Recreational Psychedelic Users Frequently Encounter Complete Mystical Experiences: Trip Content and Implications for Wellbeing

Psychedelic drugs have re-emerged in Western societies after decades of suppression, and increasing numbers of people are using them recreationally. Earlier research and clinical trials have established that classical psychedelics and some related compounds can reliably occasion mystical-type experiences—operationalised as states combining deeply felt positive mood, transcendence of time and space, ineffability, and noetic or mystical qualities such as unity and ego dissolution. However, most prior characterisations come from clinical settings with carefully controlled set and setting, and comparatively little is known about the phenomenology and psychological correlates of psychedelic experiences occurring naturally in recreational contexts. Tianhong and colleagues set out to describe the content of naturalistic psychedelic experiences and to test whether recreational use commonly produces complete mystical experiences, whether those experiences vary by drug type and dose, and whether complete mystical experiences are associated with psychological wellbeing. To do so they combined data-driven text mining of >2,000 first-person trip reports with psychometric analyses of an online survey (N = 1,424) that measured lifetime psychedelic use, dose estimates, mystical experience intensity (MEQ30), and a broad battery of wellbeing measures. The study is presented as descriptive and associative rather than causal, with hypotheses and analysis plans pre-registered on OSF.

The study used two existing data sources. First, a corpus of public trip reports from Erowid (extracted via the "tmasc" R package) provided over 24,000 reports overall; for the present analyses the authors selected reports mentioning psilocybin-containing mushrooms, LSD, DMT and MDMA. Text preprocessing included tokenisation, lowercasing, removal of punctuation, numbers and English stopwords; reports could list multiple substances. Sentiment analysis employed the AFINN lexicon, which assigns words valence scores from -5 to +5; per-report sentiment sums were computed and mean sentiment compared across drugs using ANOVA with Tukey's HSD post-hoc tests. Second, psychometric data came from an online survey originally reported by Qiu and Minda (2021), augmented with 205 additional participants to yield N = 1,424. Recruitment was via psychedelic-related Reddit communities and a university subject pool; the survey collected demographics, lifetime doses, typical doses per substance, and wellbeing instruments. Measures included the MEQ30 (mystical experience questionnaire, with a predefined criterion for a 'complete mystical experience' requiring ≥60% of maximum on all four MEQ subscales), the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), Brief Wisdom Screening Scale (BWSS), Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS; three subscales), and Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ; presence and search subscales). Topic modelling used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) applied separately to each drug corpus; optimal topic counts were selected using multiple coherence metrics (Griffiths2004, CaoJuan2009, Arun2010), resulting in k = 23 for mushrooms, 20 for LSD, 18 for DMT, and 22 for MDMA. Iterative removal of subject-specific stopwords (for example drug names) was performed to improve topic interpretability. For psychometric analyses, the authors compared proportions of individuals meeting the MEQ 'complete' threshold between psychedelic users and non-users with a z-test. Among self-identified psychedelic users (n = 991), logistic regression models tested predictors of encountering a complete mystical experience; models controlled for age, gender, ethnicity and education. Lifetime dose counts and typical dose estimates were modelled; dosage units were standardised by dividing by an estimated "standard recreational dose" (1.0 g mushrooms, 100 μg LSD, 30 mg DMT, 80 mg MDMA) so coefficients represent multiples of these standards. Group differences on wellbeing scales were tested with two-tailed Welch's t-tests and Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons, with effect sizes reported as Cohen's d (Hedges-corrected where appropriate).

Text mining results: Sentiment analysis showed differences in mean emotional valence across the four drug corpora, consistent with the hypothesis that trip reports differ by substance. Topic modelling produced drug-specific patterns: the term "life" appeared commonly across all models, "friend" was prominent in LSD, mushrooms and MDMA topics but less so in DMT, and somatic terms such as "body", "eyes" and "face" were more prominent in DMT topics. MDMA topics included terms related to love and family more often than other drugs. The authors identified topics suggestive of mystical-type content in the LSD model and highly positive interpersonal content in MDMA topics. All models also contained setting-related words (e.g. "day", "night", "room", "music"). The authors note greater variance and potential for extreme positive or negative sentiment in mushrooms and LSD reports. Prevalence of complete mystical experiences: Psychedelic users reported a substantially higher proportion of complete mystical experiences than non-users: 63.5% versus 11.7%, z = 17.1, p < .001, 95% CI [0.47, 0.56], supporting H2. Within the subset of self-identified psychedelic users (n = 991), lifetime number of doses was a statistically significant but very small predictor of encountering a complete mystical experience, b = 0.008, OR = 1.008, 95% CI [1.004, 1.012], p < .001; the authors characterise this as weak evidence for H3 and caution the lower bound of the confidence interval. Drug-specific associations: In a multivariable logistic model including mushroom, LSD, DMT and MDMA use, LSD, DMT and MDMA were each uniquely associated with higher odds of encountering a complete mystical experience, while mushrooms were not when the other substances were accounted for (mushrooms: b = 0.22, OR = 1.24, 95% CI [0.84, 1.84], p = .28). Dose-dependence analyses showed that higher mushroom doses per 1.0 g were associated with higher odds (b = 0.21, OR = 1.23, 95% CI [1.08, 1.41], p = .002) and higher LSD doses per 100 μg were associated with higher odds (b = 0.25, OR = 1.28, 95% CI [1.08, 1.53], p = .006), supporting H5a and H5b. DMT dose per 30 mg reached nominal significance (b = 0.38, OR = 1.46, 95% CI [1.02, 2.12], p = .04) but the authors regard this as weak or possibly spurious evidence. MDMA dose per 80 mg was not significantly associated with increased odds (b = 0.19, OR = 1.21, 95% CI [0.97, 1.52], p = .09), contrary to H5d. Wellbeing associations: Individuals classified as having experienced a complete mystical experience scored more positively across most wellbeing measures compared with those who had not, with mean differences ranging from small to medium effect sizes and the BWSS (wisdom) showing a large effect. Specifically, higher scores were observed on mindfulness (FFMQ), wisdom (BWSS), life satisfaction (SWLS), positive affect (PANAS-positive), and MLQ-presence, alongside lower scores on negative affect, depression and stress (DASS subscales). Two exceptions were DASS anxiety and MLQ-search, which did not differ significantly between groups. The pattern supports the hypotheses linking complete mystical experiences to more favourable self-reported wellbeing across multiple domains.

Tianhong and colleagues interpret their findings as evidence that recreational psychedelic use frequently occasions complete mystical experiences in ordinary users, and that such experiences are robustly associated with higher self-reported wellbeing across numerous psychological domains. They emphasise that multiple substances—LSD, DMT and MDMA—were each uniquely associated with increased odds of a complete mystical experience, and that dose-dependence was clearest for LSD and mushrooms. The text mining results are taken to show meaningful qualitative differences between substances, for example greater somatic emphasis in DMT reports and increased interpersonal and "love" language in MDMA reports, while "life" was a common theme across drugs. The authors position their results as complementary to clinical literature that documents psychedelics' capacity to elicit mystical-type states, but novel in documenting these phenomena in naturalistic, recreational contexts and relating them to a broader battery of wellbeing metrics. They repeatedly caution that their analyses are observational and associative; no causal claims are made about psychedelics producing lasting wellbeing benefits. Key limitations acknowledged include the non-random, convenience sampling strategy (recruitment via psychedelic-focused Reddit communities and a university pool), which biases the sample toward people with interest in psychedelics and limits generalisability. The authors also note the inherent limits of retrospective self-report, potential dosing imprecision, and that some dose-related findings (notably for DMT) are weak and warrant scepticism. Methodological strengths highlighted include the large psychometric sample and the use of scalable, reproducible text-mining methods (sentiment analysis and LDA topic modelling) to summarise thousands of trip reports with reduced top-down bias. The authors suggest that the consistent association between complete mystical experiences and improved scores across diverse wellbeing measures justifies further investigation, while reiterating that longitudinal or experimental designs would be needed to address causality. They propose their descriptive model as a non-causal framework to guide future research on recreational psychedelic use, naturalistic mystical experiences, and wellbeing.

The study presents a mixed-methods description of recreational psychedelic experiences, combining topic-modelling of trip reports with psychometric analysis of a large survey. The authors conclude that complete mystical experiences occur at substantially higher rates among psychedelic users than non-users, that certain drugs (notably LSD and mushrooms) show dose-dependent relationships with such experiences while others (MDMA, DMT) show different patterns, and that complete mystical experiences are associated with broadly higher self-reported wellbeing. They frame these conclusions as associative observations intended to inform further investigation rather than provide causal claims.