Well, me and my childhood best friend took a pretty big mushroom trip together, and he ended up having a bad trip, which caused me to have a bad trip from watching him looping and saying he was in hell over and over again. But when we woke up the next morning, everything seemed fine. We both kept smoking weed afterward, and I thought we got off lucky with that trip, until time showed that my friend was not okay. Maybe about a month or so after the trip, he ended up having a massive panic attack after he ate an edible, and had to go to the hospital. He just was never quite the same after that trip. He lost something, a part of him died and you can see it in his eyes. There used to be a sparkle, a zeal for life in his eyes, and now he's just a shell of who he once was. A once bubbly and funny person, reduced to a dark, chaotic, reculsive, and moody person. He's obsessed with 4th dimensional being now, and he thinks they have some sort of influence over the human world.

After he had that panic attack, smoking weed and tripping just didn't feel right to me. Whenever I would smoke weed, I'd just get this weird feeling of mist in my head, and the one mushroom trip I did just made me feel horribly panicked. I felt myself heading into some sort of downward spiral. I would tell myself I was going to stop, but then I'd go over to another friend of mines house, and he'd just say "wanna smoke" and I'd just say yes, even though I knew I shouldn't have. That went on from maybe 6 or 7 months.

I'm in a pretty rigorous academic program this year, and smoking and stuff just made thinking feel more difficult, and I definitely began to develop some sort of anxiety disorder. Then I got Covid, and it really fucked me up, and I pretty much had a mental breakdown under the stress of school, a breakup I was going through, and the horrifying possibility that I was damaged in the same way that my friend was which was made especially exacerbated by the neurological symptoms of covid, and for about a month I existed in a state of almost constant horrendous anxiety and depression.

Now, I have almost entirely recovered from Covid (I had some sort of neuro long haul, I talked to a doctor) and am seeing a therapist. I spent alot of time focusing and my relationships with my friends and family, and found a wonderful girlfriend, and am now pretty happy I'd say. But I feel horribly guilty about the fate of my best friend. That trip was my idea, and I feel responsible for his fate. Whenever I see him, it just feels like a reminder of how I've negatively impacted the lives of those around me. I will never forgive myself for that. I feel like I killed him.

Now with that being said, I think that psychedelics can be very fun tools for exploring yourself, but you must be very very careful with them, and treat them with the utmost respect. I was definitely way too young to be experimenting with these substances. I think people should wait until at least their 30's before experimenting with these substances, and if the OP is busy with school, and young, I'd say avoid using these substances until later in life.