Abstract
Background and aims
Microdosing psychedelics refers to the practice of repeatedly ingesting doses that do not reach the threshold for perceptual alterations. This practice has gained attention from mass media, businesses, and the general public, as evidenced by the proliferation of online communities dedicated to it. In this contribution, we examine the content generated within the online community r/microdosing from its creation on October 16, 2013, until the day of data collection on October 31, 2020. Our aim is to examine the narratives reflected by users' contributions, specifically the compatibility or incompatibility of spiritual and scientific narratives.
Methods
In this contribution, we used text analysis techniques and examined the content generated within the online community r/microdosing from its creation on October 16, 2013, until the day of data collection on October 31, 2020.
Results
We clearly identified a topic that reflects a spirituality narrative as well as a topic that we coined as “neuro-cognition” and that reflects a scientific narrative. These topics were typically not present within the contributions of the same users, suggesting that the scientific and spiritual narratives are segregated within the r/subreddit community.
Conclusion
Our approach emphasizes the potential of text analytic techniques for uncovering the cultural repertoire surrounding a particular practice, in our case, the practice of microdosing psychedelics.
Introduction
Microdosing psychedelics (hereafter referred to as microdosing) refers to the practice of using serotonergic hallucinogens, also known as psychedelics, by repeatedly ingesting doses that do not reach the threshold for perceptual alterations, with the purpose of improving wellbeing, emotional state, and cognitive function (Kuypers et al., 2019). The scholarly interest in this practice is not new (Passie, 2019); however, due to seminal articles such as the one published in Rolling Stone magazine (Leonard, 2015), this practice has gained the attention of mass media, business, and the general public. This process is especially visible online. To this day, various online communities have emerged and grown, a process facilitated by the emergence of social network sites such as YouTube, Facebook, or Reddit. Given the legal status of psychedelics and the difficulties of identifying individuals who engage in the microdosing practice, it is no wonder that these online communities have become recruiting grounds for survey studies and a source of information as a whole (Andersson & Kjellgren, 2019; Hupli, Berning, Zhuparris, & Fadiman, 2019; Lea, Amada, & Jungaberle, 2020; Petranker, Kim, & Anderson, 2022).
In the present study, we focus on the r/microdosing subreddit,1 an online community that has already received attention from researchers who focused on the microdosing practice (Lea et al., 2020). Unlike Lea and colleagues and other studies that focused on online communities, we ask to what extent scientific and spiritual narratives are endorsed by community members. In doing so, we contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the confluence of scientific and spiritual knowledge within the psychedelic experience and literature, as brought forth by scholars who positioned the mystical experience as a key factor explaining psychedelics' effects on health and well-being (Griffiths et al., 2011; Johnson, Hendricks, Barrett, & Griffiths, 2019; Noorani, 2020). The struggle to accommodate science and spirituality, two incompatible ontological and epistemological systems based on different assumptions, methods, and truth criteria, is genuine (M. Corbin, 2012). Regardless of whether we agree or not with framing the mystical experience as a key explanatory factor (Breeksema & van Elk, 2021; Sanders & Zijlmans, 2021), we can accept the proposition that “psychedelic substances served as a doorway through which spirituality entered the scientific laboratory” (M. D. Corbin, 2010, p. 4).
Subsequently, the first contribution of this study is to investigate whether members of the r/microdosing community tend to use a more scientific or spiritual narrative, or whether they combine these narratives. Additionally, since we were able to extract all posts from the beginning of the microdosing subreddit on October 16, 2013 until the day of data collection on October 31, 2020, we also examine whether scientific and spiritual narratives on microdosing become more or less prevalent over time.
We decided to focus on the practice of microdosing because the use of tiny amounts of psychedelics theoretically does not result in mystical experiences, and therefore, the need to use spiritual terminology (such as “referring to a transcendent sense of interconnection that moves beyond the knowable, visible material world […] described variously as divinity, the sacred, spirit, or simply the universe” (Fernandez, 2003, p. 10)) is less evident. In fact, this practice has been framed by mass media and scholarly work through a utilitarian/instrumental lens, as a means for cognitive enhancement, fostering creativity, focus, and productivity (Aronov, 2019; Leonard, 2015; Liokaftos, 2021). Finding evidence of spiritual terminology within the microdosing community is an interesting finding in itself, and is parallel to the science-spirituality debate within the scholarly psychedelic community (Breeksema & van Elk, 2021; Sanders & Zijlmans, 2021).
A second contribution to the literature is methodological in nature and refers to the method that we use, i.e., we estimate a structural topic model to explore the prevalence of scientific and spiritual narratives, and the relation between them. Text analysis techniques have improved dramatically in recent years, enabling researchers to quantify semantic relations between words, e.g., Pennington, Socher, and Manning (2014). Even more recently, these methods have been used to trace the development of cultural narratives (Arseniev-Koehler & Foster, 2022; Kozlowski, Taddy, & Evans, 2019), as part of a growing interest in text-analytic approaches to capturing cultural trends (Michel et al., 2011; Mohr et al., 2020). Subsequently, with our study, we aim to illustrate how topic models can be used to study online communities and the narratives they engage with, providing an application of the possibilities and limitations of text-analytic methods, and an invitation for future research to expand on it and formulate more complex research questions.
Data and methods
Data and pre-processing
Reddit is among the top ten most visited websites in the U.S.2 It hosts a network of online communities that discuss a vast range of topics, consisting mostly of left-leaning young males (Alexa Internet, 2022). The content on Reddit is generated by users, known as “redditors,” and is organized into discussion sites called subreddits. Users can follow and participate in these subreddits by posting submissions, commenting, and upvoting or downvoting posts. A detailed description of the Reddit online discussion forum has been provided elsewhere (Kilgo, Ng, Riedl, & Lacasa-Mas, 2018; Lea et al., 2020; Shatz, 2017).
Using the Pushshift API wrapper (Marx, 2018), we initially gathered 117,843 posts – both submissions and comments – since the start of the r/microdosing subreddit on October 16, 2013, until the day of data collection on October 31, 2021. Figure 1 shows that the activity on the subreddit has steadily increased over time, with minor peaks in early 2017 and 2019, before stabilizing at an approximate 150 posts per day during 2021.
Submission frequency over time within the r/microdosing subreddit
Citation: Journal of Psychedelic Studies 7, 2; 10.1556/2054.2023.00260
Using the Pushshift API wrapper (Marx, 2018), we initially gathered 117,843 posts – both submissions and comments – since the start of the r/microdosing subreddit on 2013-10-16, until the day of data collection on 2021-10-31. Figure 1 shows that the activity on the subreddit increases steadily over time, with minor peaks in early 2017 and 2019, before stabilizing at an approximate 150 posts per day during 2021.
In order to prepare the raw text data for analysis, and following usual procedures (e.g., Anandarajan, Hill, & Nolan, 2019), several steps were taken. First, we cleaned the text corpus by converting all text to lowercase, excluding the standard list of stop words included in the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), and removing hyperlinks and punctuation. Next, we lemmatized words so that inflections are recognized as the same word. For example, the phrase “I was running with friends” becomes “I am run with friend”. To increase the amount of available information, we included combinations of words (2-g) in the analysis, such as “mental_health” or “cold_turkey”. Terms that occurred only once or twice in the corpus were uninformative in estimating the topic model and were therefore removed, as well as posts that contained fewer than five unique words. Posts from accounts that were deleted at the time of data gathering were excluded from the analysis. Our final corpus consists of 85,912 posts and 188,844 words and collocations.
Analytical strategy
To identify the narratives and their interactions, we adopt a two-step modeling strategy. First, we estimate a “document-level correlated topic model” (Blei & Lafferty, 2007; Roberts, Stewart, & Airoldi, 2016) that allows us to identify the narratives present in the subreddit. For a detailed methodological presentation of the model estimation, please see Roberts, Stewart, and Tingley (2019). In layman's terms, the building blocks of the topic models are the words, topics, and documents. In our case, a document is equivalent to a unique post of a user, whether it is a post that starts a thread or a comment left in an existing thread. The topic models are commonly used to identify latent topics in a body of text, where the identified topics are mixtures of words, and each word is assigned a probability to belong to each topic. Thus, a document consists of a mixture of topics, meaning each document has a predicted probability of containing each topic. For every document, the topic probabilities sum to one. Likewise, for every topic, the word probabilities sum to one.
In the next step, we computed the network of topics at the user level (see Leifeld (2017)). This allowed us to establish how users interact with these narratives, i.e., whether users tend to engage similarly with both scientific and spiritual narratives or have a preference for only one of the two. To construct the user-level topic network, our strategy was to retain topical precision by deriving user-level correlations from a document-level topic model. In practice, this means that we summed the document-topic probabilities of all posts from the same user and divided by the number of posts from that user. The result is a vector of k topic probabilities across documents that sum to one. Figure 2 presents this process in a visually intuitive manner. These user-aggregated topic probabilities can be seen as a two-mode network, where each user connects to each topic with a certain probability.
Visual representation of the process of aggregating topic probabilities from document to user level
Citation: Journal of Psychedelic Studies 7, 2; 10.1556/2054.2023.00260
Following Wasserman and Faust (1994) we transform the two-mode network into a so-called one-mode projection: a topic network where the identified topics in the body of text are related when users tend to co-adopt these topics.
Figure 3 presents a visual example to illustrate this procedure. For example, the strength of the tie between the spiritual and neuro-cognitive topics at this user level equals to 0.20 * 0.40 = 0.08. These calculations are performed across users and topics. For ease of interpretation, the resulting topic ties are averaged across users. In the final topic network, a stronger tie between two topics indicates a stronger average tendency for users to discuss both topics in their posts. Topics that are not visually related by a tie indicate that users will have a preference for one topic but not for the other. Since all topics are related to some extent, two topics are considered meaningfully connected when the tie strength exceeds the strength expected under a random (‘null') distribution of ties.
Example of the one-mode projection (in black) of a two-mode network
Citation: Journal of Psychedelic Studies 7, 2; 10.1556/2054.2023.00260
Results
What are the topics in the microdosing subreddit?
The number of topics k must be determined before the model can be estimated. To ensure that we select the number of topics that produce interpretable results, we evaluate the global fit of the model and substantively compare a range of candidate models. We derive global model fit from the trade-off between topical coherence and exclusivity. Semantic coherence and exclusivity are global fit statistics that indicate the extent to which the model produces coherent and exclusive topics. Intuitively, high-quality topics prioritize words that are used in the same context (coherence) and not in other contexts (exclusivity). The semantic coherence of a topic increases when the most probable topic words more frequently co-occur in the same post (Mimno, Wallach, Talley, Leenders, & McCallum, 2011). Topic exclusivity, on the other hand, increases when the most probable topic words are ranked low in other topics (Bischof & Airoldi, 2012). Roberts et al. (2014) suggest using the trade-off between coherence and exclusivity to evaluate the relative fit of models.
The coherence-exclusivity trade-off in Fig. 4 points to an optimal number of topics in the range of k = 12 to k = 20. The figure displays the mean coherence and exclusivity across topics, as well as the standard deviation in coherence between topics. The clustering of mean exclusivity and coherence indicates that the topics start to stabilize after k = 12. Additional topics continue to erode topical coherence while only marginally increasing exclusivity.
The coherence-exclusivity trade-off when deciding the optimal number of topics
Citation: Journal of Psychedelic Studies 7, 2; 10.1556/2054.2023.00260
However, we note that a model with coherent and distinct topics overall is not necessarily the best at isolating the spiritual and scientific narratives that we are most interested in. To check the extent to which the models discriminate between words associated with each narrative, we evaluate a range of candidate models substantively, from which we selected k = 20. The full model's solution and interpretations are available in the Supplementary Materials S1-5, and Table 1 summarizes our interpretation of the topics in each model.
Substantive models evaluation
| k = 12 | k = 14 | k = 16 | k = 18 | k = 20 | |
| Protocols/Dosing | schedule | schedule | schedule | schedule | schedule |
| mushroom | mushroom | mushroom | mushroom | mushroom | |
| lsd | lsd | lsd | lsd | lsd | |
| intensity | intensity | intensity | intensity | intensity | |
| stacking | stacking | stacking | stacking | stacking | |
| questions | questions | questions | questions | questions | |
| full trip | full trip | ||||
| microdosing | microdosing | microdosing | |||
| first time | first time | ||||
| neg. emotion/capsules | capsules | ||||
| Mental health | addiction | addiction | addiction | addiction | addiction |
| therapy | therapy | therapy | therapy | therapy | |
| neuro-cognition | neuro- cognition | neuro- cognition | neuro- cognition | neuro- cognition | |
| medical advice/neg. emotion | neg. emotion | ||||
| medical advice | |||||
| sleep | sleep | sleep | sleep | ||
| focus | focus | focus | |||
| pos. emotion | pos. emotion | pos. emotion | |||
| Spirituality | spirituality/neg. emotion | spirituality/neg. emotion | neg. emotion/spirituality | spirituality | spirituality |
| Other | trip | trip | |||
| survey | survey | survey | survey | survey |
Note: topics written in bold italic are chosen to best reflect the scientific and spiritual narratives. Topics written in italics have helped choosing between the k = 18 and k = 20 solutions
One of the first decisions we made was to classify the topics into broader categories and only focus on those that clearly reflected either a scientific or spiritual narrative. We differentiated between the following categories: 1) a broad category covering topics related to protocols and dosing; 2) a category covering topics related mostly to mental health; 3) a category containing only one topic linked to spirituality; 4) a category with other uncategorized topics.
Turning first to the “spirituality” topic, we found it in the k = 12 solution, but it was mixed with negative emotions such as anger and suicide. The “spirituality” topic is much clearer in the k = 18 and k = 20 solutions. We then focused on the “neuro-cognition” topic under the mental health category, as it expresses a scientific narrative clearly. This topic was present in all our solutions, so we had to choose between the k = 18 and k = 20 solutions. Since the k = 20 solution improved the interpretability of some topics above the k = 18 (e.g., “medical advice/negative emotion” and “negative emotion/capsules” were separated into “medical advice”, “negative emotions”, and “capsules”), we chose the former.
Table 2 presents the words and an example post that are most associated with the “neuro-cognition” and “spirituality” topics, as reflected in the microdosing subreddit. The full model is available in Table S5 in Supplementary materials.
Illustration of the “neuro-cognition” and “spirituality” topics (k = 20)
| Most probable | Most exclusive | Example document (post) with high topic probability | |
| Neuro-cognition | psychedelic, effect, lsd, brain, can, use, drug | serotonin, receptor, pmc, serotonin_receptor, serotonin_syndrome, hta, pmc_article | “A lot of people are worried whether the 5-HT2B receptor agonism/partial agonism of psychedelics could promote heart disease (fibrosis, valve issues). This is plausible due to the association of the 5-HT2B receptor with cardiac fibrosis (1).” |
| Spirituality | life, change, experience, love, feel, live, world | watt, alan, alan_watt, pollans, michael_pollans, ego_death, experience_ego | “I love Eckhart Tolles definition: “Love is a state of Being” Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you.” |
Prevalence and trends over time
The prevalence of topics in the corpus is determined by the average proportion of each topic across posts. “Spirituality” comprises 3.7% of the average post, while “neuro-cognition” accounts for 4.7%. Although “neuro-cognition” is slightly more prevalent as a topic of discussion than “spirituality”, both are less common than the average topic, which is 5% (or 1 out of 20).
The development of prevalence over time is visualized in Fig. 5. “Spirituality” becomes slightly more prevalent over time, while the “neuro-cognition” topic remains more or less stable. Note that the estimates of prevalence become more stable over time. This is because the number of posts per month increases, as shown in Fig. 1. The estimates in the early days of the subreddit are very uncertain and cannot be reliably interpreted.
The prevalence over time of the “spirituality” and “neuro-cognition” topics
Citation: Journal of Psychedelic Studies 7, 2; 10.1556/2054.2023.00260
The relationship between the “spirituality” and the “neuro-cognition” topics
We began the paper by framing the scholarly debate surrounding the spiritual and scientific narratives applied to psychedelic research. We asked the question: Can we find evidence of the (in)compatibility of these narratives in the r/microdosing community? The topic network that provides an answer to this question is presented in Fig. 6. The graph uses a centrality layout, which means that the topics that are most central to the discussion in the subreddit are closest to the center of the graph. This graph shows a lack of connection between the “spirituality” and “neuro-cognition” topics. Users who discuss spiritual matters tend not to discuss scientific matters, and vice versa. Given that science and spirituality topics are discussed largely by different users, these particular narratives appear to be incompatible.
The topic network – relationships between topics across users
Citation: Journal of Psychedelic Studies 7, 2; 10.1556/2054.2023.00260
More generally, the observed relations between topics create a coherent set of results. It appears that dosing questions are most central to the discussion, and users who ask such questions also tend to discuss dosing schedules, dosing intensity, and other dosing-related topics. Note also that those discussing subjects pertaining to the “neuro-cognition” topic also tend to refer to the “professional medicine” topic. The “spirituality” topic tends to be discussed in tandem with positive and negative emotions. As one would expect, the discussion around emotions is also connected to “therapy” and “addiction” topics. Furthermore, the “spirituality” topic is not directly tied to the “therapy” topic, suggesting that therapy and spirituality are also part of different cultural spheres.
Finally, in Fig. 7, we show the trend of users discussing both “spirituality” and “neuro-cognition” topics over time. There is no reason to conclude that the incompatibility between science and spirituality changes over time. The peaks in the early months of the subreddit are, much like in Fig. 5, impossible to interpret due to the few users and posts during that period. Once the estimate stabilizes, the connection never exceeds the threshold of “significance.”
Relationship between “spirituality” and “neuro-cognition” topics over time
Citation: Journal of Psychedelic Studies 7, 2; 10.1556/2054.2023.00260
Discussion
In this contribution, we aim to investigate how members of the online community r/microdosing engage with scientific and spiritual narratives. Do they adopt one or the other, or do they combine the two narratives in their posts? We used text analysis techniques, specifically structural topic modeling, and applied this technique to the full body of text produced by the users of the r/microdosing community since the subreddit's start on October 16, 2013, until the day of data collection on October 31, 2021. Based on our analyses, we have derived the following conclusions.
First, we found that a “spirituality” topic was present in the discussions of the r/microdosing community from the start, and slightly increased in prevalence as the community developed. This is an interesting result in itself, given the fact that microdosing psychedelics is, by definition, a practice that does not (theoretically) result in perceptual alterations (Kuypers et al., 2019). To this extent, users engaging in microdosing do not report similar types of experiences as the users that ingest large doses of psychedelics, i.e., the so-called mystical experiences that pertain to the realm of spirituality (Griffiths et al., 2011). We note that the role of the mystical experience for the outcomes of psychedelic-assisted therapy is precisely the issue that has stirred the scholarly debate on the usefulness of bringing spirituality into the scientific study of psychedelics (Breeksema & van Elk, 2021; Sanders & Zijlmans, 2021). As such, the fact that we could clearly identify a topic that reflects a spirituality-related narrative within a microdosing community is, to some extent, surprising, especially because microdosing was framed in the scientific and mass-media coverage as a tool for human enhancement and self-therapy (Aronov, 2019; Leonard, 2015; Ona & Bouso, 2020; Petranker et al., 2022).
Still, if we turn to the current literature that describes users' motivations and effects of microdosing, we find hints supporting the presence of a spiritual narrative in microdosing practice. For instance, Aronov (2019) describes the process through which eastern spirituality was associated with the discourse around psychedelics and found that especially the link to meditation and meditation-like states was reflected in the accounts of the microdosing users in the study. Furthermore, scholars report accounts of microdosing users reporting feelings or insights regarding the unity of life, such as being the same as the environment (Andersson & Kjellgren, 2019), and a recent quantitative study provided evidence for microdosing practice enhancing a sense of awe (van Elk et al., 2021). These disparate pieces of evidence point toward various experiences linked to microdosing that reflect a spiritual narrative, and this would explain our finding of a distinct “spirituality” topic within a microdosing community.
However, we note the centrality of topics covering dosing and dosing regimens in discussions within the r/microdosing community. This finding complements the work of scholars who position microdosing predominantly at the intersection between clinical and human enhancement narratives (Lea et al., 2020; Ona & Bouso, 2020). The downplay of dosing-related topics in previous research has to do with the methods of analysis, which are usually based on qualitative methods and selective subsamples of posts that cannot capture the extent of specific discussion topics. Our analysis of the full body of text allowed us to expose that the “how-to” aspects of the practice are, in fact, not secondary topics. We propose that the centrality of discussions pertaining to different methods of psychedelic substance use within this community suggests that online communities serve mainly as conduits for the dissemination of knowledge and the lowering of barriers to use. If this is the case, and online communities of users serve mostly as knowledge hubs for users interested in either starting a microdosing practice or perfecting an existing one, that would explain why the prevalence of topics such as “spirituality” and “neuro-cognition” was very low.
A second conclusion pertains to the segregation of spiritual and scientific narratives. We have chosen the “neuro-cognition” topic to represent the scientific narrative in its clearest form. Our results indicate that users who discuss spiritual matters tend not to discuss scientific matters, and vice versa. In other words, these particular narratives appear to be incompatible. Therefore, our findings suggest that an integration of these two narratives is not present in the r/microdosing community. We note that the lack of centrality and prevalence of the “spirituality” and “neuro-cognition” topics further supports the idea that only a minority of users discuss these topics. It seems that the two narratives are not mainstream within this community, but rather a niche type of discussion, which could be well explained by the specific knowledge and skills required to engage in both narratives. All in all, the same tension that we emphasized within scholarly discussions surrounding the role (if any) of spirituality within the scientific method as it pertains to psychedelics is also found within the r/microdosing community.
A warning regarding this last conclusion: while we conclude that there is no overall compatibility between science and spirituality narratives in the r/microdosing subreddit, this does not mean that there are no users at all who combine these topics. For specific subgroups, which this analysis has not located, the combination of science and spirituality may still be common. The same can apply to different types of (online) communities that gather users with different profiles. As such, the integration of spirituality and scientific narratives that we did not find in the r/microdosing subreddit could still be present elsewhere and/or within a more specific subgroup of users.
And last, a limitation of our study is the sole focus on the r/microdosing community. Broadening the scope of the study to include other dedicated communities, or conducting a more in-depth analysis of different subgroups of users, could result in a more accurate picture of the extent and the way spiritual and scientific narratives coexist within the cultural milieu. For this purpose, text analysis techniques provide a broad but efficient way to address such questions. Our study convincingly shows that such techniques have great potential in uncovering the cultural repertoire surrounding a particular practice, in our case, the practice of microdosing psychedelics.
Declaration of interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Supplementary Materials
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2023.00260.
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