Do other opioids help your depression?
If so, then buprenorphine has the ability to be effective, somewhat.
I have borderline personality disorder, which means I feel my emotions incredibly robustly & things that might bother a normal person for a little bit, can bother me for much longer. I've found that buprenorphine really dampens my emotional output. Although I can still get pretty angry on it.
I'd say buprenorphine has the potential to make you more depressed after being on it long enough too. It helped my depression similar to other opioids in the beginning, but after 10 years of using it daily, it doesn't do jack shit for me as far as pain or depression goes. Still keeps my mood some what balanced though.
It's not common, but not completely unheard of for doctors to use opioids for depression. There is a theory that some treatment resistant major depression is caused by a dysfunction in the endorphin system, which opioids fix.
Depression can actually affect the part of the brain that processes physical pain. So yes, opioids can help depression.
Before SSRIs were invented, they used morphine & opium for depression. And it worked!
As far as other doctors go, some may look at it & treat you like crap for being on subs, or assume you're a drug addict.
But I had my wisdom teeth taken out a couple years ago while on Suboxone & they still gave me 15 tramadol after the fact. So it all really ends up being at the discretion of the doctor. Some doctors don't care if you were on subs & will still give you meds if you're in pain.
I recently lost my Suboxone doctor. And at my yearly physical, I brought up to my GP that tramadol worked better for me than buprenorphine. And he said he had no problem putting me back on tramadol. Except that was 2 months ago & he still hasn't done it, so I doubt I'll even get it. But I was still shocked that he even had an open enough mind to consider giving me my tramadol back.
Personally, unless you were a heavy opioid user/lover to begin with, I think avoiding buprenorphine may have been the right choice.
It may only be a partial agonist but it's almost as potent as fentanyl & can cause a big tolerance to opioids. Plus if you're on high doses & need acute pain relief, the buprenorphine will block what ever they give you for the pain. So then you would have ended up with a dependence on a shitty, potent partial agonist opioid, on top of dealing with your depression.
Tramadol & heroin use to help my major depression tremendously. So much so, that now I'm angry every single day that heroin & tramadol aren't legally available over-the-counter. Because that means I'm basically being forced to live a miserable life all because of pathetic drug war hysteria.
