I was reading mydeathspace and several of the people on it died “while playing the choking game”. I didn’t know what this was so looked it up on wikipedia. Is this actually a game some kids/grown ups actually play or is it a politer way of saying someone has committed suicide by hanging?
My group of (apparently not so smart) friends did when I was a 14-year-old in South Dakota. It was a pretty brief fad - I think they were all over it in about a month or so. I tried it once. A friend used the thumbs-on-the-neck technique that’s mentioned in the Wiki article. I blacked out for a couple of minutes and had a hallucination that I don’t remember too well anymore. It scared the shit out of me, and the next day I got a couple of pamphlets from the school guidance counselor’s office on the dangers of strangulation, and some anti-whippits material as well.* My friends were doing strangulation because they said it was similar to whippits, which I absolutely refused to try, based on the strangulation experience. That was about 11 years ago, so I don’t know if the kids are still doing it or not. I’d imagine that they are - kids will do some incredibly stupid shit in order to achieve an altered state, even if it only lasts a couple of minutes. Especially if they don’t know how dangerous it can be.
*Yes, that’s how much of a nerd I was.
Me and my friends did basically the same thing as pprgrl and friends did. It was a brief rush feeling. Stupid, stupid!
I never heard of it until today nor had I heard of whippits.
My friends and I did this in high school back in the early 90’s. We would hyperventilate ourselves and then somebody would press on your cartoid arteries until you passed out - usually within seconds.
It’s the strangest experience that always produced hyper-realistic dreams/hallucinations.
I quit after a friend fell after I made him pass out and split the back of his head open. I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified. He ended up needing about 8 staples in his scalp.
It was really popular when I was in sixth grade. The fad lasted for about a month or so. I never tried it because I had no desire to pass out and hit my head and die. Which never happened to anybody, but I was a cautious kid…
I just attended a school nurse seminar on The Choking Game on how hundreds of kids die every year and how many are mistakenly attributed to suicide. There’s some good info on the dbfoundation.com
I did it a few times in high school, 1988-89. We did the version involving hard breathing followed by a bear hug, and we called it “doing airplanes” for some reason.
It was intensely disorienting and not much fun. And, in retrospect, stupid and dangerous.
We used to do it a bit when we were 14-15 years old. At times the sensation was genuinely transcendental- the whole time-space-where-am-i-infinity thing. But man- stupid stupid stupid.
Interesting. The Wiki article mentions reports going back to 1989 but I did this as a kid in maybe 6th grade back in the mid '60s. We quit after one kid went into convulsions and I had no idea this was still being done.
Regards
Testy
We did this at school here in Scotland a few times back in the, um, early 70s, I guess. Age 12 or 13, I expect.
Yep - did it at primary school in Kilburn, aged about 8 or 9 (circa 1968).
All we ever played was kick the can and contemplated smoking nutmeg.
My friends and I did this back in the late 50s, using roughly the method mentioned by jackelope, with the addition of the breath being held at the time of the bear hug. We knew it as the fainting game. We stopped doing it after one of the guys spasmed and jerked about in a quite spectacular fashion as he lay unconscious, scaring us all half to death. Fortunately he came round with no ill effects but that was the last time we played that particular game!
Just as a followup, could we have all been charged with any offence if he had died?
I don’t remember even hearing about this being done when I was a kid, and I hung out with some pretty weird kids! Perhaps because, at the school I went to, it was a lot easier to just get some pot off someone than to go through the trouble of trying to strangle yourself/each other! We used to assume that 90% of the students toked!
When I was in highschool (94-98) I remember seeing other people do it. IIRC, they would stand with their back against a wall, hyperventilate and then someone would put their hands on the person’s lungs and push on them (I think it was on their chest, I suppose it could have been their neck). The person would pass out, slide down the wall and stand up a few seconds later. The whole process looked unappealing and I never gave it much thought again.
there’s a 12 year old in a nearby middle school that ended up in the psyc ward after playing this game. He nearly killed himself trying to do it with a dog collar. Ended up in the hospital to recover, gave a lousy excuse about “tripping on something” for why he was strangled and promptly got moved to psyc on a suicide watch.
dumb, dumb, dumb game. The younger Woodhouses have been warned.
I watched some kids do it when I was in middle school (late '90s). They used a hyperventilation method and called it a Harvey Wallbanger. It looked dumb and disturbing to me.
That’s exactly the way we did it when I was in junior high – somebody pushed on your chest after you hyperventilated. It basically gave you a few seconds of light-headedness (like hyperventilating does but more so) followed by some really crazy dreams that lasted a moment until you woke up. Except for the occasional pounding headache, it was quite entertaining.
I’ve always wondered exactly what mechanism caused the loss of consciousness, though. Eventually the realization that I had no idea how it was working caused me to worry that it might be causing brain damage, so I stopped.
I did this for a while as well in HS.
We had several methods. Hyperventilating then standing against a wall was the most common. I leaned to do it to myself. I could make my self pass out by Hyperventilating then standing up and essentially choking myself. I came up with the great idea of taking a bong hit for the last breath then choke out. I did this alone once in the bathroom and fell on the glass bong cut my head and had multiple spasms. I mostly avoided or grew out of the game after that. I still have a smallish scar on my forehead.