I have had  severe post traumatic stress disorder for nineteen years. It was not properly diagnosed for the first five years I suffered from the disorder. I was only able to bring the disorder to a manageable state by becoming very conscious of the symptoms of adrenaline release and making myself use up all the adrenaline I released through heavy exercise. I wore out a ten story flight of stairs in the building next to my office by running up and down them until I was exhausted whenever I had a sudden adrenaline release; sometimes I had to do this two to three times a day. I return to the office, shower, and go back to work.

It took a period of four years from the time I was properly diagnosed to acquire coping skills sufficient to manage the disorder. I use biofeedback techniques to generate alpha waves which relax me sufficiently to stop the adrenaline cycling, at least if I have exhausted the adrenaline supply loos in my bloodstream. I have managed the condition successfully for ten years now without medication for it and despite using a variety of street drugs.

It is essential to the management of the condition that you understand what it actually is and why it does what it does to you. Your adrenaline and cortisol systems are out of control, overstimulated, and running wild. Your brainstem releases norephenephrine into your bloodstream too easily, you get a sudden surge of adrenaline, and you don't use it up. You have free adreanaline still circulating in the bloodstream from the last release, and before it is used up or depleted, you have another release, pushing the level of adrenaline in your bloodstream even higher.

You reach a point where the adrenaline in your bloodstream keeps you nervous, edgy, and agitated all the time. I couldn't sleep past two in the morning for several years when I was suffering through the worst of it. The edginess makes you much more susceptible to release even more adrenaline. Soon you realize things that never set you off with an adrenaline rush now do so easily. Then you reach the point where your adrenaline levels are so high the adrenaline itself triggers the release of even more adrenaline... and you being the cyclic release of adrenaline into the bloodstream which you can't stop and cannot control. You realize you are a snowball rolling downhill that nothing can stop.

In the process the brain uses up far too much norepenephrine, lacks enough of it to use as a precursor to make Dopamine or Serotonin, and you find yourself in the deep well of the blues, unable to feel any positive emotion at all. The deep well of the blues that marks that stage of the disorder is the blackest, most hopeless place you can find yourself. You crash at the end of long downhill slope, exploding into a thousand fragments, wind up in treatment, sedated, isolated... until you get your adrenaline and cortisol levels normalized.

If you are released from treatment without an understanding of the physiological basis for this psychiatric disorder, you make it just fine until some upset gets the adrenaline monster stirred up again, and the cycle starts over, and you find you don't know how to stop it, and it revs up until you crash and burn again. There is no magic pill for the disorder, and no cure. The disorder is caused by physiological conditions in your body related to the release of cortisol, a stress hormone, and adrenaline... and until you understand what is happening, when, and why, and how to deal with it, you will be destined to repeat the cycle of crashes so familiar to PTSD sufferers. Once you understand what is going on, what triggers your adrenaline releases, and learn how to burn up the adrenaline you have secreted to keep it from lingering in the bloodstream-- you can control the condition and keep it from becoming a problem.

The odd thing about the disorder is that the psychiatric profession seems to be out of touch with the rest of medical profession on this disorder. Most doctors now recognize the physiological basis for the disorder; the psychiatrists still try to treat it as a psychiatric condition rather than consider the psychiatric problems as symptoms of the underlying physiological disorder. You can't treat the psychiatric conditions without dealing with the physiological component and have any luck at controlling the problem. The majority of psychiatrists I have talked with about the disorder are insufficiently informed of its causation to be very helpful at all.

"It was not properly diagnosed for the first five years I suffered from the disorder. "

Yup . A VERY good point ...... one needs GOOD doctors . There are far to many people out there that make selfdiagnosis and then try to get treatment for it .  Things have to be diagnosed properly by profesionals as its to easy to see some symptoms and imagine more so that a person thinks they fit into a diagnosis box . = each illness has a list of symptoms and a set of criteria and there are a lot of those diagnosis and boxes that are similar BUT not the same .

Aspergers , PTSD , ADS , ADHS and HPPD are good examples . Talking to people who have been diagnosed with them and then looking at the standard diagnosis criterioa has shown me over and over that a lot of those diagnosis are false .

Unfortunately since the internet this is becomeing very common .

Behaviors that occur secondary to the post traumatic stress disorder may be irrational and counterproductive, but there is no mania with PTSD. There is severe depression, but no mania, which is  the distinguishing characteristic of bipolar disorder. I went to five physicians over four years trying to find out why I couldn't handle the stress of a high pressure law practice anymore. Every one of them at some point asked me about my dreams, and I told each of them casually, probably nonchalantly, that I did not remember my dreams, without giving them a history of my dream experiences or guessing why I do not recall my dreams. When I did not report dreaming about the traumatic event, they dismissed PTSD as a diagnosis, and then each later decided they were stumped.

Behaviors that occur secondary to the post traumatic stress disorder may be irrational and counterproductive, but there is no mania with PTSD. There is severe depression, but no mania, which is  the distinguishing characteristic of bipolar disorder. I went to five physicians over four years trying to find out why I couldn't handle the stress of a high pressure law practice anymore. Every one of them at some point asked me about my dreams, and I told each of them casually, probably nonchalantly, that I did not remember my dreams, without giving them a history of my dream experiences or guessing why I do not recall my dreams. When I did not report dreaming about the traumatic event, they dismissed PTSD as a diagnosis, and then each later decided they were stumped.

Many soldiers are comming back doing things, sometimes violent things, which exhibit many characteristics of mania. The adrenal rushes your talking about sound similar to mania as well. Regardless of the classical definition trust me when I say that mania is not always happy. Most of the time it is but going off when in a bad mood leads to very bad things. However most of the time mania/hypomania is a wonderful thing. I wish doctors did not spend so much time attempting to cure it, its a drug in itself... its a natural high that needs no drugs. It feels very similar to amphetamines in its early stages. To suddenly for no apparent reason hop out of a deep depression and be king of your castle with the world under your thumb feeling is not something I wish to cure, its something I wish to stabilize into a steady state. No higher, no lower.

first off, saying hello to the house conciliere.

second, i've found myself suffering that type of hair trigger temper after years of abuse i dunno what you call it.
i just realized one day it was better to give than it was to recieve.
so give i did, and kept on giving, and giving more beatings, and things i can't go into.
i just thought it was the "i aint having this shit no more" syndrome.
correct me if i'm wrong.
i don't keep a dsm IV handy.
 i got to that point it made sense to me to dish out pain without giving it any thought.(action is faster than reaction)
inflicting pain is quite pleasurable, but only for a fleeting moment.

oh, and sedit if you were only that lucky i include myself in that category the most productive creative members of our "society"
are constantly hypomanic.
problem in my case, is it goes from feeling quite grand, to irratability, irrational actions, broken relationships, zeroed out bank accounts.
trouble with the law, and a slew of other problems too.
like "i can't believe i slept with that last night"
and of course the flipside is the day of reckoning, and all the shame, and embarassment that comes along with it and, the very real consequences too.

no i've been in rougher institutions in my formative years look up straight inc.

for fun we would jump up and slug people we did'nt like this was just everyday amusement.
seen stabbings, people getting choked out, u name it and all at the tender age of 13.
Rape was also common staff to females one guy raped this 14 year old gave her 20 bucks and told her to have a nice life.
so violence is normal to me unfortunately society takes a dim view of that (the very society that breeds these situations)

Interesting about the cyclic increases in adrenergic activity. might have to start taking some notes for myself as to when that kind of thing happens.

I wonder if it has anything to do with my being tired so often, to the point of nonfunctional.

Interesting also Salat, that you speak of muscle stiffness and poor digestion, makes perfect sense when there is a large excess of glucocorticoid activity and adrenaline release. My girl has the same issues though, but the inverse situation when it comes to steroid levels, not producing more than traces of ACTH, and I think, probably, little CRF also. She is always suffering muscle aches and digestive upset

As for diet, I don't really eat much, mostly fish when I do, and various carb-rich snacks. I try to eat more protein than anything else, but I guess I don't do so well there, not as much as I could, I don't have much of an appetite.

Salat...what sort of glutamate dysregulation do you speak of? I've noticed, as I think I said, that moderate use of NMDA antagonists, specifically methoxetamine (I need to order some more, actually) seems to squash all the symptoms I mentioned in my first post, especially the paranoid aspect. I know its likely not the case, but all the time, I think 'cop car' when some engine starts. Especially early in the morning/late at night, but still, the fight/flight response kicks in.

I will be interested to see how memantine performs. Although I have a hunch I might prefer the MXE, I'm not too confident about memantine, due to the alpha7 nicotinic antagonism of the latter, and AFAIK, memantine doesn't bind the PCP site at the NMDAr and the fact its an uncompetitive antagonist at NMDAr rather than acting at the PCP binding site.

Trials will tell, though.

I certainly would make a poor vegetarian. I don't eat vegetables at all, at least, not most of them. Tofu is about the only exception, and chickpeas, or kidney beans in chilli, although I don't have that often. Hmm..I fancy chilli now I post that

I would probably starve to death as a vegan. Perhaps you are right though, and I should keep a diary of who I eat..I mean..what I eat, oops....

I'll dig up the references to the glutamate disregulation when I get home, I'm on the road now and limited time on the computer.  It makes perfect sense to me that ptsd involves disregulation of the metabolism since the intent of the Flight or Fight response is intended to provide us with optimal resources for surviving a short term crisis.  After PTSD type events occur, there can be difficulty in getting the organism back to homeostatis.  Other symptoms include emotional numbing, which feels like I don't care about anything.  It's a bit liberating, except that eventually your emotions show up again so you wish you hadn't said or done things while you were numb.

glucocorticoids interfere with the binding of insulin - causing insulin resistance and can cause catabolism of muscle tissues.  It also damages brain cells.  There are many pieces to the stress/ptsd puzzle and I'm still trying to gather them all together to effectively recover.  Time without stress and with drugs to assist with neurogenesis seem to be needed.

Salat

I'm not so sure about that jon. The dose-response curve does seem rather steep Looks like one to bee careful with. Toady is looking forward to it, should bee arriving early tomorrow, he had it overnighted, its been waaaay too long since he tripped. His last dose of P.cyanescens last year was stolen by his former housemate, the psychotic thieving bipolar attention-seeking goatwhore that she is...damn, does tsathoggua ever want to skin her and boil her alive in pure capsaicin.

I shall look into the DHEA derivatives, they sound interesting, alhough the data on DHEA gives me cause for concern, what with its connection to certain cancers. Do the 7-C=O and 7-OH-DHEA derivatives carry this risk?

As for the AMT, dosage shall start small, at 20-30mg per os, or maybe 2-3mg smoked, Toady's scale has a +-10mg resolution, which isn't bad, and can certainly sufficec for this compound, weighing a larger quantity and division thereof, prior to storage in IPA or EtOEt for liquid dosing. People seem to vary hugely in their individual response/tolerance to AMT, erowid even has a warning to that effect under the dosage section. Currently reading trip reports on it to get a feel for the stuff prior to going ahead with it. Still, looking forward to it, very much so. My amphibian friend has tripped many, many times on methoxetamine, and is thinking of doing so on a couple of PCP analogs, but as I say, the last dose of mushrooms, was taken from him by Lady Smallpox the pestilent gorgonharlot.

What SHE doesn't know however, is that a deadly Conocybe or Galerina species was also amongst those drying mushrooms, well, she knows of a rust brown sporeprint being taken, but what she doesn't know, is that it was among the dried mushrooms she stole.

Serve the bitch bloody well right if you ask me.

Have you done AMT jon? or is that a stupid question:P

Did you notice any memory improvement with the DHEA derivatives?