illusion25 said:
ya I have ben hospitalized from stimulant sleep deprivation.
MDPVagrant- after 4 days of no sleep I can can barely differenciate between "real" things and hallucinations. Auditory and talking to people who arent there.
7 days or more!! shit i cant imagine the psychosis
I'm almost immune to dopamine psychosis (maybe it's a genius for timing or something, i.e. how often, how long, what invervals). Not to mention being so naturally dopamine-deficient that ... well I won't get into that, because for me it's very disabling. A lot of the time I not only fail to "get a life," I am content about that and have no desire for one. So you see how it is... you are talking to a piece of broccoli here. I don't even eat much (regardless of stimulants) cuz food is mostly something to take away hunger pangs & refuel what amounts to a complex biological mechanism.
Anyway... Sleep dep doesn't really bring on psychosis, just suffering and badly compromised cognition & judgment/decision making skills. As well as a painful, weak body that feels like it could collapse at times and prove a monumental challenge to stand from a sitting position. Better to stay standing up. Mentally, you're prone to stuff like looking around the house for something, except you forgot what you were looking for but you just GOT to have it because you WANT this unknown object. Or you go into a room to get something, forget why you went in, then go back to the other room and forget why you came back. It doesn't seem to hit long-term memory very hard, but basically wipes out short term processing at some point. Typically it will come and go in terms of severity, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds.
I figure if sleep dep went on long enough, a person would lose their self care skills and be at risk from disease, neglect, falling down and getting a concussion, forgetting to eat... eventually it resembles moderate Alzheimer's, minus the
long-term memory loss. But add on an exhausted and gradually sickening body, so you probably break even.
Not something anyone would ever seek out, except a few of us stim users who are both unlucky enough to react a certain way and have a boring/useless enough life anyway not to care too much )as long as it isn't a regular thing).
P.S. after being awake a long, long, long time, the brain can interpret sleep as a survival threat. After all, it's a form of temporary (we hope) ego loss that troubles even some ordinary non-insomniacs. Consider being a stim-boosted, self-centered, hedonistic egomaniac for 100+ hours with nary a break, and falling asleep
really is a form of death, and whether you'll ever wake up again truly comes across as unknown. Many are too tired or oblivious at that point to care, but for others who tend to think too much, this can be a very serious issue.