[nyolfen]

my thought as well, particularly the bit about following amphetamine use and the death of their mother, assuming it wasn't figurative or an arbitrary example. as someone who has experienced mania it reminded me strongly of the way i've felt in the midst of it -- the sense of mastery, the paranoia, and feeling like i had some kind of conceptual or philosophical breakthrough.

[ThJ]

Oh, I read psychology. Actually, it was mania at one point, but, uh, I... stopped it? And then interesting things began happening. My ability to improvise on the piano improved. My appreciation of classical music grew. The paranoia was replaced by the understanding that people usually aren’t out to get me. It wasn’t so much mania as it was my social skills turning on for the first time and it was a bit intense. I’m talking to people as I’m going through this and the feedback was concern at first, followed by keen interest in what I was saying, in the sense that people now want to talk to me more often, women actually pay attention to me and laugh at my jokes. I think if this is mania, it’s controlled mania in a way? I’m able to bring myself up and down and I stop if it goes too high. There are a couple of friends of mine who have had similar experiences and they’re smart people too, and nobody locked them up for it. I think there are people out there who can control their mind states like this and it’s a rather powerful tool. I’m positive about it. I live, think and feel. I have good days and bad days. Also, I’ve been stepping the ADHD meds down not up, and even late at night when they’re supposed to have worn off, I can still get into that state.

I guess in a way if I didn’t know breathing and relaxation techniques and didn’t know much about psych stuff, I’d be very confused and would possibly lose it, but since I know these things, and I know science, it’s a thing I can control. I’m not alone in it and I’m sharing these things with friends and while some of them don’t get it, some of them do totally get it.

I think what you should know about my story is that I was a ball of stress and fear before this happened. All my life, actually. The notion that people go through breakdowns at stages of self development isn’t exactly unheard of.

The scary thing, of course, is that it DOES break people down completely at times. It’s too much for them to handle... but when it isn’t too much to handle and you just grow from it? I’d call that self development.

[pavas]

>I think if this is mania, it’s controlled mania in a way?

That sounds like hypomania. If you're relatively smart it's like a superpower, but most medical professionals do not believe its something you can control.

I know nothing about you and you could very well have experienced a spiritual awakening, and if so I'm happy for you. From what you say a lot of this stuff sounds pretty recent; if you've lived like this without the heavy down periods for many years then it's likely not what I'm talking about.

I just wanted you to know that if it is mania or hypomania, in which case you will eventually come down, you'll be OK. You'll get through it and it's OK to get some help.

All the best to you.

[ThJ]

Some of the stuff on the hypomania page rings a bell, but I don’t think disinhibition requires testing and confronting your fears first. What I’m going through, behaviourally speaking, feels more like learning the actual vs believed limits of what I can do to affect my environment. It’s a bit like being a kid and testing borders with your parents to see how far you can take it and then gaining a little more confidence. I wait patiently to take the next step and plan things out and then execute them. Again, if I was feeling a loss of control and my behaviours made me dysfunctional, that would be the time to seek help. Instead, it would seem that I’m actually improving my life situation. The definition of mental illness isn’t symptoms but whether they are giving the patient issues interacting with their environment, and as far as I can see, I fail to satisfy that criterium.

It’s of relatively recent date, but thinking back on it, I’ve had vaguely similar experiences before. Difference is that there wasn’t the same bringing online of feelings and abilities. It wasn’t as powerful.

[cwkoss]

Amphetamine can cause a somewhat paradoxical sensitization at lower doses. I'm not sure if it's ever been clinically demonstrated in humans, but I suspect that chronic 'microdosing' of amphetamine could lead to a manic-like state even when sober.

If you're planning on taking doses lower than ~5mg regularly, I'd recommend doing some research on amphetamine sensitization. But, I'm just a guy who likes reading pharma studies in my spare time and definitely not an expert.

[sujNansnam]

Do you have any pointers to those studies? I’ve been taking a lower dose of methylphenidate (10 mg of 8-hour extended release) to try to avoid risks of tolerance and addiction, in addition to skipping it entirely for tolerance breaks. I figured lower was better from a risk standpoint so I’m interested if that’s not that case.

[cwkoss]

Most of the studies of sensitization I have seen have used low doses. I haven't been able to find many studies that measure comparative sensitization at different dosage levels. (So the extent to which this applies to higher doses as well is unclear to me). Further confounding, the definition of "low dose" seems highly variable, and it's hard to accurately extrapolate from rat studies.

"In addition, whereas both groups of rats developed the same degree of sensitization to 0.5 mg/kg AMPH, only the HR rats developed pronounced sensitization to repeated administration of 1.0 mg/kg AMPH. " Individual differences in amphetamine sensitization: Dose-dependent effects https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0091305792...

Amphetamine Sensitization Alters Reward Processing in the Human Striatum and Amygdala https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3981726/

Amphetamine-Induced Time-Dependent Sensitization of Dopamine Neurotransmission in the Dorsal and Ventral Striatum: A Microdialysis Study in Behaving Rats https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1859849/