I listed the cases I could easily list of full-blown manic/psychotic episodes in the extended bay area rationalist community (episodes strong enough that the person in most cases ended up hospitalized, and in all cases ended up having extremely false beliefs about their immediate surroundings for days or longer, eg “that’s the room of death, if I walk in there I’ll die”; “this is my car” (said of the neighbor’s car)).
I counted 11 cases. (I expect I’m forgetting some, and that there are others I plain never knew about; count this as a convenience sample, not an exhaustive inventory.)
Of these, 5 are known to me to have involved a psychedelic or pot in the precipitating event.
3 are known to me to have *not* involved that.
In the other 3 cases I’m unsure.
In 1 of the cases where I’m unsure about whether there were drugs involved, the person had taken part in a several-weeks experiment in polyphasic sleep as part of a Leverage internship, which seemed to be part of the precipitating event from my POV.
So I’m counting [between 6 and 8] out of 11 for “precipitated by drugs or an imprudent extended sleep-deprivation experiment” and [between 3 and 5] out of 11 for “not precipitated by doing anything unusually physiologically risky.”
(I’m not here counting other serious mental health events, but there were also many of those in the several-thousand-person community across the last ten years, including several suicides; I’m not trying here to be exhaustive.)
(Things can have multiple causes, and having an obvious precipitating physiological cause doesn’t mean there weren’t other changeable risk factors also at play.)
I listed the cases I could easily list of full-blown manic/psychotic episodes in the extended bay area rationalist community (episodes strong enough that the person in most cases ended up hospitalized, and in all cases ended up having extremely false beliefs about their immediate surroundings for days or longer, eg “that’s the room of death, if I walk in there I’ll die”; “this is my car” (said of the neighbor’s car)).
I counted 11 cases. (I expect I’m forgetting some, and that there are others I plain never knew about; count this as a convenience sample, not an exhaustive inventory.)
Of these, 5 are known to me to have involved a psychedelic or pot in the precipitating event.
3 are known to me to have *not* involved that.
In the other 3 cases I’m unsure.
In 1 of the cases where I’m unsure about whether there were drugs involved, the person had taken part in a several-weeks experiment in polyphasic sleep as part of a Leverage internship, which seemed to be part of the precipitating event from my POV.
So I’m counting [between 6 and 8] out of 11 for “precipitated by drugs or an imprudent extended sleep-deprivation experiment” and [between 3 and 5] out of 11 for “not precipitated by doing anything unusually physiologically risky.”
(I’m not here counting other serious mental health events, but there were also many of those in the several-thousand-person community across the last ten years, including several suicides; I’m not trying here to be exhaustive.)
(Things can have multiple causes, and having an obvious precipitating physiological cause doesn’t mean there weren’t other changeable risk factors also at play.)