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Opiate anti-depressent properties

F

Fried Man

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Is there any research being done on the anti-depressent effects of opiates?

Like major pharmaceutical companies or just regular chemists trying to synth some opiate that gives you all the euphoria, motivation, and overall wellbeing, yet does not have the horrible addiction attached to it.

Lemme give you my background. I take amphetamines for ADHD. My mother thinks I get depressed sometimes, I think it's normal. My behavior is a bit unstable (ADHD hyper kid). My moodyness and unstableness is mostly due side-effects of the amps I think. Lack of sleep, bad eating habits. As well as occasional other polydrug use. My other problem is shyness. I can be social when I want to, but it's hard and often uncomfortable for me. I would like to be less shy. I also lack alot of motivation with things i'm not interested in. I don't have a strong work ethic. I hate doing alot of things like school and taking out the trash (yeh, somewhat normal, but I know alot of kids who feel rewarded for doing things like this.)

So to make me a bit more stable, happier about things, more motivated, and less shy, I have tried a few anti-depressents which really made me unhappy. Wellbutrin, Strattera, zoloft. The wonder drug for me is OPIATES!

Opiates for me do so many good things. I would def choose to be on it everyday if it was not so addictive.

-It makes me happy
-It clears any depression I have
-It motivates me better than amphetamines in most ways. Amphetamines always help me learn and study better, but opiates make work and annoying tasks way more fun, easier, enjoyable, and more rewarding than amphetamines. The combination of opiates and amphetamines are perfect for me. Happiness and the ability to focus and learn.
-It makes me social, and happy to socialize
-It stimulates my appetite and makes eating wonderful
-It makes sleep wonderful
-It makes me compassionate and caring with people I love
-It makes life better while I am high on it
-It kiss most pain


I just believe that some chemist could tweak an opiate chemical to make the perfect anti-depressent with very few side effects that would work for me. I know that some people do not gain these effects from opiates. But maybe some new opiate chemical could make most people feel the way I do.

so does anyone know if research is being done on this subject? I would dedicate my life to this, I just can't grasp chemistry.
 
Like major pharmaceutical companies or just regular chemists trying to synth some opiate that gives you all the euphoria, motivation, and overall wellbeing, yet does not have the horrible addiction attached to it.
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Could you explain how this would be possible if all the euphoria, motivation and overall well-being is the cause of addiction?

-It makes me happy
-It clears any depression I have
-It motivates me better than amphetamines in most ways. Amphetamines always help me learn and study better, but opiates make work and annoying tasks way more fun, easier, enjoyable, and more rewarding than amphetamines. The combination of opiates and amphetamines are perfect for me. Happiness and the ability to focus and learn.
-It makes me social, and happy to socialize
-It stimulates my appetite and makes eating wonderful
-It makes sleep wonderful
-It makes me compassionate and caring with people I love
-It makes life better while I am high on it
-It kiss most pain
Click to expand...

You didn't describe the perfect antidepressant, you described a highly addictive drug. Antidepressants doesn't get you high and make so happy you think you love everyone and everything. They are supposed to help you and not to do the whole job for you.

You seem one of those people who need to find a good excuse to take drugs. You've just found yours 'it makes me feel good!'. Yes, that's what drugs do and that's why they're called drugs.
 
I think that opiates definately can be an antidepressant.

One thing with our brains is we experience negative emotions more commonly and easily. Also The brain is so adaptive that it can rewire itself according to which emotions are felt. So at times its easy to see why feelings like anxiety or depression can get out of hand. Breaking this cycle of thinking clearly can be done by promoting positive emotions like being happy. So opiates with thier feelings of wellbeing and etc. can get you out of a rut and start to feel positive again. Just moderation is needed i dont think i need to mention why.

Ok now for a more pharmocological prespective it also makes some sense why opiates can be antidepressive but less then the psychological. Endorphins are providers of pleasure and lack of thier activity clearly can be related to to depression. However It doesnt make to much sense to deal with this problem by simply artificially stimulating the endorphin system because it doesnt solve the problem in the long term.

jus something intriguing i wana share is that peptides in milk and wheat can damadge opiate receptors in the brain. correct me if im wrong but doesnt taking opiates consecutively stimulate new receptors to appear? that could help with that aspect. http://www.13.waisays.com/zombie.htm
 
Opiates will surely stop you from feeling depressed. Just like any other drug with abuse potential. And that's not the case. Dextromethorphan helped me to fight my depression. Does that mean it's an effective antidepressant and should be widely used? Certainly not, the same goes with opiates, they're very addictive and if someone uses them for depression he or she will soon feel the side effects.

Theoretically, take an antidepressant for 6 months, then taper off if needed, you're fine. Take an opiate for 6 moths, then stop. You'll get the answer to your question. Even if you taper off and go through withdrawal, you will get back to your addiction because you'll end up more depressed than you were before. It's stupid to think everything that makes you feel good right away is effective for your depression.

Take opiates as much as you want but don't fool yourself and (mostly) other people. It's just an easy excuse for taking a drug because it fights your depression. You didn't discover anything new. That's why people started taking opiates and getting addicted to them.
 
Having an abuse potential doesn't nullify the antidepressant properties of a drug. Actually, abuse potential just emphasizes these properties. An effective mood brightener should always be abusable. The only reason SSRIs aren't very abusable is the time it takes for the effects to be noticeable. But there is no rule saying a drug has to have a delayed onset to be an antidepressant as opposed to a drug of abuse.
 
^ A mood brightener is not an antidepressant; it's a euphoriant.

An antidepressant fights depression.
 
^ So antidepressants don't brighten your mood? Is there a clear difference between what we call antidepressants and drugs such as cocaine/opiates etc.?

As Blador have said, the extremely slow onset of SSRIs compared to common drugs of abuse doesn't really seem like a clear-cut difference.
 
There are many things on www.opioids.com on the antidepressant properties of Opioids.
http://opioids.com/antidepressant/opiate.html
http://opioids.com/antidepressant/analgesia.html
(and there are many other pages on the subjects, go on the www.opioids.com homepage and use the search engine)

Something I find especially interesting: the antidepressants properties of kappa antagonist opioids:
http://opioids.com/kappa/kappa-antagonist.html
http://opioids.com/norbinaltorphimine/antidepressant.html
 
I see two major problems to developing opioidergic antidepressants:

1. You would have to make the pharmacokinetics such that the drug didn't have significant abuse potential. This would include (but not be limited to) relatively slow onset, high oral bioavailability, long halflife, maybe a prodrug whose conversion to the active metabolite is rate limited, and probably some polymer crap to stop people from injecting it.

2. You would also have to solve the issue of opiate receptor downregulation. I've heard a little bit about NMDA-antagonists and this, so that would be a place to start, but I really don't know.
 
BilZ0r said:
^ A mood brightener is not an antidepressant; it's a euphoriant.

An antidepressant fights depression.
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And don't they do that by brightening the mood? Going from depressed to "normal" certainly looks like a brightening of the mood. Or do you mean that the pharmacological pathway from a depressed mood to a neutral mood is different than the pathway from neutral to euphoric?
 
An Opioid that would be only a kappa antagonist would be a good antidepressant (accoding to opioids.com), it would cause no addiction I think, no abuse potential....
If such a molecule was invented, that would be really interesting...

(unfortunately, the only common kappa antagonist that is commercialized is Buprenorphine, it's also a partial mu agonist, so it has addictive properties...)
 
As mentioned, what about (+/-)-tramadol, a compound that has the following actions (both opioidergic and monoaminergic):

(+)-O-desmethyl-tramadol: a weak mu opioid receptor agonist, formed in vivo as a tramdol metabolite (M1).

(-)-tramadol: a weak noradrengeric transporter inhibitor, similar to venlafaxine (Effexor).

(+)-tramadol: a weak serotonin transporter inhibitor, weaker than most SSRI antidepressants, but still enough to weakly potentiate extracellular 5-HT concentration.

Tramadol can still be addictive and still exhibits tolerance and withdrawal effects, however, so one cannot take it every day. Failing that, try venlafaxine (Effexor), chemically similar to tramadol (a positional isomer), it has SNRI properties without significant opioidergic activity. Beware, however, as it too has horrible withdrawl effects.
 
^ opiates wont cause long term depression directly, but both opiates and benzodiazepines can cause acute depression with use, long term use could easily cause depresison, if the root cause is a lack of activity that used to be filled by endorphin activity that is no longer present even with opiate use, since opiates dont replace endorphins in a 1:1 manner.

And opiate USE longterm will cause depression in the absense of the drug.

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Drug class is totally fucking irrelevant to what a drug can be used for, and what said drug is effective for.

I dont care if prozac is an antidepressant, and fentanyl is a pain killer.

Prozac is used as a pain killer for a number of reasons. You can class shit together all you want, its retarded. The only time people start making classes for shit is AFTER someone finds an effective use for something. And many drugs have many different uses anyway, so confining them to a class for use is irrelevant.

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Depression is also subjective, and there is more than one type of depression , major depressive disorder has multiple subtypes as well if i remember my psychology class correctly. You cant just say depression=prozac as a treatment, unless your counteracting the cause of it, your just masking it with an SSRI the same as with an opiate, as a "mood brightener".

Bipolar disorder would never be treated with an SSRI, even though its a type of depression. And bipolar has little to do with serotonin.

Some kinds of depression have little to do with chemical imbalence, being totally emotional in nature. In that case the only thing you CAN do is mask it with a chemical of some kind, unless other physical activities help, or diet etc.

And doctors arent SUPPOSED to prescribe SSRIs for depression that is short term, or caused by common life events.


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Depression that is unreasonable or continuous is what SSRIs are supposed to be used for. And even in THAT case, SSRIs are more dependance causing than opiates, to a much worse degree. SSRIs dont have any advantage in that area, both cause dependance, in most cases people who stop using SSRIs are WORSE than when they started.

Second to that, prozac and most of the antidepressants of the SSRI type, increase endorphin levels anyway, Its not a disputed fact. So if the end effect is increase in endorphin levels through SSRIs, youve already proved the point, opiate substitution for endorphins would be an effective antidepressant.

And if depression can in fact be CAUSED by low endorphins levels as many researchers and pain clinics have found, and then CORRECTED by alteration of endorphin levels, it is entirely logical, probable and likely that opiates can correct depression directly in a case like that.

There are posts all over this board from Phreex, myself, and speedlimit55 about the use of endorphin enhancing drugs in depression, and im sure you will find tons of them by us and others touting the usefullness of opiates in severe depression.
 
Yeah, give me some morphine for my depression and anxiety! SSRIs do nothing for me. I can't imagine being dependant on one. I managed to take sertraline for 2 weeks and fluvoxamine for 2 days and you say opioids cause no worse dependance. Even shitty codeine usage makes me crave for an opiate and I would never take an SSRI again.

How many people can bear terrible side effects of SSRIs for a month to feel their supposedly wonderful and dependent making effect? Opioids get rid of depression right off, an average depressed person is likely to increase the dose and shooting is likely to cause fast addiction. I don't know what this discussion is about. Opioids are highly addictive and people are trying to make them antidepressants because they can't stand the fact they actually do drugs.

An Opioid that would be only a kappa antagonist would be a good antidepressant (accoding to opioids.com), it would cause no addiction I think, no abuse potential....
If such a molecule was invented, that would be really interesting...
Click to expand...

It's already been.

^ So antidepressants don't brighten your mood? Is there a clear difference between what we call antidepressants and drugs such as cocaine/opiates etc.?
Click to expand...

You probably wouldn't have to ask this question if you had experienced the great pleasure of SSRI induced 'euphoria'. Antidepressants are supposed to stabilize your mood, make you feel like you felt before depression. cocaine and opiates don't do this, they make you so fucking happy as you would never feel without drugs and never felt before depression.
 
It's not but there has been already a few selective kappa opioid receptors antagonists synthesized, norbinaltorphimine being the most known, I guess, it has a very weak antagonist effect on other subtypes of receptors. Google the name for some information.
 
adder said:
You probably wouldn't have to ask this question if you had experienced the great pleasure of SSRI induced 'euphoria'. Antidepressants are supposed to stabilize your mood, make you feel like you felt before depression. cocaine and opiates don't do this, they make you so fucking happy as you would never feel without drugs and never felt before depression.
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Well, certainly it would depend on the dosage used. What if just enough was used to stabilize ones mood as with SSRIs?
 
I thought Sertralin has some (kappa?)opioid activity?Where did I read that?
 
Well, certainly it would depend on the dosage used. What if just enough was used to stabilize ones mood as with SSRIs?
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They would be still ineffective. Tolerance would appear shortly, one would take it up to 3 times a day to maintain a 'brightened' mood. A depressed person will surely increase the dose if he or she feels it can bring more pleasure. I don't know anybody who would increase the dose of an SSRI to get euphoria, only stupid suicides do that.

I thought Sertralin has some (kappa?)opioid activity?Where did I read that?
Click to expand...

I know it also works via sigma activity but I haven't heard about opioid activity.
 
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