Table 4.

All items from the PES (Richards, 1975, Appendix E, pp. 271–276) which are likely to involve a psychologically distressing experience. These 20 PES items entered the distressing-experience EFA. An “(N)” after the item number indicates that the item was already part of Di Leo’s nadir subscale.

Dis-stressing item #	Distressing item phrasing
4	Feelings of anger or aggression.
13 (N)	Emotional and/or physical suffering.
16 (N)	Feelings of despair.
21 (N)	Experience of confusion, disorientation, and chaos. a
28	Sense of being trapped and helpless.
39	Experience of repulsive biological material (urine, feces, pus, dead flesh, etc.).
40 (N)	Feeling that people were plotting against you.
45 (N)	Experience of isolation and loneliness.
52 (N)	Experience of fear.
57 (N)	Feeling of being rejected or unwanted.
61 (N)	Experience of meaninglessness and absurdity of life.
64	Feeling of reluctance to return to normal consciousness.
66 (N)	Frustrating attempt to control the experience.
72 (N)	Experience of antagonism toward your therapist or co-therapist. b
76	Sense of being separated from the normal world, as though you were enclosed in a silent glass chamber with thick walls.
85 (N)	Fear that you might lose your mind or go insane.
88 (N)	Feelings of guilt.
89	Experiences of intense pressures on various parts of your body.
91 (N)	Feelings of grief.
93	Experience of physical distress (e.g., nausea, vomiting, sweating, rapid heartbeat).

^a“and” in the original PES, “and/or” in the slightly modified PES. We used the original PES phrasing for the German version (used “and” only).

^bCf. footnote a in Table 2 for the terms “therapist” and “co-therapist”; the same situation applies here, and will be taken up in the Discussion section.

EFA: exploratory factor analysis; PES: Psychedelic Experience Questionnaire.