I actually have a full hypothesis on the connection between trauma, mental illness and psychosis.

I think it's possible, let's say that the spiritual hypothesis is true and I took in a spiritual being. The Shaman's description was that I am already "open" from bipolar, and I was "too open" after I took LSD, letting a walk-in sneak inside.

I have a lot of trauma, and I mean serious abuse, coming in from childhood. That I believe is correlated with me having bipolar.

So my idea is as follows - we know that the edges of mental illness like mine can be caused by trauma, often times because the mind is "protecting you" from the abuse in some extreme way that leads eventually to mental illness. In a way, the mind is running away from the traumatic event, it for instance often erases the trauma years from memory (something that's happened to me). So the mind is protecting you by removing you from reality.

The thing is - we say the mind is removing you and running away but to where?

My perception now is the mind "escapes" into the other world. The spiritual, mushroom, LSD world we perceive and learn from when under psychedelics. That means people with mental illness, like me, get to have psychedelic experiences naturally (my manic episodes pretty much match descriptions of LSD trips, and they don't go away, so I can stay in them for a week+). That means our mind, the mind of those heavily traumatized, is already "in between" worlds.

Having your foot in the other world, the Psilocybin-psychedelic-spiritual world, means you're protected somehow. Somehow, it actually works. Your mind knows what it's doing. Your mind is able to enter a psychedelic or latent psychedelic state to protect itself from the real world being too dark, too grim, and too horrible to think about/remember. In one hand, you could say it explains bipolar, schizophrenia, etc. if the mind is just protecting itself from true horror.

"Normal" people, or neuronormal people, who haven't experienced a lot of trauma, then find it immensely therapeutic to experience the Psilocybin / psychedelic / spiritual world for a few moments, thanks to the chemical changes of taking LSD or your drug of choice. And then they came back.

What happened to deeply traumatized people through trauma happens to neuronormal folks artificially through the introduction of a chemical change. But that chemical change happens naturally in heavily traumatized people, who had to use the same mechanisms to escape reality when they were young, thus "breaking their brain" a bit under conventional psychology. So it could be the mind knows enough to break into a psychedelic state for self protection, which is fascinating to think about!

But when someone like ME takes psychedelics however, someone loaded with trauma, we go too far and we don't come back quite the same. I suspect that explains why some people benefit immensely from LSD and Psilocybin for trauma, coming back healed, and why some people like me, it will just induce a psychotic episode.

Basically regular people get to do a shallow visit to the psychedelic-spiritual world, while people with heavy trauma go WAY TOO DEEP and lose themselves. That's what we call a psychotic episode.

That's because people with trauma are already one foot in the psychedelic world, or they have to go way too deep to find the origins of their trauma, and they "break". The sad reality is that shallow trauma is easier to treat, even in the psychedelic state, while deep trauma might just lead to a psychotic episode.

I have no idea whether this holds up or not, it's been something I think about ever since that experience.