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

Analysis of 7317 online psychedelic experience reports, mostly about psilocybin, shows that the use of mystical language increases with the self-reported intensity of the experience. At the same time, negative sentiment rises and positive sentiment falls as intensity increases. These results suggest that mystical experiences may coexist with challenging elements during a psychedelic session, a possibility that warrants further qualitative investigation. A new mystical language dictionary is provided for future research.

Study at a glance

Abstract

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.