I get it. I’ve been down that road within the last couple years after decades of “treatment resistant depression”. The treatments aren’t pseudoscience, but it might make more sense when you realize it doesn’t do anything that can’t be done without them. It just accelerates what you can already do with therapy and positive lifestyle changes - provided you do those things. It can also help people with lingering depression whose circumstances have changed for the better. I’m not saying it’s impossible for them to help you and anything is worth a shot, but I would emphasize that you get what you put in and if your circumstances are a big contributor (like they are for many of us) it’s going to be an uphill battle.

Shrooms have high potential and they’re honestly easier to get. But mindset is still important. For some people, it’s a one and done cure. For many, they need to re dose every few months. For very few, they convince themselves they’ve messed it up and make things worse. They hold the potential for radical shifts in perspective like you never imagined, but only if you’re ready.

TMS and ketamine work by increasing neuroplasticity. Your provider should tell you: the day of and after treatment, avoid things that are stressful and upsetting. Stay off social media, or make sure the media you do use is a carefully curated feed with positivity and things like cute animal pictures. Unfortunately, in my experience, many providers are not great about giving you this information. They lead you to believe you can just go get drugged up or zapped with magnets and magically get better. It doesn’t work like that. It makes your brain more flexible so you can break old thought patterns and develop new ones. If you just feed yourself stress and ragebait during the most critical periods, it is far less likely to help.

Shrooms are different. The mechanisms are less well understood because political fuckery has set research back over half a century, but neuroplasticity is likely only a fraction of it. They also break down barriers, create new associations, suppress the ego, and enhance social connections. It is … an unforgettable experience. I can’t say it’s for everybody because mindset is so important. But for anyone who is really ready to take control of their depression, I think shrooms make ketamine seem like a complete waste of time and money.

It’s the truth. Former domestic policy chief for the Nixon White House, John Ehrlichman, spoke out about it years after the fact:

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Psychedelics were criminalized in the US to target anti-war protesters. This is in the open and on the record, but they’re still classified as a Schedule I drug: no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Neither of those things are true. It’s completely fucked up.

Sounds similar to my journey in some ways. I’ll share a bit on the off chance that some of my experiences might be useful.

I always had headaches and mental health struggles. Hopefully you don’t. I sought help for both. My mental health issues were misdiagnosed (I’m AuDHD, the other stuff mostly stems from that) and for the headaches I was just told to lose weight. Easier said than done, and the headaches got worse while I tried. I used pain meds and developed chest pain that got diagnosed as heartburn. Prescription omeprazole (prilosec) keeps it in check.

I finally lost enough weight for them to take the headaches seriously and get referred to a neurologist. We can’t be sure of the exact cause, but a good bet is anxiety - a very sensitive/overactive nervous system as a result of C-PTSD and autism. I take topiramate to calm it a little, edibles 1-2 times a week, quarterly injections, and I do a somatic meditation. This is a great exercise for pain without a physical source, caused by things like my overactive nervous system.

If your pain is made worse by anxiety, it may help to get in the habit of practicing a quick somatic meditation focusing on the pain whenever you experience it. Otherwise, just keep advocating for yourself until you find a doctor that will help. I hope you find something that works for you soon.

Also, on brain meds: they’re all multi-function, so if it’s anti-anxiety that’s more of a happy accident. They wouldn’t give you a nerve blocker just for anxiety. Side effects tend to lessen the longer you take the drug, but not always, and the time scale is a bit different for each. At 2 weeks it should be starting to get better, at a month if it’s not better it’s probably not going to get much better. Hang in there!

Damn, got it in one

Yup, it was the first thing we checked when I actually got treatment. I’m sure that didn’t help, but compared to the pain of the migraines it was negligible. Having to refrain from pain meds for a while to make sure was a hell of a ride though. I lasted about three months. The doctor was satisfied with 1-2 but I wanted to be damn sure.

I give people the same warning nowadays. Don’t take that stuff more than once a week.

I’m kinda in this meme. I went through one of those big bottles roughly every 1-2 months for 20 years. Sometimes 12 pills in one day, with 4-8 acetaminophen on top (they do giant double packs of those too). Chronic migraines, but every doctor I asked for help just told me to lose weight so it went untreated and got worse and worse. Our health care suuuucks.

I did lose the weight. It didn’t magically fix my migraines, or affect them at all. Insurance dicked me around for another year and a half while my neurologist tried to help every way she could, but we finally got it down to only one migraine a week. I’m truly glad for that, but I still think about the years of unnecessary suffering, and how much better it might be now if I’d been treated sooner.

This is really sad. While it’s valid and understandable to not always be able to hold space for that kind of a conversation or story, at a minimum there are far kinder ways to communicate that than for your partner to just say you’re trauma dumping and leave you feeling like this is stuff you should never talk about. A good partner cares enough to listen to those things, and when they ask you not to share, it’s more of a, “not right now, let’s talk about this later.”

I’m not trying to draw any conclusions because there’s no way I’d have enough information anyway, but survivors of abusive upbringings are more likely to end up in abusive relationships because so much of that has been normalized (among other reasons). If your partner really accuses you of trauma dumping, that’s a bit of a red flag to me and it might not be a terrible idea to talk to friends, family, or a therapist as a sanity check to see if it’s nothing or if it’s a pattern of how you are treated. If you don’t want to do that, journaling can also help a lot with organizing your thoughts and feelings, plus it gives you a record of things in case you forget, downplay them, or are told otherwise and start to doubt yourself.

I really just hope everything is okay though. Stay safe out there, stranger.

I try to minimize what I buy off Amazon, but I allow myself one bag of Frugra per month because I can’t get it any other way.

Steins;Gate. It starts slow, but once it picks up it’s amazing and puts all that slow build up to good use. Not sure if it technically counts though. Visual novels are a weird middle ground that aren’t really book or game, but there are some really good ones. Definitely the way to go if you’re in more of a reading mood but want some art and music to go with it.