Placebos are often extremely effective. In fact, many clinical drugs are only 1% more effective than the placebo in trials. The mind is a powerful thing. People often have the side-effects they might expect from a real substance when given the placebo.

Hypnosis is an even more extreme use of suggestibility. It has been shown to be able to completely alter physiological responses so that people not only can be told that something cold is burning hot... but they actually get burned.

Of course letting someone hypnotize you is a level of trust far beyond that of having someone keep an eye on you while you go deeper than you might feel comfortable with.

I don't see why giving someone an aspirin or a salt tablet and telling them it will bring them back to earth in 15 minutes wouldn't work... if they trusted you and didn't recognize the pill, anyway. For a little while at least. Longer acting drugs have a tendency to creep back up on you, though.

A larger question is, what powers does someone give to a sitter when employing one? What responsibility do friends and family have to someone in a bad way? IME people often do more harm when meaning well than they would have done by doing nothing. Though people do call the ambulance or police on themselves occasionally, it is more often a loved one who freaks out upon finding someone un-responsive or delusional who brings in the authorities and all that goes with that.

If you have never seen the horror of someone you care about being processed by the mental health system and the lifelong stigma it can carry... hope you never do. SWIM thinks that most anything that could keep someone out of the looney bin or a jail cell, is preferable to watching someone get carted off.

The keyphrase here is "upon finding". If the other people do not know what has happened and just find a loved one delusional or un-responsive, its quite understandable if they panic. For all they know their loved one could need medical attention (thinking of solid medical reasons). Also if they know psychoactives might be involved still they could panic: not everyone that happens to find someone under the influence can discuss them reasonably or know about them or their effects.

So, more or less what im talking about is an informed sitter that knows the broad spectrum of the psychedelic experience and knows that the effects can be dramatic to an external observer without warranting "medical attention".

Yes Crystalito

Hey what about gravol? If people are saying that the pills may not end a trip, but just calm a person down, gravol seems to have a powerful sedating effect. I think 2 gravols would probably all but put most people to sleep. But I'm not sure if it reacts with psychedelics, or may potentiate them etc. Anyone know the properties of gravol and if it's ok to use with tryptamines and harmalas?

If people are so desperate that trip-abortion becomes nessecary, for instance because the chance they'll harm themselves is very real...i think you've got to consider the possibility that they'll no longer act in a sane way towards this trip-abortion theme either. How do you prevent them from taking a huge load of trip-abortion pills in a state of blind and total panick? (like when the valium still doesn't work after 2 minutes)

Stuff you can O.D. on is not reccomendable in these cases, i think.

Good point. I would recommend the amount be predetermined and the person can have that dosage at their disposal.

might not be an option for all, but when i have a particularly difficult pharma/aya session i engage myself in a physical activity to direct my focus outward. I live in a rather rural area, so if i am having mental issues i tend to put a comedy album/podcast on some headphones and go for a walk. If i am too far gone to walk safely, i will focus on physical excercise in the home such as squats, pushups, chinups, etc... I find that to be a great distraction. laying in bed with the world dissolving around you is just asking for trouble. One of my most terrible trips turned great after i jumped into the pool nude, and spent most of the trip underwater staring up at the stars!

Sounds like good fun, as long as one is able to swim!

I had my shares of hellish trips years ago. What always helped me was to walk away from it. Literally just walk fuck away from wherever I was to somewhere else. To different setting. From people to be alone, from town to nature. And keep walking till calm again.
To go to emergency for help is not very useful, all one will get is indeed valium or some anti-psychotic. Plus hard to answer questions and bill. It's cheaper to have some valium at home ready in the case of need. I never used valium to get down, don't like it. Used something very addictive once, worked wonders.

There was an occasion when we felt we need to go to emergency triping: one of us developed greenish color of face which got us worried. Soon we all seem to have a green face. Long story short...we never made it there anyway

From experience i can tell that niacin doesn't abort psychedelic trips.

Maybe some amino-acids like tryptophan or other serotonin boosters like 5-htp could help (don't combine 5-htp with MAOI's!). increasing levels of serotonin should at least partly counteract most psychedelics, since lowering serotonergic activity is one of the main effects of classic hallucinogens.

Thanks for the point about niacin. I have never really believed that claim. But wouldn't increasing serotonin levels potentially increase the intensity of psychedelics?

I do not know if psychedelics "decrease serotonin" in the synaptic cleft, if they do could it be through presynaptic 5HT1a interaction?

I think increasing serotonin may vanish some of the "symptoms" through competition for between serotonin and the molecule in question. Such a tactic though is not advised when MAOI has been co-administered.

I don't know boys. I think when people take enough psychedelics that they freak out, physical symptoms are part of the problem as well. And the physical symptoms are often related to elevated levels of serotonin. Major tremors, odd breathing, a feeling of all muscles contracting, and feeling hot, for example. And in some cases, I think the freakout might be caused by the physical symptoms themselves, as the person might think their body is out of control and about to die. There comes a point where high doses of psychedelics will become physically uncomfortable.

Serotonin syndrome could be a concern, therefore, I wouldn't recommend people take anything that increases serotonin activity, if they are worried they already took too much psychedelics.

No: 5htp, melatonin, l-tryptophan.

That makes sense, but imo its because there's other neurotransmitters jumbled up in the receptors besides serotonin. Increasing serotonin could only work if if somehow blocked the affects of the other neurotransmitters, ie something like having a higher affinity to bind to the receptors. I tend to think its because the receptors themselves are over stimulated, an overload of neurotransmitters.

In that case, gabageric drugs make sense, being the main inhibitory system of neurons. They would inhibit the excitatory state of the neuron, or in my mind numb it to increased stimulation.

I can also attest to having psychological freak outs due to physical symptoms, for me its mostly a racing heart and chest constriction. That triggers anxiety and causes further elevated heartbeat, after a few of these episodes i learned to stop this positive feedback loop, and made myself understand that its the fear causing the problem. I am over-analyzing my health, causing anxiety that causes the symptoms in the first place. It has nothing to do with my heart, because when the panic attack subsides, and I'm still tripping balls, my heart is only slightly above normal.

This also happens all the time before blastoff with changa if i let fear "take the wheel and drive" as it was so eloquently said.

In any case meditation serves a much better way to turn a bad trip good rather then take the easy out and drop something that will calm you down ime. It can just be hard to conjure up the willpower to discipline yourself when you are in the middle of a freakout and tripping balls at the same time.

Yeah, gaba may be a possibility. However, I am still not sure whether gaba inhibits a trip, or potentiates it. I tried to get an answer to that a couple of times, but never felt like I had a concrete answer. Here's a thread I asked about gaba

In theory, it would seem that gaba inhibits everything, but I don't know for certain. I know that benzos are classified as gaba agonists, but I'm not sure if gaba itself has the same effect. I tried to learn about what gaba is, how it works, and how it relates to psychedelics, and I made myself very confused. Still, I wouldn't touch 5htp, melatonin, or l-tryptophan to calm down a psychedelic high.

I wouldn't add any serotonin or pre-cursors if physical symptoms (even psychosomatic) were at play. Better to be safe than sorry. Certainly not if the person in question has had any exposure to anti-deppressants or other psych drugs. Some of them have rather long half-lives. (we've gone through the no SSRI's SNRI's anti-anxiety or psych drugs thing already)

As Day Tripper says, meditation is the best. I don't know how anyone can trip at all without some quiet sitting. CEV's are generally much stronger than OEV's so I can understand how some people might be adverse to performing an activity that would seem to make the trip stronger (and it does)... but it is only by the concerted effort to still the mind and let go, that you can surmount the egoic obstacles that account for any bad tripping. You have to go through the burn to reach your second wind, so to speak. It can be a trial by fire. Except in the rare instances where someone might have accidentally physically poisoned themselves, meditation is the only true path through the forrest.

SWIM recommends getting the meditation out of the way early on. From the 1st inklings of coming on until one has performed what he likes to call "the mental backflip" [think I will add that to the Hyperspace Lexicon] sit there and simply observe and let go of everything that comes into your mind. Be the watcher of your thoughts, completely unconcerned about the content of the muddy river that is flowing by. Added bonus, the rest of your trip will be a) consideably more insightful and useful & b) more vivid, fun, and joyous.

When you have completed the cleansing of your mind, you will know. It can take anywhere from 15 min to damn near the entire trip. If this seems arduous or interferes with the social plans you had for your journey... that's for you to decide. There are certain trip recipes that are good for social interaction... and some that are simply not advisable for much but OOBEing in a completely dark space. I suppose you should be clear about what it is you are taking entheogens to achieve in the first place.

No, classic psychedelic's do not elevate levels of serotonin. They cause serotonin levels to drop. If no MAOI's are taken, serotonin syndrome is not a probable scenario at all.

DMT and other classic hallucinogens stimulate serotonin receptors, but as a result of that, serotonin levels drop and serotonergic activity is diminished dramatically. Some psychedelic's like LSD or mescaline increase levels of dopamine on the side. DMT and shrooms do this only in a very modest way when taken in large amounts.

Substances like MDMA increase levels of serotonin, but all of the classic hallucinogens hugely diminish levels of serotonin. Increasing serotonin levels is very likely to reduce at least some of the symptoms of psychedelic's. Especially the psychological effects.

Hmmmm, I will assume all that is true for a moment. But in the first post in this thread, I said this thread is about aya/pharmahuasca, so people will have taken maoi's. It seems that all the physically uncomfortable symptoms people get from large amounts of ayahuasca, mirror the symptoms of serotonin syndrome. So, I still think it's a really bad idea to take things that are going to further increase serotonin levels in an aya/pharmahuasca trip.

I think you are wrong here Poly. Serotonin syndrome is not caused only by excess serotonin, but by any agonistic action or overstimulation of the 5HT receptors. This "classic" psychs do in spades.

Wikipedia (not a fool proof source by any stretch) says this :

"It was originally suspected that agonism of 5-HT1A receptors in central grey nuclei and the medulla was responsible for the development of the syndrome.[39] Further study has determined that overstimulation of primarily the 5-HT2A receptors appears to contribute substantially to the condition.[39] The 5-HT1A receptor may still contribute through a pharmacodynamic interaction in which increased synaptic concentrations of a serotonin agonist saturate all receptor subtypes.[1] Additionally, noradrenergic CNS hyperactivity may play a role as CNS norepinephrine concentrations are increased in serotonin syndrome and levels appear to correlate with the clinical outcome. Other neurotransmitters may also play a role; NMDA receptor antagonists and GABA have been suggested as affecting the development of the syndrome."

The studies referenced seem above reproach.

Furthermore, on the list of known causes of SS LSD & 5 MEO DPT are both featured along with DXM, MAOIs, RIMAs, Amphetamines, Cocaine, Ginseng, St. John's Wort, Tryptophan, SSRIs, SNRIs, various Opiods etc. It is safe to say that DMT, Mescaline, Shrooms etc. would also be indicated despite not being explicitly mentioned. All the common tryptamines show up on the list.

Individually, even at extreme doses, none of these things is likely to cause a serious serotoninergic toxicity, but in combination... people have died. And, as APOC mentioned, many of the physical side effects associated with a negative trip report mirror SS very closely. Considering that 5HT overstimulation is likely a spectrum, this is not surprising that people would have uncomfotable reactions even well below life-threatening levels. Also, it should be said that people have been diagnosed with SS even from taking only one substance on the list.

It is not a good idea to give people the false idea that simply because serotonin levels drop with certain classic psychedelics that they are therefore free from serotonergic overstimulation issues. The fact that these chemicals are well known to stimulate the 5HT receptors is not debateable.

thanks, that makes sense.

Wow, I didn't know ginseng had anything to do with serotonin.