This is a story about self prescribing…
If you know what medication you want, you can cut out the middlemen and just buy it yourself direct from a country that doesn’t have a rigid system of prescriptions, provided it’s not a controlled substance, and therefore illegal to import.
I wrote about self medication through non-pharmacological mechanisms in a previous blog post entitled Self Medication (Part One) if you wish to refresh your memory.
Going GP -> Psychiatrist -> Pharmacist is actually quite a slow process when you’re trying to find a medication that works for you. Also, many medications are only licensed to treat certain illnesses, but there is sometimes a strong body of research that proves they are effective on other illnesses. Because of concerns about medical malpractice lawsuits, it’s quite hard to get an ‘off label‘ prescription, even if there is good data to support the use of a particular medication in your individual case.
So it was that I came to be experimenting with medications like Pramipexole (Mirapex), Bupropion (Wellbutrin), Cabergoline (Dostinex), Aripiprazole (Abilify) and even crazy ones like Piribedil (Trivastal). Results were a mixed bag.
The bottom line is this: you probably don’t want to f**k with medication. Aripiprazole left me uncontrollably dribbling, and unable to speak without an unintended spray of saliva. Piribedil would cause me to fall asleep randomly, like a narcoleptic.
But, Bupropion works. It’s a very effective, fast-acting antidepressant. However, it raises your anxiety levels, causes insomnia, panic attacks and exacerbates hypomania. It’s not a good medication for somebody with Bipolar, unopposed by a mood stabiliser.
Messing around with medications was very dangerous, and I may have even put myself at risk of early-onset Parkinson’s disease. Certainly, my later messing around with L-DOPA was on a trajectory leading to complete disaster.
It’s about harm reduction though. Tea and coffee are on a stimulant continuum that leads to amphetamines and even stronger stimulants. Alcohol is on a depressant continuum that leads to benzodiazepines and even stronger ‘downers‘. If you have been using coffee & alcohol to self-medicate for your mood fluctuations, you will be driven to seek out stronger alternatives, when those substances no longer work anymore, or face a breakdown.
Eventually, you’ll find that heroin is really great to help you sleep, and crystal meth is really great when you need to be awake and get stuff done. You don’t want to end up there. Don’t go there.
There are modern sleep aids like Zopiclone & Zolpidem, and newer wakefulness and concentration promoting agents like Methylphenidate (Ritalin) and Modafinil. Naturally, I experimented with these.
Ritalin, I found to be very much like cocaine. You want to take more but you’re not sure why. You don’t really feel like you’re getting anything out of it, but you strangely find yourself taking loads of it. Dangerous. Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a book called More, Now, Again which is amongst the literature that inspires my writing. However, it’s simply not possible to snort 60 Ritalin pills, like she claims. That volume of powder will simply not fit into your nasal sinuses. She’s right about one thing though: Ritalin is addictive.
Modafinil simply makes you awake, not happy. More time awake, unhappy, is really the very last thing that you want if you’re depressed, so I discontinued its use and find no function for this wakefulness promoting agent, personally.
Zolpidem doesn’t keep you asleep for long enough to be of any use. Sure, you fall asleep, but then you wake up again and spend the whole night with your usual insomnia. Useless.
Zopiclone works but it’s a little too brilliant. Again, for somebody with Bipolar, waking up feeling totally refreshed simply stokes your hypomania to dangerous levels. It delays an inevitable crash, when the drug ceases to be effective at acceptable dosages, and insomnia leads to exhaustion, which leads to depression.
It’s all available, out there on both the public internet and the Dark Web. It’s a few clicks away for a middle class person with a computer and a postal address.
My parting advice is this: don’t go there. Don’t even look. Don’t tempt yourself. Don’t give yourself false hope. Don’t experiment. I’ve done the experiments, and found nothing good there. The side effects just aren’t worth it. The downsides outweigh the upsides.
There are no medicinal cures. There are no medications that ‘fix‘ Unipolar Depression and Bipolar. It’s an avenue not worth pursuing.
Sorry about that.
Tags: #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth
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Self Medication (Part Three)
5 min read
This is a story about being tired & depressed all the time…As things start to get out of control with uppers and downers, you’re going to come across legal highs and the black market sooner or later. Let me describe my life to you, after it was ravaged by depression: I never left my bed except to go to the toilet. I never answered my phone. I never answered the door. What does a depressed person want? They want a life.For the summary of what I’d tried myself to date, you can read:https://www.manicgrant.com/2015/self-medication-part-oneand:https://www.manicgrant.com/2015/self-medication-part-twoI was completely disillusioned with medications. The common antidepressants take 6 weeks before they kick in, and they’re a nightmare to stop taking: the withdrawal effects are horrible.I went on a legal highs website, and I systematically worked though every chemical they had on offer:5-IAI
6-APB
MDAI
Benzylpiperzine
Ephenidine
Ethylphendiate
3-Fluromethamphetamine
3-Flurophenmetrazine
Methedrone
Methiopropamine
Methoxphenedine
Methylenedioxypyrovalerone
Mephedrone
Methylone
Pentedrone
4-MePPP
Those are just the ones I can remember. I have a spreadsheet somewhere that documents everything I bought, and all the dosages I took. I used a high accuracy measuring scale (down to 0.001 of a gram) which I calibrated before every use, and I was careful to do an ‘allergy test’ before taking anything approaching a psychoactive dose.The short version of the story is… all these designer drugs were a pile of pants. Complete rubbish. Waste of time & money.With one exception: Methylone. The chemical name of Ecstasy (MDMA) is 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. The chemical name of Methylone is 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylcathinone. Basically, the clever chemists swapped out the crystal meth and replaced it with Meow Meow. The novel compound is known as βk-MDMA, instead of just regular MDMA.If you were to try and take Ecstasy every day, you probably wouldn’t get much sleep, and people would think you were really weird. Your face would be gurning all over the place, and you’d keep telling strangers you loved them.Methylone is not like that. It was as if I’d just gotten over a really bad sickness and I was back to my old self. I had energy and motivation. I could feel joy again. I was getting stuff done. I was functional.I used to measure out my exact same dose every morning, and then I could feel the storm clouds part about 30 minutes later, and I could get on with a normal day, just like a normal person. I did my work. I did my chores. I socialised… I had re-entered the world.This went on for the best part of 6 months, and then the government decided to make it illegal. I stockpiled as much as I could afford (about 2 months supply) but when that ran out I was screwed.Prolintane and Pyrovalerone (sold as Jolly Green Granules) propped me up for a while, but I had pretty much lost my antidepressant. There was no more gas in the tank. The engine was spluttering to a stop. All the other stims I tried were just that: stimulants. They made me awake, alert and they stopped me sleeping. The best part of all about Methylone had been that I could sleep normally at the end of the day.Out of a suicidal death-wish, I tried NRG-3, which sounded from anecdotal experience very much like MDPV (Supercrack). I was so terrified by this chemical that I diluted an entire gram in a litre of water so that I could measure a very precise 3ml (3mg) as a test dose, using an oral syringe. Turns out that water completely screws up the compound. Anyway, after the car-crash that was my ex’s brother’s wedding, I decided “fuck it” and measured out 15 milligrams of the powder on my scale.”Binge” was not a term that I had first-hand experience with. Not until that point.When 3 or 4 days go by, you haven’t eaten, you haven’t slept, you’re just shovelling white powder up your nose… yeah I guess I had my baptism of fire.When you wonder what day it is. When you wonder when the last time you checked the time or the date, or did any kind of reality check at all… you’re pretty deep into a binge.It’s weird, how somebody who was always so self-disciplined, so self-controlled, even with coke and speed and pills… one day they find their drug of choice and they’re like an instant junkie. I did kinda panic a bit when I’d had 800mg of a 1000mg bag, because I’d read about somebody who suffered heart damage after 800mg of this potent stimulant, but you find yourself saying “ok, well I’ll make this the last one”…. until it’s all gone… and all you can think about is when can you get some more.The reason it was so addictive, is because it broke my dependence on my girlfriend. We needed to break up, but I couldn’t see an alternative. I couldn’t imagine going backwards to go forwards. This stuff was powdered girlfriend. She no longer had any power over me anymore. I wasn’t afraid of us breaking up.She didn’t like that very much. Tags: #drugs #addiction #depression