Posted by Ç(r)ëëþý Tabitha on October 31, 2002, at 22:41:59
In reply to Re: Wellbutrin and LSD » BrittPark, posted by Eddie Sylvano on October 31, 2002, at 15:06:58
If someone started an education campaign to tell school kids that LSD would trigger 20 years of chronic mental illness, I would scoff, but if one person reports that it happened to them personally, I'm inclined to believe they could be correct in attributing their changed brain to the LSD trip.
While LSD may not cause immediate organ damage, and I know the fatal overdose amount is like a million doses or something, it still jolts your brain into a heckuva non-normal state. In susceptible individuals it can trigger psychosis (I think this much is accepted medical fact).
Here's my not completely scientific opinion... Anytime your brain is jolted, it's changed. For instance, one traumatic event can start PTSD that lingers forever; or a brief ECT jolt can cause huge and long lasting changes. LSD stays in your brain's blood supply only a few minutes, but the trip lasts 8 hours, and nobody really understands how. We just don't understand the brain enough to know the full effects of these extreme chemical changes.
Personally I suspect this is how ADs work. They jolt your brain into some chemical change, although more slowly than ECT or acid, and it somehow breaks up the grip of the depression. It almost doesn't matter what kind of jolt. I read that serotonin reuptake *enhancers* have also been shown to have antidepressant effect, though serotonin reuptake inhibitors are the preferred treatment these days.
So as much as I might enjoy the effect a hallucinogen has on my brain, I know that as a mood-disordered pill-popping person, it's not wise to jolt my brain into any wacky serotonin state, especially when I've reached some stability. If anything, I'd want to jolt my brain when I was horribly depressed, and there's nowhere to go but up.
poster:Ç(r)ëëþý Tabitha
thread:125886
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20021025/msgs/126023.html