drugresponse

My responses to the psych drugs has not been what is written on the box. All of the meds which are supposed to calm me down just crank me up or make me suicidal. So let’s break it down.

I have been diagnosed with nothing and doctors just threw things at me for trial and error.

Valproate:

This supposedly dampens emotional reactivity by dampening the entire brain through increased GABAergic tone. The presumption is that your emotional reactivity is higher than your executive function. At the start, this was the case for me, and valproate was just what I needed. If I hadn’t been a recovered alcoholic, a few beers would probably have done the job.

I think that after the aripiprazole incident, my emotional volatility is *way* down and valproate has the opposite effect (see the image at the bottom). Now I think it dampens my executive function more than my emotions. It makes me too numb, too depressed, too non-reactive. 

It destroyed my sleep architecture. At 800mg I stopped dreaming. I couldn’t meditate, ate nothing but sugar, had no inclination to exercise, etc.

At 400mg things improved. My mood, my sleep, my self-control, my awareness.

At 0mg things have improved again. My sleep is the sleep of the gods. My brain is fixing itself in realtime. I am waking up fresh and clear and I was a little anxious yesterday but that’s it.

Valproate really is just long-term alcohol consumption without the ups and downs. You are permanently in a state of neuronal suppression, and if you’re an emotional wreck then maybe that’s what you need. But it’s not what I need, and I feel and sleep so much better without it. But maybe only because of the self-guided trauma therapy I did on…

Aripiprazole:

Insanity in a pill for me. Exactly what I needed but I wish I’d known what would happen so I could have spared my family the trauma.

It destroyed my sense of self the second my 3-day come-up was gone. I was the zuckerbot. And the world was beautiful.

What I think happened is it held me in a state of high tonic / low phasic dopamine for 2 weeks and I was chemically enlightened. I was aware of this, because of past meditation experience, and I logged everything like a scientist. I saw this was my chance to break my own cycle of samsara.

Then I built a tolerance. The tolerance meant increased dose, but aripirazole has a strange activation curve where lower doses = more tonic dopamine and higher doses = less. There is a very small sweetspot and it was gone forever because of tolerance buildup.

So I ended up in a kind of yoyo situation for the next 5-6 weeks where I was constantly coming up and in withdrawal at the same time. This was the opposite to enlightenment, or maybe it wad like an experienced meditator being placed in the brain of a junkie: it was high phasic dopamine and moderate tonic dopamine. But I had established the operating environment by then, and was able to observe this agony and analyse it, because I understood the system.

So this - I think - enabled me to self-guide the process of deduction and figure out the root cause of all my suffering.

I then used meditation techniques to ‘bed in’ the understanding and have a kind of enlightenment-formatting of the brain, which changed the physical layout of my neural network in an instant. Literally - zap - and it propagates all the way down to my fingers and toes and then I’m no longer James.

I spend 4 days as the ship and managed to guide myself from a rapid, out of control acceleration into orbit around our new planet. I realise that orbit means we are stable and I can let go of all control of the reins, and I stop aripiprazole cold turkey. 

It takes 5 days for any cessation of aripirazole to take effect because of the long half life, and I use these days to let my new understanding of reality bed in. It’s all a bit confusing and scary at first, but as the epoxy on the piece I made cures, so too does my understanding of the world and confidence this is real.

Then I go into withdrawal but honestly it was easier than the vast majority of my life to that date so whatever.

Guanfacine:

Has been good for me. I will continue taking it for a while. This does what it says on the box, and lowers my perceived noradrenaline. No side effects. I will keep it while I recover fully and let the new dhamma really bloom, and then I will see what things are like without it. My fight or flight response will always be high, and that’s ok, but I’ll dial it down a little over the coming months.

You are what you eat!

/jb202508160702