Posted by bleauberry on August 13, 2010, at 19:33:52
What is treatment resistant depression? Well, to most of us, it is one that does not respond very well to various methods of manipulating serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, gaba, and glutamate.
Endogenous endorphin deficiency. That is a good keyword phrase to do some google searching and reading. The endorphin/opioid system is a major player in mood, but is practically 100% ignored in psychiatry. All the hoopla is on serotonin and friends.
Very easy to test if this is your kind of depression or not. And much easier to treat once it has been identified. Simple things like LDN and/or DLPA or DPA. Sometimes PEA. In tough cases, maybe tramadol, vicadin, hydrocodone, those these are better for diagnostic tools than longterm treatment IMO.
Anyway, there is some good reading out there on this topic and you might find it describes you. I hope you find something helpful. When we've done everything we can imagine for our serotonin and buddies, I think it makes sense to look at what we didn't try to treat....the major player endorphins.
We have two choices:
1. Test the hypothesis to confirm it or rule it out within a time period of 1 to 3 days. If positive, then we know where to focus for rapid recovery. If negative, then we are back to the serotonin and friends stuff and taking a look at other things like infection and toxins.
2. Keep beating the bush on serotonin and friends as far as we can see into the future with fingers crossed we'll get lucky someday.Treatment resistance to me means we haven't hit the right chemistry yet. The one we almost always miss is a huge player, the endogenous endorphins.
poster:bleauberry
thread:958488
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20100811/msgs/958488.html