Hppd?

[SteveT113]

About a month ago I put myself into a mild drug induced psychosis (dope, MDMA, ice, benzos).. I pretty much immediately (mainly out of fear and recommendation from docs) cut out all the drugs I was using. I don't remember exactly when it started (the last month has been a blur) but I seem to have developed what I think might be HPPD. I see tons of dots in my vision, sometimes when I stare at the sky I see moving vortexes and patters, I seem to notices faces in the background of videos or in wood (they appear as if they are faces), colors sometimes get brighter, patterns shimmer and move. I have been put on mitazapine and olanzapine. I have heard mixed opinions online about HPPD... I know it sounds strange but is it really a thing? None of my psychs or docs have brought it up with me. There seem to be mixed opinions: some people say that it is just an anxiety disorder and that people that claim to have it are just being overly anxious about everything others believe it is a serious psychiatric condition. I was never really much of a psychedelic drug user. I took a trip a few months back but never noticed anything the morning after. Is there anyone else that suffers from this, anyone managed to find a way to suppress the symptoms? People mainly seem to develop HPPD after taking trips or other psychedelics, can it be triggered from overuse of MDMA?

 

[Nambo]

I developed it after a bad mdma trip where it literally felt like my brain had been fried. There is serotonin in your visual cortex of the brain and I believe a disruption / alteration / damage to these axions causes symptoms referred to as 'visual snow'.

 

[Mikek11]

I developed it after a bad mdma trip where it literally felt like my brain had been fried. There is serotonin in your visual cortex of the brain and I believe a disruption / alteration / damage to these axions causes symptoms referred to as 'visual snow'.

Visual snow is a complex phenomenon and involves much more than serotonin and its pathways. For example i had some form of visual snow all of my life apart from that my vision is perfectly fine. There is a conclusion that subjects who experience visual snow show some form of hypermetabolism inside of their brains. I assume there are many causes of having brain hypermetabolism which includes anxiety as well as brain injury or any other form of destabilization.

An interesting thing which i personally experience in my case is that sometimes when i wake up from an intense dream during the night the visual snow that i perceive tends to form patterns and when i go to sleep again and close my eyes these patterns continue to form into dream ladnscapes of clear perception! This interesting observation pours quite a bit of mystery into the phenomenon of "visual snow" and maybe even broadens its boundaries into metaphysical fields.