The Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) measures how hard or distressing a psychedelic experience was. It was developed from reports of challenging experiences with psilocybin mushrooms and scores seven factors: grief, fear, death, insanity, isolation, physical distress and paranoia (Barrett et al., 2016).
It came out of a large survey. Of 1,993 respondents describing their most difficult psilocybin mushroom experience, 39% ranked it among the five most challenging experiences of their lives, and 2.7% received medical help (Carbonaro et al., 2016). The same survey found that 7.6% of those whose experience was over a year earlier had sought treatment for enduring psychological symptoms (Carbonaro et al., 2016).
The CEQ gives researchers a common language for what people loosely call a bad trip. It is a self-report tool, and survey samples are self-selected, so its figures describe the people who answered, not all users. A German translation was validated alongside the Ego Dissolution Inventory in 2022 (Dworatzyk et al., 2022).
Sources
- Barrett et al., Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016
- Carbonaro et al., Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016
Last checked .