Is it possible a night of drugs (coke, weed, alcohol) has stopped my antidepressants from working?
Last Saturday I celebrated something a little too hard, and did something highly unusual for me and did a lot of drugs. Mostly alcohol, a bit of coke, some joints. None of these, bar alcohol once a month, are something I usually do. Had a great time, but ever since I've felt like my SSRI citalopram has stopped working? Or more accurately I feel depressed and de-motivated. I've gone up and down in mood, (the day after was truly dreadful), but overall I'm way down on what I was before, and I'm worried I've fucked it for myself, as I WAS feeling good for the weeks prior.
Obviously I've learnt my lesson, and won't be doing all that again, but I feel incredibly upset that after finding myself in a good place I've gone and done this.
I always hate myself after a night of drinking and sniffing. I kicked weed a few years back because I stopped enjoying it at all and only ever get massive anxiety from being high.
It could just be the drugs themselves, it's always good fun at the time, but you pay for it afterwards; part of that is "natural" shame and guilt and regret and what have you, where you think about all the daft and potentially embarrassing shit you might have done and said while you were out of it. But part of it is also that these kinds of drugs do fuck with your brain chemistry, dopamine and all that stuff.
It's not that your SSRI stopped working, it's that you did a bunch of other shit to your brain that the SSRIs are intended to regulate, and knocked it all out of whack. Give it a week or two and you'll be right again.
Because that's what it does. You'll crash a little after, too. Try to take it easy on the chemicals, including caffeine, for a while and let your body find the balance again.
Thanks lads. I really do appreciate that strangers on the internet are happy to offer advice and comfort, I don't have many people in the real world to speak about this stuff with.
Your brain is wired together with neurons, which are little bundles of nerve tissue. Signals move within the neuron electrically, but they move between neurons chemically. The axonal terminal at the end of a neuron produces neurotransmitter chemicals like serotonin, dopamine and GABA. The dendrite at the start of a neuron detects those molecules and fires an electrical signal once a certain threshold has been reached. Reuptake pathways absorb and metabolise neurotransmitter molecules once a message has been received.
You can fiddle about with your brain chemistry in various ways. Drugs like cocaine and alcohol are agonists, meaning they are detected by the receptor sites on dendrites as if they were neurotransmitters. Chucking a load of them into your blood plasma means that the receptor sites are constantly detecting what they think are neurotransmitters, reducing the amount of actual neurotransmitter necessary to reach the firing threshold and trigger an electrical impulse. Cocaine primarily imitates dopamine, an excitatory neurotransmitter involved in alertness, arousal and reward-seeking.
The problem is that your brain is easily fooled, but is always trying to maintain a stable equilibrium. In the presence of massive amounts of a neurotransmitter-like substance, your neurons adapt in an effort to return to normal operation. The emitters on your axonal terminals will produce less of the relevant neurotransmitter and the dendrites will reduce the number of receptor sites. Hoovering up a load of chang effectively causes a kind of temporary brain damage that has the exact opposite effect to the drug, i.e. a big ugly comedown.
Your brain will return back to normal equilibrium, but it takes longer than you might expect. Transmitters can respond fairly rapidly, but lost receptor sites take a few weeks to fully recover to normal levels. Feeling like death warmed up the day after a night on the lash is very obvious, but there's a more subtle effect on your mood for a good couple of weeks afterwards. Your transmitter sites can't figure out what they're supposed to be doing until the receptor sites have fully recovered, hence the up and down levels of energy and motivation. Your reuptake sites are also trying to adapt to this constantly-changing level of dopamine, further adding to the muddle.
Unfortunately there's no shortcut for this recovery process. The best you can do is help it along by trying to keep physically and mentally healthy - eat properly, keep hydrated, get some exercise and do something meaningful.
>>31710 Interesting, thanks for that. It is comforting to hear that yes, that night of debauchery may well explain why I'm feeling like this, and that it isn't 'in my head' as my girlfriend put it. Thank you.
Fascinating stuff. WIthout meaning to derail the thread, my eyes were drawn to this:
>Cocaine primarily imitates dopamine, an excitatory neurotransmitter involved in alertness, arousal and reward-seeking.
Are there any ways of controlling your dopamine to get these kind of effects when you want it, short of doing a line of coke? Exercise stands out as a possible one. I'd be interested to see a general neurology/psychopharmacology thread, as a few knowledgeable lads often chime in on the subject of SSRIs, recreational drugs, and the like.
The one thing you should absolutely steer clear of if you're on SSRIs is MDMA/ecstasy. If you only party occasionally there's a chance you mistook a "bag of whatever" that people were snorting for a bag of coke, it's likely that bag of whatever, no matter how it may have been described to you or sold to you, contained at least some mixture of MDMA or some analog to it, ecstasy directly affect your serotonin and therefore the ability for your anti-depressants to have an effect in the immediate aftermath if you're feeling like this. This is why people rarely party on MDMA for more than a few days on the trot but can drink and coke for years and years without taking a night off.
Actual cocaine itself, while obviously never a good idea lol, doesn't actually "fuck up" your serotonin receptors in the same way despite obviously having a massive effect on the way your brain processes dopamine while you're on it. You just randomly die of a heart-attack one day.
Dopamine is a slightly misunderstood neurotransmitter. It's often called the "reward chemical", but it has a more subtle and complex role than that. If something happens that's good but entirely expected, there's not much of a dopamine response; dopamine is primarily released when either seeking a reward or receiving an unexpected reward. Gambling addicts aren't addicted to winning, they're addicted to the possibility of winning. A fruit machine that paid out every time would be profitable, but it wouldn't be addictive.
Trawlermen have what is objectively one of the worst jobs in Britain and by far and away the most dangerous. Most of them are paid on a share basis, so sometimes they earn nothing for two weeks of getting lashed by the North Sea. They also have incredibly high levels of job satisfaction, probably because their job is highly dopaminergic. When they go out for a trip, they don't know if they'll come home with their pockets bulging or absolutely nothing. Every time they cast out their nets, they don't know if they're going to reel in thousands of pounds worth of fish or shred thousands of pounds worth of equipment on the seabed.
If you want more dopamine in your life but don't want to ruin it, seek out productive opportunities for uncertain rewards. Start a business, go busking, forage for wild mushrooms. Make your life less like that of a farmer and more like that of a hunter-gatherer.
With that said, dopamine is rewarding but not necessarily fulfilling. The hollow but compulsive feeling of scrolling through social media or endlessly swiping on Tinder is a pure dopamine loop. Dopamine will reinforce a behaviour, but that behaviour won't necessarily make you happy.
> Gambling addicts aren't addicted to winning, they're addicted to the possibility of winning.
I think this also goes for the stock market, which by some measure is just a very elaborate form of gambling. If a stock you own goes up, and maybe even by a few percent in one day, it can be kind of a dopamine rush, and in the back of your head you're already buying that game console or booking a holiday to Australia. But then a lot of the time, you fail to cash out while the stock is still climbing, and your book profits dwindle until you're back under water. You've played the game before, and at least at some level you'll know full well that it'll probably happen to you again despite all your best resolutions, but while you're on the way there, every new high of your stock investment feels fucking awesome.
>>31717 This is distilled down to its essence with the dozens of crypto coins being made out there. It's not just a gamble, it's the dream that you can get rich by doing nothing just because you're clearly much smarter than everyone else and saw the potential where others didn't.
>it's the dream that you can get rich by doing nothing just because you're clearly much smarter than everyone else and saw the potential where others didn't.
There's a saying on /r/wallstreetbets that in a bull market, everyone is a fucking genius.
I started investing in stocks after the 2008 global crash, circa in the spring of 2009, when for about two years, it was almost impossible not to make shedloads of profits, both realised and on paper, just by buying all the dips. And I felt like an absolute Warren Buffett.
But at some point, I think everybody realises that turning a consistent profit in the stock market, apart from a few lucky wins because you're riding a colossal bull market, is absolutely hard work. There's a reason why investment firms moving trillions of dollars around the globe employ hundreds, if not thousands of market analysts and other investment professionals, and don't rely on a handful of hobby-horsing retail investors like you and me in their investment decisions.
Theoretically, if you near-constantly buy and sell at just the right time, you could make absolute oodles of money trading bitcoin and other cryptos, and technically speaking, you'd become a millionaire just by making a few mouse clicks a week. But as anybody with even a passing understanding of risk-reward profiles will tell you, highly volatile assets like cryptocurrencies have a massive inherent risk of loss, while the probability of large gains is very small. It's a bit like a lottery ticket. Yes, somebody will probably win two or three million that weekend, but most people play all their lives never winning more than a few quid.
