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Magic Medicine: Unmasking My Demons With Psychedelics
OCD and the Therapeutic Potential of Psilocybin and LSD
As far back as I can remember, I’ve had the tendency to mentally assign significance to words and numbers, avoiding the “bad” ones while finding ways to work the “lucky” ones into my daily life as much as possible. In the early days, I lived in fear of things that came in threes, and touched doorknobs or quickly flicked light switches four times in a row to avoid some faceless but ominous misfortune from happening.
I knew on some level that none of this was normal. The term “pathological” may not have been in my 8 year old consciousness, but I was painfully aware that none of my family or friends lived with this burden. There was something shameful about it even before I knew the name for what I had, and so I kept my mouth shut. Being raised Catholic didn’t help. The highly structured rituals and superstitions in the church only made my personal rituals evolve into ones of higher complexity that were backed by more sinister fears.
As a teenager, I learned about OCD from magazine articles and movies. By then, the beast had mutated into something that seemed far beyond the reach of therapy. Besides that, I lived in fear of my loved ones knowing such a horrible secret and had developed new sets of rituals that…
