Story Time (It’s long, don’t bitch, 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 would hate myself for, for the next 2 years.
I liked to experiment with drugs every now and then, as there was this part of me that would get numb, and felt the need to explore. At this time, I felt the need to explore again. This time, I chose to take DXM, or Robitussin, for the first time taking it. It was a Saturday, and to make it interesting, I decided to do it in a forest with 2 friends. They’d be my sitters. Well, I took 19 gel caps or 195mg. Not that high of a dose for DXM. I waited a couple hours, but nothing seemed to happen. Disappointed, we went back to their car.
As soon as a sat down in the front passenger seat, it hit me all at once. It was a very unpleasant experience at first, I felt shaky and disoriented, and I was breathing into a bag in case I’d throw up. My vision was distorted with starbursts from lights, and beams coming out of them. But once I calmed down it was quite pleasant. I started to feel heightened emotions, and as I remembered things, all my memories become more pleasant and happier. This was great, I thought Anyway, we went to a coffee shop for me to calm down, 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), 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, and they prescribed benzos that did nothing. My doctors could do nothing. Anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, nothing. 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. 6 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 was 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, when I thought I was just saying the same stuff as before. All that was left of my once growing social life was my one friend taking care of me, whom I could barely converse with, 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 lost, some I haven’t discussed, each required its own amount of years. 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 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 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 I told myself with absolute certainty “the worsening of these symptoms you are experiencing for these drugs and supplements are 100% placebo for sure”. And you know what? After that statement, after that night, it never got worse again, no matter what I took. 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. And now that nagging question in my mind had finally come to the forefront. Was the Robitussin itself placebo? Well, I was scared to death, but I was going to find out.
So I went to the store, and I got some Robitussin with DXM as the only active ingredient, as one should. I took a very small dose, and nothing happened. I then took a half a capful, nothing happened. I went to sleep that night.
The next day, I was more adventurous. I took a whole capful, and nothing happened. And then I was like fuck it, I took a total of 200mg and got high off it. And other than the mild high (still not a lot if you want to get high off it), there was no symptoms like before), nothing like the previous episode happened. I tried a few more times at higher doses, and nothing.
I’ve since been high on Robitussin 100-200 times, 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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It turns out that it was all placebo and psychogenic. That my mind was ready and willing for this to happen and needed and excuse. That it was coincidence and likely to happen in some fashion anyway. It’s just a reminder of something we always spout but always forget, that correlation does not imply causation. But we don’t like to apply this to ourselves. If we took 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 nonsense. And what about the timing, it’s too perfect! 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, OP, I can almost guarantee you that it wasn’t the tryptophan. The problem has more likely to do with you being off your medication and your brain trying to adjust, or looking for an excuse to deepen your depression, just as mine sought and excuse.
Also, things like “excess serotonin” and “needing more dopamine” are gross simplifications of the mechanisms of depression, that are mostly false. In fact, the serotonin theory of depression has already been proven false. We don’t even know why SSRIs work at this point, but we do know it’s not because of an increase in serotonin. However, some theories include downregulation of post-synaptic 5HT2a receptors and an increase in production of allopregenolone.
Now, if you’re willing to reconsider the notion that the Tryptophan did this to you, which I understand can be quite a feat given how obvious the conclusion may seem (it took me a long time with the Robistussin), and are willing to give other medications a try, I can help you out with some recommendations after I learn some more about your situation.
