Mystical and Affective Aspects of Psychedelic Use in a Naturalistic Setting: A Linguistic Analysis of Online Experience Reports

Nov 3, 2023Journal of psychoactive drugs

Emotional and Spiritual Experiences of Psychedelic Use in Real Life: Analyzing Online Reports

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Psychedelic Science on OpenScience ↗PubMed ↗DOI ↗

Abstract

Analysis of 7,317 psychedelic experience reports reveals that mystical language increases with self-reported experience intensity.

The study identified specific words associated with mystical experiences in psychedelic use.
Increased self-reported experience intensity was linked to a higher occurrence of mystical language.
Self-reported intensity also correlated with increased negative sentiment and decreased positive sentiment.
These findings suggest that mystical experiences may coexist with challenging aspects of the psychedelic experience.
A new mystical language dictionary was created for further research and exploration.

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Analyzing online retrospective experience reports of psychedelic use can provide valuable insight into their acute subjective effects. Such reports are unexplored in relation to mystical states, which are thought to be a therapeutic mechanism within psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. We created a set of words that, when encountered in an experience report, indicate the occurrence of mystical elements within the experience. We used the Shroomery.org website to retrieve 7317 publicly available retrospective psychedelic experience reports of psychedelic use, primarily of psilocybin, and have a designated experience intensity level self-assessed by the text authors during submission of the report. We counted the mystical language words using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software and additionally performed sentiment analysis of all reports. We found that the occurrence of mystical language grew with increased self-reported experience intensity. We also found that negative sentiment increased, and positive sentiment decreased as self-reported psychedelic experience intensity increased. These two findings raise the question of whether mystical experiences can co-exist with challenging elements within the psychedelic experience, a consideration for future qualitative studies. We present a new mystical language dictionary measure for further use and expansion, with some suggestions on how it can be used in future studies.

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Mystical and Affective Aspects of Psychedelic Use in a Naturalistic Setting: A Linguistic Analysis of Online Experience Reports

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