Suboxone causing depression?
Lately I've been having some issues with depression and slight anxiety, and I was wondering if any other suboxone users have had similar experience. Let me begin with a history of my drug usage, I'll keep it as brief as possible....
I'm 23 now, I started using opiates around age 16 or so. For the first few years I did oxycodone almost exclusively until suboxone showed up in my town. I was tired of paying top dollar for OC and I wanted to slowly stop using opiates all together anyway so I moved to suboxone. It was fairly cheap, and you make them last alot longer (for example I could get suboxone for maybe $5 a pill and 1 pill would last a few days or longer if eaten sublingually). Initially when I switched to suboxone I tried to eat as little as possible to manage withdrawal and I didnt really want to abuse it or do more than I needed to because it was a foreign substance. I did this for a few months and slowly began to abuse it more and more. After a while I found out that you could snort it and it would have more or less the same affect as eating it. Even more, I only had to snort a tiny little bit each day to stop withdrawal. I would only snort one little bump each morning per day, and I did this for about 3 months. After a while I started snorting it a few times each day instead of once in the morning. Around this point I went to a doctor and got prescribed suboxone. I wanted to stop snorting it to prevent damage to my nasal passage, but I was so used to snorting suboxone multiple times a day I began doing both. For example I would wake up each morning, eat my daily morning dose (I think I was prescribed to do half of an 8mg tablet in the morning, then half at night) then halfway through the day I would feel the urge to snort more suboxone to get whatever high feeling I could since I was so used to snorting it multiple times per day. So instead of doing one half of a tablet in the morning, then one at night, I was doing a half in the morning, snorting a bump or so every few hours, then eating a half at night. I kept this up over the next 6-8 months, but at each monthly doctor visit my doc would urge me to settle for a lower and lower dose. Over that time period I went from getting maybe 40-50 tablets for a monthly prescription to 8 at the least. My doctor currently thinks I am eating a quarter of a tablet every other day, but actually I am snorting a little bit 4-6 times a day.
Now let me explain the depression/anxiety part of this whole ordeal. The first issue I had was about a year and a half ago when I had first gotten prescribed suboxone. This is when I started doing a lot of the drug, I was eating my prescribed amounts, as well as snorting some each day. It started with some shortness of breath, and general depression but it wasnt too severe. Day after day I would feel out of breath, or a tightness of the chest, and this lead to some anxiety. I figured the high amount of suboxone I was using was the cause of my shortness of breath, but I would still get anxious and deperssed. At times I even had full blown anxiety attacks, once or twice I went to a hospital emergency room but they would only tell me that I needed to stop abusing suboxone and send me on my way. Slowly the anxiety and shortness of breath went away after about a month, and I went back to abusing suboxone for 5 months or so. This leads up to the present day and about 3-4 weeks ago is when I began feeling depressed. It is different than the previous situation though, in that there is not really any shortness of breath, only steady depression, constant thinking of negative thoughts, etc. It would be safe to say that before it was a physical feeling but now its mental. Although my lungs do hurt once in a while now which I gather is from snorting the suboxone, and maybe the suboxone going straight through my nasal passage and landing in my lungs. The depression worries me in that its so random, I dont see how I feel depressed now and not at all over the last 4 years of suboxone use/abuse. I thought about getting checked for cancer (chest x-ray, colonoscopy, etc) because I've heard depression is a symptom of some forms of cancer. I'm thinking the depression could be a result of the suboxone abuse though, causing a chemical imbalance or something.
Looking ahead I'm thinking of two possible solutions. What I would like to do is find a detox that will accept my health insurance and go get completely clean. It is extremely hard to quit on my own, not only am I too tempted to snort suboxone often throughout the day, but I know so many people around where I live that are on opiates that It would be hard to quit while staying where I currently live. The thing that scares me is that if I go to detox and come home clean living my life day to day without opiates will be extremely hard. I'll probably still be depressed, maybe even more so than now, I'll probably have problems sleeping seeing as I've snorted a bump of suboxone almost every night before bed for the last couple years. This leads me to the second solution, I go back to my suboxone doc and tell him that I havnt been doing a quarter of a pill every other day but instead snorting some 4-6 times a day and suggest that I switch to enough pills so that I can eat enough daily and lower the dosage from there. I would like to stop snorting it all together and just slowly taper off by way of eating it, but I dont have access to enough pills to last me so I can do it that way, im only getting like 8 a month or less.
Basically why I'm posting is to find out if anyone else has been in my situation and what you guys think I should do. Also what do you think is the cause of this recent depression, is suboxone abuse by way of snorting a legitimate cause of depression???
Thanks in advance.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
