Posted by bleauberry on April 9, 2018, at 13:14:20
In reply to Why is alcohol the only thing that helps me?, posted by Prefect on April 6, 2018, at 14:34:51
My first gut instinct guess is that alcohol is stimulating the release of dopamine which might be your weak link, and that the way it stimulates dopamine is different than any of the psych meds.
I experienced the exact same things you described and the medication that fixed it all like magic was the medication I thought would make it all much worse - Ritalin!
It could be that dopamine is the weak link. As the adrenal glands try to compensate for that, they pump out the best substitutes they have, which are adrenalin-like. And thus your symptoms. When dopamine is normalized, those symptoms go away.
Your story and mine are identical except for 2 things. Ritalin for me instead of alcohol. And a diagnosis of Lyme as well. Your symptoms are 100% consistent with an unsuspected, stealth, misdiagnosed or undiagnosed, tick born disease. Either Borellia or Bartonella - both are bacterias from ticks - present a symptom profile that looks exactly like what you described.
Alcohol likely makes your problems and your life worse in the long run. It is generally destructive to many people. I would try experimenting with other things that hit dopamine.
And consider going a step further than merely treating the symptoms - set your sites on figuring why it is all happening in the first place - there is a reason - and in my experience it is not often the mystery we think it is - not often the complicated unsolvable puzzle that we think it is.
imo
> I suffer from severe anxiety, inner tension, tremors, cognitive deficit, derealization, etc
>
> One double shot of whiskey gives me more relief than 1 mg of clonazepam. I am able to think, I become more motivated, relaxed, and my inner tension and tremors stop.
>
> What is the mechanism behind this? It can't just be GABA and NMDA antagonism otherwise clonazepam would work too. It's got to be something else alcohol does that I need to find a medication that can do the same, otherwise I'm on the path to alcoholism.
>
> And no, my symptoms are not from alcohol withdrawal, I had them for a year before I accidentally discovered alcohol practically makes me NORMAL for a few hours.
poster:bleauberry
thread:1098005
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20180331/msgs/1098038.html