Through the Looking Glass · 10:22pm Oct 11th, 2016
I've said a lot in the past about the effects and my experience of depression. In turn, I feel it would be remiss of me not to post about one of those rare bit of good news.
Yesterday (Monday) I had the first of three ketamine infusions: tiny doses administered intravenously at a hospital by trained staff. They warned me not to take the dosage lightly. "It will mess with your mind," they said. They were right. The first quarter of an hour I was enjoying the show as that thing we call out minds, as if it was a singular entity, unravelled it's secrets and divided itself into a multitude of discrete functions, abilities, drives, and senses. Just before the twenty-minute mark, I lost track of time – that is, I completely forgot that time was actually a thing – and panicked because it suddenly felt like I would stay as I was forever and I was barely a few percent of a functional human being at the time. It may sound like fun to some people, but forgetting that you're actually a material being in a three dimensional world that obeys the laws of thermodynamics can really put a dampener on your mind-altering experience.
It was terrifying. It has also been rewarding in ways I could not have foreseen.
I don't want to get bogged down in minutiae, so I'll cut to the chase:
1) My mind is now quiet. Like an engine stripped down, cleaned, and rebuilt, everything in my brain works and feels effortless. No background noise. No resistance. Just tranquillity. That is something I haven't felt since I was... oh, twenty two, I think? Maybe twenty three. A long time ago.
2) My cognitive bandwidth has increased dramatically. I no longer get bogged down simply for the audacity of having emotions or processing vast swathes of sensory data. Being content no longer makes me instantly tired. Being in a room with twenty voices speaking no longer makes my head feel like it's being violently stuffed with cotton wool. When I have a thought, it gets processed and logged quickly without feeling like it's jamming up the works.
3) It may sound hard to believe, but I am now consciously aware of having an emotion layer to my moment-to-moment experience. A simple thing like going out to the park with a friend to enjoy having the sun on my face is literally new. Looking up at a vibrant blue sky and having it put a smile on my face is new. In fact, just sitting here smiling because I've thought about something that made me smile previously is basically new. It's not literally new, but suffice to say it's been so long I'd forgotten it.
4) My amygdala works. I mean, I thought it did before, and I guess it did after a fashion, but now I can actually turn things of with a bit of conscious effort, rather then merely turning the volume down a tiny bit. Now I can actually shut it down, if only for a little while.
5) I can sympathise with every person who has been unable to explain how and why they feel the way they do. These changes are incredibly subtle. If I hadn't spent as much time as I have studying this stuff, I could have missed an awful lot of the detail. Even now I'm struggling to fine words to explain some of the barely-perceptible changes that result in such a fundamentally different experience.
6) It's not been thirty-six hours and I think I can feel it starting to wear off already. It's hard to imagine how much I'll miss it when it's gone. Maybe I'll be distraught. Maybe I won't even be able to remember what it was like. Still, I'm told that most people feel nothing at all after their first infusion, so I'm not worried.
The bottom line is that all those educated guesses about what my brain was or wasn't doing appear to have been more or less on the money. Happiness, contentment, joy: these are emotions that not everyone can actually feel. On Monday morning I could not feel them. By Monday evening I could. When I want to do something right now, I just do it. By the time this wears off, I will have to struggle through a mire of treacle-y anxiety and doubt to perform even the most basic tasks.
I have stood on both sides of the looking glass, and only now do I understand that I have lived in a nightmare bore diabolical than even the dreamer can understand. And yet, I an not afraid to think that I will be back in it soon, because I have again the one thing that has been missing for such a long time.
Hope.
Thank you for sharing this. :)
<3
Thank you for sharing. Good to know you're holding on, pushing against it - finding what works for you!
Incredible. Please, do keep us updated. And good luck!
Woo! Living the dream of getting better! Hope that upward trend continues for you.
That is incredible news. Thank you for taking some of this precious time and writing this blog post!
I'm so thrilled that your experience was a good one.
Wow. That sounds like a straight-up awesome change.
If things do stumble back toward they way they were, then I hope you remember that you deserve every minute of those last 36 hours, and more, and that the dark side of the looking-glass is neither natural nor right. I'm rooting for you over the long term, and I hope that having seen that it's possible makes it easier to stay on the bright side and/or return there.
Good luck, & let us know what happens next. Or by now, even. It's one day later. How do you feel?
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I will write out another post either tonight or tomorrow. I have a fair bit I'd like to say even if it's just for the sake of writing it down.
In the meantime, the effects were almost gone by last night, and yes, I was very, very afraid for a while, but today I am more stable and able to pick out several important details that seem to have shifted on either a longer-term or possibly even permanent basis.
Until then, thanks for commenting. It really does help.
—M
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I'm bumping the ponies here who might know me b/c this is surprisingly relevant and nopony said anything to me until Catalysts Cradle mentioned it in my blog today.
I did ketamine infusions too at the end of Spring (I think that was when)!
I dunno if you saw my blog posts on it? I had to start trying bizarre things because SSRI/SNRI medications weren't working anymore for me. It's one hell of a trip, but the benefits faded after a week or two.
So ketamine did not work.
I've tried ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) over the past few months, and it worked perfectly while I was taking the brain-shocks, but a week after the twelfth treatment I started to backslide and a month later I'm right back where I was.
I'm currently trying a huge concoction of different drugs, including lithium, which is likely to help me. Hooves crossed, anyway.
I wish you the best of luck with your journey as well.
4338582 Holy shitting biscuits:
Man, now I feel bad for only having to shell out £600 for a 3-course trial! While I did slide back to more or less where I started once that trial was over – which exactly what was expect, to be fair – I have actually started a home-use course of ketamine that should be vastly more practical. I get to take a dose of oral ketamine solution twice a week. It's a only a little weaker than the direct titration, but having it twice weekly should compensate for that. Actually, I'm expecting slightly better results than the titration, once the successive doses can build up a more continuous sense of wellbeing. I can do this for £50 per 50ml bottle, which should do eleven doses – five and a half weeks, if I can measure it right. Every three months I need a £150 consultation to make sure it's not doing anything untoward, but that still only comes to about £1200 a year including travel. It's a metric fuckton to me (considering it's a necessary part of healing enough to get a job in the first place), but not so much in the grand scheme of things.
You say that the effects only lasted a week or two, and that surprises me because you say that as if you expected something else. I'm interested in what your doctor told you to expect, because I was quite explicitly told that K is a medium-term direct effect that is only meant as a pathway to natural regeneration of the damaged neural pathways – regular use only grants a space in which to heal, rather than being a direct cure. What you describe sounds much like what I experience, but both myself and my doctor considered it a significant success. However, there was never any illusion between us that it would have any long term effect from short term use. As in, that just isn't a thing, which leaves me wondering what you have been told and what your doctor expected.
The other thing that interests me – and this is entirely selfish interest – is how much psychological/therapeutic work have you done? I find myself in the position of being the only person I know to find the intricacies fascinating far beyond any practical application, so I always wonder how much difference my fairly focused knowledge base assists me.
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I have a degree in psychology with hundreds of hours of psychometric testing experience.
I've had major depression my entire life. Meds worked pretty well up until two years ago, and they just all stopped working. I've tried all the SSRI/SNRI meds currently on the market, and mild doses of other things. I tried ketamine (it was a series of four or five treatments, they were pretty big doses, and it's only quasi-legal in the US, hence the huge cost). I tried ECT (I can't do transcranial magnetic stim., which is a weaker form of ECT that's less invasive, because I have a neurostim implant in my right cheek: bzzt).
I'm currently on Wellbutrin XR (weak by itself), starting lithium, and Zoloft (which didn't work the last time I tried it, but it's the furthest one back in history to attempt again and I need immediate relief so we're dumping all the medications in a big stew I must gobble).
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I'm also on narcotics for the pain issue that the stimulator helps with: I get pain in my teeth for no reason. :V The stimulator has halved the amount of narcotics I take. I take slightly more than 13mg of hydro per day, on average.
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Oh, and the ketamine treatments were aggressive and supposed to last a few months at least.
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) I'm not 100% on what you mean by therapeutic work, but if you are curious about therapies that I've tried, it's mostly standard CBT which works best for depression. There are other therapies more appropriate for borderline patients like DBT but I don't really fit the model enough for it to be worth trying. I've considered systematic desensitization, but I'm not sure that would help either since my problem isn't related to particular trauma. Everypony seems to being EMDR these days and my opinion is that it's complete bullshit apart from the underlying desensitization element.
Also (just to clog a billion posts here
Therapy used to work for me a little bit, but that was back when my transition was more recent. It doesn't really help at all anymore. I don't have unresolved issues, I just constantly want to die, and when I'm alone I frequently say disturbing things like, "I hate myself" or "I deserve to die" or "I'm going to kill myself today", without intending to, which is kind of disturbing. The ECT experience helped remind me of what it used to be like to not be suffering from this, and it was amazing. I'd forgotten what things could be like.
I'll get there someday.
4338809 GO TRICK QUESTION I BELIEVE IN YOU AND YOUR ABILITY TO NOT HAVE SUCKY THOUGHTS!!!
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4339319 shoutout to fellow fimficer Chinchillax for making that
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I never knew! Small brony world.