Any type of antidepressant that allows for continued pscyh/disso use?

[LucidSDreamr]

I may be going on antidepressants, if the psychiatrist I will see says so. Ive been self medicating it for 2 decades myself. Its there whether I'm sober or clean. Even when life is going perfectly.

The only thing that seems to improve it is dissociative use evey once and a while which gives benefits lasting for a week or two.




The question is are there any antidepressant treatments that allow for continued/safe pscych/disso use? I like to trip a few times a year. I assume MDMA will be out of the question if I get put on any sort of med.

I've read ppl on bupropion continue to use dissos. Thoughts? What about bupropion and classical psychs? (the seizure issues are worrisome)


The other option is to just trip on a regular basis and hope that it fixes the depression, which it seems to, I just don't trip enough to have the benefits all the time in my normal life, causing me to use alcohol/pot/opiates which all make the depression worse when they wear off, pot actually makes it worse while high and not hig

 

[LucidSDreamr]

^ I didn't know they can check them.

 

[Durzo1258]

My flat mates brother was on high dose SSRI (sertraline), he tried to kill himself. We did both mushrooms and LSD and mushrooms. He did around 2gs of dry mexicans and he handled it very well. The LSD not so good.

 

[DroneLore]

I would say no if the anti depressants are of the SSRI or SNRI variety. May be a better idea to keep self medicating for now with something like ketamine.

Have you considered getting your neurotransmitters checked? This should be able to pinpoint what is making you feel the depression.

Like LucidSDreamer, I didn't know this was a thing you could do. Is this different from genetic analysis? I know that in recent years techniques have been developed to analyze a person's genome and rule out which antidepressants are least likely to work for them.

 

[Volsam]

I'd look into low dose Tianeptine.
But please be careful as it has good affinity for opioid receptors as well!

Also look into Agmatine.

Good luck!

 

[LucidSDreamr]

Like LucidSDreamer, I didn't know this was a thing you could do. Is this different from genetic analysis? I know that in recent years techniques have been developed to analyze a person's genome and rule out which antidepressants are least likely to work for them.

perhaps that what he meant. I am very interested to find out my pharmacogenomic profile.

 

[vaginafruit]

I'd recommend staying clean if you're on psych medications. Drugs can mess with the progress and overall purpose of some psych medications and other (more physical) problems can occur as well.

 

[Kaleida]

Not that I'm necessarily recommending that anyone experiment with these things, but for the record, I've known people who were prescribed SSRIs and still had pretty normal responses to most psychedelics. It doesn't seem necessarily a given to me that they'll prevent you from tripping, there's just a chance they will since they work through the same neurotransmitter systems. Whether it dampens your trips or not will probably just depend on the individual's neurochemistry and the antidepressant dose used, among other things.

 

[vortech]

My experience is that of kaleida's information...mirtazapine doesn't fux with my use of 3meos...I don't seem to always have the healthiest response to deschloroketamine and maybe DXM would be a little jankier as well because of the way it plays with serotonin...DCK is just very strong for me sometimes...a little 'messy' on the receptor activity, but not as bad as DXM. Whether or not this has anything to do with a mirtazapine is not 100% sure however. My feeling is that ketamine should be ok with both SSRI and Buproprion because it feels cleaner with the way it effects serotonin/dopamine/norepinephrine.

I personally wouldn't recommend buproprion...it was pretty shitty to me, not the direction I needed to go, made me more jittery and feeling like I wanted to self medicate with downers. I suspect doing something like 3meo, which feels to increase dopamine on par with amphetamine to me, like 10mg being equiv to 20 or 30 of adderal...and being that buproprion is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor as well, might make your levels a bit scatty. Again just speculation and ballpark guesstimate. More conventional psychedelics on the other hand would probably be a better interaction outcome with buproprion since they are straight serotonin fuckers and not dopamine or norepinephrine....but I feel that LSD might be a bit less trancendental, and more like a buggy energy. Last time I say this, but just speculating.

You are correct that MDMA use should be carefully considered if you are on an SSRI or SNRI. Serotonin syndrome danger may be overstated but still a very real possibility. Buproprion + MDMA should be not dangerous, but given how each make me feel, I have a feeling the bupr would make the MDMA feel less 'warm'.

I also can't in good faith suggest tianeptine if you have any history of self medicating. I forsee it becoming a physical dependence you won't enjoy coming down from. It does however play VERY nicely with something like 3meo...too nicely I would say.

 

[Hodor]

You can still trip on SSRI's and SNRI's just fine, you might just need a slightly higher dose of your hallucinogen of choice.

The main issue would be if your antidepressant also affects your receptors directly - Trazodone, for example, is an SSRI that also acts as a 5HT2A antagonist (i.e. basically an antipsychotic), which will *seriously* impair your ability to trip.

Tianeptine is a good antidepressant that doesn't seem to impair the effects of psychedelics, but unfortunately it isn't available in many parts of the world (like the US)... apparently some people self-medicate with tianeptine powder bought in bulk from various "nootropics" vendors, but I'd strongly advise against it if you've ever had problems with opioid abuse (unlike other antidepressants, tianeptine has some abuse potential due to its mild opioid agonism).

So all in all my advice would be to just get a script for a plain SSRI (e.g. Lexapro) and just take slightly more acid next time you want to trip.

 

[vortech]

When I have tryptamine'd while on mirtazapine (which I normally take before bed) I just wait till late in the day to dose the tryp and skip my mirtazapine dose that night...everything fine...

 

[Vastness]

Realistically no psychiatrist is going to take your desire to continue using other drugs into account when choosing what antidepressant to prescribe you, so the answer to this question is, almost certainly, purely hypothetical unless you are going to continue to self medicate and ignore your psychiatrist's advice.

That said I would second the suggestion about Tianeptine, granted it does have abuse potential, but you do not need to take recreational doses to feel the therapeutic effect, and if you can stop yourself doing so then it does seem to be a very safe and, if it works for you, quickly effective antidepressant with almost no withdrawal or "discontinuation syndrome", and minimal interaction or even in some cases positive synergy with other substances.

 

[vortech]

I have read a number of reports of people having trouble stopping even the suggested prescribed doses of 12mg 3x/day so I wouldn't exactly trust the advertised 'no discontinuation syndrome' claim, but it does seem to depend on your individual chemistry, how long you've been using it etc.

 

[Theroux]

My personal experience on various SSRI's didn't affect dissociatives for me, mainly ketamine and nitrous, nor did they drastically affect shrooms, acid, 2C-B or 2C-E. The only noticeable difference with psychs was the decreased visuals, this was only slight but noticeable nonetheless.

 

[Xzbtya]

I'd look into low dose Tianeptine.
But please be careful as it has good affinity for opioid receptors as well!

Also look into Agmatine.

Good luck!

Good is pretty relative. Its about 12x less potent than oxycodone and 200-300x less potent an inhibitor at the mu opioid receptor given its Ki of 300 nM verse 0.24 to 25 nM of prescribed pain killers. Still, people have taken it in very high doses in an attempt to achieve similar results which I would highly advice against. That's not to say that the constant low level agonism of receptor doesn't play some role in tianeptine's therapeutic effects.

Edit: I would also add that you might want to try both tianeptine Sodium and tianeptine Sulfate if you decide to give it a shot. The sulfate is said to last longer but some people claim different effects. In my personal experience I can't exactly pinpoint any exact effects from either over a trial spawn of a week other than a slight decrease in anxiety, though there are far fewer horrific side effects than I've had from SSRIs, SNRIs (I've tried all but one available in the U.S.) so far, and tricyclics/tetracyclics.

 

[Solipsis]

It doesn't seem like HR to select your psychiatric medication (and you ought to take AD's seriously or not at all) so that you will be able to trip. Get one for proper reasons like a rationale for why they would be appropriate for you, efficacy and side-effects.

All of those factors are way too iffy to put your ability to trip as a higher priority.

Kinda tempted to close this as you would do well to use other threads that have used the above approach, so that perhaps you can select the more ideal one out of your final contenders - as in: tripping as low priority.

IMO psychedelics support a healthy and centered life-style, and wanting to be good to yourself, but they never gave me the feeling like they could just fix up a depression out of the blue. Maybe indirectly there is something in your life very directly causing you to be depressed which you could do something about, and psychedelics could play a role in seeing that clearly... but they seem unreliable to just substitute for an AD.

Just wait and see what kind of medication it turns out you will go on... be wary of heavy and side-effect prone medications as the limited efficacy and calculated placebo which you would get with any other AD it's often not a good cost-effect ratio at all. Trying one may not cost you a long period of your life, but don't get led on too long.
I always recommend playing an active role in choosing one - for example I don't agree at all with SSRI's being so popularly prescribed, after what I read about actual meta-studies - it was also in the quality national newspapers - I always chose my meds myself, except for the seroquel I reluctantly tried briefly just to give their idea a try (one of the main meds given to people with ASD), just to be fair. It sucked.

A good reason to choose an AD though can be e.g. that it particularly suppresses some edge of anxiety - my ex apparently benefited from such an AD although her primary problems were more anxiety related. I chose mirtazapine for a year mostly focused on benefit with sleeping, eating, and mood stabilization. I never had depression as my primary disorder, always as a secondary one. It's much different with regard to just symptom management in cases like that. Little point in treating a secondary effect rather than the root of the problem.