Washington: Use of psychedelic substances such as LSD and psilocybin can induce enhancement in mood and closeness to one another in people even after the high phase subsides. The Yale research that got published derived its findings from a field study of more than 1,200 people attending multi-day arts and music festivals in the United States and the United Kingdom. The results hence obtained, confirmed to the previous laboratory research indicating that psychedelic substances enhance feelings of social connectedness and improve mental well-being, the authors said.
“Our results show that people who take psychedelics ‘in the wild’ report positive experiences very similar to those observed in controlled laboratory studies,” said Yale’s Matthias Forstmann, postdoctoral fellow and first author of the paper.
The team found that people who recently took psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin, more commonly known as magic mushrooms, were more likely to report having “transformative experiences” so profound that they came out of the experience radically changed, including changes to their moral values.
Transformative experiences, in turn, were associated with feelings of social connectedness and positive mood.
