One of the first things that I was taught when I started studying science at a higher level (in junior high school) was a lay man's explanation of the null hypothesis. The teacher wanted us to construct a hypothesis and test it, but wanted to make sure that we didn't make one which was asserting that something didn't exist. The real explanation of the null hypothesis is more complex, but the simplistic version is that you can't prove something does not exist. You can support the idea that it does exist or has a relationship with something else, but you can't prove a negative.
If you think about this, it makes perfect sense. It is impossible to test and rule out every possible relationship between two things/concepts/etc. This is one of the reasons why science and religion don't play nice together. You can't prove God doesn't exist and scientists have little interest in proving that said entity does exist, particularly when the only means of doing so is to make indirect inferences between natural phenomena and a hazily defined deity.
To give a less emotionally loaded and concrete example, let's say that my hypothesis is that there are no unicorns on earth. Unless I can search every single place on earth simultaneously including any hidden spaces and show that there are no unicorns, then I can't prove that there are none. I can, however, say that there is no evidence of them. I can attempt to prove that they do exist by looking for forensic evidence (rainbow poop, bones, discarded horns, etc.), but I can't prove that they don't exist. While the conclusion to a hypothesis that they exist is essentially the same as they one that asserts that they don't exist, the bottom line is that basic scientific method suggest that you don't look to prove non-existence as it is impossible to do so credibly.
I'm offering a refresher on this topic because it relates to a conversation that I had over dinner with my father-in-law, a man who often picks at research and claims to be a person of science. We were talking about intoxication, and when I use that word, I don't mean simply consuming alcohol. I use it to mean the ingestion of any substance in order to alter ones emotional or cognitive state and am including intoxication by cannabis. Since my father-in-law has a history of intermittent use of marijuana (including a stint in which he grew his own), this is something that he has a vested interest in validating.
Before I get any further, I should assert that I have never been intoxicated through the use of any substance because I have never consumed anything which has a known consequence of changing my emotional or cognitive state. You might be able to count caffeine from soda, coffee, or tea, but my consumption of those items is incredibly modest. I drink one cup of coffee in the morning, cut in half with almond milk, and another similarly diluted cup in the afternoon most days. I drink two cups of tea most days, but sometimes none at all. I drink one to two cans of diet soda, but not only or always caffeinated ones. Sometimes, it'd ginger ale or root beer. Sometimes, I don't drink any at all. I have never gotten an energy boost or buzz from the beverages I drink, and I've never touched an energy drink.
I don't have any moral issues with modest consumption of substances because one likes the taste of something. My husband drinks one drink of some sort each day; he sometimes has a single small bottle or beer or a mixed drink with rum. He has never gotten drunk and extremely rarely consumes more than one drink. His personality does not change, though he never drives after even a small amount of alcohol consumption as we both know that even one beer can affect the ability to perform critical tasks.
While I don't have any moral issues with substance use, I do have some other problems with it. My father is an alcoholic, so I know what it is like to be around someone who is intoxicated.
The primary one is that I don't like how intoxication changes people's personalities. They become mean, stupid, lazy, childish, slow, etc. If someone wants to get high and sit in a room alone, I don't care, but I don't want to be around someone who isn't fully present with me when they are talking to me. I should add that I don't want them to be in that state in a way which cannot be altered on a moment's notice. Someone can be watching T.V. or using the internet and not be "present" with me, but that can change in a second if needed. They can change the focus of their attention or turn off the device. It doesn't work like that with substance-induced intoxication. You can't simply change on a dime.
The other issue that I have with a lot of substance use is that many people use it instead of developing real coping mechanisms. The answer to boredom, anxiety, depression, etc. becomes consumption of a substance. My sister-in-law's youngest son has been using cannabis for so long that he has developed a philosophy of, 'If I'm home, I might as well be high.' He doesn't have any other concrete mechanism to turn to to make him feel better in whatever way he needs to feel better because he's never had to trouble himself. His use of substances started at a relatively young age and now it's just what he uses all of the time. He's not even troubled. He's mainly using it to moderate boredom/enhance how he spends his free time. The problem is that he does it so much and that he is, from all external appearances, on a road to strong addiction that he won't be able to break free from when he finishes college and has to be more present in daily life. I'm not worried about this, mind you, as he is not my responsibility, but his mother is concerned.
Now that I've made my position clear, I will say that the reason my sister-in-law's son was using from such a young age was that their family history was one in which substance use was viewed as inevitable, innocuous, and "normal". My discussion with my father-in-law over dinner ended up being one in which my take threatened all of these notions so he gave a very irrational and unscientific explanation. My basic assertion for why I have never tried substances is that I don't know when I use one if I will be the type of person who is prone to addiction. With my family history, I view it as a not insignificant risk. With my depression, I view it as an even greater risk as any substance which may instantly ameliorate my suffering would be very hard to resist. My feeling is that there is that the risk of becoming addicted is not worth the sating of curiosity or the temporary and false emotional elation that sometimes accompanies such substance use.
My father-in-law's argument for this was that we might be addicted to anything once we try it, including sex. My answer to that is that we have a drive for some behaviors. That is, there are biochemical processes in our bodies that compel us to act on certain impulses. Drives include eating, sleeping, and sex. We are compelled through processes related to survival to do these things and suffer various types of distress if we don't act on them. Men get erections without bidding them to come. Your stomach hurts if it is empty. You can't resist nodding off if you deprive yourself of sleep for too long. These are manifestations of the processes fueling human drives.
When I talked about drives, my father-in-law said, "you don't know that we don't have a drive to get high." I said that, I do indeed know that we lack such a drive. There is absolutely no evidence that humans have a biochemical process that compels them to become intoxicated. He insisted that I couldn't know that, but I have studied psychology and human biochemistry for 30 years. I'm no expert, but I haven't once run across a study, theory, or experiment which suggests a "drive to get high." And, as my husband pointed out on our drive home, not only is there no evidence that we have a drive to become intoxicated, it would go against the grain of evolution and survival. If we ever had such a drive, those who acted on it would likely have been more susceptible to predators, less likely to tend to their needs, and more likely to waste time and energy seeking out intoxicants. There is a reason that tribal cultures use substances for ritual rather than recreation. They can't afford for everyone to be getting hepped up on goofballs all of the time.
My father-in-law, obviously losing ground, blurted out that there was no evidence that we don't possess such a drive. Um, well, yeah, because you can't prove non-existence. My husband said, "I thought you couldn't prove a negative." I mentioned additionally that this is the problem with religion and proving God is/is not real. My father-in-law then changed the subject.
This situation annoyed me because my father-in-law is incredibly pedantic about studies. He won't believe them unless he vets them, and speaks as if he is strict about science, but then he totally tosses science out the window when he needs to validate a lifestyle choice. I realized that this is what happens when you toss a question into the narrative that a person uses to construct his notions of what is "normal". No matter what their asserted orientation is vis a vis "science", it all goes out the window when it doesn't fit the preferred worldview.
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Stupid Facebook Arguments
I post a lot of silly thoughts on Facebook because I want to amuse people rather than simply talk about my day. I'm not afraid of being wrong nor am I afraid of making a fool of myself. One way you learn is by making mistakes.
Unfortunately, there will always be people who have sufficiently low self-esteem that they cop an attitude if they believe they "catch" you in making an erroneous assertion. I try not to do that, though I'm sure I have come across poorly in such cases as well. Such is the weakness of on-line communication, especially that designed to embrace brevity. In fact, I often wonder how many people bother to click the "see more" link when I write longer posts. My guess is very few.
Yesterday, I remembered something that happened while I was taking a graduate psychopharmacology class at my husband's school and making a presentation on depression. We (my husband and I did the presentation together) were talking about treatment and medication. One of the medicines that is commonly prescribed is an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). This drug keeps the brain juices that you are deficient in that are possibly causing your depression dancing in the synaptic gaps longer.
A fellow, known for his lateness, self-centeredness, and general disruptiveness in order to bring attention to himself, raised his hand and said that SSRIs were shown to create suicidal ideation in users. I said, and the teacher supported this assertion, that the people who took the drug were depressed and it was impossible to know if the drugs caused it or if they would have had them anyway. As a depressed person, I can say I've had plenty of thoughts of suicide. Generally, they were escape fantasies and I would not have acted upon them. In moments of misery, you can turn to them like a comfy blanket. No matter how bad it gets, there is always this one way out.
This guy wasn't happy that I wasn't on board with his attitude that the drug made things worse instead of better for people with depression. I don't know if they create suicidal thoughts or simply sometimes fail to inhibit the depression which causes one to turn to them. I was simply unwilling to conclude that they cause them.
Yesterday, for some reason, I remembered this exchange from about two years ago and thought about how they'd test for this issue. It occurred to me that the only way to do that would be to do something dangerous and unethical. That would be to give SSRIs to people who were not depressed and see if it made them suicidal. My understanding of drug tests based on whatever journal articles I've read in psychological documents is that the most common way to test them is to get a bunch of people suffering from an illness, give some of them a new drug, some of them an old drug (sometimes), and some of them a placebo. I had never read that drugs (except possibly OTC drugs) were given to people who were healthy to see how it affected them and I've read a fair amount.
I posted my thoughts on Facebook and a Canadian woman who I met through blogging (and who lives in Japan) rather flatly and with what I perceived to be a tone of "you're so stupid, how could you not know this," said that SSRIs were tested on healthy people. I granted that I did not know the data, but that, to me, that seemed akin to giving insulin to people with diabetes. It shocked me that this might be the case. That is not only because I'd never heard of it before, but because there are possible long-term consequences to giving medication that messes with neurotransmitters to people who don't need them. For one thing, any neurotransmitter that plays around between your neurons for a longer time may create more receptors on the neuron. In essence, it makes your neuron "hungrier" for a bigger "meal" of that neurotransmitter now that it's had a chance for a bigger taste. You can take people who are fine and mess them up for good as, once those receptors are formed, they never go away and they may need more serotonin than their body previously produced. Since SSRIs are long-term drugs (they often need to be taken for weeks to get any effect), you wouldn't just take them for a short time in a test situation and stop or the test would be useless as a comparison of the reaction of a healthy population to an unhealthy population.
To me, it makes very little sense to test all drugs, and particularly ones which target very specific problems, on healthy people as they aren't the population that it will be interacting with. What could be discerned from it? It's possible that side effects could be seen, but those same effects would be seen in unhealthy populations as well. Besides messing up the bodies of a healthy person, I could see no reason to test on healthy subjects. It's one thing to test aspirin. It's another to test an SSRI or a drug that affects dopamine (like Parkinson's disease drugs). It seems insanely unethical and of extremely dubious value. It's also a violation of the Hippocratic oath.
This woman misread what I said about it being a shock to me as umbrage at the unethical nature of such tests and got snarky with me. I repeated that I did not know the data, but would appreciate a link in order to educate myself. I was sincere about this. If this is the practice and the studies I've read fail to mention it (not bloody likely), I'd like to know. She ignored the request at first and smugly said, "now you know," as if her saying it made it true to which I replied that I'd still appreciate a link. She finally gave me links, but not to any studies of SSRIs that said they tested on a healthy population. She linked to a general site and three studies which did not describe the testing conditions at all. Either she was too lazy to provide concrete support or she didn't have it. I was not impressed, but I simply said, "thank you" in reply to the links and let the matter drop.
I still don't discount the possibility that I somehow missed this testing practice. I also don't discount the possibility that the testing conditions are different in Canada or other countries than the U.S. and this woman was speaking as a Canadian with the knowledge she gained there. I also know that disadvantaged populations (prisoners, poor students, poor people) are used at times as guinea pigs and accept or take potentially harmful drugs in exchange for cash. I just never heard of it for SSRIs.
This exchange illustrates one of the things about stupid Facebook exchanges which annoys me and I'm sure others as well. Part of the problem is the tone and degradation in civility. This woman needed to be "right". I didn't need to be "right", but I wasn't going to take her word for it because this is how stupid things become "truths". It's why Snopes exists - people pass around stories long enough for others to believe they're facts. I genuinely wanted to learn something new, if indeed there was something to be learned. What was more frustrating was that she smugly acted as if she was "educating" me, but then when I asked for that education, she either got lazy and provided sloppy links or found out she was wrong and couldn't produce the goods and pretended what she offered was sufficient.
In the end, though I thanked her for the links and let it drop, my husband, who also was skeptical, commented on the lack of substance of the links. He also couldn't believe what she said made any sense. Of course, life doesn't always make sense and companies often don't behave ethically. However, in this case, unless I get pointed at some studies which explain their methodology clearly and say they tested a specific SSRI on a healthy population, I'll remain skeptical that what she said was true.
Unfortunately, there will always be people who have sufficiently low self-esteem that they cop an attitude if they believe they "catch" you in making an erroneous assertion. I try not to do that, though I'm sure I have come across poorly in such cases as well. Such is the weakness of on-line communication, especially that designed to embrace brevity. In fact, I often wonder how many people bother to click the "see more" link when I write longer posts. My guess is very few.
Yesterday, I remembered something that happened while I was taking a graduate psychopharmacology class at my husband's school and making a presentation on depression. We (my husband and I did the presentation together) were talking about treatment and medication. One of the medicines that is commonly prescribed is an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). This drug keeps the brain juices that you are deficient in that are possibly causing your depression dancing in the synaptic gaps longer.
A fellow, known for his lateness, self-centeredness, and general disruptiveness in order to bring attention to himself, raised his hand and said that SSRIs were shown to create suicidal ideation in users. I said, and the teacher supported this assertion, that the people who took the drug were depressed and it was impossible to know if the drugs caused it or if they would have had them anyway. As a depressed person, I can say I've had plenty of thoughts of suicide. Generally, they were escape fantasies and I would not have acted upon them. In moments of misery, you can turn to them like a comfy blanket. No matter how bad it gets, there is always this one way out.
This guy wasn't happy that I wasn't on board with his attitude that the drug made things worse instead of better for people with depression. I don't know if they create suicidal thoughts or simply sometimes fail to inhibit the depression which causes one to turn to them. I was simply unwilling to conclude that they cause them.
Yesterday, for some reason, I remembered this exchange from about two years ago and thought about how they'd test for this issue. It occurred to me that the only way to do that would be to do something dangerous and unethical. That would be to give SSRIs to people who were not depressed and see if it made them suicidal. My understanding of drug tests based on whatever journal articles I've read in psychological documents is that the most common way to test them is to get a bunch of people suffering from an illness, give some of them a new drug, some of them an old drug (sometimes), and some of them a placebo. I had never read that drugs (except possibly OTC drugs) were given to people who were healthy to see how it affected them and I've read a fair amount.
I posted my thoughts on Facebook and a Canadian woman who I met through blogging (and who lives in Japan) rather flatly and with what I perceived to be a tone of "you're so stupid, how could you not know this," said that SSRIs were tested on healthy people. I granted that I did not know the data, but that, to me, that seemed akin to giving insulin to people with diabetes. It shocked me that this might be the case. That is not only because I'd never heard of it before, but because there are possible long-term consequences to giving medication that messes with neurotransmitters to people who don't need them. For one thing, any neurotransmitter that plays around between your neurons for a longer time may create more receptors on the neuron. In essence, it makes your neuron "hungrier" for a bigger "meal" of that neurotransmitter now that it's had a chance for a bigger taste. You can take people who are fine and mess them up for good as, once those receptors are formed, they never go away and they may need more serotonin than their body previously produced. Since SSRIs are long-term drugs (they often need to be taken for weeks to get any effect), you wouldn't just take them for a short time in a test situation and stop or the test would be useless as a comparison of the reaction of a healthy population to an unhealthy population.
To me, it makes very little sense to test all drugs, and particularly ones which target very specific problems, on healthy people as they aren't the population that it will be interacting with. What could be discerned from it? It's possible that side effects could be seen, but those same effects would be seen in unhealthy populations as well. Besides messing up the bodies of a healthy person, I could see no reason to test on healthy subjects. It's one thing to test aspirin. It's another to test an SSRI or a drug that affects dopamine (like Parkinson's disease drugs). It seems insanely unethical and of extremely dubious value. It's also a violation of the Hippocratic oath.
This woman misread what I said about it being a shock to me as umbrage at the unethical nature of such tests and got snarky with me. I repeated that I did not know the data, but would appreciate a link in order to educate myself. I was sincere about this. If this is the practice and the studies I've read fail to mention it (not bloody likely), I'd like to know. She ignored the request at first and smugly said, "now you know," as if her saying it made it true to which I replied that I'd still appreciate a link. She finally gave me links, but not to any studies of SSRIs that said they tested on a healthy population. She linked to a general site and three studies which did not describe the testing conditions at all. Either she was too lazy to provide concrete support or she didn't have it. I was not impressed, but I simply said, "thank you" in reply to the links and let the matter drop.
I still don't discount the possibility that I somehow missed this testing practice. I also don't discount the possibility that the testing conditions are different in Canada or other countries than the U.S. and this woman was speaking as a Canadian with the knowledge she gained there. I also know that disadvantaged populations (prisoners, poor students, poor people) are used at times as guinea pigs and accept or take potentially harmful drugs in exchange for cash. I just never heard of it for SSRIs.
This exchange illustrates one of the things about stupid Facebook exchanges which annoys me and I'm sure others as well. Part of the problem is the tone and degradation in civility. This woman needed to be "right". I didn't need to be "right", but I wasn't going to take her word for it because this is how stupid things become "truths". It's why Snopes exists - people pass around stories long enough for others to believe they're facts. I genuinely wanted to learn something new, if indeed there was something to be learned. What was more frustrating was that she smugly acted as if she was "educating" me, but then when I asked for that education, she either got lazy and provided sloppy links or found out she was wrong and couldn't produce the goods and pretended what she offered was sufficient.
In the end, though I thanked her for the links and let it drop, my husband, who also was skeptical, commented on the lack of substance of the links. He also couldn't believe what she said made any sense. Of course, life doesn't always make sense and companies often don't behave ethically. However, in this case, unless I get pointed at some studies which explain their methodology clearly and say they tested a specific SSRI on a healthy population, I'll remain skeptical that what she said was true.
Saturday, December 6, 2014
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.
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.
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