Posted by bleauberry on January 11, 2014, at 9:40:07
In reply to Desperation -- even with (whoo) Parnate, posted by Snell on January 11, 2014, at 7:07:49
I'm so sorry Snell. What a hard war. You have extraordinary strength and endurance and you are a fantastic special person for that!
When MAOIs fall short, it seems like the end of the road? Trapped? Scary? Yeah. I think we all hit that wall at some point. Multiple times for some of us.
Do you believe in the Bible? Even if you don't....talk to this imaginary guy named Jesus, challenge Him that if He is real, show it, and be authentic about it. I've never seen the miracles of the Old Testament occur in present day, but strange things can happen.....things people would call "good luck", "good timing", "coincidence"....Jesus is real, is alive, and at your heart felt request will take over the steering wheel for you. He wants to actually. Waiting on you. If you are a Jesus believer, keep talking to Him. He rewards the faithful, those who believe even though they have not seen.
I say that because I believe it and have seen it multiple times, enough times that I could no longer shrug it off as imagination or nonsense.
There is something great and grand in your sufffering. What is it? There is a purpose. It is not punishment. What is the purpose in all this evil? What good could possibly come out of it all. How could God take such badness Satan threw in our path, and somehow transform that to good? Well, it happens all the time. You may already know what it is, you maybe don't know what it is, but through all this crap you will be a huge, unique, and special blessing, to other people. Your strength and endurance alone are an inspiration to others who may be ready to give up and die.
I don't know about add-ons. I mean, you are apparently already aware of what your choices are.
Here's what happened when I tried Parnate. At the proper doses, it made me feel exactly like you described. At lower doses, I actually felt better. Even though I do not strongly believe your dose is too high, it could be. Too high of a dose of any of our meds can and will make symptoms worse. Just a random thought to mull over.
The loneliness and isolation. Yeah, sucks. I have found only one way out of that, and it is work. It doesn't just happen. With a treatment that works good, yeah, it can happen by itself. But in a treatment that is falling short, it can be tackled but it takes purposful forceful work and time.
Here is an example. Patient XYZ just got out of the hospital. ECT failed. Thinking about suicide. Dragged into a church service. The rock band was pretty good. Almost felt goose bumps in the midst of all the tears. The Pastor's message was ok, didn't resonate very well due to the depression, and it was hard to concentrate. Felt so damn lonely with all these apparently happy well-to-do people sitting around. This happens again the next Sunday, and the next, and the next. Somewhere along the line you are invited to a picnic or something. Oh no! The last thing you want to do! Well, you suck it up, take a deep breath, another one if needed, and you go. It isn't fun because everyone else is having fun but you are not. You feel so lonely. And time goes on like this. A few months into, something is changing. You actually feel a distant connection with someone in that church. You actually were looking forward to asking a particular person a question or talking to them about something. The shell around you is cracking, the real you is trying to get out and see sunshine again. All the purposeful forceful activity is doing that. It is actually retraining the brain receptors, genes, and nerve endings, on what you want them to do. Now, the same MAOI, well, it's not working as bad as it used to, not great, but it is not as dark as it used to be. Something has changed. The more you keep going, the more promise and progress there is.
Stay at home, none of that happens. We have at least the comfort of our own solitary comfort zone...the dungeon...but that's it. The brain has absolutely nothing to zap it, spank it, slap it, steer it, guide it, nothing. It will continue to deteriorate unless it gets outside stimulation. That's the hard part. Simply thinking about going out the front door is a monumental task, right? It is. But in reality, it is only as difficult as putting one foot in front of the other, then direct the other foot forward, then back to the other foot. The mind does not have to play. The feet do the work. They don't care if you are depressed and they will walk where you point them no matter. So it's really a matter of instructing the feet to go that way, and depression be damned.
I look at depression as my enemy. Satan in emotional form that I can feel. I am NOT going to just let my enemy have his way with me. I AM going to fight back. I mean, me, not my drugs, me, I am going to fight back, depressed as hell, you aint gonna beat me without a fight! I'm going out that door because you don't want me to! Screw you enemy, I'm going to the mall, I'm going to church, I'm going to the park, I'm going to do anything besides this couch! It's gonna feel bad and suck, but each time I do, I WIN! Lots of little battles, win them.
I've never had behavioral psychology, but it has to do with retraining the brain. I guess my above example is sort of similar. A Neurologist once explained to me how our emotions, just like drugs, shape the way our receptors and messengers operate. Drugs and purposeful activities together do that better than either alone. imo. Most of empirical and anecdotal evidence supports that.
Medical marijuana is usually dosed in small controlled doses. For example, 2 puffs in am, 2 puffs pm, 2 puffs evening, something like that. Medical marijuana MD offices sometimes have instructional videos. In those videos they make it clear that if the right amount of mj is consumed, symptoms improve. Low doses are good for motivation and wanna-do-something, and actually even have a little pleasure doing it! Washing the sink full of dishes? Well, yeah! Haven't felt like doing that in months! But on the other hand, doses that are too high will worsen symptoms. For each patient, it is important to experiment to find the right dose size, the right timing of the doses, and the right method of consumption. Pipes, papers, tinctures, culinary....they have different effects. MJ MDs usually have a lot of information to help guide your decisions.
Personally I would be a bit cautious with MJ because while I do believe it can help you in the ways you want it to, actually maybe better than any other prescription I can think of, there is not enough known on its mechanisms to be able to definitely say it is, or is not, safe with Parnate. Does it dramatically increase serotonin like some people have claimed? Does it boost NE and DA as claimed? Since your doctor is ok with it, I'm thinking then it probably is ok, but with an extra dose of caution while starting up.
I know two people personally who have a long history of decades of depression and failed treatments and are now doing quite well, not cured, never will be, but quite well on just marijuana and no more drugs! Marijuana alone did for them what all those decades of prescriptions did not. For one of those people, it even included ECT. Marijuana ended up being remarkably more effective than ECT in that person.
Forget the dog thing. You need PEOPLE in you life, not dogs. The forced thing I was talking about. I don't think a dog is going to take you to a good outcome, just the same outcome except with a 4 footed friend. The interaction of the spirits of other humans needs to be interjected into your life. Probably by force. That's ok. The world's greatest success stories were born from intense pain and work. They would not have been great otherwise.
Somebody told me this years ago, I did not believe, but remembered it. They said the day would come when God would give me bumper crops following the years of locusts ravaging my crops. That came true. When it was said, all I saw was a cold dark dungeon.. What they said was, impossible. But alas, it was not impossible. It was the Word of God and it happened. And I had nothing to do with it! Somebody else prayed that for me. Again, the reason we need people instead of a dog.....people can pray for you, even when you can't pray for yourself. Ask them to. I used to tell people, "I am in such bad shape, wow, could you please just pray for me?" Simple as that. God does the rest. Years later when things are considerably better, you might look back and realize it was God directing the doctor's decisions and it was God orchestrating every little detail the whole time. But without prayers, not likely to happen. He is waiting to be asked because He does not force Himself upon someone. It is their will to invite Him or not. We are not puppets on a string.
I really want to give some medication advice, but I'm stuck. I almost want to say the parnate itself, or the lamictal itself, or likely the klonopin, are the ones causing the emptiness, not the depression itself causing that. Hard to tell. We get so far down the road on our meds it's hard to back up and see what's really going on. I can say, anyone I've ever known that took 4mg or more of klonopin had bad depression as one of their complaints, a certain version of depression a bit different than the one they were treating, a darker one, a more hopeless trapped one. So I dunno, I think you'll have to weave thru the maze with your doc and try to figure out the next move. I am actually more suspicious of the meds themselves than I am of your actual underlying depression. Could be wrong.
Marijuana medically prescribed and dosed low. Adderall. On the table at this very moment those look like good choices to me. Hopefully someone else here can chime in with some creative ideas to add to the discussion.
> Hi, everyone. I looked for an existing thread to hook this to but could not find one.
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> Ths short story is after trying everything except TCAs other than desipramine I forced my shrink to prescribe Parnate. I take 60 mg/d. It only works when augmented with an SGA (currently using Fanapt). I have the typical sleep fragmentation. I'm not in abyss-mode but I'm so, so sad--it's like the Parnate facilitates the movement of sadness and desperation through me, so I cry all the time. Hell, I was watching reruns of "Friends" and crying at *those.*
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> While I am somewhat preserved from total anhedonia I have almost complete anergia. I cannot do anything except surf the web and go to doctor's appointments. The government provides a "homemaker" to come for two hours per week and that is a godsend--having her here helps to motivate me to clean alongside her.
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> The pdoc and therapist have prescribed a dog (an "emotional support animal") to help with my loneliness and isolation, which is crushing.
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> So I take the 60 mg Parnate, 8 mg Fanapt, 150 mg lamotrigine, and 4 mg clonazepam. I would dearly love to go back on Adderall but it's contraindicated with Parnate (though many pdocs use it) but it makes my blood pressure soar.
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> We are looking into Provigil (modafinil) as a means to prevent the absolute necessity of taking a three-hour nap every afternoon.
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> My pdoc mentioned marijuana, which is medically legal in Massachusetts, my home state. Maybe ... in greater than moderate doses it takes away my motivation even more, but in low doses it might help with the anxiety and the tears.
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> Could I raise the lamotrigine? Sometimes switching the atypical works for a bit--I've also had success with Seroquel, Latuda, and Zyprexa. The problem is that Seroquel and Zyprexa make me eat like a fiend.
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> Ideas, ideas?
poster:bleauberry
thread:1058262
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20140104/msgs/1058277.html