People who take hallucinogens may be hoping to escape their lives, reset their brains or have new experiences. While the drugs may provide these benefits, they can also cause side effects, including hallucinogen persisting perception disorder or HPPD. Read on to learn more about this disorder and what can be done to treat it. The use of second-generation antipsychotics in HPPD patients without comorbid psychotic disorders is debated.
Living with Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder: Tips for Better Quality of Life
Importantly, other etiologies of this distress such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depersonalization, derealization, etc. must be excluded. Other causes of visual disturbances such as anatomical lesions, epilepsy, and schizophrenia must also be ruled out. Finally, an association between the first intake of the hallucinogenic drug and the onset of the HPPD symptoms must be established1920. With a multitude of potential etiologies, it may not be possible to put forward a unified pathophysiological model of HPPD. Rather, a multifactorial origin of HPPD-related phenomena is to be assumed that may differ from case to case.
What Are Hallucinogens?
Fourteen HPPD cases were contributed in de-identified format from four neuro-ophthalmologists employed across five Australian health care sites. To be included, cases had to meet DSM-5 HPPD diagnostic criteria (3). Due to HPPD symptom diagnostic uncertainty, one patient was excluded, leaving 13 cases for review.
What Are the Causes and Risk Factors for HPPD?
- Non-pharmacological management could include brain stimulation treatment, but this has not been fully substantiated or investigated.
- In the clinical trial, 16 HPPD patients were treated with a Clonazepam dosage of 2 mg/day 51.
- Moreover, a consistent etiological model to explain these effects has yet to be proposed.
- Episodes of type 1 HPPD don’t come back as often as type 2 episodes typically do.
- These symptoms may appear during intoxication or withdrawal from substances such as stimulants, alcohol, or hallucinogens.
- However, in HPPD, they tend to be less intense — it is mostly vision that is affected, rather than the other senses.
We describe 13 cases of HPPD with the inclusion of visual assessments demonstrating that visual acuity, visual fields and OCT are typically normal in this patient group. This highlights the importance of a careful history in the assessment of patients presenting with positive visual phenomena, focusing on timeline and relationship to substances and medications. In the absence of other neurologic features, a diagnosis of HPPD can be elicited from history alone without unnecessary specialist investigations.
HPPD does not cause people to have full hallucinations or delusions. Worrying about having an HPPD episode could actually make you more likely Sober living house to experience one. Because so few cases of HPPD are officially diagnosed, research is quite limited. That makes what doctors and researchers do know about the condition limited as well.
What Are the Symptoms of Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder?
- The flashback type, also referred to as HPPD I, is a benign or harmless condition.
- During an episode, you may feel like you’ve lost some or all control.
- With regards to this point, neither HPPD I nor HPPD II can really be considered as persisting in a narrow sense of the word.
- No significant cognitive deficits were detected, except for underperformance in the test for phasic attention.
Since so little is known about the development of HPPD, it can be difficult to find a psychiatrist with experience treating it. Finding a way to ease the visual disturbances and treat the related physical symptoms may take a bit of trial and error. If you’ve used hallucinogenic drugs, you should let your doctor know. It’s important to understand that your doctor’s primary concern will be helping you address and treat your symptoms. Researchers have found that certain medications have been useful at helping improve HPPD symptoms in some cases. However, because of the small study sample sizes, the evidence for the use of these drugs isn’t very strong.