Effective Texas Hallucinogen Addiction Treatment Program
There’s a common misconception that people can’t become addicted to hallucinogens. While they aren’t generally life threatening, hallucinations are profound distortions of a person’s perception of reality, including delusions and an inability to distinguish reality from illusion. In this state, people see images, hear sounds and feel sensations that seem real but do not exist. Hallucinating can thrust someone into a perilous situation if they don’t have a firm grasp on reality, and decide to act recklessly. Hallucinogen addiction is real, and can be incredibly dangerous.
Historically, hallucinogens have been used in religious rituals or spiritual pursuits to produce mystical “visions,” or simply to induce detachment from reality. Research shows that writers, poets and artists used these drugs through the decades to find inspiration or to spark creativity. However, we now know how hallucinogens work, and just how dangerous they can be.
Today, studies reveal that hallucinogens are abused more often for social or recreational purposes. People take them to have fun, deal with stress, or enable themselves to enter into what they perceive as a more enlightened sense of thinking or being. Whatever a person’s reason for taking them, the effects are dictated by the amount taken, and your own unique personality and brain chemistry. This makes them highly unpredictable and dangerous.
You or your loved one might not have a physical addiction to drugs like hallucinogens, but there is a big change that a psychological dependence will develop if it hasn’t already. At this point, help is needed in the form of hallucinogen addiction treatment.
Commonly Abused Hallucinogens
- LSD or acid
- Psilocybin Mushrooms
- Peyote
- PCP
- Ketamine
Hallucinogen Addiction and Abuse
A recent study by the Substance Use Disorder and Mental Health Services Administration revealed that more than 1 million Americans tried a hallucinogenic drug for the first time in 2013. Out of those participants, 751,000 tried ecstasy for the first time that year and 482,000 first tried LSD.
If you or your loved one believe they can function while high on hallucinogens, they’re wrong. Hallucinogens work by disrupting how your nerve cells and the neurotransmitter serotonin interact throughout the brain and spinal cord. By changing the normal, healthy structure of serotonin in the body, hallucinogens twist and alter the way your brain processes your senses, feelings and visual information, distorting reality.
Your continued abuse of this drug can cause dependency and addiction. This is common for hallucinogen abusers. It’s a frustrating situation to be in. You need the drug to function, but the way you function when you’re high causes negative consequences.
