... vetting your trip buddies...

[Si Dread]

I was reading the thread about DOC Psychosis & it strikes me that this sort of thing is pretty common on all psychedelic trips, & it might handy to find a way to weed out folk who might be inclined to lose it under the unfluence of psychedelic drugs.

Do you think there could be some way to predict the liklihood of a particular individual having a difficult trip by administering a series of short psychological tests, perhaps casually, to try to see if they have the right head-set for tripping either on that occassion, or generally?

Or, is there any obvious way to predict that someone might have trouble on a trip?

If there was some way of reducing the chances of freak-outs, it would make psychedelics alot safer for newbies...

 

[Thomas Davie]

I don't know man. I avoided psychs my whole life (with one exception when I was 28) because I thought I was a prime candidate for losing it and going permanently insane. I was not prepared to experience 'a equals non a'. Had too much education and grounding in logic for the psychedelic experience; at least this is what I thought.

Now I've got a problem staying away from them. I also think the flip side might be true; that someone you think would be okay with tripping could possibly end up in a psych ward.

I'm high strung, agitated, nervous and jumpy all the time - but yet psychs calm me down.

I would have said the obvious way to predict good/bad tripping would be to watch the person's base personality

Does losing it once under the influence make you more (or less) likely to lose it in the future?

Tom

 

[Clocktower]

Trip with someone who's calm, level-headed, capable of controlling their emotions, not prone to paranoia, who doesn't drink to excess, is not egotistical, is not too fastidious or obsessive-compulsive, and so on. I don't think there's a hard-and-fast set of things to check, you'll just have to get to know the person. I think you should know someone pretty well before you decide to take LSD with them anyway.