Fear of the Void: Cosmic Anxiety in ‘Aniara’ (2018)

Aniara (2018) is a Swedish sci-fi film written and directed by Hugo Lilja and Pella Kågerman. It is an adaptation of the 1956 Swedish epic poem of the same name by Harry Martinson. It depicts a dystopian, distant future in which extreme climate change, war, famine, disease, social collapse, pollution, and lawlessness force humans to…

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On the Stigma Against Antidepressants in the Psychedelic Community

On his site Ecstatic Integration, the writer Jules Evans published a post titled ‘Are you a psychedelic cultist?’ It features a ‘Psychedelic Cultism Questionnaire’ to help readers assess how ‘culty’ they are when it comes to psychedelics. It consists of eight statements – all in the vein of a rosy, utopian, ‘no bad vibes allowed’…

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Does Microdosing Enhance Neuroplasticity?

It’s easy to find glowing accounts of microdosing. On psychedelic-related subreddits and forums, on social media, on blogs, and in real-life psychedelic circles, many people report incredible, life-changing, and wide-ranging benefits from taking tiny, sub-perceptual doses of psychedelics (typically psilocybin mushrooms and LSD). Despite reports of persistent depression fading away, not needing psychiatric medications anymore,…

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A Psychedelic Experience is Not Comparable to 10 Years of Therapy

A common narrative in the psychedelic space is that having a psychedelic experience is like undergoing 10 years of therapy (or another number of years), condensed into just several hours. A headline for a 2023 piece in The i Paper reads ‘How a five-day, £4,000 psychedelic retreat saved me 10 years of intensive therapy’. Mark…

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Nitrous Oxide: A Gas With Mystical, Antidepressant, and Addictive Potential

Nitrous oxide (‘laughing gas’) is a colourless gas with sedative, analgesic, euphoric, dissociative, and (if the dose is right) mystical effects. When used recreationally, the gas comes in canisters, known as ‘nangs’ in Australia and New Zealand, with other street names for the gas including ‘whippets’ (or ‘whippits’) and ‘hippy crack’. There is both a…

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