[cameronh90]

I suffer from severe crippling OCD and anxiety. Years of therapy and psychoanalysis have failed to find any cause, and, if anything, made it worse. The best explanation has been it's probably because I'm autistic, and these things tend to happen to autistics.

Luckily, sertraline was an almost instant cure.

I can come off it for periods, but it tends to reoccur after a while. So, it does mean I have to take a drug indefinitely, but is that really a problem? It turns my life into one worth living.

The reason we can't take sleeping pills daily is because they stop working in fairly short order. But if, like antidepressants (typically), they didn't lose their effectiveness over time, would there even be a problem with using sleeping pills if you had trouble sleeping?

[andai]

I'm not an expert so maybe someone else can clarify further, but in relation to sleep medications I've heard that they should not be used for more than two weeks, or they can permanently fuck up your sleep cycle.

They also give you low quality sleep, because they just knock you out. It's not a natural kind of sleep.

At least that's how it was a while ago. Maybe the situation has improved.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

I used ambien for sleep and provigil for mindfullness (the go/no go packets) during long deployments in the military and it took me years to get back to anything normal after leaving the Army. These are very powerful medications.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

> At least that's how it was a while ago. Maybe the situation has improved.

Fortunately it has. Orexin antagonists don't cause dependency and provide high-quality ("natural") sleep.

[Aerbil313]

Bit off-topic, but melatonin taken at right doses appears to work very well. (commonly prescribed doses are 10-30x too much and likely cause tolerance). See the post https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...

[corv]

I’ve heard this before that common doses are unnecessarily high but why is that? Patents?

[zemvpferreira]

Rather, lack of. Melatonin is over-the-counter, generic, badly understood by the people taking it and dosed according to personal preference which means marketing it is all abouy big numbers. Bigger number on package = more sales.

[Projectiboga]

The help aiding sleep is only one function for melatonin. The reason for higher suggested doses is due to its anti-oxident function. From personal experience melatonin needs to be paired with vitamin e to really clear out over night. I take vitamin e as I get into bed right before I take a melatonin sublingual. Another benefit of melatonin is that it upregulates our insulin receptors.

[kstrauser]

They’re considered dietary supplements and not medicine, so they’re not meaningfully regulated in the way meds are.

[quietsegfault]

> why is that

Why buy 1mg pill when you can buy 100mg pill?

[temp0826]

Even funnier is that often 0.25mg or 0.5mg is closer to the correct dose, and those sizes tend to be hard to find.

There actually is a condition that calls for extremely high (100mg+ doses), but it is a very rare thing, no one should ever consider that much without instruction from a doctor. But you'll find it right next to the normal <=5mg doses without any explanation.

[calfuris]

The Natrol liquid isn't usually too hard to track down. They advertise it as 1 mg or 2.5 mg, but it's the same stuff, the bottle just direct you to take 4 or 10 mL respectively.

[Projectiboga]

So 1ml (20 drops) would yeild an average dose of .25mg in that form.