And Then I Thought I Was a Fish
IDENTIFYING INFORMATION: Peter Hunt Welch is a 20-year-old single Caucasian male who was residing in Bar Harbor, Maine this summer. He is a University of Maine at Orono student with no prior psychiatric history, who was admitted to the Acadia Hospital on an involuntary basis due to an acute level of confusion and disorganization, both behaviorally and cognitively. He was evaluated at MDI and was transferred from that facility due to psychosis, impulse thoughts, delusions, and disorientation. He was felt to be a risk to himself and others due to his high level of disorganization and disorientation and impulsivity. He did not know where he was. He believed that he had murdered his friend by sucking out his soul. The patient was also reporting, upon admission, that he could see, smell, hear and touch God. She as an acid smoky smell. Patient is an unreliable historian. He initially denied any alcohol or drug use, but later on admitted to having had LSD on several occasions. He also acknowledged the use of heroin, crack, cocaine, mushrooms, ecstasy, speed, etc. Just prior to his admission to Acadia Hospital, he had been displaying markedly abnormal behavior with confusion, illogical statements, and appearing disoriented, and as if walking in a daze. This is the story of why someone wrote that.
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What Hacker News says
- Amped to see Still Drinking on HN again.
If you enjoy devouring this guys writing, buy his book, “And Then I Thought I Was A Fish” (I think it’s the “novel” he references the game being based on?). I really really liked it. Link at the bottom of the original post.
The other book is just a collection of blog posts. It’s /okay/. But I really really liked ATITIWAF. The kind of book that makes you want to try your hand at writing.
—a random internet fan.
- I really recommend the author's book "And then I thought I was a fish". Not only is it incredibly funny, in my opinion this is one of the best descriptions of a drug-induced psychosis out there. It is really pretty rare that someone can remember that much from such an episode and also has the ability to put it to paper.
- I'm a fairly introspective person and I wouldn't say that it shook my world view - in the sense that I went in with a scientific world view and came out with one. I do have a better empathetic appreciation for mental illness and psychosis though (read And Then I Thought I was a Fish if you want to scare yourself). A trip makes you realize how incredible differently someone else's mind can perceive the world.
The challenging or scary part for me at least is when you rely on your own mind as a place where you can reason about things and then you start to worry if your ability to do that has been compromised.
The anxiety attacks after made me think that I really was dying or had a brain tumor or something and since I knew that the drug could no longer be in my system I got scared. I could no longer rationalize it as temporary affects of the drug. Researching all of the psychiatric information I could find online started to convince me that we know very little of how consciousness and mental illness actually work and I felt stupid for taking such a large risk.
Another thing I found scary is that a lot of healthy, normal people believe things I find absurd (like religion) and the information we're exposed to growing up seems to act as the training data for our neural net. I think consciousness emerged out of some evolved way to handle feedback and I didn't want to lose my ability to be able to reason about things.
The physical sensations after were really unpleasant (elevated heart rate, depersonalization, seeing visual patterns) and might have been caused by the anxiety that the LSD seemed to trigger. Also I had really low Vitamin D which seems to correlate with these kinds of issues too.
The fear of death I used to think about more than most people in a kind of distant way, but this experience made it feel imminent and traumatic - I think you're right that another life event could have caused similar symptoms.
I do worry less about things that aren't about people dying so maybe that's a good thing. It also comforts me a bit that everyone on earth is in the same boat, we're all sharing it for a limited time together and can work to make amazing things. Sometimes though, when I really think about the inevitability of dying it's still hard to go to sleep.
I think most people don't think about it.
- This reminds me of a programmer and very talented blogger who wrote a book ("And Then I Thought I Was A Fish") about his experience of staying up for many days under the influence of LSD, and who is also committed to an institution as a result of his delusions. Very interesting and entertaining read. http://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1
- Another really good read covering what it's like going through psychosis is "And Then I Thought I Was A Fish" by Peter Welch, covering a three year long psychotic break he had after taking LSD. (He's the writer of http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks, a hilarious blogpost I saw linked on HN a few months ago).
- It's the same plot to “And Then I Thought I Was A Fish”
