Ayelet Waldman’s Really Good Day [on psychedelics]

艾莱特·沃尔德曼真的很棒的一天[迷幻药]

Good Life Project

自我完善

2017-03-20

58 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

Suicide or psychedelics? Those were the options this week's guest, Ayelet Waldman, found herself facing. A married mother of four and novelist living in Berkeley, Waldman struggled with bipolar, anxiety and depression her entire life. According to her, mental illness ran wide and deep in her family. Over the years, she'd found a pharmaceutical regime that made life tolerable, until peri-menopause destroyed her ability to time her medication and things spiraled rapidly out of control. Waldman found herself increasingly mired in suicidal ideation. Nothing seemed to be working any more. Then, she heard about decades old research on psychedelics and a non-trippy therapeutic approach called microdosing. Through a series of events, Ayelet found herself in possession of a vial of pure LSD and, seeing few others options, decided to try following a 30-day psychedelic microdosing protocol shared in James Fadiman's The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide. Those 30-day changed everything. Within hours, the gray numbness began to lift. Life got more vivid, connected, stable and alive. Waldman wrote about her psychedelic microdosing journey, its affects, her fears and concerns, along with the politics, history, mythology and truths, how microdosing affected her work, mindset, relationship with her husband and kids and more in her latest book, A Really Good Day. Head's up. This is a raw, unfiltered and provocative conversation. The bigger questions, issues and potential applications extend far beyond Waldman's immediate circumstances and life. This episode is neither an endorsement, nor an indictment of her choices or the use of psychedelics, but rather an exploration of deeply-challenging, yet critical issues from mental health to parenting and drug policy to science-fiction vs. fact.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
更多

单集文稿 ...

  • You know, some people send their kids out.

  • They're like, drive safe, honey.

  • As my kids leave the house, my teenagers, I shout after them, use a condom and test your molly.

  • Because these drugs are criminalized.

  • There is no body testing it and verifying purity.

  • So imagine being in such an unrelenting state of depression that the only thing that was stopping you from ending at all was the thought of leaving your children motherless.

  • Well, that's where today's guest is found herself.

  • She tried pretty much everything through years and years and years, nearly every kind of medication, every kind of therapy.

  • And she reached a point in her life where what was working for a long time stopped, and she just didn't know where to turn.

  • Until one night she had a major wake up call, and she decided to try something that she never in her wildest imagination would have thought that she'd be open to trying, and that is psychedelics.

  • That journey that unfolded from that point forward became the subject of a book called a really good day.

  • And it documents in fierce and funny, at times detail, her 30 day microdosing experience with LSD.

  • We go a lot of places in this conversation, from the nature of these types of medicines and chemicals to the history of it, to the politics of it, the legality of it, and also, on a really personal level, what it did to and for her and what she was thinking about as she was doing this and how it affected her relationships with her family and with other people.

  • It's a real episode.

  • It's a real conversation.

  • It's raw, it's unfiltered, as always here.

  • And she has some really strong opinions that really made me hit pause and think, what would I do if I hit that point where everything I had tried wasn't working anymore?

  • And the only hope that I saw was something that was very illegal?

  • What would I do?

  • Interesting conversation.