DOSE:	10 ug		LSD
	10-15 g		Peyote	(dried)
	0.5 g		Mushrooms	(sclerotia)

BODY WEIGHT:

54 kg

Visual Snow Syndrome as a Result of Psychedelic Use

From the ages of 20-23 I used microdosing on and off. Mostly for a couple of months to half a year on end, with breaks in between.

In the beginning it was very helpful, I experienced more joy in my life and I felt more creative. However, the effects started to slowly become less as the microdosing started to remind me of the challenging experiences I had had during a full 150 microgram LSD trip and a couple of 15 gram truffle trips. These were feelings of confusion, fear and feeling as if I had merged with an uncaring and endlessly painful universe.

Because of these negative associations, which would sometimes cause me to have 'attacks of confusion' at the end of a microdosing day, I decided to fully stop a couple of months ago. This is when I started noticing that symptoms that I had normally associated with microdosing, had not subsided. These symptoms are an oversensitivity to light, seeing flickering dots, flashes of colour, and something I can only describe as seeing the outline of an object in my visual field after it has moved away, which I experience every day in my entire visual field.

I remembered that a friend experienced flickering dots while on a very strong weed trip, which was called visual snow. I googled my symptoms and I realized that everything I was seeing was not normal and could maybe explain the exhaustion and distractedness I had been feeling.

I think I had been dealing with these symptoms for a while, but I had always attributed it to small side effects of microdosing and as nothing to worry about , which is why I can't really say when it started exactly and if it has gotten worse. Discovering this for me felt as if I always knew something was bothering me, but because I did not have the language nor the understanding that what I was seeing was different from what most people saw, I was not consciously affected by it. It almost felt a bit dissociative.

When the idea came that I might be dealing with visual snow syndrome, I googled what it looked like and it showed images of exactly the things I saw. This made my experience a lot more real and thus more distressing in a way, but it also gave me an explanation for why I see things different from most people, and a language to communicate this, making me feel less disconnected from others and my own reality.

I am aware that it might seem as if I only think I developed visual snow syndrome because I heard about it googled it, and then imaged symptoms to fit the description. I understand that the way we look at symptoms and disorders from a perspective of a disorder being there or not and you notice it or you don’t. I am however more of the opinion that a disorder can be given form and understanding through language and legitimization through institutions. A disorder can come into being enacted through a cultural vessel, and without this cultural explanation, a unexplained suffering stays an unexplained suffering in the unconscious, waiting to be described and understood and acted out consciously.

For me, the contemporary concept of visual snow syndrome as the result of repeated drug use, probably from long term microdosing psychedelics, is the best fit to describe my experience in the context of my life right now. I am aware that the understanding of visual snow syndrome is changing, and that as I change and evolve, my explanation for what I am experiencing might change as well, due to the reflexive nature of both my personal understanding and society’s understanding of reality at large.

Knowing now that my visual experience is likely more overwhelming compared to others, I hope more research could be done on possible treatments.

[Reported Doses: ''10 microgram LSD, 10-15 grams of dried peyote, 0.5 g of truffles'']

Exp Year: 2023	ExpID: 117730
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Oct 26, 2024	Views: 14
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Mushrooms (39), Peyote (42), LSD (2) : Unknown Context (20), Post Trip Problems (8), Health Problems (27), Retrospective / Summary (11)