faith, e.g. the lives of St. Anthony, or of St. Francis the Jongleur de Dieu having visions in his cave and living as a Holy Fool.
As I have described, there are many types of rationalists. There is the religious rationalist. And there is the irreligious rationalist. But the two are closer than it seems. The atheist takes obvious precaution not to go beyond reason, but do not let the religious rationalist fool you. He may have what he calls a faith in God, but it is a faith in his own theories about God. But: “Let your religion be less of a theory… and more of a love affair.” —G.K. Chesterton. Such a statement bothers the religious rationalist. He is not unlike the rationalist atheist in several key ways: The two of them a) distrust the irrational part of the soul, b) are very wary of psychedelics, and c) are preoccupied with being deceived. The atheist is wary of psilocybin giving a false sense of profundity. The hyper rational Christian is worried mushrooms opens himself up to demons. But both of them, at bottom, are full of the same fear. They cling too tightly to sanity and therefore have trouble getting outside themselves. To protect themselves they wear a mental straitjacket, not because they’re crazy, but because they’re afraid of going crazy.
To fear the Lord is the fullness of wisdom; she inebriates mortals with her fruits.” —Sirach 1:16.
In this verse, the Old Testament describes the fear of God as an intoxicant. This is interesting, because it is possible to interpret all rationalism as a kind of self-trust that is a substitute for the fear of a higher power. Like depression, rationalism is a withdrawal from the world and a withdrawal from ever putting one’s mind on the shelf and trusting something else. Self-talk, as I have said, is both selfreferential and a form of navel gazing, and the effect of a psychedelic is to re-introduce a person to the world. If you’re a depressed atheist or a depressed Jew, it doesn’t really matter. Rediscovering the world will always inspire something like a fear of a higher power: both a fear and a reverence. But the depressed person “defiles every flower by refusing to live for its its sake.” —G.K. Chesterton.
One of the most popular unhappy characters in literature is Ebenezer Scrooge. He is described by Charles Dickens as a hermit, and as a compulsive doubter. When a ghost confronts him, he disbelieves in the ghost. Naturally, the ghost asks him why he would doubt his senses.
He replies “Because a little thing affects them… you [the ghost] may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” Scrooge comforts himself in the way a depressed person comforts himself. He takes whatever he’s worried about, and makes it subjective and therefore imaginary. Scrooge is deficient in trusting people (particularly the poor) and so his skepticism is psychologically hypocritical. For, behind his refusal to believe, is a refusal to love. But like a psychedelic experience, the ghost is persistent and breaks down Scrooge’s smokescreen of subjectivity.
Such skepticism can be inauthentic, a phony defense mechanism against love, and against belief. In Scrooge’s case it defiles not only the poor, but it “defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake.” When we were children, many of us remember feeling in awe of our mother, of trees, of plants, and of flowers. For this awe there is the word veneration. To venerate comes from ‘Venus’ and it means to both revere and love. The Romans— and the Catholic Church— were right to consider it a quasi-religious feeling. You can venerate a flower, or you can venerate your father. But our society has become so jaded, so skeptical and secular, that people are now embarrassed to venerate anything. But we do see now, in psychedelic culture, a reemergence of the veneration of nature, and of the genders for one another (e.g. ‘divine masculine and feminine’), and I find it interesting how quickly people poke fun at this sort of thing.
And yet, we also have trouble venerating ourselves. Fewer people today are even sure life is sacred and worth living at all.
If you can revere a flower again, as you did as a child, who knows where it will take you if you allow it? Could it make you want to have a cry? To repair your relationship with your father? Could it lead you to all sorts of embarrassing beliefs?
Or to the tomfoolery and debauchery of Burning Man? Some are indeed afraid it will take them there, although that is unlikely. But when I observe that strange festival in the desert, it seems to me an obvious overreaction for our skepticism and our secular incapacity for belief.
This sort of thing was suggested by research in a 2023 study at Johns Hopkins University. Roland Griffiths and colleagues found that belief in a higher power shifts dramatically after psychedelic use— from 29% to 59%. The changes did not seem to depend on ongoing use of the drug.
Skeptics will of course say that if a change like that is induced by a mind-altering drug then it’s obviously not rational. It isn’t surprising they say that… the gatekeeping of what is considered ‘rational’ is a popular pastime for rationalists. E.g. was Beethoven rational? Is falling in love rational? Is kneeling before an altar rational? Are fairy-tales rational? Is monogamy rational? Is the moral condemnation of theft rational? A rationalist cannot be too careful to avoid things that aren’t rational. Perhaps we should take a detour, to see what is even meant by the word ‘rational.’
If we define it as having a preference for what is real, we already encounter problems: reality is weird. Like a hallucination, reality is wild, and weird. There are lightning storms, and kangaroos. Reality is a dizzying variety of things you couldn’t dream up.
What if we define rationality as meaningful? The problem is that reality is full of mysteries, barely intelligible to humans. Reality can be almost indescribable, like a psychedelic trip is, and yet we still are left with a dim sense that it is meaningful. Unintelligibility can still mean something, even if we are not privy to what it is. That is the whole point of the science of algebra. I have no idea what an oogabooga is, but I know for certain an oogabooga is an oogabooga. And I know for certain that just as we can solve for ‘x’ without knowing what ‘x’ is, we can talk about an oogabooga or solve for oogabooga without knowing the darnedest about the thing. There is probably something of the divine mystery of Arabian theology in the idea of algebra… but for our purposes here I only wish to point out how practical — and yet mystical— a science it is. As Lewis Carroll showed, logic quite happily and quite perfectly exists in wonderland. Alice politely asks a grinning Cheshire Cat “which way I ought to go from here?” The wise cat replies that if she isn’t clear where she is going, it doesn’t much matter where she goes. In the same way no one can say a hallucination isn’t rational unless he knows why it is there.
And with the question “is life, with all its suffering, worth living?” we are somewhat in the position of Alice. We may want to know, and we may wonder. But we aren’t in any position at all to demand a rational explanation. It was this sort of rationalism Carl Jung was aiming at when he said, “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”
The rationalist’s need to explain is so compulsive that he begins to refuse to even look at questions that are difficult to explain. He limits his vision of the world. He becomes like the proverbial man who is trying to find his keys under a streetlamp, and is asked why he does not look in the shadows? His response is that “the light’s better here.” A lot of people are like that; they’re not fond of psychedelics, religion, or soft sciences, and they only accept the hard sciences. But in this preference he forget his original purpose wasn’t to see but to find. For him, to mistake something else for his keys is worse than missing them altogether. To a man like that the world is no longer a big, wild, wonderful place, but something more like a warehouse under fluorescent lights. As Hamlet remarked “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” Like the depressive, who engineers his own social life in the privacy of his own mind, this sort of man pulls the world into his own drab subjectivity. He wears a mental straitjacket— not because he’s crazy but because he’s too afraid of going crazy.
The epistemology of psychedelics— i.e. their relationship to truth— is the exact opposite. It is ironic how many people believe psychedelics are deceptive when one of their main functions is to take away the crippling fear of being deceived. Psychedelics remove this fear and replace it with a happy curiosity. They seem to make people crave the whole truth, even if that means having a blurry vision of it. That is why Humphrey Osmond in describing LSD’s effects said “these are not escapes from but enlargements, burgeonings of reality.”
But the skeptic still isn’t ready for all that. Like the hermit crab, he prefers the certainty of his own shell. He prefers what he can know for certain. Whatever may catch him off guard, he will regard as a fraud. In his fervor to disprove God or disprove psychedelic experience as a lie, he is at risk of making everything a lie. He ends up like René Descartes in solipsism, in the absence of objective truth. He has taken asylum within himself, in the safe shelter of skepticism. His mind is an asylum, and it does not occur to him to break out of the asylum. He thinks that thinking and analyzing protect him from mental illness, but: “I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.”— Fyodor Dostoevsky.
So far, we have discussed how psychedelics ease the fear of deception, and can allow a wounded or neglected person to rediscover their capacity for reverence and faith. But this only addresses deception that comes from outside the self.
But deception may also be self-imposed. “My life is worthless” is not only a conclusion of thought. It’s also a betrayal of what was previously known to be true. Every child knows their life is sacred. To become depressed, one must tell a lie to this inner child.
So: I will now address the topic of dishonesty with oneself.
The intellectual or skeptical man may fear LSD for its deceptive properties, but this is an incredible irony, because it is well known that LSD is a drug which produces extraordinary honesty. It may cause a hallucination, which means that it makes a man unclear of what is outside him. However, it also makes very clear what is inside of him.
LSD is very well known for its truth serum properties. In the 1950s LSD was investigated by the CIA for its utility in extracting classified information from spies. It has long been recognized that while it may distort the senses, it reveals what is in the psyche. It may make your senses play tricks on you, but it makes you unable to play tricks on yourself. In fact it engenders in people a most refreshing form of honesty. To hallucinate is, ipso facto, to be honest: it is the spilling outward of your internal world. You may be embarrassed, you may also see what is not there, and you may say inappropriate things. But one thing is certain. You can no longer pretend something isn’t real because you have submerged it within yourself.
Psychedelics make a person very honest because they release emotion, and emotion is hard to hide because it is physical. But there is another reason psychedelics engender honesty, and that is that emotions are intoxicating, and when you are intoxicated by emotion it is difficult to conceal, much less suppress anything.
Many people in the world pretend not to have emotions. But with a psychedelic, emotions really cannot be kept secret. People cry spontaneously while tripping. But if emotions are kept secret by sobriety, they are kept hidden behind a veil of hypocrisy. But once they are release into the environment, there are visible. They can be falsified, tested, doubted, and sized up. This exposure— ironically— affords them an opportunity to be falsified and corrected. For example, a depressed young man with hyper-ambitious and hypercritical parents may have a bad trip where he feels watched, jeered at, and mocked. But this uncomfortable experience may heal him because it may ironically reveal to him his emotions are silly. They aren’t relevant. Even a smile from a friend is enough to set this man straight and settle his fears. Again, if a depressed young woman had unrealistic ambition, thinking “I could have been a famous dancer by now… I’m a might have been,” a bad trip experience in which she feels he is dying, or going crazy, may re-educate her out of her self-hatred and warped idealism. “I’m just glad to exist, and be alive.” But as long as her emotions are kept inside, they are kept hidden. Ironically emotions remain active and unchecked when concealed internally. By hiding her feelings, she never adjusts. She remains forever a disappointed superstar.
The absence of mental privacy is one of the core features of psychosis. In schizophrenia, a person has trouble distinguishing their inner world from the outer world. A thought can be thunk, but it can also be heard. It can be sensed as if it came from outside. This is also what happens temporarily while on psychedelics: whatever is in the mind is perceived as if it were outside the mind. And this is why LSD makes dishonesty impossible. This is also the reason psychedelics make many people nervous. They do frighten people, but a brief loss of sanity isn’t the full explanation why people fear them. After all, when we sleep, we temporarily lose our sanity every night by dreaming. But no one is afraid of that. But, to lose subjectivity itself, such that no secret can be hidden within yourself: this is a different fear entirely. It is a fear of total exposure, and of the relinquishing of all secrets.
In 1957, Dr. Humphrey Osmond chose the name psychedelic precisely to reflect this. ‘Delos’ in Greek means ‘to show, to make plain.’ The term psyche- delic means a drug by which you are exposed.
And we have again reached a strange irony: a drug which simulates insanity also offers a sober and honest view of oneself.
In this special sense, psychedelics should not be called intoxicants at all. By exposing what is false, or phony within the psyche, these drugs actually promote sober thinking about oneself. This really isn’t as paradoxical as one might expect. To be drunk on alcohol is one thing. Countless sober people, however, are very much drunk on themselves. The entire genre of corporate self-improvement books are an example of this self-drunkenness. Perhaps that’s a bit harsh, but many people are stone cold sober, and yet, wildly intoxicated by ideas of their own superiority, by visions of money, by insane social presumption, by what St. Augustine called the libido dominandi: a deranged ambition. It is a far worse intoxication than any drug… far more unnatural, far more damaging. The prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament, spoke of those “drunk… but not with wine,” that is, the sort of people intoxicated by phoniness, and by presumption.
This describes the phoniness of the selfish person. But in the case of clinical depression we have phoniness of another kind.
The clinically depressed speak literally, and despairingly, but internally they hide how they truly feel. As I have remarked above, the depressed young adult is a jumble of emotion: he misses his parents, but is embarrassed of this, and so pretends not to, and he also profoundly resents his parents, but he pretends not too. He retreats into himself, to keep himself company and play out his conflict internally. He criticizes himself mercilessly and cocoons himself from the world. His true emotions are kept hidden, even to himself. He tries to appear rational and sane but he is not. He’s not psychotic. But neither is he sane.
With a bad trip on a psychedelic however, there is no more pretending. He must confront himself. He regains sanity when his pain is exposed and the real story comes out. One man who posted on Reddit about overcoming depression with a bad psychedelic trip, said: “My bad trip gave me a sudden and unpleasant realization of what a phony I was. And how much I wanted people to like, love and accept me. I kept thinking, ‘I’m so plastic, man.’ ”
Depressed people are believed to be sad, but depression is technically not a sadness, but a defense against a sadness. Numb is a better word. The depressed are in fact hesitant to express any emotion that would expose their conflict or reveal their situation.
Emotions expose and intoxicate. To yield to an emotion is to be ‘moved’. It is to agree to be acted upon. It is to yield to a force that visibly moves the soul, disrupting its self-sufficiency. It is not unlike yielding to the effects of a psychedelic. A depressed person who takes ayahuasca may lose his powers of reason for a time, but gains knowledge of himself and begins reacting properly to his loneliness. He may be flooded with compassion for himself and he may arrive at a newfound awareness he is punishing himself for his parent’s failings.
Emotion is often associated with insanity, but it is in fact an ingredient in sanity. Emotions are reactions to an experience just as the patellar reflex is a reaction. You can have an overreaction, but by the same principle you can have an underreaction. It is not sane to be calm when a man sleeps with your wife. It is not sane to be indifferent towards your father. He is your flesh and blood! It is not sane to be calloused towards your own childhood. It is you. It is your own story. Long ago, St. Augustine of Hippo critiqued the Stoic idea that emotions are deceptive, cloud the reason and predispose us to insanity. St. Augustine instead argued that if we are “carried beyond ourselves” it is for our natural wellbeing to be carried away temporarily, and “we must further make the admission, that even when these affections are well regulated… we yield to them against our will.”
Not only does emotion not promote insanity, it prevents it: “Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.” —G.K. Chesterton
That a mild intoxication is a way to ward off insanity is surely a strange paradox. But emotions are paradoxical. We associate them with insanity. But they promote insanity only when they are mercilessly suppressed. There is perhaps no escaping them, and as old Aristotle said, “There is no genius without a grain of madness.” And by madness, he surely meant the sort of temporary madness of which we speak. He also believed fear heals the psyche. In his Poetics Aristotle claimed that Greek tragedy— by inspiring pity and fear— cleansed the soul. A man truthful to himself and others has a clean soul. He is like an open book. He is not worried by the fact that emotions always tell the truth. A Jack Russell Terrier is, like all dogs, honest, and does not hesitate to express himself.
He may irrationally bark at the mailman, but he never lies.
He is rooted in his five senses, not in his mind, not in ideas. The five senses cannot lie, but only react. And as such, considered in themselves they are practically infallible. Your eyes and ears are faithful reporters and “sensation is always true of its proper object.” — Aristotle. And emotion, of course, is a kind of sense. That is why we call it a reaction. As such an emotion—as a physical response— cannot be false. You cannot have a false emotion any more than you can have a false heartbeat or a false brainwave.
But deception is spiritual. It originates not in the body, but in the soul. Illusion isn’t in the senses, but in the cortex. Misinterpretation isn’t in behavior, but in the mind. This is one of the reasons Aristotle argued that the intellect is immaterial and non-physical. His argument rested on the fact that physical objects cannot be true or false. But ideas can be true or false. Therefore an idea is not a physical object.
An idea can be utterly false, in a way that no emotion can be. But things get interesting when we assess the falsity of a hallucination.
A hallucination can be false, but it cannot be false in the way an idea is false. Because a) a hallucination is a representation of an old sense impression, whether visual or auditory, and although it is regurgitated back outside the self, it retains a connection to sense experience. And because b) as a hallucination is a projection or regurgitation from inside the self, it had been submerged in the cauldron of memory, tinged by the emotion that lies within, and therefore it is connected to real experience just as all emotion and their associated memories were a reaction to real experience.
This is why psychedelics bring a primitive, animalistic honesty out of people. Both emotion and its psychotic expression are always about something real, even if we are wrong about what it is. All psychedelic experience and perhaps especially a bad experience, leaves a person groping their way blindly like a mole, an animal that lacks functioning eyes. It leads them backwards, groping like Theseus in a labyrinth, towards an understanding of a forgotten difficult experience. Where memory of childhood is blank, or fails, emotion— often stored in implicit, rather than explicit memory— provides clues to heal old wounds. Just as animals are more honest than humans, so too are the emotions connected to a bad trip.
Emotions can be put where they belong and the past can be sorted out from the present. Fears and judgments can be sorted out in this way only if they are projected outwardly and psychotically. For, when emotions are hidden within us they cannot be falsified. The easiest way to falsify an emotion — or to discover its irrelevance to the current situation— is to express it and see if it makes sense of the current environment.
For instance, a depressed young adult says they are very disappointed in themselves. And that they aren’t critical of their family or of anything in their environment. But, while smoking DMT and having a very bad trip, they see entities jeering at them. E.g. jester spirits staring at them with grinning faces. Dr. Seuss described the unpleasant nature of being stared at in his HEJJI cartoon: “the seven wombats… not physically violent, they simply stare, stare, stare… until at last their victim goes stark-staring mad!!” We can sympathize with the depressed young man seeing entities jeer at him, but we can also understand that behind this horror lies a worse horror, and that is not being seen at all. To be given any attention, even bad attention, is better than being ignored. And so a stressful psychedelic trip can lay the groundwork for his self-awareness of his need to be seen and loved. A fearful and unpleasant experience may help him more directly and faster than anything else, and the reason is simple. His self-hatred was a substitute for external attention, whether good attention or bad attention. A hallucinatory experience— with the hostility of grinning faces— can lead to an emotional honesty about his loneliness and his desire to be seen. Ironically, it can also open up an opportunity for his distorted self perception to be corrected. So long as “I am a disappointment” is kept internally rattling around in his own mind, it is believed. But if it takes on a horrifying external form, he may begin to disagree with it.
The depressed person cannot see themselves in the third person, and thus cannot love themselves, as I have noted a couple items in this article. They’re too close to themselves. They’re trapped in first personhood. They are an omniscient observer of everything but themselves. Their harsh critical self-talk is sort a god complex. Like Santa Claus it “sees you when you’re sleeping” and like a parent it “knows if you’ve been bad or good.” There is a grandiosity to it.
A depressed person has to be just grandiose enough, to belittle himself. He is a gigantic disappointment to himself. He could have been oh so very great. If only A, B, C. That depression requires an inverted pride is a paradox and perhaps an absurdity. But in a human way, it is profoundly true.
The self-seriousness of a depressed person is hard to crack. But a hallucination of jester spirits with grinning faces is enough to start the process. A hallucination of grinning faces is enough to silence the self-seriousness of the internal critic. This sort of bad trip is, in fact, a visual representation of the internal critic. It has been projected out, and it now takes the form of a sense perception. Ironically by externalizing the critic and for once being afraid of it, the depressed young man is free to decide that he doesn’t want it anymore.
And though his perception is distorted for a short time, his vision of himself is never clearer.
Post script: Dr. Cook does not recommend the use of any federally illegal drug.