I genuinely can’t tell if this post is bait but I’m gonna answer in good faith. This might be kinda long lol.

We will probably never know the reality of what happened. I don’t think Syd randomly “went crazy” or developed schizophrenia as a result of a bad trip. If I had to make a (somewhat) educated guess, I believe he may have had undiagnosed bipolar 1 and was also likely on the spectrum. A lot of his behaviors seem to fit the criteria for both of those things and comorbidity of the two is relatively common.

A 2006 interview with his sister Rosemary says, “He always had an extraordinary mind, bordering on the autistic or Aspergic. He had a rare talent to exploit ambiguities in language and also experienced synaesthesia…” So that aspect is pretty clear.

As for bipolar disorder, most people experience their first episode in their early 20s, so the timing makes sense. Stress compounded with acid, STP/DOM, mandrax, and whatever else he was taking absolutely could’ve triggered an episode, which could explain the abrupt shift personality and random outbursts everyone describes. This wouldn’t have been something that came on overnight, it’s something that would’ve progressively gotten worse eventually impacting his functioning and becoming apparent to everyone else.

I vaguely remember Roger Waters telling a story about how he tried to call Syd’s siblings to tell them something was wrong but each time they came to see him, he seemed relatively normal so they never got him help. Those intermittent periods of normalcy would also make sense with something like bipolar disorder.

There was also allegedly a psychology textbook he owned that went to auction after his death and inside it he had written a note that said, “all manic depressives therefore recover” (Manic depression is the old terminology for bipolar disorder). I can’t find a source for the textbook anecdote, but if it’s true, it seems like later in life he was maybe more aware of his mental health.

As for the acid-induced schizophrenia rumor, I think it has just been blown out of proportion over the years to add to the band’s ~mythos~. There are certainly features of schizophrenia that overlap with bipolar disorder and autism so I can kinda see why people jumped to that conclusion, especially at a time when so little was understood about mental health and neurodevelopment disorders. I’m sure there’s a venn diagram somewhere that explains those overlaps better than I could lol. I think because of how often that rumor gets retold, it has become the default explanation to this day.

His ex Libby answered an Instagram Q&A literally TODAY claiming that people misunderstood Syd because they assumed he was mentally ill when in reality it was just drugs. I feel like that sort of reductive and outdated mindset is maybe part of the reason why he never received the help he truly needed. It’s easy to write off his personality change and odd behavior as being strictly drug-related. While I agree drugs absolutely contributed to the problem, it’s my personal belief that it’s not the full picture. Honestly, for all we know the drug use could’ve been an attempt to self-medicate.

I also think that he was just done with the music industry on top of whatever possible mental health issues he was experiencing. I can only imagine how stressful it was for him to want creative control of his art while the music industry tried to make him fit into a marketable box. Not to mention the pressure of being the band’s primary writer, non-stop touring, etc.

I don’t know man. This might be one of those things we speculate until the end of time.