shaolinbomber

Switch to Valium. Try to get 40mg/day dose prescription. Im telling you it works so much better than clonazepam. Klonopin lost it's value and potency for me pretty quickly but i've been on 40mg of Valium/day for about 6 months now and it's been working wonders day after day without losing it's strength.

I'm here

Your symptoms sound rather mild to me. I wouldn't sweat it too much. If you need an escape from reality and just need to relax and forget about HPPD and all the baggage that comes with it, valium, in my experience, makes me feel totally normal again. Now it doesn't fully take away from visuals bit it is BY FAR the BEST benzo at reducing dissociative disorder to 0% and i've been on it for over 6 months now and it has never lost any of it's potency.

I think Valium should be reconsidered as the benzo of choice to treat HPPD and similar visual/DP/DR patients.

Exercise is good too and on the VERY RARE occasions some nice opiates are a god send.

I look at myself in the mirror and flex my muscles. That usually does it.

Psychiatrists used to think that dissociation was a multiple personality disorder. My guess as to why they thought this is because people with DID lose the sense of their formal self identity and to an outside observer who is listening to someone explain the symptoms or the sensation of it, it would sound like the patient has bouts where his personality randomly changes when the fact of the matter is that the dissociation only makes it seem like you've lost all sense of who you are.

It's a trick that your mind is playing on you. It's an uncontrollable defense reaction of the brain when your conscious perceives a mind/life altering change in reality.

Soldiers returning from war get it all the time. PTSD. I used to think the DP/DR was caused by a physical change in the brain but now as I have experienced short time spans where my dissociation (which only manifests into DR for me) was not there and my reality/environment seemed completely normal and familiar again. These are on days when my visuals are lower than normal.

After seeing visuals 24/7 for the past 2 years, or however long any of you have had it, I wouldn't understand why someone would want to use them again after being in the never ending trip. It would be a huge relief just to be out of the psychedelic world again.

I wasn't aware that there was someone working on the HPPD theory before Dr. Abraham. Horowitz, back in 1969, seemed to have been on the right track from what i've read of his explanations of the causes.

It seems as though the research community has just about everything they need in terms of theoretical approaches and ideas on how HPPD is caused and ways it could be alleviated and now it looks as if all that is missing is the medical equipment to test these theories. I could be wrong though as i'm not at all plugged into the medical research community.

David, have there been any advancments in the technological field of study since you've began your work? The last I remember about it was that the fMRI and the QEEG were the most accurate machines that could identify the problematic areas causing the disorder.

High doses of Diazepam and opiates are the only thing that lower my visuals. Clonazepam never lowered visuals for me but only helped anxiety. I'm currently getting off klonopin because I believe it to be a weak benzo in quality compared to Valium. Valium reduces my visuals and my anxiety without totally destroying my memory.

I've had this for 2 years and not until recently (about a month ago) did my symptoms begin to improve. Unfortunately, no one can give you a set time period when your symptoms might start to fade, if they will fade at all, as Jay has explained. The only thing you can do for now is to try and continue to live your life and not let this condition bring you down. I'm speaking from experience. The first year I had it I wanted to be high 24/7 just so I wouldn't have to stop and think about what had happened to me. It's a hard thing to accept, but accepting it isn't giving up so to speak.

Hang in there. There are bright minds working out alternative treatment plans as we speak. We should be so lucky that there is anyone who is willing to dedicate their time for a relatively small community of sufferers because lets face it, HPPD doesn't really compare to some of the horrible diseases and mental disorders out there, but nonetheless it is a horrible condition to have.

I've seen some of my visuals begin to diminish only recently and I've had this for 2 years. It seems to me that HPPD is the cause of, not damaged, but altered neuronal circuitry in the visual cortex. In my opinion, the alterations effect the response time of GABA mediated inhibition of excitatory currents that, in an HPPD patients brain, continue to circulate much longer than normal. Some of the symptoms I have (visuals) that, for me, are evidence for that explanation, like afterimages, trails, ghosting, etc. have begun to dissipate. The ghosting is not as pronounced, meaning the double imagery is not as big. The trails aren't as long in my field of vision as they once were. The afterimages do not linger nearly as long as they used to. This, to me, are signs of natural improvement by the brain to fix a broken valve, so to speak, in the visual cortex.

Another argument for easy treatment is that when I combine certain drug combinations (I don't advocate anyone doing this at all so please don't do it) like opiates and benzos, my visuals nearly vanish. I mean almost all of them. The only one that doesn't seem to be affected by any drug is the visual static and that seems to be the visual manifestation of the ongoing excitatory currents in the visual cortex that is always there without needing visual sensory excitations from the environment to manifest into a visual symptom.

But having said all of that, I agree with Merkan. Unless you are devoting a career to the study of this, like David, I think it wise not to dwell on hypothetical questions and especially not on the board where it can snowball.

Sounds like it has a similar effect on the NMDA gated ion channels that psychedelics effect. Speeding thoughts and the "trip" like sensation sounds so familiar to a mushroom "trip" and If im not mistaken, psilocybin does the same thing in brain to cause this to happen.

I would not recommend smoking weed or fulling around with cannibanoid antagonists. Stick to benzos (valium is the best for me) and painkillers if you are desperate and really need some temporary relief from HPPD/DP/DR.

"In addition, distortions of time sense, self-image, or reality sense may occur." this is 24/7 for me.

Hi, this is my first post in this forum.

I have had HPPD for about 8 or 9 years now.

My urge to talk about sleeping issues has led me to this thread.

I actually don´t have any hard time falling asleep, but since I got HPPD I have some disturbing symptons that are pretty hard to explain to people in general.

In my first years of the disease, I used to have dreams that were so vivid that I woke up and stayed lying in the bed still dreaming the same dream for about 1 or 2 hours.

While that occurred, I had no body feelings, and no sense of self at all. Just terror.

After a few years, after been on olanzapine, risperidone, antidepressants and clonazepan, those symptons started to mild.

By now I still get vivid dreams, but one other thing has becoming the center of my worries.

I´ve noticed that for a long time now I wake up every mourning feeling that the time has not passed - the next day is merely a continuation of the day before. I noticed I can´t tell diference in time. Everything that happens taste like past, I think I kind of lost my time perception.

I didn´t use to associate this with sleeping patterns, but as I got to study a little closer these symptoms, I started to remember what felt like to have a good night sleep - and I just recalled that it feels like being refreshed, as born again to a new day - a feeling that I haven´t had since HPPD.

I don´t know if any of you guys ever felt like this.

Rgds,

John

I hate this aspect of the disorder. It feels like time has been molded into one perceivable period and it drives me insane.

There is definite neurological changes in the brain causing HPPD. There is no other explanation for it. It is a seizure like condition that is continuous. All of the scientific research thus far shows it to be a neurological problem stemming from over excitation in the sensory lobes.

When i bombed 350mg of powder MDMA I knew something was wrong on the comeup, I just didn't know how wrong it was. The roll was very intense and to be honest not even enjoyable. The next day felt like the usual hangover from rolling. Then the next week it began. The dream like state, noticing the visuals, etc.

I used to use opiates and H rather extensively because it gave me so much relief from the condition that the addiction that developed was stronger than normal. It drove me to want to be on it all the time not just because of the feel good high, but because while im on them it feels like I have my life back. It reduces many of the visual symptoms for me and also vanquishes the dp/dr.

On the other hand, opiates can be very bad news if you dont know how to control yourself. If you have an addictive personality, recreational opiate use will turn into an opiate addiction VERY quickly. My advice, if you want to continue to use them, use them 2, or max, 3 times a week. This will keep your tolerance down and will also avoid the physical dependecy that your body will develop if you take them everyday.

Cocaine, Meth, PCP, "designer" drugs and psychedelics are the drugs i will not touch or not ever touch again. Any stimulant raises Norepinephrine in the brain and this is what causes the increase in visuals. If I were you, I would stay away from cocaine. If you want to have a good time and have some self control, take a couple vicodins. Talk about a vacation from HPPD, opiates are IT.

Im going to be trying to work around my criminal background to be able to get a full-time summer job while I finish up my AA degree at school. Daily basketball is on the list as well as partying/hanging out with friends (drug free of course). Call of Duty Black Ops will be another activty ill be enjoying as well as weightlifting in the gym and going swimming.

Of course, but I think opiates are hard drug to work around, the addiction is (from what I can gather from knowing addicts) a lot worse than what we are suffering (give or take some people)

I wouldn't bash anyone down for self medicating, that would make me hypocritical, but I do not codone it, especially opiates.

I only use opiates 2-3 times a week at the most and it's mostly on the weekends. I used to use them almost everyday and I quickly learned that the constipation, the tolerance and dope sickness is not worth it at all. I actually started to get into tar H (snorting) and after about 3 weeks of that I came to my senses and made the choice to quit before I found myself at a deadend down the other road with no where to go. However, I get headaches quite frequently and am prescribed Tramadol and I take that as prescribed and the effects greatly diminish dp/dr as well as visuals. And they clear up my headaches too.

So since having acquired HPPD, I found my way to hydrocodone and eventually to Oxycodone because of self-medicating purposes. Slowly I started to notice that with the side effect of pupil constriction from this class of drugs, most of my visuals clear up. Starbursts and halos vanish, trails are reduced, ghosting is reduced, etc. Basically every symptom is reduced until the rebound when the drug wears off and then of course everything comes back and is worse until i sleep it off.

I'm not encouraging people to self-medicate with pain killers for this purpose at all. Infact I advise against it. I simply want to know if anyone else has an opinion or experiences they'd like to share as im very interested in this aspect of the disorder. (pupil size in relation to visual intensity.)

I would wake up and wonder where the last 2 years of my life went because having HPPD with DP/Dr feels like my life has been put on pause and im waiting for it to resume.

After reading all of the research and literature about the subject, post 1 in this thread was my best guess of what had been disrupted, the thalamocortical feedback loop.

A good and simple summary of David's post would be that the thalamocortical loop, in an HPPD scenario, recycles sensory information throughout the brain much longer than it should. The failure of the GABA mediated inhibitory response mechanism theory for causing the excessive feedback loop makes the most sense to me.

I've experimented with ridiculously high doses of multiple benzo's a few times and, although I passed out from the hypnotic effects rather quickly, what little I do remember is that the visuals were lessened greatly.

Here's an easy read from wikipedia about this theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalamocortical_dysrhythmia

And here a bit more indepth review of clinical studies on the theory.

http://www.pnas.org/content/96/26/15222.full.pdf

I got a naltrexone prescription and it did not do much for me. Actually it made me feel very bad. I only took it 1 night because that was all I could handle. I only took 1/8th of a 50mg so I took a little over 5mg. It's very powerful stuff so anyone who decides to try it I would suggest going very low on the amount at the beginning.