So I recently made this post in another thread, but seeing as how common it is for people to believe they fucked up their brains for life from just one drug or another, I thought this deserved to have it's own thread, something to refer those people to, to give them hope that this is likely not the case. It's a long one, so get some Adderall, sack up, and read.
Back in the end of 2010 I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had just gotten back from studying abroad, gained a newfound confidence, and resolved a lot of my social anxiety. I was getting new friends, being more social, and things seemed to be going swimmingly. Then I did something I for which I would hate myself on a daily basis, for the next 2 years.
I liked to experiment with drugs every now and then, but it wasn't too frequent of a thing for me (yet), as there was this part of me that would get numb, and felt the need to explore to resolve this. Around this time, I felt the need to explore again. So I had to choose a drug for my explanation, and this time around, I chose to take DXM, or Robitussin. It would be my first time taking it, and I always liked to do new drugs instead of repeating and old one, even if I liked it. It was a Saturday, right after a great thanksgiving and black Friday with the family. To make the trip more interesting and spiritual, I decided to do it in a forest with 2 friends. They’d be my sitters, as I would recommend anyone doing a new psychoactive drug to have a sitter. Well, we walked for a bit, and then I start dosing. I was a little nervous, so I started with 10 gel caps to see how I'd feel. This is a measly 150mg, which is the bare threshold for some of the psychoactive effects one gets from DXM. An hours passes and I feel nothing. Within the next hour, I separately take 5, and then 4 gel caps, interspaced to look for any effects. This brings me to a total of 285mg. I'd say this is a nice standard dose for a DXM trip, nothing too high, but nothing to sneeze at. I waited a couple hours, but strangely enough nothing seemed to happen all. No visuals, not even a body load. All I could say is felt 'something'. I couldn't describe that something, it was very minor, and certainly not worth 4-5 hours meandering in the forest. Disappointed, we went back to their car.
As soon as I sat down in the front passenger seat, it hit me all at once. I was high as a kate, and had problems controlling my body movements (this will happen with a high enough DXM dose, but if you're not used to it, can be quite scary) It was a very unpleasant experience at first, I felt shaky and disoriented, and as I said, my movement was restricted. I was breathing into a bag in case I’d throw up, as I felt extremely nauseous My vision was distorted with starbursts from lights, and beams coming out of said lights. But once I calmed down after what seemed like one of the longest 45 minutes of my life, it became something quite pleasant. I started to feel a sense of heightened emotions, and as I remembered things from my past, all my memories became more pleasant, vivid and happier. This was great, I thought, to reimagine my life this way! Anyway, we went to a coffee shop for me to calm down, and over the next hour or so I returned to baseline. All’s well that ends well, I thought.
But that was only the beginning. You see for much of my life I had had this pain running through my body that no doctor could figure out (that I only figured out and got diagnosed this last month. Don't ask please, it's a bit personal), and for some reason, a day after the trip, it increased. The next day more. And then more and more and more. A week later, I was left crying and screaming in my bed, while my girlfriend watched helplessly. I went to the emergency room, they prescribed benzos that did nothing. My doctors could do nothing. Anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, nothing. All of them seemed to think that it was in my head. Even if it were, as if it being in my goddamn fucking head would make the torture hurt any less. Fucking idiots.
Three weeks after the trip, the visual distortions came back, and I developed HPPD (Hallucinogenic Persistent Perception Disorder), which included a lot of visual snow. Six weeks in I developed a spasm. All the while I was still in horrific pain, just lying in bed. This lasted two months, and the only time I’d get out is when my girlfriend would almost force me to get out and take me to the bookstore, just so I would be doing something. I had to drop out of my classes. And I was about to start a new job. But thankfully my boss was kind and let me start a month late. After two months, it was over, and I swore I’d never touch Robitussin again.
At least I thought it was over. It must have been some sort of complete nervous breakdown, because what happened over the next six months was even more horrific. I began to lose pieces of myself, perhaps due to the trauma of writhing in pain. I lost the ability to write cursive. I lost the ability to speak (vocalize) Spanish, although I could still read and write it. I lost much of my ability to drive, and had to be very careful on the road for the next two years as I reacquired it. My social anxiety went up to a level I’d never seen it at, so bad that I couldn’t even raise my hand up in class. This was just after giving presentations in a second language abroad. Worst of all, I lost all my social and conversational skills. All of them. With it, I lost almost all my friends and could not make new ones. People would give me weird looks when I would talk to them. Though I thought I was just saying the same stuff as before, it was apparently embarrassing babble that would cause people to widen their eyes, freeze, or just walk away. All that was left of my once growing social life was my one friend taking care of me, whom I could barely even converse with (due to my absent conversational skills), and my emotionally-abusive girlfriend.
The best way I’ve been able to describe this so far is a ‘nervous breakdown’. It seems fitting, but I’m still not sure what truly happened. My personality was all but wiped out. It took four years to fully rebuild my social skills, and for each part of my self lost, some of which I haven’t discussed, each required its own amount of years to reconstruct. I had to rebuild myself from scratch, essentially. For the first two years, I fell into an extremely deep depression, as I know longer knew who I was, and came close to killing myself. All I could think about was how much I was a fool for taking the Robitussin, and how I wished I hadn’t.
But I learned a lot about the mind during this whole time. Normally I would try a variety of supplements and drugs to try to alleviate my pain, but I didn’t touch anything new for over a year, out of fear of what happened. But by 2012 (maybe earlier) I began to experiment again. Some pharmaceuticals, some supplements. But something interesting happened. I noticed some of the drugs I was taking were exacerbating three symptoms: the HPPD, the spasm, and the social anxiety. At first I searched for the mechanisms as to why this would happen. But then things got stranger. It was seemed that the list of things that would exacerbate these three symptoms kept growing. And I became more and more convinced that I was very susceptible to placebo.
A lot of these drugs/supplements kept making the HPPD worse. Well, one night I was going for a walk around my neighborhood. I was looking around, and observing my visual distortions. And then, thinking about all the substances making it worse, I finally decided to tell myself, with absolute certainty that “the worsening of these symptoms you are experiencing from these drugs and supplements are 100% placebo without a sliver of doubt”. And you know what? After that statement, after that night, it never got worse again, no matter what I took, even hallucinogens. Though it didn’t get any better either, at least for a while. Now though, it’s in a weird place, where it seems to fluctuate.
The final straw was when taking green tea extract, it bumped up my social anxiety a bit. I was like, this is some complete bullshit. But now, that question that begged to be answered, that dared me to explore itself, whose voice was growing louder and louder, which I silenced out of fear, had finally come to the forefront. That nagging fucking question: was the Robitussin itself placebo? Well, I was scared to death to answer its call, but after all these placebos, the shutdown of the worsening of the HPPD, and now the green tea extract, I just had to find out.
So I went to the store, and nervously paced up and down the medicine isle. I finally grabbed some Robitussin off the shelf, with DXM as the only active ingredient, as one should (recreational use with additional ingredients such as Guanfacine can lead to harm). I got him with nervous, but determined energy. I was cautious at first, as I couldn't bare a repeat of last time. So I took a very small dose at first, and nothing happened, nothing at all, except the initial bitter taste in my mouth. After an hour, I bumped it up a notch, I took a half a capful. Once again, a whole lot of nothing. I thought I'd give it a rest for the night, and I decided it was time for some sleep. I went to sleep that night.
The next day, feeling like a boss from the lack of effects the previous night, I became more adventurous. After the usual morning ablutions and meal, I took a whole capful, and well guess what happened? So much more nothing! And then, I felt like the time had finally come. To through all fucks to the wind and see if it was the Robitussin that did me in what seemed like an eternity ago, or if it was my mind all along. I went balls deep and got high, taking a total of 200mg. Sure, it's not a huge high for DXM, but given the circumstances, it was quite intimidating for me. And other than the mild high nothing like the previous episode happened. I tried a few more times at higher doses, and I had no sort of collapse. It appears to have been some sort of placebo all along. My mind was ready for a meltdown.
I’ve since been high on Robitussin 100-200 times, with doses at 500mg and above, and I’ve never had an incident other than great highs. It’s now my favorite recreational drug (and it’s legal!). When it’s working at its best, it’s like being wrapped in a warm blanked on a pink fluffy cloud. As a tangent, my favorite trip was probably hallucinating the room I was in as a 2D pop-up book. The third dimension was lost, and everything in front of my, like the lamps in the corner of the room, all of a sudden appeared next to me. Good times.
As I said, tt turns out that it was all placebo and psychogenic. What people don't realize is that theirs no shame in that. The mind is an incredible machine that we don't understand, that processes things in incredible ways we don't understand. That my mind was ready and willing for this to happen and needed and excuse, well, that's just the way things were in my life at the time. Perhaps was coincidence, and very likely to happen in some fashion anyway. Maybe it wouldn't have, who knows?
It’s also a reminder of something we always spout, though many of us don't fully grasp it, but always seem to forget when it comes to applying it to our own biases, that correlation does not imply causation. But we don’t like to apply this to ourselves. If we took a pill/medicine/supplement/crystal healing, and then something and something happened, then by God, that was the fucking cause, cause placebos don’t work on me. I’m a STRONG-MINDED individual and I don’t have to worry about any of that placebo nonsense. And that timing, it’s too perfect to not be causative! Never mind that correlation/causation nonsense.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that being susceptible to placebos and hypnosis has nothing to do with strength. It’s a trait that seems to be randomly distributed in 33% of the population as far as high-susceptibility, and there are no corresponding traits like character, strength, gender, extroversion, or anything else that seem to go along with it.
So that's my story. It taught my quite a bit about myself and about humanity. I now well know that I am quite susceptible to placebo and hypnotic suggestion, and I have no shame in this. In fact, this can have some advantages in meditation. It's just the way I'm wired, and if it's the way you're wired, don't worry, it doesn't make you weak.
I can tell you that there's no available drug or supplement, OTC or prescription, that taken within a reasonable dose, will damage you in one dose. That's your mind ready to do something, as mine was. There are drugs that can damage your brain over time, with repeated use. These include, but are not limited to:
First-Gen Antipsychotics
MDMA and other Serotonin Releasing Agents (without proper precautions)
Repeated use of NMDA antagonists (DXM, Ketamine), without time in between
Opiates
Cocaine
And others. But none that I can think of in a single dose. So if you're brain has been 'ruined' in a single dose, or a few doses of a substance that's not known to cause this. Just relax, rethink things, and trying to find an underlying mechanism.
Edited by OneScrewLoose, 17 October 2016 - 09:06 PM.
