He is not too long removed from the psychotic break he incurred from an ayahuasca ceremony, but he seems steady and grounded.
#Psychotic break stories series#
I don’t want to fortify the old-school fear narratives, or scare off people who need help with my one “bad trip” story.Īs a series of synchronicities stack up, I find myself sitting down with Shane six weeks later. It felt bold and honest, and disconcerting.Īs a psychedelic advocate, and someone who has personally found healing through those substances, I have a hard time talking about my own psychotic episode. It was not what I was expecting to hear in the opening minutes of a film I’d heard about through channels which preach the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. So I did all of them.” He chuckles, and then adds off-handedly: “I just got out of a psych ward.” “I wanted to prove that psychedelics are not as scary as they seem. The film opens with Shane on stage, offering an audience the shortest version of the story.
#Psychotic break stories movie#
The movie was Shane Mauss’ “Psychonautics ,” informatively subtitled “ A Comic’s Exploration of Psychedelics.” Two years later, that tingle ran up my spine during a documentary screening in Hollywood. But every now and then that feeling, that creeping, surreal, terrified feeling would sneak up on me, and I would be thrust full-force back into paranoia. The memory of that night faded in my memory. I shrugged off the weirdness, and decided to take a break from psychedelics. And I awoke to a world that would never look quite the same to me.Įventually, I regained my grounding. I grew convinced that I was in for a life of pills, white walls, guarded elevators, and double-paned windows. She turned to stone, and vaporized before my eyes. I tried to confide in my girlfriend, but the frightened expression on her face only ushered in more paranoia, fear, anxiety. One thing was certain - there was no returning to whatever game it was I called reality. The world around me dissolved into darkness. I heard it said once that most who seek God will cower in Her presence. One cold night in Tennessee, thanks to a heroic dose of very potent mushrooms, I got what I wished for. I wanted to come face to face with the divine. I spent several years exploring the depths of my consciousness through psychedelics, always wading above the water, belly-up, pulled by the current, fancying myself a member of the former group - a mystic.
You never know which you are until you’ve swam out past the breakers, out of your depth, with no floor beneath your feet. We accept as fact that some are mystics, some are psychotics. Joseph Campbell said it first, and today it echoes in conversations about psychonauts who went too far. T his aphorism has become almost a cliche in the psychedelic community.
“ The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
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