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Every night, as he fell asleep, a 25-year-old man saw an eye in his ceiling. It was huge and unblinking, and it felt as if the whole world was being sucked into it. He didn't have psychosis, and he wasn't on drugs. But he had taken psychedelics in the past, and he was worried enough to contact Max Greenwald, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at Yale School of Medicine, with a question: Was he developing psychosis?

"It's truly unclear whether this guy is at greater risk for psychosis," Greenwald says. But his experience would raise his score on the scale clinicians use to identify people at high risk.

That uncertainty is at the heart of a new study published in Scientific Reports by Greenwald and Albert Powers, M.D., Ph.D., medical director of Yale's PRIME Psychosis Risk Clinic for young people at high risk of psychosis. The study examines the lingering visual effects some people experience after psychedelics—which the researchers refer to as persisting perceptual abnormalities (PPAs)—and whether they work like the hallucinations of psychosis.

Now being tested as treatments for mental health disorders, psychedelics like psilocybin or LSD can leave behind PPAs, and researchers suspect this links to changes in how the brain receives, interprets and organizes information. In the study's sample of 186 psychedelic users, recruited largely through online forums, more than half said they had experienced PPAs that started after psychedelic use.

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