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What happened to me? Severe symptoms after mushrooms persisting for over a year I've posted my story on threads before but the short version is that earlier in December 2020, I had a 5 gram dose of psilocybin mushrooms. I had an intense experience, beautiful and parts were traumatic towards the end. I came out of it fine, however, I believe somehow that trip ‘primed' my brain, because two months later an accidental micro dose of 0.1 grams was enough to trigger the onset. Approximately 5 to 6 hours after the micro dose, I experienced a seizure-like event which caused me to fall and lose consciousness. I do not remember the exact details following this, but recall having a severe panic/derealization sensation, causing me to alienate myself from those that I love thereafter. These symptoms continued to progress over the coming months into total insomnia lasting three months whereby I slept on average 1-2 hours during that entireperiod. Some of my symptoms include but are not limited to: - During first month: frequent urination and abnormal stools, extremely bad internal head tremors and pressure, body twitching, heart palpitations, loss of appetite, passing out on floor, total insomnia. - Severely altered perception both visually and sense of being within reality - Loss of balance and coordination from altered perception, often can’t balance my head up, laying down also feels really distorted. - Chronic insomnia and abnormal sleep, cannot feel sleepy. Insomnia lasting weeks with no sleep. - When I close my eyes, they feel wide open inside as though I can ‘see through’ my closed eye lids - Face feels very numb and transparent. - I lose all awareness of body, self and surroundings and boundaries with eyes closed - Severe head pressure and uncomfortable sensations - Internal head tremors. Head shakes because of this, ear on pillow I can hear everything much louder. - Burning sensations across head - Out of body experiences like dpdr, and eventually a total loss of default state - Constant oscillating high pitch tinnitus and static tinnitus - intense terror anxiety - Severe agitation from this severe disconnect and not being able to rest into the moment or rest my eyes anything. When my agitation gets really bad I have no control over my body, no regulation Several of my previous psychiatrists, including my current, have established that it is very unlikely I suffer from psychosis alone but that my condition may have overlap- while depersonalization-derealization disorder has been considered it does not capture many of the main aspects of my lived experience; HPPD is the diagnosis I’ve received from several psychiatrists jointly but still does not capture my unique case. Neurofeedback (Brain Therapy Centre, Kent Town) has also found persisting aberrant brain activity. Details of symptoms: I struggle to describe the current state I am living in, and much of the distress has been around crisis of authenticity where I feel like I am not believed. I will now try to describe my lived experience. I acknowledge that my descriptions may be difficult to parse and I’ve tried my best to convey my states of being in spite of their highly unusual nature. My reality is distorted with my eyes open and closed. With my eyes closed, I perceive a hyper dimensional void headspace, my face feels dissolved, and experience very psychedelic closed eye visuals etc. I don’t retain any memory or impression of my environment or my spatial placement and orientation within it. Is is not as though I'm staring straight into a screen in front of me but that there is nothing staring anymore, there is just void and no sense of where my eyes are looking from. This state is permanent and severely alters the way I perceive reality with my eyes open too. I have lost the ability to feel the default waking state with my eyes open. My reality is dissolved to the point I can no longer see anything I look at the way it would normally appear, it feels as though I can see reality but I’m not looking at it. I cannot rest my eyes on anything. I can’t feel that rested state when I close my eyes, my perception is such that it no longer feels like my awareness sits behind my face. I often struggle to balance my head or rest my eyes on anything. This is extremely physically uncomfortable. I cannot feel sleepy and cannot drift off to sleep when I close my eyes. There is no shift between my sleep or wake state. It feels like I’m stuck in-between states, disconnected from my default states and their cycles. These sensations are extremely physically uncomfortable, with tinnitus, compulsive blinking, head pressure and severe internal head tremors being constantly experienced. I have not fallen asleep normally for over a year. I lay there all night trapped in this void space with sometimes vivid visuals all around and ‘through’ me. I am awake for weeks and will have moments where I will slip into dream-like thinking. This was later revealed to be the way that I “sleep” during a sleep study. I am hardly able to function and I do not feel my current state is viable long-term. There is a fellow with the same experience that has reached out to me online, who describes his experiences the exact same as me. Their condition was was also triggered by a micro dose one month following a high dose mushroom journey and has persisted for a year with little change. Any thoughts? I attempted to end my life in January using a euthanasia drug but I was found roughly 20 hours later and ressusicated from a 5 day coma. My heart is too shattered, and it’s unbelievable that a whole year of daily exercise, sobriety, eating and focusing my all on my healing did nothing. I do not feel my current state is livable and I will not be here for much longer. It is my greatest hope that in continuing to share my story, at least one person will be spared from the trauma I’ve experienced. Sending hope and wishing safe journeys upon those who choose to take these trips

Hello guys, it's been a year since i had the same problem as you. Always exactly 1 year I took 150ug of LSD and had a terrible bad trip that traumatized me and left me sequels. I had flashbacks and I missed a lot because of it. Distorted visions in my peripheral field. All this was cured with antipsychotics, especially risperidone (I can not remember the dosage). But what it took to be cured was the emotional sequel that caused me. Psychedelic experiences transform you radically and unfortunately if you are not prepared for them it may take a long time for you to get back on track and I confess that I am not yet 100% healed of this trauma. But what I can say to you is that the worst of all this is not the visions, but the horrible thoughts that go through our heads thanks to the anxiety that causes us. And what I want to know about this post is just that. What are the thoughts that torment you because of this anxiety? Write them in the comments and we'll help each other by talking about them. For example, I used to think all the time that I was getting schizophrenic, that there would be some outbreak, over time this evolved into existential crises where I thought my soul was lost in space time and I was not living reality, just watching it (depersonalization and derealization helped in this).

So I did 1.75g of shrooms three days ago. Ever since streetlights have appeared brighter with visible halos as if the exposure setting was set too long on a camera. I can see color hues and brightness contrasts more starkly. Basically it looks like I'm at the beginning stages of tripping where everything looks more vivid... but I'm sober. I do remember things subtly changing a little bit after the last time I did LSD but it was a lot more subtle and I basically chalked it up to being able to appreciate colors and lights more after the trip. Now after shrooms it feels really apparent. Personally I'm enjoying it. Night time is hella beautiful and extremely calming. I don't know if this is permanent or completely unrelated to HPPD. I've done shrooms before and none of the visual symptoms ever carried over after the trip. I'm sorta alarmed but I don't have any of the visual snow or any other symptoms other than everything looks brighter and more vivid. Like J.J. Abrams made me a special pair of glasses. I'm also psychologically fine and I don't see anything in particular when I close my eyes. Did I just forget that streetlights at night are bright and make streaking halos or did my perception physically change? This is a good approximation of how I'm seeing things. albeit a little more colorfully vivid:

So I'm just trying to find some commonalities amongst all of us and determine what the main culprit in causing HPPD is(i.e. frequency, dosage, substance). So if you could just list the drugs you used up until HPPD and what substances you used after HPPD and how frequently, I'd appreciate it. Also, if you could state whether or not your HPPD was instantaneous after a particular experience or gradual.....I guess really I just want like as detailed of an account as your trying to give from the time you started using drugs up until this point. If you don't wanna read this entire thing(It's kinda long) just skip to the bottom. Story: {{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{So for me I smoked weed for about a year before my HPPD "hit" I had done ecstasy around 20-25 times, taken LSD about 5 times, shrooms once, cocaine twice, and pills every now and then(klonopin, xanax, vicodin) but not very often. The bulk of my ecstasy use was the summer before I got into LSD.......After all my ecstasy use I had a little HPPD, I would see trails on certain things and I had a little light sensitivity but nothing out of control. It really didn't bother me at all, everything just looked a little more vibrant and alive. So then sophomore year(when I started using LSD) of college I found a LSD hook up and started trippin. I tripped 3 times over like 1 1/2 months and felt completely fine. No anxiety or weird visuals and my weed highs were still normal. Then I took like a 2 week break and then tripped acid twice more within like 3 weeks of each other. After these two trips things started to go down hill. These last 2 acid trips I had were terrible. I was really paranoid and one of my friends was screwing with me the entire time and the experiences left me in some odd state of mind. Afterwards things started to look a little "acid-like" when I was sober but I still felt like everything was ok. However whenever I would smoke weed I started to clam up and have a lot of anxiety and couldn't really speak straight at all. So I decided to take a break on weed for Christmas break and when I tried to smoke once second semester started the problems were like 20 times worse. From here on out things gradually got worse and worse, I tried to continue smoking as I thought if I regained my tolerance weed would go back to normal. After a bit of this the weird delusional thoughts and anxiety started creeping into my sober life and I decided to stop smoking weed. But, I did decide to do DMT twice and LSD once in an attempt to have a good experience and maybe redirect where everything was heading. It didn't really help....it made the visuals slightly worse but overall was just a waste of time and money. So I decided to stop with all the psychedelics and was "sober" for about a month before I went to a 2 day rave. I took ecstasy both days thinking I could never have a bad experience with that but did and that weekend worsened my visuals quite a bit. So........about a month later I got hit with DP and that was about 7 months ago.....I've taken ecstasy twice since DP hit.....Once was terrible and once was actually enjoyable. I've been more or less sober since around August except for a few drinks from time to time. So yea that's my drug story.....all of that was within about a year and a half from the first time I smoked weed to the time I got DP.}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} I don't expect most people to of read all of that but mainly what I'm wanting is just to know what you believe the main culprit of your DP/DR/HPPD was. I think for me it was the two negative experiences I had on LSD. Those two experiences just set in a negative undertone to my subsequent drug use from that point forward. I feel like if I had kept the same frequency of drug usage but avoided those negative trips then I never would've developed anxiety that never would've led to DP and I don't believe my HPPD would've gotten as bad.