Sure. But I’m happy to run Lilly’s ideas past any randomly selected panel and ask whether they think it came from a person of right mind or not. Clinicians involve themselves when a person is suffering because of their mental disconnect with the rest of the world. That’s definitional of mental illness. And, as such, we’ve had many debates over the years on these forums between the disconnect of the lay person’s understanding of “craziness” and the medical version, e.g.:
Most people consider you crazy if you say and believe things that are delusional, clinicians only call you that if it’s causing you harm.
You’re free to decide that the layperson’s definition isn’t meaningful. Personally, I think it’s the more reasonable version for this particular discussion because lots of people would prefer that their peers continue to think that they’re sane and, if they had reason to believe that might end, they’d consider the ramifications of continued use of hallucinogenic drugs more seriously.
Likewise, it might not be clinically relevant if your hair turned irreversibly purple because of some medicine that you’re taking. People would still prefer to know about that side effect before taking the pill.
Musk is talking about SSRIs, I’m talking about hallucinogens.
To give a better example, let’s agree that warfarin and heroin are wildly different drugs.
If I say that heroin will fuck up your life and Musk says that Warfarin will fuck up your life, we’re not basically saying the same thing. Sure, the end state that we’re talking about is the same, but that doesn’t mean that both statements are equally reasonable. Most research will show that warfarin is generally harmless and that heroin is generally harmful. One is genuinely likely to fuck you up and the other probably won’t.
Yes, Musk said that SSRIs will turn you into a zombie. That’s not the claim that I made about hallucinogens but, for the sake of argument, let’s say that I said the same thing. Why does what he said about SSRIs have any relevance to what I said about hallucinogens? Isn’t it more meaningful to use cited research as a measure of the reasonableness of statements than bizarre comparisons to things that Elon Musk said about other drugs?
And let’s say that there was some drug or procedure (e.g. a lobotomy) that really did turn you into a veritable “zombie” (a person living in a haze - not a person who tries to eat brains) and that this process was irreversible. Maybe you disagree that, that’s a form of death. I think we’d still both agree that it’s something that nearly everyone would rather avoid if they knew it was a plausible outcome.