The risks and benefits of

psychedelic substances
Findings of a survey
100 respondants

Created by ihprac
Disclaimer!
As these surveys were distributed on the communities r/LSD and
r/Psychonaut, they may be biased. Please consider this if you want to
factor in these results for taking in a psychedelic substance. These
communities mainly attract those who have ingested these substances
successfully, therefore my findings may be one-sided at times.
This is merely an effort to identify some correlations and add some
rough numbers to phenomenons that are usually described with
words. I often read of eye opening, positive experiences but also of
ones that caused hospitilization and damage a persons psyche.
I am not responsible for any harm resulting from actions that were
justified with this data.
Age
25

20

15

10

0
15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 41 43
Age when taking the survey Age when trying psychedlics for the first time
Substances Preferance in first
substance by age, in %
I noticed that there is a
significant discrepancy
between LSD and
0,9 mushroom use in 17 year
Substance tried first old when compared to the
0,8
15 year olds. I think some
0,7
of this tems from statistical
0,6 inaccuaracy, considering
the small number of 15
0,5
year olds. But this could
0,4 also indicate that 15 year
olds tend to avoid LSD
0,3
more due to the
0,2 misconception of chemical
0,1
substances being more
harmful. It is possible that
0 they are more gullible and
15 year olds 17 year olds
therefore believe it.
LSD or analoges Psychobilin mushrooms MDMA DMT LSD Mushrooms DMT
Mental conditions There are multiple things that I find very interesting.

Firstly, I find it highly suprising that 39% suspect that

Prevalence of mental disorders
they have a mental disorder. This is obviuosly quite a
bit higher than average. This could be attributed to
multiple factors, mainly that these surveys where
distributed on r/LSD and r/Psychonauts. One
interprtation could be that these placesattract many
who often get introspective and might wrongfully
attribute a mental disorder to themselves.

Secondly, there is also a high number of people with

diagnosed mental disorders. It seems that psychedelic
substances overproportionally attract those with a
unconventional or even damaged mental functions.

Yes, diagnosed Yes, suspected No, assumed No, certainly

Psychological changes The discrepancy for the long term experience
between all the questionees and just those with
medically diagnosed disorders seems very small at
Long term effects as described by the first glance. This is only the case because the number
questionee of negative experiences is very low to begin with.

Positvie
50
If you take a closer look into the source data, you
40 notice those with disorders make up around 2 of the
30 4 negative or mostly negative experiences. Consider
20
Negative
10
Mostly positive that the rate of medically diagnosed mental disorders
0 amongst the questionees is 23%.

This would mean that the probability of having a

Mostly negative Mixed
negative long term experience is more than twice as
high for those with prior mental conditions.
Total

With medically diagnosed mental disoreder (numerically scaled by factor 4,5

Of course there might be plenty of statistical
for better comparsion) inaccuracy to this but the fact that it is a noticable
phenomenon, even in a small survey, is pretty telling.