The Family History Curse

Illustration by me

This one’s been bugging me for a while.

There’s this little mantra that’s been going around for decades: “don’t take psychedelics if you or your family have a history of mental illness”. This seems simple enough. It’s built on the reasonably sound logic that psychedelics can trigger (or bring to the surface) any underlying mental health conditions which might have flown under the radar. Be that psychosis, bipolar…