Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder does not have the same visual qualities for all. For some it is mild, for others it is very strong and can interfere with daily lifestyles and social life. About 59% of people with HPPD see geometric patterns on blank surfaces like walls. Almost as many, see false movements of still objects, usually in the peripheral visual fields. Others reports flashes of light, trailing images behind moving objects, intensified colors, and afterimagery.
About 1 in 50,000 hallucinogen users will develop HPPD.
H.P.P.D. does not generate hallucinations, technically speaking. Sufferers can appreciate that their perceptual aberrations are unreal—that their surroundings only appear blurred by afterimages (palinopsia) and trails (akinetopsia); shimmered by sparkles and flashed by bright bolts of light; interrupted by transparent blobs of color floating around; electrified by visual snow; magnified or shrunk by “Alice-in-Wonderland” symptoms; adorned by halos around objects, around people’s heads. The pseudo-hallucinations are ultimately unconvincing, if deeply unsettling.
The cluster of symptoms first appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1986. Ever since, the official diagnosis has been lumped together with “flashbacks.” Brief fragments of a trip that occasionally bubble up to one’s consciousness, flashbacks may arise from sudden spikes in the cerebral cortex—stirring perceptions, sensations, or emotions mimicking those of the hallucinogen high, in the absence of any chemical. But as the term has been popularized, flashback has been rendered “virtually useless” diagnostically, writes Dr. John Halpern, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the most recent literature review of H.P.P.D. In the review, published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Dr. Halpern reasons that by conflating two distinct diagnoses, a strict definition of H.P.P.D. has remained elusive, leaving its prevalence obscured. Yet, “it seems inescapable,” he concludes, based on twenty related studies dating back to 1966, “that at least some individuals who have used LSD, in particular, experience persistent perceptual abnormalities reminiscent of acute intoxication, not better attributable to another medical or psychiatric condition.”
Peer-reviewed accounts of drug users whose world had been transfigured permanently can be found as early as 1983, prefiguring the initial D.S.M. entry. In a case-control study of a hundred and twenty-three LSD users, Abraham was among the first to catalogue reports from those who flashed psychedelic and never turned off: a struggling shoe salesman whose dark-brown pairs bled into the navy-blues; a confused student whose text jumbled into “alphabet soup”; a distracted office worker whose flower pot slid back and forth along the windowsill. “This isn’t flashbacks,” said Abraham. “We have to call it what it is: a persisting perception disorder.”
READ MORE: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-trip-that-doesnt-end
Had a few of those trailing effects myself. A few years after having used LSD and psilocybin and psilocin, I found that I'd experience a sort of sparkly shimmering at the peripherals of both eyes, followed by a migraine like headache. They would come and go infrequently and haven't experienced one in years. Wonder if this was in any way connected to my ingestion of psychedelic drugs?
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