I've seen this in a lot of boards, including this one. Where people abuse phenibut and when they stop using, they're anxiety is much less severe than before phenibut. Is the brain plastic enough to make such permanent changes? I suppose this can happen with any drug abuse.
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N&PD Moderators: Skorpio | thegreenhand
Permanent lowered anxiety from phenibut?
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Anamo7tram
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I cant see how.
The brain would change to become more prone to anxiety after phenibut, since it is relying on having a supply of it.
The brain would change to become more prone to anxiety after phenibut, since it is relying on having a supply of it.
atara
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If people with poor social skills improve said skills on a drug, their brains remember how to do those things. This is also true for, say, antidepressants; often a depressed person doesn't have much of a life, they take antidepressants, find meaning, and later they don't need them anymore. While it's commonly complained that, say, SSRIs are not "curative", in practice it isn't too rare for someone to take it for a period of time and then quit to find themselves happier; it's just that said period of time may be as long as five to ten years. Tolerance is a competing phenomenon. Another way to say this is that anxiolytics cause people to give themselves exposure therapy, which eventually resolves the problem.
Unfortunately the persistent benefits seen with some medications do not generalize to all medications, and in particular the long-term effects of benzodiazepines can be terrible. But this isn't a fault of addictiveness; the long-term effects of opioid treatment for chronic pain are much less onerous, as long as the medication is not abused. Instead in this case it seems that benzodiazepines are simply bad for you. In fact it may be the long-term toxicity of benzodiazepines that scares people away from other anxiolytics.
An aside: benzodiazepines essentially "slow down" the whole friggin' brain. GABAa is the most widely-distributed inhibitory receptor in the brain, and most benzos bind nonselectively to GABAa-linked channels. It doesn't surprise me that this frankly crude inhibition of everything leads eventually to smaller brain sizes.
In other news: how easily of a time do you think the authors of this study had falling asleep the night after they submitted it for publication? e_e
Unfortunately the persistent benefits seen with some medications do not generalize to all medications, and in particular the long-term effects of benzodiazepines can be terrible. But this isn't a fault of addictiveness; the long-term effects of opioid treatment for chronic pain are much less onerous, as long as the medication is not abused. Instead in this case it seems that benzodiazepines are simply bad for you. In fact it may be the long-term toxicity of benzodiazepines that scares people away from other anxiolytics.
An aside: benzodiazepines essentially "slow down" the whole friggin' brain. GABAa is the most widely-distributed inhibitory receptor in the brain, and most benzos bind nonselectively to GABAa-linked channels. It doesn't surprise me that this frankly crude inhibition of everything leads eventually to smaller brain sizes.
In other news: how easily of a time do you think the authors of this study had falling asleep the night after they submitted it for publication? e_e
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Anamo7tram
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Atara, I really don't think those things are related to nueroplasticity but more along the lines of psychological adaptations.
Anamo7tram
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Changes in nueral pathways?
Now, with psychological adaptations you also get nueroplasticity, but I don't think drugs could do the converse in a beneficial way.
Anamo7tram
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I disagree, firstly, I could see a neurological adaptation not changing the psychological, for example , some kind of motor cordination disfunction. Secondly, I could see psychological adaptations without nueroal adaptations, example, mental therapy, sure any psychological change will result in physical change (or the opposite? ) but that doesn't mean the reason the patient is doing better is due to changes in the brain rather than change in psych.
Anamo7tram
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Sekio, this is a rather special moment for me actually, your posts informed me and saved my ass a number of times throughout the last 5 years, in fact you and ebola? are the reason i joined this site.
Back to the topic;
of course there is a direct correspondence between the mental and physical, but the point is, just because am calmer, does not mean my gaba receptors are upregulated, it could simply mean, that whatever used to give me anxiety, is now better understood, hence calming me. evidently, this was accompanied by neurological changes but not on some class of receptor but some small change in the operation of the brain.
example, if 2 people commit crimes due to some neurological problom, you cant claim the changes in the brain due to social deterrence (prison) and some kind of pharmacological treatments are of the same nature.