Re: I'd like to talk about MY remission...Pls read » Jay2112

I didn't get very far into your post before realizing that you had no way of knowing what I believe and what I don't believe. Perhaps it would have been better were you to ask rather than assume. You were way-wrong, but I'll get to that later. And yes, I know who Albert Ellis and David Burns are.

If you read my narrative, then I again invite you to consider the source. It has been 41 years since I swallowed my first antidepressant pill (imipramine) as an outpatient participating in a study at Columbia Presbyterian in 1982. I've been through years of psychotherapy - including CBT. My brain has been exposed to 87 different drugs meant to treat depression. Some drugs were anxiolytics and hypnotics. They don't count. Can you imagine how many different combinations of these drugs I tried over 4 decades? In addition, I tried mega-dosing vitamins and minerals, took various herbs and nutriceuticals, a rotation diet looking for food allergies (Stuart Berger), etc. I tried not to leave any stone unturned.

Now, I'll continue until the end of your post. I used question marks to reply to those things that I find difficult to believe that you would assume I needed to learn.

> As I said, I am just glad you are feeling better, and safe. Safe enough to realize what your drugs may have caused you: mania.

I appreciate both your kind sentiments and your contribution to Psycho-Babble with your post. It is instructive and full of important facts and insights.

Whatever it was that I experienced, it was drug-induced. I remember explaining this to somebody. I thought it was you. My brief mania was most likely the result of a change in treatment. I have a history of experiencing a *discontinuation* rebound improvement, especially with tricyclics. In the past, these periods lasted from 1 day (TCA) to 2 weeks (MAOIs). On this recent occasion, I had just reduced the dosage of nortriptyline (TCA) from 100 mg/day to 75 mg/day. It was immediately after doing this that the manic state appeared. I had to return to 100 mg/day because of experiencing a gradual relapse into depression.

Not at all. What works, works. I get frustrated when I see people not respond to things that I currently believe have wasted years of their lives unnecessarily. I prefer the word "holistic" rather than "complementary". I think holistic is a broader term which includes all aspects of recovery. I also like the words "synergistic" and "additive" to differentiate the result of combination treatment.

To help me understand you better, could you list a few of these proven treatments? Perhaps my current beliefs will change based on yours. I would rather be accurate than be right.

Complementarity, obviously, is crucial to the success of my treatment regime. This involves the combining of drugs. Is lithium a drug? Semantics is the issue here, not actuality.

What works, works. I know what you meant. I almost always include the word "current" when I say things like, "It is my *current* belief that L-methylfolate (Deplin) is ineffective when added to allopathic substances in the treatment of depression." I don't always say this, of course. There are oodles of things that I am far from sure about.

> Someone you greatly love...as was my case...could pass with the next minute. I lost a wife and child.

Oh, my god. Oh, my god. I am so very sorry. I have never suffered such loss, and what you experience every day is beyond my imagination to comprehend. Again, I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say, except that it was brave of you to describe this part of your history. Accepting my mother's death was relatively easy. I had two years to get ready for it. Death is to be expected with elderly parents. Your loss was sudden, unexpected, and catastrophic. I am all but sure that there is a hole in your universe - in your heart - that can never be filled.

> My psychiatrist even told me...some people NEVER get over something like that.

I'm sure that I could never escape any wound, any hole in the universe, and the hole in my heart, were I to lose my fiancé. She and I are as one.

> After a four or so year period, I found new love (temporarly), but my meds only were able to work till I got to that point. But, I am not ASYMPTOMATIC, and NO medication will ever make me be.

I have no "formulas" regarding the treatment of mood disorders. I can't predict which treatments will work for any given individual. However, I can recognize mistakes in the application of a given treatment that I am familiar with. The clinical principles of treatment for mood illnesses are often overlooked, and too often ignored. The track record for the standard practice of psychiatry is actually pretty good if you consider the entire population of people with "true", strictly diagnosed affective disorders.

That is not a logical conclusion - unless you tried the exact treatment that I am currently responding to. I have an advantage in being able to guess that you haven't. Which of your doctors were willing to treat you with a combination of MAOI + TCA. If you feel so much better, then keep doing what you are doing. It works.

* I put into words something that I have come to understand about the Gestalt of the mind and the brain. I wrote the following in 2000, and I still find it the best encapsulation of psychobiology that I have yet encountered:

Your loss sculpted your brain, and this resulted in a persistent change in its architecture. It is likely that this new architecture needed a biological intervention to compensate for. This might explain why drugs are necessary for the improvement in your condition. Something else that I think is important to consider is that psychotherapy is far less effective while a biological pathology continues to depress you and impair your cognitive processes. So, "fix" the biological as best as possible and then psychotherapy will be far more effective.

* Whenever you encode a memory that you can retrieve at a later time, the brain has been sculpted by the mind. Every new memory is facilitated by new neural connections that persist over time.

I understand. No psychologist can ever fix you either. Loss is never fixable. Loss remains loss.

> What HAS worked for me is coming out of my little hole I dug, and getting into my community. I meet new people, who CARE, I practice mindfulness, which, in its formal name of CBT, IS the most successful long-term psychological approach to most mental illness'. I wrote about it in my Master's thesis, and have nearly over 1,000 scientific references behind it. References from the Journal Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal.

I respect your expertise, but I like to investigate things I don't know about. "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy" (CBT) is not synonymous with "Mindfulness". It seems that mindfulness falls under the umbrella of CBT. I had to look that up.

"MBIs [Mindfullness Based Intervention] also perform comparably to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). The treatment principles of MBIs for anxiety and depression are compatible with those of standard CBT"

> I help the homeless, the addicted, mentally ill, jobless, physically ill in my job as a community concurrent disorder social worker. THAT is part of my healing, and that is how I was lead on the road to healing and peace was by a fellow social worker, who took me on, as he had lost a child himself.

That is noble. I'm sure you don't need to hear that from me. However, I was to be homeless. However, I was fortunate to find Easter Seals to put a roof over my head. I didn't spend a single moment on the street. I wouldn't have survived that.

> There is a little story I tell my first year social work students. A man is trapped in a sewer with a grid above him. A doctor walks by, drops down a prescription; a priest walks by, drops down a prayer; finally, a regular guy walks by, opens up the grate and jumps down. The trapped guy goes "That was stupid. Now we are both stuck down here." The guy who jumped down goes "It's okay. I've been down here before, and know the way out."

> Medicine has it's great points, but the science in psychiatry is a sham. Laboratory experience is NOT replicating real-life experience. Placebo NOW beats most new drugs in trials, and are being beatten in real-world trials everywhere.

Just for the heck of it, look at the statistics that were reported in the medical literature in the 1970s and 1980s. You will see that:

I have addressed this issue *many* times here on Psycho-Babble - beginning over 10 years ago. In short, in order to make more money, eligibility requirements are far less restrictive now than before Prozac came out. Investigators are payed by the pharmaceuticals companies for each subject they recruit. Why be strict with diagnosis and eligibility requirements when you can make much more money by taking people who don't have the illness being studied?

Clinical psychiatry isn't a scam any more than psychotherapy is. Neither knows enough to explain the phenomenology of mood disorders, or how best to treat them.

> As the great psychiatrist Gabor Mate' has said, this capitalist society, a mean, one against another society that values rich man's money over the average working person, has created trauma, sickness, and hopelessness.

I came to a similar hypothesis. However, I just used the umbrella term of "stress" in general. The pace and demands of modern life in developed countries now exceeds the ability of a great many brains to cope with. Genetic and phenotypic vulnerabilities facilitate the ability of stress to precipitate mood illness.

> The promising answer seems to go back to a major, overlooked, promise: psychedelics.

> I have been microdosing Psilocybin, with some very excellent results. Once every 4-5 days.

The same periodic dosing protocol applies to ketamine as well. One dose every 5 days seems to be the sweet-spot. Do ketamine and psilocybin have mechanisms in common?

In 2001, someone gave me a copy of the literature research he conducted regarding psilocybin. A hallucinogen? I gave no credibility to anything suggesting that psilocybin could treat mental illness. Obviously, my beliefs have changed.

> My 'being' is much lighter...much, much, much so than ever on any drug. However, I take a small dose of Effexor with it, and carbamazepine. They had previously failed me. I may be switching to 10mgs of clomipramine, instead of the Effexor.

Psilocybin is a drug, as is atropine. They both occur in nature and are derived from plants.

> I am feeling a lift of existential angst, a peace much more like the life I had when I was a teen, before the 'black dog'.

What works, works. You found your holy grail. Be cognizant that the progress of improvement is seldom linear, although it might be for your treatment. Progress is not like an ascending straight line. It is not like an escalator where theres no worsening along the way. Progress usually resembles a saw-tooth pattern - as per Robert Post's drawing on a piece of construction paper demonstrated to us at the NIH.

Be patient. If you have determined that the trajectory of your therapeutic response has plateaued for perhaps 3-4 weeks, then it makes sense to rock the boat.

> For those on here (many) who are interested in psychedelics, please go forward, they can certainly be no more harmful than the chemicals we already take.

I agree that psilocybin has demonstrated therapeutic properties to treat depression and other mental illnesses. Physically, it is relatively safe. I don't think the same can be said about being psychologically safe if psilocybin isn't administered properly and given in a managed environment. Obviously, the way you administer psilocybin is ideal for you.

Psilocybin is no less a drug than is Effexor. Natural substances are used in drug discovery. From Nature:

Drug substances, even those that occur in nature, all have one thing in common. They are allopathic. If an herb works, it will be because it is allopathic. It is not homeopathic. Psychedelics are allopathic. The Bella Dona plant extract is allopathic.

That's the most important statement to be made. I used to tell people that I would drink horse piss if it worked for me. I would have. No joke.

I wrote my narrative to demonstrate my exposure to both clinicians and researchers in the field of psychopharmacology. I have only one objective. I want to help facilitate an outcome as favorable as yours has been. I'm sure that is your goal as well. I want to help "fix" people on Psycho-Babble as they have helped to fix me. I consider it a duty.

Some see things as they are and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Re: I'd like to talk about MY remission...Pls read » Jay2112

Thread

Post a new follow-up

Notify the administrators

Start a new thread