Health - Dissociative Effect from MDMA?

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Once upon a time, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, SWIM and his girlfriend each took 80 mg MDMA in orange juice. The material was well known and accurately weighed out. Even though it had never been analyzed, dozens of honest friends had consumed from exactly the same batch for months, without any problems or unusual events. The stuff also looked pretty much like several pictures on the internet being referred to as pure MDMA (white to light tan solid crystals up to 5 mm in length). Tsich hinleherefore, for him and some of his friends, this batch had become the subjective MDMA reference for assessing the effects of Ecstasy pills bought in clubs, in order to generate a hypothesis on the ingredients. SWIM, as well as all his friends, felt very sad about the fact that their supply of it was running short. SWIM has had about 40 trips with it up to 150 mg, and this one turned out to be no different, while his girlfriend had had five experiences up to 120 mg with the same material, without untypical effects, too. However, this one should turn out to be very different for her.

At first everything went fine. t+20 after ingestion, SWIM's girlfriend felt powerless and tired and wished to lie down, but SWIM could convince her to leave the house for a walk to boost blood circulation (which she would appreciate as a good idea afterwards). SWIM felt beeing onset at t+40, his girlfriend reported slight effects a few minutes later. The mental opening occured as expected, so that the two lovers sat down in the light and had a wonderful talk on their relationship, in all respect and harmony and the sundown in all its beauty. When it got cold outside, they agreed to go back home, get naked and close to each other in bed.

Done that, at approximately t+180, when SWIM started to touch her gently, she was erotically non-responsive. Instead, she told him that in that very moment, when she felt that she was touched by him, a state of emotional vacuum suddenly had struck her, and that she now was shocked to have no feelings at all for him. She compared it to a morning years ago, when she had awaken next to her ex-boyfriend, instantly knowing that she had lost all her feelings for that man and it inevitably was time to end the relationship. Now, coming down from MDMA, the only things she could emotionally identify were some kind of anger about her emotional imperfection, about the disability to feel anything, and a strong fear that it would stay this way. She definitely wanted to go to her appartement and be alone, which SWIM permitted after a brief discussion, because he understood that any further objections would do nothing but antagonize her.

During a phone at approximately t+300 she was still jailed in her emotional vacuum. Fortunately, SWIM could manage to talk her out of the fear a bit, making clear that drug-induced psychosis fades away in 99,9% of the cases and that it is best not to revolt against it. He also tried to establish the perspective, that drugs can only show in man what has been there before, and that therefore such incidents should be seen as the rare chance to get an emotionally unaltered insight into one's personality, as even another MDMA ingestion would most probably not reproduce the same effect. Because he is psychologically untrained, SWIM was not able to provide her with the proper questions or excercises to harvest from this insight. As she felt very anxious, confused, helpless and stressed, she might not have had the energy and contemplation to do work on herself anyway.

In PIKAHL, Chapter 38 ("Crisis"), Alice gives a detailed description of a very similar set of symptoms, triggered by 40 mg DESOXY and lasting for days, which could not be reproduced (any further experiments showed no activity on her or Shura). She also identifies this state of mind as "dissociated". SWIMS own research on dissociation reinforces this diagnosis so far.

It has to be said that SWIM's girl actually undergoes early stage ambulant psychotherapy, in order to find out how this can help her, as she has had several mental symptoms for over 10 years. For example, she finds it generally hard to concentrate or to eat and sleep regularly. She also believes to be behind any expectations concerning what one should have accomplished in her age (there is no objective reason to think so as she HAS success in her life, nevertheless she is unable to see it). In all former relationships she has experienced the same feeling of fear, often escalating into panic, when thinking about the possibility that she could be betrayed or left alone by the man, an idea which continously occupies her mind dozens of hours per month. This seems to be also the reason that all her former relationships broke after 1-2 years, which obviously gave her additional reasons to believe that her fear is justified and she somehow is not "worth" a man. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is suspected due to the suicide of her father when she was a teenager.

It is trivial that drugs should not be given to persons suffering from psychic problems on the one hand, and that MDMA has been successfully used in therapeutic sessions especially when dealing with PTSD on the other. However, from a more theoretic point of view, SWIM would love to know if anyone has experienced or heard of a similar phenomenon triggered by pure MDMA, detaching a human from his emotions instead of anything that one could call entactogenic, as it is expected from the drug. Any attempt to give an explanation would be even more appreciated. As everybody can imagine, the incident has SWIM given back a great deal of respect for MDMA, which he considered a mild and safe substance before. Astoundingly, his girlfriend told him two days later that she would be open to repeat the experiment, but with better preparation this time. What kind of preparation this might be has not yet been thouroughly discussed between the two.