Many people criticize me for recommending psychedelics for therapy but advocating against psychiatric drugs.
They claim I am being hypocritical or contradicting myself, since both drug therapies are chemical in nature.
I call their position "drug schizophrenia." They harbor a fractured view of chemicals, because they fail to look at the differences in cognitive and psychological effects. The two classes of drugs cannot be more different in their effects and risk profiles.
The psychedelics and designer drugs drastically alter the nature of consciousness and provide a person with a mindset geared toward introspection, openness, empathy, and creative self-therapy.
Conversely, the psychiatric meds either numb or stupefy the individual, or inhibit the reuptake of certain neurochemicals in the brain for the purpose of altering mood slowly over time, through prolonged use in the human system.
The psychedelics offer a one-shot, transformative experience that can last a lifetime, whereas the psychiatric medications subtly change perception, dragging a person's conscious experience through the mud of despair.
My position is not just based on an assumption, either.
There are reams of evidence to indict psychiatric medications for their harms, especially the most popular: antidepressants and antipsychotics. On the other side of the coin, evidence for harms caused by the majority of psychedelic compounds pale in comparison.
I am not saying the psychedelics and designer drugs are absolutely risk free. To the contrary, they can cause harm as well, especially if used blithely and without knowledge. The designer drugs are especially problematic if abused, which is why I champion the harm reduction approach to healing.
With that said, the psychiatric medications are touted as the medicine par excellence for mental health disorders and are handed out like candy by psychiatrists. The result is hundreds of thousands of fully legally addicted patients, who are also suffering from a laundry list of nasty side effects.
If people had access to the healing potentials of the psychedelics and designer drugs, like MDMA, I'd be willing to bet there would be a lot less people chronically addicted to SSRI's, Benzos, and other classes of psychiatric medications.
The reason why pharmaceutical-industrial-complex lobbies against legalization of these compounds is to maintain their authoritarian hold over the population via the chemical straitjackets they prescribe to their patients on a regular basis.
To wit, psychiatry is a broken pseudo-scientific cesspool of quackery and pomposity. It's been corrupted by special interests with massive marketing budgets, and now everyone who is embedded in that system suffers from severe myopia regarding the whole enterprise. People must continue to speak truth to power about psychiatry, and work to help the millions of people suffering from the depredations of their psychiatric addictions.
I'll leave some links to current evidence and other good information in the comments. If you haven't explored this wormhole before, you are going to be blown away by all the indignities and sweeping amounts fraud.