5-HTP

At some point within the last week, I had a situation which I have had many times since returning to the U.S. I was at a breaking point emotionally and I told my husband that I just didn't feel like I could continue as I have been any longer. This was the culmination of my diminished psychological resources as a result of all of the stress, changes, and difficulty I've experienced since leaving Japan, an overall sense of hopelessness coupled with no strong sense of what is to come in the future (not concrete goals, dreams, or expectations), my own particular nature based on the damage I've incurred throughout an extremely hard life emotionally (especially in the first 20 years), and the more immediate issue that I'd been having with noisy neighbors. I have felt for some time that I'm long overdue for a break from the constant upheaval in my life and the drain on my psychological resources, but no such reprieve seems to be coming. It does often seen that there is one thing after another and my resilience, which was never great to begin with, is constantly a well that is repeatedly drained dry.

After this most recent bout of tears and feeling overwhelmed, my husband, who is doing his internship now as a therapist, told me that, if I were a client instead of his wife, he'd recommend that I consider taking anti-depressants. Taking medication for emotional problems is something that I have resisted for my entire life. There are many reasons for this. One is that I worked with seriously mentally ill people and saw what happened to them when they took such medications. Another is that I'm not someone who ingests medications lightly. I know from my understanding of human biology that many of them are toxic and processed by the liver as poisons. They are not "good for you", though they can be good at alleviating symptoms or protecting the body from further damage when its systems are imbalanced due to degradation, damage, or unlucky genes.

Mood-related medications in particular "scare" me because they can often have a sledgehammer effect. You can end up unlike yourself. You can also end up with terrible side effects. There can be a slingshot effect over time as well as dependence which is hard to break in some cases. Benzodiazepines, which are often prescribed for anxiety, can become enormously difficult to free oneself of once they are taken.

I'm 50, and after about 30 years of resisting any medical intervention for depression, I told me husband that I'd consider it seriously if he could find a psychiatrist for me to see. That is a reflection of how at the end of my rope I am. I have managed for many years in large part through the application of my orderly mind - I use behavioral techniques and try to build up my capacity to cope over a long period of time. This is a very difficult thing to do, and I could only do it in the past because I had just enough inner resolve to do it. That resolve, which like California, seems to be in drought status is just not there anymore.

About five days ago, my husband and I were driving to Costco and it occurred to me that they sold St. John's Wort at one point. I mentioned that we could buy that supplement in the hopes that it might do me some good in the interim between this point of distress and seeing someone who could assess me and consider prescribing medication. When we got there, we scanned the supplements section and found that they no longer carried it. They did, however, carry SAM-e and 5-HTP. Like St. John's Wort, these are both non-prescription supplements believed (but not proven) to help people who are suffering from depression.

I had received a free sample bottle of SAM-e last year and it didn't really do anything for me so I had no interest in trying it. The more intriguing option was 5-HTP for a couple of reasons. First of all, I knew that it was a chemical precursor of serotonin, the neurotransmitter that is often manipulated by stronger anti-depressant drugs in order to help people with depression or anxiety. Second, it was pretty economical. For $20, I could have a 75-day supply. Third, I hadn't tried it before so there was at least hope that it might have a positive effect.

The first day after I took 5-HTP, I had a short time of what can be described as "mellowness". It's probably what most people feel like when they are genuinely relaxed and a feeling I only tend to experience in the day or two preceding a cold when my whole body seems to just lay down its arms and say, "Yay, we'll have no choice but to rest now!" That's actually a good feeling and a reason I'm sometimes happy to catch a cold - that feeling was so rare.

During the five days that I have taken 5-HTP, I have experience between a half hour and an hour of that feeling within a few hours of taking it. It seems to be having at least that impact on me. It also sometimes makes me a little tired, but the truth is that I've been suffering from crushing fatigue at times and this is nothing compared to that. In fact, it's a nice mellow tired which doesn't make me want to lie down or sleep. It makes me feel lazy, which is something else that I never generally feel. My husband has remarked that he wishes I could just "relax". This sort of tired puts me in a place in which I feel fine doing that. In fact, I feel good about just doing nothing during this relatively short time (again, usually a half hour to an hour).

The second day that I took 5-HTP, I experienced my first (and so far only) side effect. When I was looking at my computer screen, everything took on a "high definition" look. The whites were super bright and strangely soft. The text looked crisper and the contrast between the words and white screen was sharper. I figured that it may be some change in my cheap display so I looked at my husband's laptop and it looked the same. The Christmas lights, when turned on, also had a brighter, softer look to them.

Some online searches revealed that this sometimes happens, along with a plethora of other side effects which are more uncomfortable and mitigate the value for some people like feeling sleepy/overly tired, upset stomach, and fogginess. Since some prescription drugs have similar effects, it's no shock that 5-HTP could have them as well.

When I read negative experiences, I have no doubt that they are all real. However, for me, so far, things have been going well. This morning, I woke up and told my husband that I felt better than I have in a very long time. It may be coincidence. It might even be the placebo effect (though I doubt it since the mood changes are concrete and distinct and I'm hyper-aware of my body and moods from years of tracking them in an attempt to manage both). I could also just be in some sort of cyclical upswing in my moods for the time being and that coincided with my starting to take 5-HTP.

I don't want to be misleading. I don't think 5-HTP was a miracle cure for me. I think that it was enough to take my depleted reserve and add a few cups to it such that all of the other things that I'm doing on top of taking this supplement are having more effect. In essence, I've been doing the therapy, and now I've also got some sort of "medication" to help it work more effectively.

I'm not sure if this will last. I hope it does. The body has a way of acclimating to medication or supplements. It will only continue to work (if indeed it works at all - which I think it does, but I can't "prove" it) if my brain had some inability to produce or properly metabolize serotonin and the added boost to 5-HTP righted a "wrong". It will only continue to work if my brain doesn't figure out that it's getting more of something it used to do by itself and decide to get lazy and stop doing what it used to do (which brains are inclined to do). At any rate, for now, given the terrible state I was in not too long ago, I'll take this and be grateful rather than worry about the future.