Solipsis
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2007
- Messages
- 15,509
I'd need evidence of this solipsis - I've taken some incredible doses and never remotely felt violent. Neither has anyone I've ever known. Similarly I've been drunk and never been violent.
To illustrate: alcohol tends to cause people to throw up and/or fall asleep before they ever get to a delirium state sort of point, but I'm pretty sure that if you take it far enough you can have a 'blackout' in which behavior can turn pretty primal.
I've never really bought into the idea "the alcohol made me do it". You become violent because you WANT to be violent and the alcohol frees your inhibitions. If you don't want to become violent on alcohol then you don't become violent. There's always a pretty strong link between the people who are violent on alcohol and the people who are violent anyway. You don't tend to get the Dali Lama having 3 pints and attempting to murder somebody.
It can be interpreted as another way of saying that extreme episodes don't usually tend to happen in people who are mentally very well
I'm sure you can have extreme episodes - I'm just questioning whether those episodes would involve homicidal violence. There's a big difference between having an extreme episode and becoming psychotically violent.
Hard to prove anything like this off the top of my head, anyways...
My personal experience tells me that for me it was in a certain way the opposite actually: the problem can be that rather than wanting to be angry or violent, anger or violence gets repressed. The only time I've been violent on alcohol was in Poland on crazy amounts of vodka, and there were people (my friends at the time) who were continuously annoying and provoking me and each other. I am rarely ever violent and I tend to freeze rather than explode, in self-defense. I tend to be highly controlling of my feelings, reactions and behavior in general.
But when I drank enough to sufficiently lose self-control / memory / self-awareness, everything I had repressed came crashing out. I even attacked strangers in the streets of Cracow, it would just be incorrect to say that deep down I wanted to do this, but it was obviously part of feelings I developed in reaction to provocation.
On GHB it was not uncommon for me to be okay with sleeping with people I wouldn't otherwise have touched with a 10 ft pole.
With LSD and alprazolam it was similar for me in that I behaved unrestrained. I believe the benzo made me temporarily blank out of my conscience / modesty / shame, etc.. I wouldn't say that these drugs made me do the things I did, they were just inside me as part of things that I felt and thought but wouldn't otherwise have told people in their faces. So I would disagree that it is as simple as that people want to do what they do while disinhibited, rather there are tendencies and urges living inside of people whether they want to or not and they can surface if you impair the control.
I don't mean to say that as a way to excuse people for what they do under the influence of drugs... but IMO it is fair to add some nuance to the actual evaluation of intention. We need to make a distinction between rational decisions that make us want something or irrational and subconscious processes, even instinct that make us have tendencies.
I believe that whether people are able to do something extreme or violent is not as simple as "I would never kill someone" or something like that, if we get a strong motive to do so, what holds us back is ultimately our self-control. I'm very anti-violence under normal conditions but if my own survival depends on it and laws would cease to exist I would never be so arrogant as to claim that my principles wouldn't change. "Wanting" may not apply anymore at that point!
Someone freaking out on a psychedelic with violent behavior may possibly be caused by an unfortunate combination of strong disinhibition, repressed anger as a result of certain difficult or frustrating experiences / factors and indeed existential confusion and terror such as is often seen with say Salvia. If a person regresses to such an extreme state, apparently in the case of this thread the guy felt like everything was inconsequential, like the opposite of synchronicity maybe IDK... the repressed anger may just start manifesting as violence, while normal conscience is impaired.
A lot of the same factors as with schizophrenia-related psychosis may be there but who ever said you can't get the same factors via another recipe?
The reason I said that drug-induced psychotic behavior wouldn't last much longer than the drug effects is that the mental disposition on its own wouldn't be enough of the recipe to sustain the psychosis-like state. I think I read enough train-wreck accounts in general to be able to claim that a significant number / most of them do not persist. The ones that do persist are evidence of either trauma derived from the episode or a mental state instable on its own where the psychosis is precipitated rather than emolated / i.e. for the most part induced.
^This.
When I was younger I used to spend many nights out getting messed up on alcohol and various substances sometimes people would "freak out" "get weird" become violent. It was people that had problems to begin with. The guy that was angry at his GF would get wasted start fights, punch walls, etc. The guy that was always "off" would start getting creepy and say dark weird things.
You go into a poor redneck bar that has fights every weekend - Then you go to a nicer place with nice well refined happy people that have no fight anyone can think of- Why?
Yes, I tried to make it clear in my previous post that I am not opposed to the fact that the mindset is essential regarding what thoughts, feelings or behavior are inhibited, repressed or not anymore. I definitely agree with you guys on that, but concluding on the whole matter that all psychotic behavior from drug freak outs has a latent psychotic aspect seems really wrong to me.