A Young Man's Experience with LSD

By Catherine H. Knott, Ph.D.
“I dropped acid just 12 times, but the last time I had a really bad trip,” said Dirk.* His blue eyes looked out unhappily from a swollen moon face. He was a young man, barely 23, yet he had already seen the inside of a psychiatric hospital, a prison, and a halfway house by the time I met him. He took a grocery list of pills, and one of the many side effects he experienced was edema. I have never forgotten his face, or his words.

For 12 months I worked with him regularly. Volunteers helped halfway house residents – most of whom were, like Dirk, coming from either psychiatric institutions or prisons or both – find their way back into the community. Other staff members helped residents find jobs and apartments. My job was to help them connect with social groups, develop outside interests, hobbies, and activities that could help them find new meaning in their lives, and most important, find new friends.

Dirk’s situation was not unique in the halfway house. He had started taking drugs in his last years of high school, first trying marijuana and then experimenting with some harder drugs, though not for very long. His parents, wealthy professionals, tried everything they could. They sent him on Outward Bound trips and to therapy. But when Dirk started college he continued to experiment. The LSD, which many students consider even today to be relatively harmless and non-addictive, triggered a meltdown in his brain.

After a bad trip, he became psychotic and unable to function, and did his first stint in a psychiatric hospital. When he got out, he wanted drugs and couldn’t afford them. He stole a television set – just one – and pawned it. But he got caught, and was sent to prison. As a first-time offender, his sentence was short – just a few months – but the stress of incarceration and apparent flashbacks from the bad LSD trip he had experienced triggered a new breakdown. He was moved from the prison to a psychiatric hospital. This time he stayed there for three years.

When he was released, he could no longer function alone. The institutionalization at a young age, combined with a vulnerable state of mind and medications, left him confused and uncertain. His self-esteem was at rock-bottom. “My brains are really scrambled,” he would say when he was introduced to people, and would ask them not to expect too much of him. The medications he was on made him speak and move hesitantly, and his hands trembled constantly.

I asked him how he felt about his medications. “I don’t want to take them, but I have to,” he said. He gripped his pill bottles compulsively. “I have to have them,” he would insist again and again.

At the halfway house Dirk often seemed alternately bored, withdrawn, or anxious, and then too eager to please, breaking out of his loneliness to greet everyone in the hopes that they would agree to be his friends. His first outing, attending a local dance with some of the staff members, didn’t go so well. The medication had caused him to gain weight and to shuffle a bit. His blond hair was lank and lifeless. None of the young women wanted to dance with him. It was obvious that the staff would have to try a different strategy to help him connect with the community.

Dirk had once been fit and trim, able to hike and backpack. The director decided it would be a good idea to help him join a local hiking club. I was to take Dirk on a day hike with the club. That day went better; he gained some confidence, talked to some of the other people in the club, and seemed to enjoy being out in the mountains.

Next, the staff tried an overnight trip to a primitive cabin with some of the staff members, Dirk, and two other residents of the halfway house. The time in the fresh air seemed to keep him more alert and focused. For the first time since I had met him, he acted assertively and smiled frequently. The staff’s expectation that he would participate in getting firewood, stringing the water pipe from the creek to the cabin, and cooking on the woodstove brought out his independence a little more. He seemed to enjoy the problem-solving these tasks entailed, and accomplishing them made him happy.

At night everyone slept well because of the physical exertion. During the days, we hiked, explored the wooded mountains, and climbed up beside a waterfall. The air itself seemed healing. When it came time to go back to the city, Dirk didn’t want to leave.

All this time I wondered about his parents. Why didn’t they come and take him home? Or try to communicate with him? “Why don’t your parents call you at the halfway house?” I asked Dirk one day. “I let them down too many times,” he said miserably. “I wish I could go home.”

With or without his parents, I hoped he would make it in the community. But “making it” involved re-learning many skills that being institutionalized requires a patient or prisoner to forget or relinquish. For example, like many of the residents in the halfway house, Dirk had trouble scheduling and organizing his own time. In the institutions he had been in, some one else had told him what to do every hour of every day. In order to survive and fit in, he had had to let go of his authority over his life, allowing others to control what he ate, wore, where he went, and when he slept.

At the same time, he was supposed to share unconditionally with therapists his stories, his imaginings, even his private thoughts. Like many of the residents of the halfway house who had been in psychiatric institutions, Dirk had a curiously permeable self, as if he had no skin, or as if, having had his insides pulled out for too many therapists to see, he didn’t know any longer how to keep his thoughts and feelings inside. The residents with this kind of history were often not able to keep information to themselves to their advantage or even for their own protection; they seemed extraordinarily exposed and vulnerable.

For Dirk to recover, it might take many years of slow gains, losses, sliding downhill, and trying again. The staff encouraged him to try an overnight backpack trip with the hiking club. He went, but it was too much for him. He struggled to keep up and at night, packed into a tent with other hikers, he felt paradoxically deeply lonely. “I just didn’t fit in with them,” he told me. “They have everything going for them, and I’m still a mess.”

He felt badly that he hiked slowly and held them back. He felt he didn’t belong, and might never belong again, in a group that a few short years before would have been natural for him to enjoy. He came back discouraged and down on himself. It was in vain that the staff tried to remind him that he had actually completed a challenging overnight backpacking trip; his comparison between himself and the other hikers had overwhelmed him.

He went back to short hikes, but they appeared to have lost their savor. His self-esteem dropped again. I decided to try a new strategy, helping Dirk find and fulfill a dream that he might think he could never achieve – doing something he had imagined being able to do but had never accomplished before. “What have you always dreamed of doing, ever since you were a kid?” I asked. “Fly a plane,” he answered promptly.

I was surprised, but then felt both relieved and chagrined. Perhaps this wish to fly, to be free, and have the ultimate feeling of empowerment and euphoria in this way had been a part of what made him seek out and experiment with drugs in the first place.

But that didn’t matter at the moment. We would try to fly literally; we would take flying lessons. We located a pilot who would let us take a couple introductory lessons for a very low rate, and scheduled two lessons. The pilot took us up in the plane – a small one – and we took turns sitting in the pilot’s seat, learning to pull up the nose of the plane, bank slightly to turn, straighten, and add fuel for speed.

The instructor sat in the right hand front seat, coaching and advising, but mostly letting us take our time flying the plane. We flew along the coast of Connecticut, following the line of the sand against the waves, with banks of clouds above us, the sun dropping into the west. It was exhilarating for both of us.

At the end of the two lessons, Dirk had a light in his eye. He walked looking ahead. “I want to do it again,” he said. This time his words gave me hope. He had learned a small piece of what it takes to be one’s own person again – he had found something that motivated him to take action for himself.

I thought he might make it. I don’t know if he did. In the time since then I have sometimes wondered how his parents could let go of such a promising young man, even (or maybe especially) after the hospitalizations and the jail sentence. How could they have given up?

People like Dirk need the unconditional love of their parents. But they also need conditioned experiences, skills training, and new opportunities to rediscover their dreams and the motivations that can carry them through to joyful and exhilarating moments in life – without the use of drugs.

Unfortunately, the use of hallucinogens including LSD continues unabated today among college-age students. “Hallucinogens can cause extreme, long-lasting adverse neuro-psychiatric effects,” according to the health services website for Brown University and many other sources. Frequent LSD use depletes serotonin levels in the brain, according to Dr. Roger Gould, quoted on the MedHelp website. Low serotonin levels may cause sleep problems, aggression, and depression.

Studies have shown links between LSD and the onset of psychoses and depression. Several studies reveal an average number of LSD-induced prolonged psychoses among user populations at four per thousand, or one in every 250 users.

At the same time, students this year report finding many websites that encourage LSD use and claim that it has no serious long-term effects, no addictive properties, and few, if any, health risks if it is taken in pure form. More education efforts are clearly needed. Parents should make sure to educate their teenagers about the dangerous after-effects of LSD use, and should make sure that teenagers and young adults receive immediate treatment for any sign of depression or psychoses. These young people need the support of their families, as well as treatment sensitive to their psychological needs for joy, exhilarating experiences, imagination, and connection to others.

*Dirk’s name has been changed to protect his privacy.