Posted by bleauberry on August 22, 2017, at 8:21:39
Hi everybody. I've used to be a regular here for many years. Long time. At least 20 years I think. Psychobabble was a brand new thing back when I first joined.
I just wanted to share hope and faith with everybody here that cure and remission are possible. While each person's journey is unique and different depending on their own genetics and experiences, I believe the causes of chronic resistant major depression and its associated syndromes - anxiety, schizophrenia - are not idiopathic. That's a fancy medical word that means doctors have no idea why it happens - many medical terms come from Greek and this one came from the word idiot.
Most doctors approach depression as idiopathic and do not make much of an effort to figure out what the actual cause of the symptoms are. This is why we all get so sick. The doctors are looking to help you with relief, but they honestly have no clue how you got sick in the first place or how to do make you un-sick. The best they can do, usually, is try to help you feel better with chemical molecules that have various affinities for brain receptors.
My journey was about 25 years of intense suffering. It included over 12 psychiatrists, several M.D.s, every drug you can name except for Nardil, failed 12 bilateral ECT treatments, and backpacks full of unsatisfactory medicines and herbs. The beginning of the end of my nightmare came when a Nurse Practitioner said, "I wonder if you have Lyme disease." We had no way of knowing, and testing is not very accurate, but it was a really good question. It was a life saving question.
To make a long story short, I was cured by anti-inflammatory herbs, anti-microbial herbs, pro-immune herbs, and anti-toxicity herbs, and rotations of various prescription antibiotics. These did what no psychiatric medicine on earth can do - restore you to who you were before depression hit. In my case, about 90% restored. In terms of depression improvement, that would be about 98%, with a little bit of anhedonia still there sometimes.
My NP told me that most patients do not do what I did - I researched topics I didn't know, I asked questions, I tried things, I figured if strangers calling themselves psychiatrists were going to use me as a guinnea pig and charge me huge dollars to do it, well, I got straight A's in science and chemistry and biology, so I can guinea pig myself thank you. Obviously their best guinea-pigging over a course of 20 years was absolutely worthless. I see that happening with people here at this board. Patients who get outside the box and really try to help themselves probably will help themselves. Those who serve as puppets to whatever the doctor says, may or may not ever see improvement, but remission is almost for sure an unrealistic goal.
The doctors do the best they can but they are just too overloaded with patient loads, new information, fast paced discoveries and technology, their own personal biases - it's hard to keep up with all that is new. What is new and promising today won't find its way into medical textbooks for another 10 or 20 years. It's that stuff not yet in medical textbooks that is much more likely to help you than the stuff that is in textbooks. We know that simply because you are here.
To get a better feel for what I am talking about, watch some TV shows - Mystery Diagnosis, for example, and Monsters Within Me. These are available on Youtube to watch whatever episodes you want. Focus not on the stories themselves, but on how moods were impacted by a variety of things you weren't aware of, and how they look a lot like you and me and everyone here.
Monsters Within Me seems to focus mostly on mysterious patient symptoms that turn out to be a result of some sort of microbial invasion, such as any number of tick born diseases (not just lyme), other critter bites, mold, parasites, bacteria, viruses, etc. Sometimes they get good test results but many times not - many times they just have to try stuff on a hunch - which is how I got cured. If you wait for definitive testing, you will be dead first. Imo
When you watch these shows, focus on how these perfectly healthy patients suffered symptoms exactly like what we all talk about here at psychobabble - the mood swings, tremors, fear, doom, depression, anxiety, nervousness, nightmares, hearing things, mind racing, all that stuff. These things don't just happen for no reason. These things don't happen because your body has a prozac molecule deficiency. Something upsets the apple cart of mood chemicals. They just don't go sour all by themselves. We have to find what made them sour so we can get better.
Fortunately anybody who wants to see if their journey could be as successful as mine, the answer is yes. Imo The hard part is coming to the realization that psychiatric medicines don't get you there hardly ever, and that you have to learn something totally new. That is hard. Without that, you may still be here in 5 or 10 years. Imo
Once I got the right treatment going - which was a best guess at the time - not a solid diagnosis - it was at least half a year before I showed any psychiatric improvement at all. But compared to the previous failed 20 years, I was prepared to stick it out a while. It started as a few great hours on an afternoon. It happened again a month later. The next month it was a whole day. The next month two whole days of normalcy. And with a turtle's pace, I got better, the body healed itself, with the right help. The psychiatric medicines were not the right help. They don't cure any disease. They only tweek brain chemistry. Sort of like rolling the dice, we hope to get lucky and tweek it right.
That said, some psychiatric meds do have antimicrobial activity. Seroquel, for example. Have you ever noticed how some people say they felt great when they first started Seroquel and then it pooped out fairly quickly and then they felt worse than before? The microbial activity is not enough to cure anything, but it is enough to gather clues. Here's what happens when someone who doesn't know they have a tick born disease takes an antibiotic - in the first day to 3 days they feel better than they have felt in longer than they can remember - it's like a miracle - but the honeymoon is really short - by day 5 to day 7 the patient is feeling worse again. That is a solid diagnostic pattern often used by LLMDs. It has a physical explanation if anyone is interested just ask.
I had two expert M.D.s who's patients come from as far away as Alaska. They were not only experts on Lyme (LLMD = Lyme Literate M.D.) but also on psychiatry, much more than psychiatrists. As a matter of fact, if there is one thing psychiatrists should be experts on but are not, it is tick born infections. They almost universally cause psychiatric symptoms in nearly everybody. And yet hardly ever even considered.
These two doctors, from different states, both told me the same thing. I am paraphrasing, but it goes something like this, "9 out of 10 new patients come from specialists who failed to help the patient. 9 out of 10 have long psychiatric histories with unsuccessful management. All of these patients are able to dramatically reduce dosage or withdraw meds completely with tick-born treatments - whether there was a good diagnosis or not does not matter. The response to treatment is the diagnosis." My own journey proved both of these doctor statements to be spot on, more accurate than anything any doctor had ever told me my entire life. Both of these doctors had tick born diseases themselves, which is where their initial interest and expertise was born.
I would just say this, that if you have been suffering a really long time, that considering other treatments in addition to what you are doing might make sense. Study some herbal Lyme books - not to learn about Lyme, but to learn about how damaging stealth inflammation is to the brain and mood, and what to do about it. Study things like NAC, glutathione, and detox pathways. You want heightened detox capabilitiies if you are to ever cure depression - most of the mood issues are from toxins hitting the receptors instead of your own mood chemicals. Anti-microbial is a big thing, as you will discover in those TV documentaries. Don't take my word for it. You will see for yourself.
Basically, if you blindly approached chronic long-term resistant major depression with these strategies, you would likely improve a great deal and remission would be a realistic goal to shoot for: 1)Anti-inflammation strategies - herbs, meds, grocery cart choices; 2)Anti-toxicity strategies - supplements, herbs, grocery cart choices. 3)Anti-microbial strategies - herbs alone can work, better with antibiotics, always use either herbs or antibiotics in combinations, never singularly (that's how resistance happens).; 4)Pro-immune strategies. The psychiatric meds themselves should be used for what they are - bandaids - use them to improve the quality of your life, sleep, energy, whatever you can improve, but don't count on them as gods or gateways to remission. That is where most of us get stuck. The LLMDs I mentioned prescribe a lot of psychiatric meds, but they do it differently. They know that often times either super low doses - 1/10th of the lowest dose - or sometimes extremely high doses - 3 times the max - are often necessary. But if the treating doctor doesn't know that, then you never will either.
What are some of the best psychiatric treatments that actually work to help improve some of your symptoms? Well, the ones I heard talked about commonly were the antipsychotics and the stimulants mostly. Ritalin is described as being the most helpful drug to the most people for the most amount of symptoms - a good all around general drug to help psychiatric patients and yet it is hardly ever used except for ADHD. Sometimes the tricyclics are helpful and the SSRIs are still popular, though they don't usually shoot for normal dose ranges. All of these fall short, however, without the actual treatments and lifestyle adjustments that focus on remission and healing instead of individual symptoms.
SUPPORT THE RIGHTEOUS AND DISPELL THE EVIL. This is the approach that works. This is borrowed from Chinese medicine on the Eastern side of the world. The 'righteous' is your immune system - the 'evil' is anything giving your immune system a hard time (stealth unsuspected untestable infections and harmful foods).
There is not much detail here - on purpose - but if someone has questions please feel free to ask. Supplying details at this time would make this post about the size of a book.
It's all fairly easy actually to make a diagnosis and start treatment. You just need the right books to read and a nurse or doctor with more of a holistic approach to the body than a bandaid approach. The compartmentalized and protocol approach of modern medicine has so many weak areas. We suffer because of that. It's not a lack of knowledge. It's not a lack of drugs. It's a lack of open minds. It's not a lack of good doctors. It's an overabundance of relatively closed minds and lack of proper training. It's a general attitude of relying on the FDA and CDC for miracles instead of the wisdom of the doctor sitting right in front of you, the wisdom of common sense, not even realizing that the FDA and CDC unwittingly actually make our illnesses worse not better - unforeseen consequences of doing things a certain rigid way. You can totally get better - but not likely with a rigid view of psychiatric that only recognizes whatever was sponsored or peer reviewed, both of which often turn out not useful or flawed.
Psychiatry plays an important role in getting better. Improve quality of life as much as you can. It will make healing happen smoother and faster, if you have healing strategies in place. But don't count on it for a cure. You can count on other things to do that. They go together. Not one or the other. Once in a great while we see someone here at babble totally cured by a med or a cocktail and it doesn't poop out and they come back years later to give us all hope. I haven't done stats, but you know as well as I do that those kinds of stories are rare. Those kinds of stories should not be your goal unless you live in Las Vegas and you are a gambler with your future.
The total time of my depression was about 25 years. The total time from when I started a different treatment other than psychiatry until I was cured was about 3 years. I stayed on psych meds about 1 year through that and then slowly weaned off, primarily out of disgust and frustration more than any other reason.
I hope this post will plant seeds of hope in your life. Remission is a realistic goal. Even if your treatment resistant depression is over 25 years old, a new life is within reach. To find that potential only requires learning new things, which are mostly found in the study of tick born diseases, imo. That kind of study covers most of the bases even if the cause of the depression is not a tick born disease. The things you need to know about depression are in Lyme books, even if you don't have Lyme and don't care to learn about it. There are no better depression books than Lyme books. That's because unlike other books, they actually tell you in great detail, in cascading detail, in chemistry detail, how the mood chemicals get altered, contaminated, blocked, inflamed, and corrupted by a variety of outside sources, most of which we never suspect.
poster:bleauberry
thread:1094565
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20161215/msgs/1094565.html