disguyhere

this is the wrong section for this. should post in the pharm/med section

when i was younger i dated a girl who swore she saw a purple talking toucan after being institutionalized for being a problem teen who took a lot of psychedelics... this is before i found out she was schizophrenic and had multiple personality disorder.... i found that out the hard way when she flipped to the personality of an 8 yr old girl mid coitus. now that was an experience i wont ever forget :| .. point being as far as im aware hearing voices is not something related to hppd. i've known many people with schizophrenia and my sister works with many schizophrenics and it's nothing to be ashamed of. if you're hearing voices, seek help. There is treatment to help manage it, and left unmanaged it can and likely will get worse.

just putting this out there .. probably mostly because im riding the tail end of a series of bad days myself.. but i was thinking it could be helpful for us here who have some really bad days (series of days..etc..) if we could set up a kind of emergency support group.. like if anyone is interested, share contact info in private among a group of us where if one of us is having a bad time dealing we could get ahold of someone else in the group just to have someone to talk it out with. sometimes friends and family are no help at all and i lose sight of any kind of positivity because i have nobody who can relate to how low im feeling.. and those moments are the ones that are most dangerous to people who experience frequent..ermm.. suicidal thoughts and shit.. even just knowing you have someone you can talk to can help as much as actually talking to them. anyways, i dont know how much traction this idea would have, but im putting it out there because i know there were times it could have helped me get out of a funk sooner. if anyone is interested, before we share any contact info let's see how much interest we have and see if we can set up a good way to handle it.. i figure something like this is also helpful, if we know one of us is having a hard time, and all of a sudden drops of the face of the earth, we have ways of contacting each other to try to reach out to them before something bad comes out of it.. anyways let me know what you guys think.

everyone but tinitus

my thoughts have long been that the visual distortions we experience arent necessarily "not there" ... we may be experiencing real stimuli but in a way our brains arent normally wired to see. whether triggered by herb shrooms acid coke mdma or meth.. the reason so many experience so similar of longterm effects is because its not just in our heads. think about how someone would react if all of a sudden they were able to see ultraviolet frequencies of light. if they had no mental reference for that spectrum their brains would still try to assimilate the stimuli.... again think about blind people with damage to the eye but not brain. their brains convert the extra bandwidth to other senses, sometimes picking up things outside the normal range of hearing... some even still pick up visual signals outside of their normal visual pathways.. and the brain winds up converting this stimuli to something somewhat recognizable. i know this doesnt answer the original question, but maybe the question isnt really is it one or the other but, is there really that much a difference?

i appreciate the well thought out response. It's refreshing to see someone who doesn't jump down someone else's throat for disagreeing with their views, and I do agree with you that hope does help. I didn't mean for any of my statements to come off in any kind of negative way, or to say to anyone that recovery is a myth or anything... everyone responds to life differently and some get better some don't.. some meds work for some they wont. Finding this forum was one of the more helpful things to happen to me in years even though it didnt much change the approach i take with my own long term broken world... it did give me a deep appreciation that there are many others out there who can relate when for years I spent my life thinking i was alone (as silly as it is to say when you know 1000's of others take the same substances and go through similar problems).. But even just that bit of validation that the problems i have arent at all unique to me helped bring me out of a really dark phase in my life. so to nightwatch, i hope for the best for you. Don't let anyone else's negatives keep you from at least trying. Had I a place like this 14 years ago and first going through this.. had there been any discussion of medications and treatments... maybe my life wouldnt have taken the turns it did. but then again had i all of those things many of the good things in my life wouldnt have come about either. so take the good and bad out of every situation and let it help you grow and find your own equilibrium.

Visual, I think that may come down to what you regard as hppd or not. See personally (and this isnt to belittle anyone going through any hppd like experience) .. I don't see it as HPPD until someone can say "ok it's now been a few weeks and this isn't going away" .. Call it philosophically debatable or not, whether the actual chemicals leave your system or not when you take psychedelics there is a permanent change to brain chemistry, if only simply from the integration of the experience into your memory. You take acid and you're going to see the world differently afterwards, if only in how you personally perceive it. To me, after a month or two, you can call it a disorder. Then it becomes something systematic that truly starts impacting your life and other aspects of your physiology. If the question was "Will most people who take psychedelics stop having side effects with time?" Then I'd definitely agree with that because most people do reach an equilibrium again. But when you label anything a disorder there is an implication of a long term systematic issue, and the realist in me wouldnt want to sugar coat it for anyone else going through this and say "don't worry, most will get better". In my personal experience most come to terms with it, or find a new baseline that's not the same as before they took whatever substance... and generally stop regarding it as an issue. This is all semantics though. Pretty much everyone here agrees that the current accepted definition of hppd is kinda crappy. It's going to get better as more research goes into it, but that's also never going to happen if everyone that feels different for a few days after taking acid shrooms pot or anything else.. gets lumped into having HPPD. When I was a kid first experimenting if you didnt already know that taking acid would forever change your life, then you were gullible or obtuse and asking for trouble. Yeah, most of the commentary was pure BS, like cracking your back releases acid stored in your spine and causes flashbacks.. but there was enough evidence from the 60's and 70's that it didnt matter if you did it once or 100 times it would still change your perception of the world in at least a small way. Just knowing that that other view on the world exist changes you. That should be expected with any recreational drug. What shouldnt be expected is that 5 months after use you're still tripping at full peak strength. And 14 years later your world can still melt away with moments notice both visually or mentally. That to me is what hppd defines, and where a working treatment would help the most. Again this isnt to belittle anyone going through any level of it, but when you have such a broad definition of a disorder you end up with things like the ADHD generation. We as a society created a disorder that 20 years prior was just called being a kid, then we medicated the hell out of it, and now those kids are becoming parents and half of them have no concept of reality world because they've been medicated from it so long, and their kids are getting the fallout. That's not to say theres not kids out there who really do have a chemical issue that prevents them from having any attention span... but how many more are going to have that issue after growing up with parents who pay them no attention. And now with evidence in epigenetics growing, the more we medicate things unnecessarily the more that will pass down to future generations.

you're lucky you get that much if even bad sleep a night.. i'm on 10 hours total over the past 7 days yet i mentally feel completely awake. my body feels like its going to collapse any second but my brain is all like... eh i got an hour last night.. i'm good. fuck you brain

to me "most recover within months" is completely different than "some recover within months with one of a wide range of medications that dont work for everyone" ... recover within months to me is someone who breaks a bone and recovers within months.. has the flu and recovers within weeks.. things like that. not to be negative about it but with how many people on these forums alone have been in the game for 2+ years, i'd be real hesitant to tell anyone recovery occurs within months, even with the meds. Most of the meds out there that hppd'ers take only lesson symptoms and not remove them. that's not recovery, thats coping.

think its different for everyone but i've never had a problem i n my 14 yrs of this shit with smoking anything.. in fact if i didnt smoke my life would be unlivable. i wouldnt be able to slow down enough to work and i would be able to have any kind of social stability. i know thats the opposite of what alot of people on here say with herb but it's never affected me the way it does some. I've never had anxiety or paranoia smoking... and i think regardless of what brought you here with the hppd, if you had anxiety or paranoia with herb before then you will after.

i'd say myth.. maybe most cases of people who think they have hppd but simply have some leftovers.... but hppd is about the "persistence" ... in time maybe but not months

i work 12+hrs a day sometimes , sitting in front of a computer... the only thing i can suggest is to find the thread of something you enjoy about the things you do and hold onto it. not always easy but i've managed it working this job (with more workload and responsibilities each year) for 13 of my 14 yrs with hppd. it is possible

from a 14 yearer to a 40 yearer.. welcome

once you get that mindset etardnow i do find it gets a bit easier to if not fix our problems, ignore them as much as possible. the paradox is you are completely correct in that every single thing i have physically and mentally and emotionally wrong with me goes through a phase where i wonder if its due to my hppd.. and being so prevents me from doing anything about it right away. once you get past that hurdle though you eventually can move on

sleep definitely plays a role.. i feel 100x better on days where i get even an hour of natural sleep whereas some days when i take a sleeping pill and manage a solid 6 hours i wake up miserable.

i think if any of us knew the reason for that we could make millions :\ ... but i know exactly what you mean. i have a series of really good days for me and then inevitably i have a day that just makes me feel like theres no reason to go on. all we can do is fight our way through those days and hope for the good ones to return

breaking one sense can lead you to perceive other senses in ways you never did before, and hppd can easily be seen as completely fucking the living fuck out of our senses. When I see people talking about thinking their vision can now perceive things like ultraviolet or infrared or magnetism or blah blah blah once they got hppd.. i dont necessarily think of it as something new they gained, merely a filter somewhere being removed.... or to use the camera analogy i love to use : my eyes and brain are like a dslr. i damage the camera's processing chip and it's software. The lens works fine even though it's a bit scratched up but the camera always processes warped looking pictures. over the eyars i've rebuilt the processing chip on my own, never repairing it to showroom condition, but to do so i removed the built in infrared filter cover on the sensor just to gain enough detail to rebuild the image ... a side effect is now i see pictures without graphical anomalies but the coloring is completely shot and black levels are non existent. that i was able to upgrade the software on my own means to me that the possibility had always been there. But for me it took damaging the chip to have the need to try to reprogram it to even know it was possible. I personally believe this is what acid does as well as other psychedlics. The damage we cause ourselves in addition to the "temporary" connections the drugs can cause within our brains, when the brain tries to heal itself it now moves along a path of least resistance to make the repairs but hits along those new pathways the drugs may have caused. Happens without drugs too. Synesthetes cant be considered to be hallucinating. Their senses are just completely rewired. Just because they can smell green and see sounds doesnt mean their crazy. It just means their brain is processing sensory input along crossed pathways. With the billions of connections up in our brains it makes sense that something like that would be normal if not common and/or noticeable.

thing is did it start when you got hppd or did you just start noticing it. I know that alot of the things some people may take as symptoms of hppd i take as being more aware of my senses and body mechanics. in the early years of my hppd i spent time just listening to my body or playing around with processes like muscle movements that would normally be controlled only subconsciously but that with focus i could do consciously, like the whole moving the muscle that stretches the eardums. This also got much more pronounced a few years ago after blowing out my eardrum while sneezing (im a very violent sneezer). But as much as its more "pronounced" since the hppd if i probe my memories i can remember making the scrunching noise way before i ever touched any substance. Its just one of those things you would probably never notice unless you were in a mental state where you almost had no choice but to notice things like that. Again this is something like being able to feel your pulse in your temple. Everyone can do this is they press a finger to their temple long enough and pay enough attention to it. And alot of times its not actually your temple but your fingers you're feeling the pulse through. If you hold two fingers together tightly enough and long enough you'll feel it. But i could be completely way off base.

i responded to this in your other post but im pretty sure its a normal if uncommon thing. i know a handful of people with the same thing and have had it myself for years. i think its more the noticing it thats the problem. it likely happens to everyone in some way but most can tune it out. All I have to do is flex a muscle in my face and i can cause it. You wouldnt even tell i'm moving something but if you happened to have a microphone buried in my ear youd probably hear it.

myself and at least two people i know have had the same sound while flexing face muscles thing you're describing. I think it's a natural if not common thing and dont know if it necessarily is tied to the cyst or just semi related. For me its just when I move the muscles in my neck i can flex the muscles of my ear making my eardrums vibrate. it's fun at times if not semi annoying but i dont know if its something to worry about and the vein pounding thing too.. completely normal if not common. you can visibly see my temples pulsing and muscles twitching throughout my body due to random spasms i get. again wouldnt worry bout it

its a bit late so im not mentally able to respond at length but no.. you're not alone in that

dont know about normal but i know exactly what you're talking about

look into the condition anti-phospholipid syndrome. it is very similar to lupus in that healthy cells are consistently attacked by the immune system. It causes a wide range of symptoms from micro heart attacks and strokes to predisposition for mental illnesses. its supposedly rare but gaining ground. My grandfather had it , my mom has it, and I have it... But the weird thing is my half sister (from fathers second marriage) has it as well. Somewhere in my dads family tree there was a recessive gene for it that passed over most of his family but hit me.. and my half sister.. but also hit me from my moms side.. i bring apls up because i am positive it put me at a severe disadvantage for permanent damage from psychedelics. call the genetics coincidence or call it another roll of the genetic die.. there is definitely the likelihood of genetic predisposition involved along the way

when i was ~11 or 12 my family dentist was sadistic.. no hyperbole he was downright torturous and enjoyed it. I had gotten a random gum infection and instead of doing what 99.9999% of dentists would do and give me antibiotics, he decided to use it as an excuse to play with his new toy. A laser... 18 shots of novacaine throughout the roof of my mouth and it did not a single thing to numb the pain as he cut off the swollen parts of my gums using his new laser.. I've been unable to drag myself to a dentist without literally being on my ass from pain for the 22 years since then. This dentist i just went to.. 2.2 shots of novacaine was it. 2 lil taps above each tooth just to get me pre-numb..and that was all i felt the entire span of the dual root canal. 2 full shots right after that i didnt feel squat on.. and then 32 minutes of him plowing through the 2 root canals and i was done. yesterday got a little more hairy because i was still sore from the root canal 2 days prior, but 2.2 shots, hour in, and i had 2 new front teeth and 2 reconstructed front teeth that you wouldnt even be able to tell had a problem before. It's amazing what you can put yourself through when you finally give up holding onto fear.

a new grill in the mouth.. a new lease on life? it's amazing how much ... better. i feel now that it's fixed. I know i still have issues to deal with but finally dealing with one of the biggest is like dropping a 2 ton monkey from my back. Now I can at least make an effort to become more sociable more engaged... start retaking reality a little bit at a time. so it goes... gotta take some pain to get yourself out of a mess you've made for yourself.