No. 87, May 2013

Newspaper Jan Mot Afgiftekantoor 1000 Brussel 1 Verschijnt vijfmaal per jaar in V. U . Jan Mot januari – maart – mei – Antoine Dansaertstraat 190 augustus – oktober 1000 Br ussel No. 87, mei 2013 Erkenningsnummer P309573 139 –140 Jaargang 17 No. 87 There’s only four perfect Cer in The Rye; and the god- Name but at Weast include things in this world: my father’s 1 & 2. i can under- akira kurosawa mang I don’t grandmother’s cooking catch. stand you can’t fit everyo Pes care for it at all,I appreciates (advertisement) Marian Zijlstra in Brussels (advertisement) By where she photographed mostly people in Jan Mot public spaces throughout the country. She has very rarely exhibited her work, one BRUSSELS, MAY 2013 – For the last show of the few occasions was a group show at of the season I invited Marian Zijlstra, a the Stedelijk Museum in 1967, a competi- close friend since many years, to present tion entitled ‘Fotoprijs Amsterdam’. The a selection of photographs taken in the selection of 27 photographs was made in Fifties and Sixties. Zijlstra (°1933, Amster- collaboration with Ben Krewinkel and the dam) studied photography at the Kunst- prints, all in black and white, were realised nijverheidschool in Amsterdam (which later by Michael Windig (De Verbeelding), son became the Gerrit Rietveld Academie) and of her former teacher. The show is her first under Carel Blazer and Ad Windig. She solo presentation and is entiteld Terugblik. lives in Amsterdam but has spent long pe- 1950 –1970 (Looking Back. 1950 –1970). riods in Mexico in the Fifties and Sixties 2 Newspaper Jan Mot 139 – 140 Early one night in the fall of, a college fresh- first experience on mescaline, as they are gling shoe salesman whose dark-brown pairs man ate half of a microdot of lysergic acid cracked open and left askew. H.P.P.D. does bled into the navy-blues; a confused student diethylamide on his way to a party. He was not generate hallucinations, technically whose text jumbled into “alphabet soup”; a young, but more than a little familiar with speaking. Sufferers can appreciate that their distracted office worker whose flower pot mind-altering chemicals: LSD, mescaline, perceptual aberrations are unreal—that their slid back and forth along the windowsill. psilocybin, and other, less common psy- surroundings only appear blurred by after- “This isn’t flashbacks,” said Abraham. “We chedelics. This trip, by comparison, turned images (palinopsia) and trails (akinetopsia); have to call it what it is: a persisting percep- out to be only a “mild experience.” The tin- shimmered by sparkles and flashed by bright tion disorder.” gling euphoria, splendid visuals, and sudden bolts of light; interrupted by transparent Preliminary estimates of the prevalence of bursts of insight mostly wore off by the time blobs of color floating around; electrified by H.P.P.D. dismissed the disorder as an outlier, he retired to his dorm. But the following visual snow; magnified or shrunk by “Alice- implicating as few as one in fifty thousand morning, some effects still remained. in-Wonderland” symptoms; adorned by ha- hallucinogen users. The most recent large- The streaking and trailing and after-imaging los around objects, around people’s heads. scale survey, questioning nearly twenty- persisted for days. He began to panic. “I re- The pseudo-hallucinations are ultimately five hundred users, found that over one in ally lost it,” he said. “I was sitting in one of unconvincing, if deeply unsettling. Eventu- twenty-five were considering treatment for my first college classes and, like, hallucinat- ally, a sense of permanent unreality casts a H.P.P.D.-like symptoms. But because par- ing.” He met with psychologists, who could pall over the acid-fuelled dreamscape, and ticipants, recruited from the popular drug discern little. He called his parents, who sufferers disassociate—from the world, due information Web site Erowid, did not repre- could discern less. He became unhinged, to derealization, and from themselves, due sent the average dabbler, and because only wandering campus in a daze, squinting at to depersonalization. At a recent Society a small portion of them had actively sought the world as if through a kaleidoscope. “I of Biological Psychiatry conference, Dr. medical care, the tally remains somewhat in- broke down,” he said. “I could no longer Abraham presented findings, later published conclusive. “Unfortunately,” writes Halpern, go to class. I couldn’t do anything.” He quit in the S.B.P. 2012 supplement, that suggest assessing the scant literature, “the data do school, moved back home, and entered re- up to sixty-five per cent of H.P.P.D patients not permit us to estimate, even crudely, the hab. His search for a diagnosis came up chronically endure panic attacks, and fifty prevalence of ‘strict’ H.P.P.D.” empty: no underlying medical condition, nor per cent, major depression. Some patients If “strict” cases of H.P.P.D. turn up only had the drug been laced with something sin- feel their only relief is suicide. rarely in scientific journals, though, at HP- ister. Weeks, months, then years went by. The The cluster of symptoms first appeared PDonline.com, a Web forum tracking re- trip just wouldn’t end. Psychedelic lore is lit- in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of search developments and connecting suffer- tered with cautionary tales. But it remains Mental Disorders in 1986. Ever since, the ers, nearly nine thousand monthly visitors to be seen whether reports of hallucinogen official diagnosis has been lumped together give some indication of what lies beyond persisting perception disorder—quite liter- with “flashbacks.” Brief fragments of a trip the academic purview. They report burning ally, the persistence of hallucinogen-induced that occasionally bubble up to one’s con- and throbbing and numbing and tingling. perceptions—should count among them. sciousness, flashbacks may arise from sud- They claim that surfaces undulate (“breath- Hallucinogens are enjoying something of a den spikes in the cerebral cortex—stirring ing walls”), objects vanish (“they mix with revival: the drugs are being tried recreation- perceptions, sensations, or emotions mim- the floor”), and beams of light splinter into ally by nearly one in five American adults icking those of the hallucinogen high, in the shards of extended rays (“star-bursting”). (approaching that of the nineteen-sixties), absence of any chemical. But as the term They share encounters that seem inexplica- while being tested empirically for their pow- has been popularized, flashback has been ble—”fluids flowing down from my left tem- ers to heal alcoholism and other addictions, rendered “virtually useless” diagnostically, ple,” “a chemical aftertaste”—and plead for anxieties from impending death, P.T.S.D., writes Dr. John Halpern, an assistant profes- the group’s insight. They raise suspicions: major depression, and even cluster head- sor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School “Every time I walk past a certain type of tree aches. Reading too much into H.P.P.D., some and lead author of the most recent literature the leaves begin to shake.” They despair: “I say, could squelch the renewed intrigue— review of H.P.P.D. In the review, published hear my brain.” And they may be making even though, to some extent, the risk factors, in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Dr. Halp- their symptoms worse. While H.P.P.D. suf- causes, and effective treatments remain a ern reasons that by conflating two distinct ferers do misperceive their environment, mystery. Others, though, suspect that unrav- diagnoses, a strict definition of H.P.P.D. has some researchers suspect that severe anxi- eling this mysterious disorder could reveal remained elusive, leaving its prevalence ety—perhaps an underlying condition—ag- clues for the more familiar ones. According obscured. Yet, “it seems inescapable,” he gravates those misperceptions. As noted by to Dr. Henry Abraham, a lecturer in psychia- concludes, based on twenty related studies Matthew Baggott, a postdoctoral fellow in try at Tufts University School of Medicine dating back to 1966, “that at least some in- psychiatric genetics at University of Chica- who privately sees patients with substance- dividuals who have used LSD, in particular, go, fMRI studies generally show close links related disorders, neurophysiological shifts experience persistent perceptual abnormali- between the attention and visual systems. observed in H.P.P.D. patients “may yield use- ties reminiscent of acute intoxication, not Such observations have raised doubt over ful models for anxiety, depression, psycho- better attributable to another medical or psy- whether hallucinogens are the root cause of sis, and even addiction.”A chronic and debil- chiatric condition.” the disorder, and even whether H.P.P.D. is a itating condition, H.P.P.D. warps the percep- Peer-reviewed accounts of drug users bona-fide diagnosis. “The more you focus tual faculties: the external senses are marred whose world had been transfigured perma- on the condition, the more it spirals out of by a constellation of mostly visual distor- nently can be found as early as 1983, pre- control,” said Halpern. “So sufferers must tions, while the internal ones are paralyzed figuring the initial D.S.M. entry. In a case- practice letting go, which most Americans by a concoction of dissociative symptoms, control study of a hundred and twenty-three tend to struggle with.” In one study of five panic attacks, and depression. The doors LSD users, Abraham was among the first to hundred Native American Church members, of perception are not so much cleansed, as catalogue reports from those who flashed each of whom had taken peyote hundreds, Aldous Huxley famously found after his psychedelic and never turned off: a strug- even thousands of times, no way jose noway.

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