[loceng]

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with anything the author said, nor any references she makes to books or otherwise, however that's such a shallow/basic view of the brain you're putting forward as a counter-point.

The brain and physical-mental-emotional-spiritual body are far more complex than a single physical lever being pulled and a single affect happening; neurotransmitters are the transaction layer, the currency, the current/flow itself.

Likewise, there isn't only a single mechanism or cause of dis-function or dis-ease - the only possibility isn't simply because of a lack of or too many neurotransmitters needing a counterbalance; this isn't to say people some people won't experience benefit from something as simple/basic, however to dismiss other possibilities is naive, and likewise if they can so simply be helped - I'd be curious to see what simple situational-environmental impact has lead them to feeling depressed or lethargic, and whether something like a yoga practice (up to practicing all 7 branches of yoga) would have a greater impact short-term and long-term -- vs. keeping someone in a holding pattern or making them worse; the problem here then is on a societal-economic level, whereby in the short-term it's cheaper to give someone $10 worth of pills every month vs. getting them into a routine with yoga or other; it's also lazy and an extension of how we still as a society treat people - and don't take care of everyone, and that you're lucky/fortunate if you are born into a healthy (physically-mentally-emotionally-spiritually) family with adequate supports and finances, reducing your chances of being negatively impacted by the stagnant, the status quo.

SSRIs/SSNRI's themselves force a change in function by being re-uptake inhibitors, meaning they cause more neurotransmitter to linger in an area - and this doesn't seem to be evenly distributed and/or there is more going on with coping mechanisms, otherwise you could 100% predict the behaviour changes via an increase or decrease. As the author points out, there is relatively short period of testing required for these medications - and they are heavily controlled for vs. when they hit the wild for distribution [and the list of problems there is far too long for me to get into here].

There can be coping mechanisms, blocks, setup by other functions of the brain - purposefully - as a way to protect oneself from something (the ego mind, for survival purposes), e.g. insufferable conditions/experience and overwhelm that the brain/mind can't handle, and so it goes on lock-down. These drugs/medications, from my own experience, and observations of/with others - if it is such a condition with something underlying/suppression/repression going on, protecting oneself from a variety of potential things (injury from physical pain, or other).

Did you know there's a higher rate of suicide (and suicide ideation) if you take certain medications vs. placebo? This can tie into the theory that these medications force changes against self-protective mechanisms. Likewise, it shouldn't be difficult or a stretch to understand someone could be protecting themselves (from consequences), by protecting others, by blocking overwhelming anger and impulses that they learned to suppress/repress to hurt others - resulting in them hurting others, and perhaps in super violent/extreme ways due to not having coping mechanisms blocking them from doing so.

Contrast drugs like SSRIs (et al) with what I will call medicines - like Ayahuasca, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), or MDMA (reference to recent MAPS.org recent study) - that instead of forcing change in mechanism by inhibiting, it floods the brain with higher levels of serotonin that the brain normally doesn't release or have on its own (or mimics closely the serotonin transmitter). Likewise with Ayahuasca ceremonies or MDMA-assisted psychotherapy (or recreational-therapeutic MDMA-assisted dance party with friends you trust in a good environment), there is a contextual setting that will make these safer or more impactful - allowing positive and social pathways to open up (or language pathways relating to talking) - vs. a doctor spending a very short period with them out of context of the life of the person, prescribing an SSRI or other to them and putting them back into their daily life.

I was severely fucked up in different ways because of doctors prescribing different SSRIs (and the like) starting at the age of 17, and the peak/tipping point at 21-22 after more unexpected (or unknown at the time) side-effects - is when I realized I can't trust those doctors, nor those medications, because the industry doesn't actually have a proper fucking clue about them, and it's all an experiment on each individual. The medications had a cascade and accumulative affect on symptoms/problems, making me permanently worse until I could start solving the underlying problems - which ended up being in part food related, in part hearing related, in part from underlying physical injuries I had that I didn't realize I had - and I'm simplifying, it's more complex than that - and hard to believe on the surface, which is why I am writing a book to explain as much detail as possible.

I'm 35 now and only recently had significant healing of physical injury that was an underlying problem since I was a child, through stem cell injections, and will return to the US soon for another treatment to heal more of the remaining physical pain.

I hope you can appreciate your literal "three seconds of Googling" allowing you to come to a conclusion is less trustworthy (on the surface anyhow) than someone who experienced how anti-depressant medications impacted them for 24 years - and then who considers that they had to recover from that experience. I don't disagree that it is complex - and therefore difficult to understand - especially because you have the interplay of what depression, anxiety, and other, can cause behaviourally in someone without the various impact and side-effects of medications.

It looks part of her recovery was finding people she could start building trust to, who then helped her learn about emotions, meditation, and other self-awareness and social-relationship building practices. She also connected to her "inner guide"(or God, whatever she feels most comfortable or comforted calling it) which could perhaps be labeled as intuition, or as an autonomous nervous system working together well on its own without logical mind being engaged; enough learning happened via mind and analysis, to start trusting herself autonomously (trust is or is a part of autonomy), allowing the body to relax, allowing the mind to relax - as there's a feedback loop between the two: the more physical stress - the more mental stress, the more mental stress - the more physical stress.

Linking back to MDMA-assisted psychotherapy gaining benefit by tapping into language and memory pathways of post-traumatic experiences, there are other talk therapies like Innerchild Regression therapy which, in part, explores similarly early childhood relationships and learning to connect or reconnect to those - and understand them better, to process emotion that you may not have been able to before, due to an unsafe environment at the time - allowing those experiences/unhealed emotional wounds, to now start to come up and be healed-processed/learned from.

Anyway, I'm writing a book to share my full story, my experiences with healthcare, the problems I encountered and explain the solutions I propose. It will take me awhile. It will fill in a lot of details here to what I mentioned, perhaps making it easier to understand - or believe. I'm also beginning to put together applications for different stages of research, to be able to reference hard evidence relating to a protocol I've developed based on my understandings and experiences healing, recovering.

[bigmit37]

Would you be able to share how you were able to solve your problem and what the actually underlying cause was? Just a brief overview.

I’m currently on SSRIs and they actually do help me sleep, but it’s not really helping with the underlying problems.

As for SSRIs they are transformative for some people, and science doesn’t really understand the mechanism. They seem to think that there are secondary effects that are the reasons for the effectiveness of SSRIs on some people.

However, doctors seems to be too quick to prescribe SSRIs. I’ve read horror stories about people with some sort of iron-ferretin deficiency as their underlying problem and they were prescribed SSRIs instead of getting a simple iron test which would have pinpointed the cause of the symptoms.

These days you really need to do your own research and bring up all these points to your doctor.

[loceng]

It's more of a conversation that I'm willing to have with someone to, in part, see where they're currently at and what might be best to focus on first - than putting general knowledge out there, which will require a book to adequately/fully explain everything as there are many interconnected factors. To note, I'm not a doctor and don't have a medical degree.

I can say that there are non-medicative practices, along with diagnostic tools available to show concrete evidence relating to showing problems, that are transformative. The difficulty can be that if certain issues are not dealt with in parallel, or in a proper order may prevent/limit/block another therapy/practice/treatment from being beneficial/giving permanent improvement - that otherwise would be beneficial.

1) There's removing agitations from your physical body - in part, starting by getting a food sensitivity test (food panel) to check for up 184 foods that your body may be negatively responding to; also cutting out certain foods that may not show on these tests but may greatly impact you - like do you eat wheat or potato (sweet potato is fine)? Likewise, vitamin D3 liquid form is also good to take, as most of us are lacking it - 5000 to 8000 UI is good for most people, taking an initial 15-20k UI per day for a few days to load up; vitamin D3 is a steroid.

2) You/everyone should also get their hearing checked for imbalances, which can be used as a diagnostic tool to know what is going on; the brain/mind is a system of homeostasis, so it should be able to balance out to hear frequencies at even decibel levels in both ears. There's a sound therapy you can then do to unlock these behaviours, developmental blocks/delays - and resulting imbalances in sensory systems and how that can impact a person and their thinking/behaviours; this can also unlock and allow other sensory to balance out, that may be hyper- or hypo-sensitive. I know on the surface it can be difficult to believe that a sound therapy (listening to specially modified sound/the way its output) could be "magical" or so transformative, however I have my own personal experiences with such - and observing others rapid improvements. There is research as well.

3) Likewise, there's breaking down any ego mind coping mechanisms that may have solidified deeply over your lifetime - since childhood that could be causing a depressed state, or anxious, or other; ego dissolution is another term being used for this, which can be achieved in a few ways, some ways less or more rapid than others - like Ayahuasca ceremonies.

Relating specifically to sleep, it could be any amount of the above 3 influencing/impacting it enough to cause problems, or it could something in your living situation and environment as well - consumption of caffeine (stimulant) or alcohol/weed (depressants), it could be too much noise (or you're hypersensitive currently) - it could be a buildup of emotional . It could be too much energy built-up by not getting enough movement during the day or a few hours before bed.

It could be a weight issue as well or something like sleep apnea (which could be caused by or worsened by any of the above). It could be that you're trying to fall asleep when your body doesn't naturally want you to fall asleep, and then pressures from your day-to-day life of when you're expected/expecting to be awake are the problem/difficulty; the Ayurvedic clock can be interesting to look into to learn about these cycles better.

Also to point out that different medications may interfere with allowing a system to reach its normal, non-dis-eased and balanced state, once trying these treatments/practices. For Ayahuasca ceremonies for example, you shouldn't be on certain medications for at least 24-48 hours before the ceremony - different shamans have different guidelines they follow - otherwise it can be unsafe. If you eat wheat regularly, you may actually be addicted to wheat, which may be difficult to stop eating - otherwise you'll get more and more agitated because of withdrawal (another specific reason why you may have trouble falling asleep); Ayahuasca is showing to be good at breaking addictions.

Regarding your last sentence, from my experience the majority of doctors are terrible at critical thinking. I realized they are selected primarily for their memorization skills via testing, and not critical thinking. Indoctrination of old, stagnant knowledge via current academic systems, and human error are the crux of the problem.

I realized I didn't actually mention underlying problems I encountered. As I child I would have been considered to have Asperger's - however I never was formally diagnosed, it wasn't really a thing back then. I was hypersensitive - though I didn't realize it at the time - it was only after medications caused me to become severely hypersensitive to sound (hyperacusis) that I realized sound was an issue. It turned out I had developed a hearing imbalance due to painful ear infections when I was a child - primarily in my right ear; it's not the hearing imbalance itself that is the problem, it's a tool to show signs of function. Likewise, when I was 5 or 6 years old I had an painful injury to my right big toe pad - which later on I realized my ego mind had created a coping mechanism to block me from that pain and/or from the emotion of the pain, and then my development continued abnormally with that block; until I did a number of Ayahuasca ceremonies which broke down my ego mind and its coping mechanism, reintroducing me to intolerable levels of pain from many sources. Through trying different healing practices I had been doing elimination diets relating to food, and eventually did food sensitivity testing, allowing me to refine and remove what foods I could eat - and by removing all of those foods, I would feel much better, and then introducing just one again allowed the contrast for me to realize just how much pain it was causing me in my GI tract. Acupuncture was another way to get energy flowing again properly. Yoga was another way getting my body healthier, of developing self-awareness by putting pressure on the systems that signal pain and such. I'm probably missing a few things, a bit tired now from writing. I should include the tipping point related to physical pain, and that lead me eventually to exploring and finding Ayahuasca ceremonies, is that 5+ years ago - the pain from LASIK eye surgery really fucked up my nervous system: a strong tension started down the right side of my neck, and my balance on the right side became notably worse; I had been practicing yoga for 5 or 6 years by that point, so I was very familiar with single-legged balance postures.

[bigmit37]

Thank you for this. What food allergy panel do you use to get such a vast amount substances included? I was looking into food allergy panels and I was seeing blood tests for most common food allergies which included only 8-9 substances.

As for the hearing test,do I just request my doctor for one?

I’ve tried lots of accupuncture but never felt true relief. I went to some of the best accouncturists but no real relief.

Most of my anxiety seems to be somatic in form. My mind is hyper aware of sensations in my body and I get a lot of interrupting anxious thoughts that break my train of thought and cause an anxious symptoms.

The main somatic symptom is pressure on my chest which with meditation I’m able to dissolve a little a bit but can never fully open up, it takes too much time and patience and the sensations are too strong. There are also sensations on the left side of my head connect to the chest— mri was negative.

I think intense exercise might open up my chest but I don’t want to do too much damage to my knees.

I’ve started stretching everyday and hoping the head to kneees , hand to floor stretch might open up the chest more. It feels like when I stretching, some of emotional tension in my body gets released. I really need to push myself a little more though.

[loceng]

Thank you for asking! Do you have an email I can reach you at?

[loceng]

Followup: It can be a new email that keeps your identity anonymous, just want to make sure I'm sending the info to you.

[bigmit37]

Sorry for the late reply! I forgot to check the reply of the thread. I’m not used to the no notifcations.

You can send me info at [e-mail]

We can continue the conversation there as well if you like .

[pasabagi]

I don't think an idea of depression that's based on anecdote and opinion is deeper than the mainstream account - which is limited ('shallow') because of the complexities of brain function you've mentioned. The fact is, for the vast majority of depressed people (including myself), anti-depressants work. For some people, they don't. Granted, the healthcare system is as fucked as any other system in our society, but the basic science is, if not absolutely sound, at least playing the odds.

[loceng]

Hence understanding the need to, and wanting to, do research for hard evidence relating to my so-called anecdote.

Also, do you realize you just gave a very short, one-liner anecdote - "The fact is, for the vast majority of depressed people (including myself), anti-depressants work." - while calling my long post, an anecdote? Interesting to say the least.

I'm curious, if you're open and willing to share, what else you tried relating to helping depression prior to trying medication - and what life circumstances were you in or had happened previously?