Psychiatric Med Cocktails

Try reading the Depression section all the time.

No need this message is from my next door naybour who is 44, his wife 36, his kid 7 ) he is my best buddy he is in mental hospital; lockdown after a break down,. they just tried to ect when he has a mental plate in his jaw, near on blew his head off. this his his email to me tonight. ======Don't really no now mate could be a few more weeks as the meds they give me are hard to get on with in all honesty I just wanted to hang myself as life means nothing to me at the moment just really low now

Sent from my iPhone

Holy crap. I don't want to end up in a mental hospital in England. Its like the State mental hospitals used to be here. ECT lobotomies, lots of thorazine. Nurse Rachet. Then one year in the 70's or 80's they decided it would be best to just shut them all down and let all the people out. Now they are college campuses and cool shopping centers and art galleries. They sat vacant for years.

The thing is they just let all the people out. Some got the right help and are living on their own but a whole boat load are walking the streets homeless talking to trees. Not a good scene. Well our posts are just getting more depressing.

On a lighter note I took a shower and shaved today and I think I will go grocery shopping. Huge step for me compared to where I have been.

I think all of that has to do with the culture. Football is the most important thing. They were protecting those football players until they couldn't anymore. Parents, coaches, classmates. All of them. It goes deeper than a single incident or alcohol and class, IMO. They felt no conflict with violating her on camera and posting it on twitter. There is a problem there. Girls are hard on each other but I bet that was cultural too. The girls are just as likely to back the guys as the team mates. The thing is if they could treat her that way those girls can expect the same treatment in the next town over. When it happened I was so mad I thought the whole town should be shunned. Not a single student should get the privilege of college and the jobs it entitles.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

ECT is used a lot in ENGLAND , a lot of high profile people have had and still do, its on going treatment ,tv stars and the ordinary plumber in the street. you are put to sleep first its not 1960 , IF they bring an unmedicated patient into hospital and they are out the head, they wont wait 4 weeks for a med or strap them to a bed , they may give them a blast of ECT to relax them before treatment . You may have several if you agree to it but you still need AD,S after. There are 2 reasons my buddy was zapped with a plate in his jaw, 1 he didn't tell them, and 2 negligence there should be records . He was excepted for ECT weeks ago and pinned that on his last hope of help, now he holds on to nothing . HE DRINKS to much on meds ,they will never work he needs 2 bottles wine a day at least ,. He will not want to live has he is, and I stopped visiting him in hospital the last time , it made me ill with to many bad memories, I e mail him most night but sometimes it drags me down with the hoplessness but I cannot abandon my buddy

I am very sorry for your friend and I hope he quits drinking.

I know ECT is very effective. Might even be the most effective. I don't know why any pdocs haven't suggested it to me because I am so treatment resistant. Sometimes I have thought about having it done. I only know one guy who goes to the VA and they work great for him. he is sober too. They don't use it much here for some reason.

I had TMS treatments done for a solid six weeks. Didn't do crap. It is supposed to be similar. Trans Cranial Magnetic Stimulation.

You can sign a form to decline ECT while you are able to make the decision and give it to your dr/family. Like a DNR.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

He was looking forward to it , success rate in England is good with follow ups.

I've been looking into TMS. I have major depressive disorder and seem to be resistant to (most) meds. If you don't mind sharing, could you say more about what caused you to try it, your experience, etc. Thanks!

So it happened again in US. With knifes. Supposedly a great kid with no problems and no mental illness. Of course his lawyer wants hom to be evaluated by a pdoc.

Gladly. A year and a half ago I had lost two good jobs in a row because of depression. After that it got even worse and it was pretty bad before I even lost the jobs. I was very suicidal and broke and could not pay my rent. I thought I was going to be homeless.

I was in CA and my family is all in Michigan. I moved away when I was 19 and worked my whole life and had good insurance. I got clean and sober and started getting treated for depression when I was 32 and developed a very strong support network in CA. So I never bothered my family about it all. They are very supportive and knew about all my problems but never saw it first hand and didn't think about it much. I was getting treated and had this good support network so they didn't worry.

So here I was 49 suicidal, broke, and had pretty much isolated myself from my previous support network. I still had a pdoc and T but my insurance with Kaiser would run out in six months so I would lose that too. And besides I had a terrible pdoc who told me to suck it up and go back to work and wouldn't put me on state disability. If he had done that I could have made it.

Any way I was at the end of my rope, had given up all hope that anything would work because I am so treatment resistant, and broke. So for the first time I really reached out to my family. Thank God they were there for me. They decided the best bet was to come back to Michigan then at least I could relive the financial pressures of rent and utilities and all of that.

My brother who is a pharmacist and very active in his community met a pdoc who was into all the latest research on supplements and all this. He still used meds but was looking for something more effective. He was frustrated with meds. So he invested in a TMS machine and had a lot of faith in it. My brother, who knew better then others in my family the struggles I have had with treatment, talked me into trying this TMS. He said he would pay for it and had the means, bless his heart.

I agreed to come home and try it. Like I said I had given up all hope that anything would work but I held out a glimmer that this new fangled thing would work. My attitude may have had an effect on the outcome I don't know. I would think that if it was going to work it would have worked.

I went in for six weeks three times a week and each session lasted an hour. They get a base line of where to put the thing on your head based on moving it around and sending a pulse and when they find the spot that makes your thumb twitch that is the spot. Then it is a set of very powerful magnetic pulses last last about 5 seconds every 30 seconds for an hour. They set the pulse thingy on the same spot on your head each time and kind of strap your head in. The only way I can describe the pulses is it is like a jack hammer hitting your skull for five seconds. That is not really accurate though because it is not really that uncomfortable. That is just what it sounds like...bap bap bap bap bap. You get used to it. The worst effect is getting a head ache. If I remembered to take some tylenol or aspirin before hand I never got a headache. Your head is immobile and leaned back for an hour so that gets a little annoying. All in all a little annoying but very non invasive and not a big deal.

At first when my brother suggested it I thought it was a bunch of quackery. But I looked it up and places like the Mayo Clinic, John Hopkins, and Kaiser Permanete were doing clinical trials. They were taking it seriously and there was some very positive research on it so I thought it was worth a try.

It is based on new research that says that there is a very strong link between the pre frontal cortex (which is where they position the pulse thingy) and the limbic system. In severely depressed patients the circuit between the prefrontal cortex and limbic system is whacked so the theory goes and there is a lot of research to back it up. So the idea of TMS is to stimulate this "dead" circuit and get it working right again. Makes total sense. It didn't work for me. Now I don't know why. It could be that the TMS is just not doing the intended job and is just not precise enough to hit that circuit. Or it could be that the whole theory it is based on is whacked. Or maybe it works for some and not others. According to this pdocs experience he has had very positive results with it but he has a vested interest in saying that. He does track his patients after and says he has an 80% success rate base on about 14 patients. My Mom talked to the lady who is top dog and runs the community mental health clinic in my home town and she said they are finding it doesn't work as well in people who have very cyclical depression which is me. But that it does work better in people who tend to have much longer term depression. It is really to early to tell.

I am a believer in the prefrontal cortex/ limbic system theory. The prefrontal cortex is the thinking rational part of your brain and the limbic system is the more primitive emotional part of your brain. The limbic system is a whole bunch of things like the amygdala and hippocampus and a bunch of other stuff. If that circuit is whacked than it makes sense to me that it could cause depression. If it is true how do they treat it? TMS is one attempt. ECT which is very effective may work on this circuit. One study says that the hippocampus is 9-13% smaller in depressed patients. In the chemical imbalance theory that is much easier to treat with drugs. The problem is that is only a small part of the picture.

I am sorry for the long reply. I usually do a lot of journaling but it seems I am doing all that here in these forums now. I would rather do it here in public than in my private journal. And besides I would never put all this in my journal because it was your question that caused it. And it helps me to write about it and reflect on my past experience. If no one reads it because it is so long that is ok. It was meant for you bluetriangle because you asked so I hope you will read it.

If I was you I would look up all the latest research on it and see how the clinical trials are going and the clinical evidence on it. If your insurance covers it or you have the means it may be worth a shot. My brother never told me what it cost but I am sure it was a lot. For me it did not work. I was already in a depression and I went into a six month long very deep depression after. That was going to happen anyway and had nothing to do with TMS. During treatment I did notice some hard to explain differences in my thinking and in my brain. This was all a year and a half ago so there is probably more known about it now and it is probably in clinical practice more now.

Also check out ketamine which is starting to be used in clinical practice and studies have shown very promising results.

I'm curious, does the ECT or TMS treatment have any effect on personailty itself (other than taking away the depressed aspect). I guess I'm wondering if it's reported that people actually feel happy, or just more "numb" for lack of a better term?

I don't know about ECT but with TMS it is supposed to "fix" or at least help the circuit between the pre frontal cortex and the limbic system. Your rational pre frontal cortex is supposed to have more control over your emotional limbic system. So if it worked you would be more "normal" more emotionally stable. Depression wouldn't run amock because your rational mind wouldn't let it. That's the theory anyway so it shouldn't make you more numb like maybe meds do

All I know for sure is that I did TMS and it didn't work but I didn't have any ill affects from it. It didn't zap my brain and make me feel numb or dumb or anything.

ECT I don't know anything about and might be a whole other ball of wax. Can cause memory problems. I have always heard and read that it is very effective. Some people around here have had it done.

I am putting my money on Special K.

I am not sure there is something wrong with any person who can take a life...I mean say like you're defending yourself there isn't something wrong with someone if they kill someone in self defense for instance. Also though yes you can get a walking time bomb, but what would be great is if people might bother to de-activate said walking time bomb I feel like many kids in this situation are treated like they committed a crime before they ever did anything due to being veiwed as a 'walking time bomb' perhaps some of these senerios would be avoided if society had cared enough to reach out and try and help before they 'explode' or implode since suicide is probably more common than killing other people.

Well sometimes medications can have bad effects and side effects of anti-depressants can include suicidal thoughts. So I can see how prescription drugs could play a role in some of these situations...but it would be stupid to simply blame it on medications just as its stupid to blame it on mental illness. Its a combination of factors that can lead someone to do something horrific...its never just one simple thing.

Start up on EFFEXOR IS BAD FOR SUICIDAL thoughts . If a person has never before used an AD and is in a bad way EFFEXOR start up may push them over the edge , they need to be monitored for mood.

Hmmm I don't know about that. I have been on and off Effexor many times and never had that effect. I had a suicide attempt when taking Paxil and after all the warnings came out I always wondered if it was the Paxil that caused it.

I know they all have big warnings on them.

One theory I have heard is that people who start an AD start feeling just good enough to actually carry out an attempt. idk it makes a little sense. Do AD's cause suicidal thoughts? I don't know. There sure is huge warnings on all of them now.

Hi... Thank you so much for taking the time to share your experience. I genuinely appreciate it.