To those with experience with both psychedelics and meditation, have you noticed some commonality of effects between them? Have you experienced either open-eyed or closed-eyed synesthesia or more specifically, chromesthesia, with both? Have you experienced similar changes in your mood and ability to focus in the following days? Have you tried psychedelics & meditation together and if so, how was it?
Is there a reason why one would prefer to focus on mild stimuli like breathing/soft music? Are strong stimuli easier to focus on while mild stimuli train the brain to achieve greater focus? If so, wouldn’t that make strong stimuli fitting to introduce beginners to meditation since they usually have a tough time quieting their mental noise/chatter/monkeys and often give up because they don’t see any improvements?
Most of us can use an inside voice to think to ourselves or read and we recognize it as our own inside voice. Can people with schizophrenia recognize their own inside voice as their own? Can they see that some perceptions/cognitions/emotions pop out from their own mental chatter or do they perceive all of them as being from external stimuli?
Schizophrenics are often harassed by hostile voices they perceive as coming from external sources. How likely is it that those hostile voices are the same negative mental loop associated with the default mode network? Has meditation been tried as a way to decrease the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia? How about other forms of psychosis like that coming from depression, bipolar disorder etc?
While the present consensus is that psychedelics are counter-indicated for people with schizophrenia or other forms of psychosis, surely some have tried it: how did they think/feel in the following days?
Can’t really answer on points 1 and 2, mostly because I don’t really know what *meditation *is (sitting on a log in the forest with your face in your palms, elbows on knees, contemplating the universe? Yeah, I’ve done that a hundred times! No visuals though, besides the Helmholz’ phosphenes!)
Many* schizophrenics report difficulty working out which voices are internal and which are external. All the schizophrenics I have known, have known that there are internal, external, and halucinatory voices.
As I have recounted elsewhere, on of my friends was distressed by the random voices coming out of the speakers on his desk late at night. Based on his past experiences, he was unable to make a definative judgement that the voices were or were not real, were or were not halucinations. He wasn’t stupid: even when he was experiencing halucinations, he understood the concept of halucinations: he just was able to assign everything correctly.
I’m sitting here and there is a TV on in another room. There are “voices” saying strange and irelevant things. I make a judgement about that based on my life experiences.
Medication is very successful in suppressing the “positive” symptoms of schizophrenia. Medication is the reason we no longer have insane asylums stacked with schizophrenics who have come to a full stop and are in dead storage.
They are given anti-psychotics if they are psychotic. I don’t know what the mechanism is, or how successfull it is.
*One well known psychiatrist said that schizophrenia was so diverse, that he would almost say the only thing all his patients had in common was the suffering they experienced – except that he had one patient who enjoyed the condition.
As noted above, that’s not the main problem now that effective anti-psychotic medication exists. However, in answer to the question, yes it has been tried, no it is not effective.
Meditation (and prayer, and Freudian analysis which I would argue is sort of the same thing), tends to increase dissociation. (This is part of the history of the Scientoligist claim that psychiatry is dangerous)
If you get good at meditation, it even gives you halucinations. If you are already having halucinations, it exposes you to worse halucinations, and decreases your ability to deal with halucinations.
This is, of course, known to gurus of meditation, and (in the western tradition) Fathers of the Church, but it’s not something that has been emphasized in western popularizations
It’s also called “mindfulness” Mindfulness - Wikipedia It comes from Buddhism but doesn’t require subscribing to any Buddhist beliefs.
By “meditation” I mean to include paying non-judgmental attention to the contents of consciousness in the present moment or focusing on a chosen external stimuli/perception/thought/emotion and a few other things I’m unsure/ignorant of right now. It can include focusing on one’s breath or staring (open-eyed) at a red disk or body scanning (noticing the sensations in your body) or well-wishing (which can apparently end up giving a sensation close to the drug ecstasy).
The most basic kind is closing your eyes while sitting in a quiet room and trying to think of nothing but your breath. Try for 5 minutes and see how many times your mind wanders.
What sort of hallucinations do people tend to get with meditation?
What symptoms tend to cause the most suffering to schizophrenics?
They often have anhedonia. How likely is it that that’s a consequence of schizophrenia messing with their lives to the point that they get severe depression?