Posted by revaaron on June 28, 2007, at 23:02:02
Hello! I'm new here, this is my first post. I started recently on dextroamphetamine IR at 10 mg twice a day, it's been a month. Never been on any other psych medications for AD/HD or otherwise. Had some non-serious dysthymia in my younger teenage years, sort of typical adolescent self-esteem problems and mild depression. However, anything along those lines have been gone for years.
That said- I started on the dextroamphetamine (BARR) and for about a month everything went very well. Then in the 5th week or so I started falling toward depression, but the kind of depression I've never experienced- sad, many negative thoughts, very moody, frustrated, wanting to just crawl into bed and stay there, with a strong desire to sob randomly. This was not the dextroamphetamine crash- I felt it equally while on and off my doses.
I had some 5-HTP around before to see about its usefulness as an appetite supressant and all the effect it had on the happy, content pre-dextroamphetamine version of me was to make me sleepy, with doses up to 200 mg. After 5 days of this very depressed/frustrated mode of thought I finally made the connection to feeling like this and depression- I just thought I was in a funk, but usually when I feel "blue" it is dispelled by simply talking and laughing with people, but this was persistent and I wasn't able to come out of it by my non-chemical means for mood control. Before starting on the dextroamphetamine I was happy, very contented, and most importantly emotionally stable- not prone to crying or mood swings at all.
After finally making the connection to my feelings to depression I remembered the 5-HTP I had sitting around and took 100 mg. Within 20 minutes my mood began to lift, and frankly after an hour I could be said to be "high." The "high" feeling lasted for 3 hours but after it wore off I felt like the normal, baseline me, and that state persisted for a full 24 hours when I took a 50 mg dose of the 5-HTP, which caused no difference in mood. Please note that I get no "high" (or much of a crash) from of the dextroamphetamine itself, but I can easily discern whether or not its working by how hard it is to concentrate on a word problem. I am going to abstain from the 5-HTP but continue my dextroamphetamine to see if after days or weeks if the condition returns and is similarily dispelled by the 5-HTP.
Has anyone seen this? Any ideas on how do deal with it? If you experienced this, is there an AD/HD medication that work better for you? I've read that ritalin inhibits reputake of the various neurotransmitters that dextroamphetamine and methamphetamine causes the release of, so perhaps that would not run the risk of serotonin depletion so much?
Are there any nutritional choices that I might make that could prevent this? Could I have be not eating enough of some amino acid to make the amount of serotonin that my regular, non-medicated brain could handle but that with the additional load of dextroamphetamine can't? (that is, because the d-amp is making my brain release serotonin and then not having enough of what it needs to make more)
Thanks!
revaaron
poster:revaaron
thread:766590
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070622/msgs/766590.html