disguyhere

i cant deal with melatonin any more. It used to help me sleep but it gave me the most insane dreams I ever had... and coming from someone thats seen the shit i've seen that's saying something :\ .. try some valerian root pills if the melatonin doesnt do the trick for you. note as good sleep inducing wise but lil more mellow on the body and can help with sleep paralysis issues. what i love <sarcasm> has to be waking up with black shadow masses either crouching on the bed or floating as a formless mass over my head... or the occasional "hall of doctors" black masses that seem to line up on either side of my bed staring down at me .. there's good reason why science has been linking abduction experiences with sleep paralysis..

i smoke daily.. throughout a day.. but in limited quantities... i dont smoke to get blazed i smoke to equalize. It never made my symptoms worse (they didnt need any help for that) ... and it helps me calm down the millions of thought strings i have going at any one time allowing me to slow down enough to work. i smoke from a bat before going to work.. then before coming home from work.. then throughout the night lil here lil there. granted the amounts i smoke would probably down a lightweight. but they dont really make me high high... just ....good. i know there seems to be a majority on the site that can't go anywhere near it but herbs always been a friend to me and i think without it i probably would have offed myself long ago. nowadays if i get in a funk i just lay down.. burn a bit. and then do my meditation and i'm good as for dealing with the daily knowledge of it... i went from promising career in bio-medical engineering, to working a dairy box at a pathmark... to finally getting my shit in gear and all but running reporting operations for a gigantic corporation. I've already learned long ago that if you own your mistakes and accept them as part of your life, then you can deal with the pain the waves of guilt can cause your a lot more quickly, and move on. a good manly cry every once in a while isnt a bad thing either .. and telling yourself that no matter how bad it is and how much damage you did to yourself.. you still survived it.. survived it for a few years at least in your case, 14 in mine. also.. another thing that makes it easier for me personally is that nobody has it together. even the people who will never in their lives understand what life is like for someone with hppd.. not one of them sees reality for what it is to begin with. the more science shows us the more we realize everything we see is kinda bs to begin with.. so the only difference between us and them, is we dont have a choice but to accept that our world is fucked up... while most people go through a denial about theres on a daily basis thats gotta give you at least some measure of relief

there's also something in the line of lupus that is somewhat rarer but with immune system and neurological impacts that can make hppd symptoms worse, or even emulate their impact. Anti Phospholipid Syndrome, or APLS. It's kind of an all encompassing immune disorder, hard to diagnose without specific tests. Lupus can be a symptom of APLS. Same goes for aenimia, mild to severe schizophrenic episodes, minor but frequent localized strokes and heart attacks, incidents where healthy cells are mistakenly attacked by the immune system causing frequent illness, stomach problems, nerve system problems (including muscle twitches, bloodflow issues, and random pains).. it goes on.. my grandfather died after a 3 year run with at least 50+ "micro" heart attacks. Just kept collapsing but the doctors couldnt figure out why. They only found out after he passed that he had APLS, not that they couldve changed anything, but iron supplements may have extended his life a little longer. Found out a year later my mom had it, and then 2 years later I did as well. The genetic bitchslap of fate :\ .. anyways the point of that is to concur with oneday.. Rule out or address the impact from any other physical disorder. If there are things you can address medically get them addressed, and if there is anything lingering after that is addressed then and the symptoms are in line with hppd, then you see if theres anything that works for that for you. hopefully you fair better then me on that front, and dont wind up on a steady diet of pills that seem to do nothing anymore but prolong the inevitable.

i've had luck in some areas.. namely gaining a measure of control of when I get affected. but any success you gain is going to take work and will. same goes with doctors. Nothing will work unless you're trying to make it work. but yeah.. meditation works for me. i lead a relatively normal life now outside of the hour or so a day when i'm at home and I allow myself to "let it all loose" as it were. it's better than all day every day every hour nonstop wizard eyes (adventure time ftw). other than meditation.. sounds cheasy but give yourself a hobby... go hiking a few times a month. learn photography.. learn photoshop.. doesnt matter what you do just that you do .. keeping your mind occupied will go a long way to letting yourself ignore everything that you think you cant.

just hang in there man... it sometimes gets worse before it gets better before its gets worse.... but it you hang in there there's always a better day if you fight to have one .. even as someone thats tried everything.. if your interested in me sharing some "tricks" or techniques or whatever word you wanna call them, that have helped me stay "sane" after 14 years of hell .. then shoot me a pm. your mileage may vary, but trying anything can be better than doing nothing -d

most optometrists wouldnt know what to do with the bulk of my symptoms but i did go to at least 6 different ones in pursuit of answers for my floater situation as its gotten worse each month since it started 3-4 years ago. not once were they able to find anything they could clearly say would cause the level of floaters i saw. the last opinion i got was that the floaters were everyday ordinary ones most people get but never see... but that for "whatever reason" I have an ability to focus my vision so close to the surface of my eye that i can see the floaters clearly no matter where i look. in otherwords they dont know. right now my floaters involve a super big clump in my left eye that leaves a permanent blacked out spot in my vision.. makes me think i see bugs in front of my when i move my eyes too quckly or look at a white or blue surface or the sky. my right eye doesnt have nearly as thick of a floater but it has more smaller ones.. alot are just straight up circles with dots.. like looking at a single see through skin cell. sime are clumps of these dots. twisted together like bent ropes of proteins.. and then there are the cracks. both eyes through the center of each eye but not aligned in any vertical or horizontal direction.. more like an inverse 7 shape.. i have thin black lined cracks in my vision. so yeah ..6 doctors.. obvious to me issues but oblivious to it doctors... no prorgess... and basically me being told theres nothing they can do until i start seeing them in connection with flashing lights which would indicate retinal tears. now how much the floaters has to do with the hppd couldnt say.. other then the ability to see them as often as i do which i think comes from the rest of my visual hppd issues. i think if anything its more a neurologist that we'd need to see to help with those things though. the problem isnt the eye itself. it's the brain. or in camera terms.. we've got this dslr in our heads... the eye are the lens and autofocus systems.. the optical nerve and parts of the brain that process the signals from our eyes are the sensor.. and the little bits and pieces like rods and cones in our eyes are a mix between points leading to the sensor and filters on top of the sensor.. my problem is i damaged the software the sensor uses to process images. the camera still works but it rarely takes focused pictures and it does funny things with colors....through hard work and effort though I added some custom firmware to the sensor that go around the normal processes and allows use of other filters. couldnt say i have a fully perfect stock working camera.. but the camera works enough. one day i'll hopefully find the proper mechanic or even systems hacker who could help me fix the damage .. before autofocus fires off wrong one day and damages the lenses .. ...end random camera analogy

i have a personal theory that a large portion of the visual effects we get are actually internal stimuli from our various biological processes that have been "re-wired" into our visual processing. science is finding more and more evidence that we have way more going on in the numerous visual pathways taken in our brain outside of the main pathway our normal vision takes. the only reason most people do not consciously process these stimuli is that the main visual pathway overloads it. Like trying to distinguish a candle in a room filled with spotlights... it's there, our subconscious uses it for processing cues to help us make decisions in the background. people with "blind sight" or damage to their vision but not their eyes... they use it.. people that are blind but hijack their hearing to create visual signals in their "mind's eye" .. they use it. we just seem to be either a) more aware of it.. or there's been some damage or limitation to our normal visual processing, and our brain's elasticity allowed them to rewire and try to tap into these other pathways to "fill the gaps" as it were. since our minds are used to processing these stimuli only in a subconscious sense, then trying to process it consciously would undoubtedly lead to it appearing random to us.. or taking on geometric patterns that could easily correspond to patterned electrical signals caused by internal stimuli. then again there's also external stimuli outside of the range of our normal vision. I personally believe we all have at the minimum some degree of magnetic vision, and IR vision, and ultraviolet vision. The ability to process these stimuli exist all across the animal kingdom, and we've gone through so many variations of dna to get to where we are, that the likelyhood of the genes that allow it existing in us are high.. but again, we've come to rely on the primary visual cortex as our main sensory system, and any other secondary pathway is overwhelmed by the primary to the point we would normally not be able to consciously observe the stimuli. .. but any one of us who has navigated their nightime home with eyes completely closed, but able to completely see their surroundings in limited detail.... well you should know as well as i do that we're not just "seeing" the light our eyes pick up but other stimuli as well. back on the original topic though... I see my pulse as a quickened speed in the rotation i always see within my visual field... any pain i may be experiencing i see as an orange brightening in a corresponding area of the field.. any of the muscle twitches to full on seizures I get I can usually see coming as blue jagged lines spreading throughout an area of the field.. the odd thing is the location of the "viewpoint" of my "eyes" within my closed eye visual field, seems to be approximately 2 inches above my head and 4 inches behind it. I can "see" a visual representation of the stimuli within myself as if looking down on myself from a 3rd person perspective out of a game like gears of war.. but a bit tighter on my head/shoulder area. I actually feel like I have better depth perception in being able to sense my body position within my visual field then i do looking at things with my eyes open. as for getting the internal stimuli out of your visual field.. once you know what area certain internal stimuli impact within the field, you learn to keep your focus off that portion of the field.. if you see the line reaching up from the lower center of your vision, move your eyes to their top left corner and then move them left to right to left to right a few times, with your eyes pointed upwards. if my ideas on the internal stimuli are right.. and i stress the if... then we control more of what is happening to us then we realize. upper left and right corners within our visual field are usually reserved for external stimuli (from my personal experimenting... ymmv). forcing your attention to these areas helps your consciousness "cover up" the portion your trying to avoid. I've spent a few years no learning to separate out the internal noise and external noise from the true visual information my eyes should be showing me.. I'm far from 100% with it, but it's given me back some semblance of a reality, which is something i long ago gave up on having again. anything I can gain back at this point is in the name of experimentation and hopefully finding people who try similar things that can help me test out these ideas and see if we can find something that can help even just a few of us.things like pulse vision are physical responses that I believe prove that our "hallucinations" are just another layer of how our brains process information. It's a measurable response that if more scientists would take the conditions seriously, would show there is a physical process behind it that maybe could one day be repaired. it's not just psychological, and it's not seeing purple toucans flying off in some weird nam weed flashback.. it's our crazy wonderful beasts of computers we call brains trying to process something consciously thats usually reserved for the subconsciousness with reason. we're not yet wired to comprehend that much raw information. which is why even in the most perfectly healthy mind, the brain is constantly lying to the person to cheat processing on things not necessary for the conscious mind to be paying attention to. but the subconscious mind is always sifting through all that raw information and processing all of the stimuli we couldnt hope to follow along with and helping us make decisions at speeds that would make us think the decision would made for us... if our brains didnt keep on lying to ourselves to convince ourselves we made those decisions consciously. ///// end brain vomitting

I just try to stay as positive as possible.. if you can't joke about something or squeeze out any possible bit of good from the misfortune you endure then you end up letting it beat you.

ahhh i should perhaps have included the </sarcasm> tag on that statement... i'm always forgetting to do that on the sarcastic responses i end up putting online.... le sigh but yeah.. no.. i dont actually enjoy it.. just my very poorly wroded sarcastic way of saying i know exactly how you feel on those inner conversations

"Blair Trip" .... ended up being 42 tabs worth of potent lsd that i thought was only 14... and a pill a shitty mdma that did nothing but give me jaw grind the whole night 1st tab.. took while at work. friends picking me up in an hr.... wow this is good stuff.. stronger then i thought 2nd and 3rd tab... friends will be here in 5.. holy crap this is good stuff... time to go hang with the girl i love and celebrate my birthday quick before going "camping" 30 minutes later.. go to girls house with friends.... she says "hi, your gifts on the table.." and then proceeds to ignore me for the next hour while talking on the phone to a guy who repeatedly treated like shit who apparently once again she was ditching me for to go back to....the seed starts for the rest of the night. 4th tab... on way out of her place.. heading to pick up 4th friend at his job at a wendy's on a busy highway... he walks out of the wendys when we get there... proceeds to run across 5 lanes of traffic, hop a divider, run across 5 more lanes... turn jump up and down.. and ran back across.... he gets in the car and screams out holy fucking shit lets get this night started!!! we go back to his house and prep the rest of the night... i put the remaining 10 tabs of mine in a bottle of oj... down half the bottle...we head out to .....the quarry mindset=quietly devastated over dealings with the former love of my life.... setting.... abandoned rock quarry sitting on the side of a major interstate.. surrounded on 3 sides by tall trees, and on the 4th by a sheer rock face topped by 3 tall office building... cool september night.. perfect full moon within minutes of getting to the quarry things started taking a turn for the crazy... one of the guys cant find 4 of his tabs.. him and another run back to the ones house and look quick.. they get back 30 minutes later, couldnt find it and decided to split some of the ones they still had instead.. other guy who waited with me decided to not take all of his (we had split a half sheet 4 ways.. not knowing it was triple dipped...).. so my friends all end up taking 10.. i take 14.... oj is finished.. walls about to come down 14 tabs of triple dipped acid now in me... pink floyd playing on a cd player... we have our little base camp and decided to go hippie for the night and leave all our posessions in the circle because we would surely lose everything.... and then we started to lose everything.. things began disappearing on us.. where did we put the herb.. who has the guitar... small things at first... we had some awesome conversations going.. cant remember them now sadly but really in depth stuff... and then we'd check the time.... wow.. only 5 minutes passed? how did that happen... we talk again... check the time... wait.. only 1 minute passed? that cant be.... again.. ok... this is fucking bad.. all of our watches are saying its 5 minutes earlier then it was when we last checked.... it was about that time reality was torn from me. i was laying back and watching the trees growing and waving in the wind... listening to granchester meadows.. and the moon was a beautiful full perfect circle sitting directly above... and the trees look even they wanted to reach out to the moon.. oh wait.. what.. what the fuck... the trees are all stretching up to the moon...wheres the sky going... holy fucking hell i'm stuck in a box.. this part is next to impossible to describe but picture a box with a balloon wrapped across the top plane of the box... now take one single point on that balloon and lift up to infinity.. and then put yourself in the box and look up.. that was what happened to me.. and the second i pointed it out to my friends it happened to them too... all of a sudden the 4 of us were in what could only be described as a shared hallucination... the moon was the point pulled out to infinity and stretching down to us in immaculate glory was the gabriel horn of the universe. it was beautiful. maddeningly beautiful... but it didnt take too long to turn rotten.. we all started exploring.. every plant seemed to be growing upwards as we walked by.. i went off to take a piss and the grass underneath the stream stretched up along the rockface and started climbing towards the moon.. each of my friends experiencing similar as we all looked to define the box we were stuck in... and then one of us tried to leave the box.. walk out the path we came in.. but the path was stretched up to the moon as well... just a wall holding us in. up to this point i can recite a precise sequence of events that would become the last "sane" comprehensive realization of my life... for whatever that word means.... we had been sitting at our gathering rock.. they were all still enjoying eden but i was getting worse.. the extra 4 pushing me a little bit further.. the emotions left over from the girl incident dragging me a little more deeply...and then the friends decided to all go exploring again... friend a walks off directly towards the highway... the thought pops into my head "he's going to go kill himself now.. If I were him I would kill myself now. I should just kill myself now because I'm going to be stuck like this forever. Oh god I'm going to be stuck like this forever" friend b walks off towards some thicker trees. his long hair starts lengthening even more spreading down his back, dragging off into a cloak that mixed with the shadows of the forest... the thought pops into my head .."he's in the darkness now.. i'm in the darkness now.. oh god i'm going to be stuck like this forever" friend c walks in another direction but stops.. turns around while 10 feet away from me.. calls out "peace... I'm out"... turns around.. takes 2 steps and vanishes. I turn around.. throw my hands in the air... say out loud.. well fuck it.. i'm insane.. and promptly blacked out collapsing into a pile on our gathering rock. i'm only blacked out for 10 minutes.. but from that point forward there was nothing left i would call sane again... i was still me.. but i wasnt.. i was still in the box.. but i accepted the box was always there and always going to be there... one of the guys decided he was going to try calling it a night.. and go home and take some valium... god i wish i had followed him and taken some maybe sleep right away would have prevented the fallout .. but alas thats a shoulda coulda woulda that is more a never gonna be a... :\ me and the two other guys finally were able to leave the quarry after a bit though.. and we we and hung out in my car.. a nice huge olds that we could all lay down comfortably in and just smoke and try to start coming down... yeaaaaaaah right.. coming back down... it was at this point that whenever i closed my eyes i would be sitting in a a tex avery bar surrounding by wolfs makes catcalls and yelling out repeatedly.. tripping balls.. tripping balls.... the word just repeating over and over in my brain, along with the increasing din of the auditory hallucinations that were only just increasing... a van pulls up behind me on the street we were parked on... and we swear we witness a gun deal going down or something which really did nothing to help the paranoia.... hours are passing... nobody is relaxing or coming down... other guys not as bad as me but still definitely peaking... and its starting to really be changing over to more morning then night... im 19 now... and i'm going to be stuck this way forever... oh god we cant be parked here when morning hits.. the cops in this town would arrest us in a second.. well where the hell are we going to go.. whose going to drive... a & b both say they can't theres no way they can.. me having driven on some sizeable amounts before volunteers.. didnt tell them at the time.. but i couldnt see past the windshield... everything had fogged over and was a blur and a blob of colors.. i drove 15 miles dropping off 2 very terrified friends safely off at their houses.. and then head home.. the matrix had just come out on dvd.. maybe if i watched that and some other shit i can fall asleep... matrix.. no luck... delores claiborne comes on tv... no tiredness still peaking fully... gone fishin comes on.. my god this is the worst movie ever made.. its 2 hours of 2 idiots stumbling from one calamiity to the next with nothing happening in between.. oh my god im going to be stuck like this forever. by the time jacobs ladder came on i felt something was trying to tell me a message... i call my friends and they say they finally coming down.. i should be ok... i lay down.. i close my eyes and listen to thousands of sirens parked outside of my house for 3 hours... its now been 24 hours.. i'm still peaking as badly as i was when i got trapped in the box... and i blacked out again... this was the last sleep i had for the next 5 weeks.. 1 hour.. that was it.. and from that point forward i was tripping as hard as i was on day one for those first 5 weeks.. a friends father gave me valium.. that gave me the first hint of sleep again.. another hour... it would happen like this every 3 or so weeks over the next 3 months... a total of 8 hrs.. the last of which was helped by an antipsychotic... a gigantic horsepill that i never asked the nameof from the guys father.. just that it would work.. this was a man who had a t beam dropped on his spine and was on so much medication to keep him moving that he took the antipsychotics just for sleep... and this pill still only gave me an hour.. starting at the end of month 4 i began fighting back... i would start telling myself a story.. trying to visualize the story in my head with as much detail as i could and to just keep telling the story whatever stream of thought would occur until the story clicked over and became a dream... or as close to it as i was going to get... but fuck i'll take it. it was tough.. really tough at first... i truly believe my body forgot how to sleep.. how to turn of all the noise and let my subconscious come out... and it took me maybe 4 years before i had what would be a liveable sleeping pattern.. The rest of the story well..... as long as the beginning is it only gets crazier and long..ier ... and thats not for this thread... but you know what.. getting this all out in a group of people who could read it and not just immediately first thought think this guy is batshit insane... welll yeah i am.. ... but you know what i mean. this community to me represents a place where i can talk about watching reality collapse and not be told.. ah your just full of shit man.. and i can talk about how even if reality hadnt collapsed.. there was no such thing once i realized .. yeah.. i did get myself stuck. it completely got myself stuck by fixating myself on the thought that i would be stuck like that forever. no fool to blame but myself.. and just to prove it and how sad i really am... anyone wanna guess how often after that I again dropped acid or shroomed without a seconds hesitation? .. I am not a proud person .. but hell if i havent had some experiences i can guarantee not another soul alive has seen just exactly the same. .. and that folks is life <end long winded words flowing from brain>

i enjoy the finer points of arguing with myself often.. when trying to sleep.. when driving to work.. when cursing out people at work who have no business being senior management... i like to sometimes visualize myself arguing with myself while arguing with myself.. like picture a few different versions of myself and let them go at it.. usually most with the same opinion but arguing with themselves just for the sake of it. ah the joys of the depths of our minds

i miss being able to look someone in the face and smile without them thinking I'm a madman... years of inability to take care of myself and an immune system that likes to piss all over any idea of being 100% healthy... i look exactly how i feel... but i wish i didnt have to wear it so damn loudly on my sleeve also fuck spiders.. fuck them in their creepy spider asses. its bad enough i gotta be allergic to you bastards .. and that i have a hard enough time seeing shit crawling out of the corners of my eyes... i dont need your creepy spider asses trying to sneak up on me and make my day worse...

out of shared interest.. what forms has your meditation taken? .. i practice what i like to call eye dancing.. i'll sit in any comfortable balanced position with my eyes closed try to focus on the point in my visual field where the data from both eyes combines into one image.. the closer I get to focusing on this point, a point with 0 information will appear.. the point where our visual pathways crosses is a blind spot for everyone but what i've found is if i focus on this center, and move my eyes in relation to the center I will have a specific significant impact on the noise in my visual field. certain movements make the noise more vibrant certain things make it quiet, and others turn it into a raging whirlpool of clouds rotating around the center. when i need to rest my mind i try to black out the wash.. when i try to rest my body i jump into the whirlpool.. when i have a problem i need to solve i let loose with the noise.. i'm definitely interested to hear what approach you've taken

i guess some people have nothing better to do with their lives.. oh noes.. i responded to the troll again.. so sad

so to get back on topic I'm gonna avoid getting into the "tricks" i've figured out so far and save that for a different thread.. i'm more interested to hear from others what they're going through. how their ercetions have changed.. until I heard about this place through the nytimes story I had no luck ever finding a place to talk to others going through something similar. yeah I'd run into the occasional person with experience with psychedlics but never someone who went as far overboard as me.. or who was dealing with the fallout as bad.. as dickish as it sounds in context it feels good not to feel so alone anymore. as for what i still deal with outside of the things ive had luck controlling... i look at anything textured for more then 2 seconds and i get wall crawl... i have 0 ability to trust surface textures on anything . my depth perception is almost 0 because my eyes like to focus independently and don't line up long enough to pick up depth. i have to trust shadow to judge distances, which sucks when you cant trust shadows to stay in the right place. my eyes also see colors differently.. my left eye gets a nice blueish tint to things and the right eye an orangey tint. trails?? more like afterimages that stay lodged for a few minutes before fading completely. I avoid night driving because between the burn-in image and a halo around most bright lights it's hard for me to judge any kind of realistic distance. About a year after the incident which me and my friends that were there that night refer to as "blair trip" .. I gained a stutter. I've lost most of it in the years since but occasionally it kicks up and I just get hung up on a syllable until my brain kicks in gear and I finish the word. I randomly start getting a building "buzzing" that will build up in my spine and i can ignore it for a good amount of time but at a random point i'll just get a muscle spasm and the buzz will die back off. occasionally the buzz doesnt even happen but i'll start getting one muscle that will keep twinging for hours and you can see it through my skin just popping off back and forth. auditory wise i lucked out.. the first 2-3 years were a nightmare but that thankfully died off almost completely. the night of "blair trip" the quarry we were on was next to a highway. all night the sounds of the highway rolled together into a giant wash of horns, and car engines, and sirens.. over and over and over.. and for at least 2 years straight it had not stopped once. that was the most contributing factor to the initial insomnia i went through. to me 24-7 it sounded like an entire state worth of police and fire engines were parked outside of my house. now though... i enjoy an extremely fine sense of hearing. once the auditory hallucinations stopped my hearing (and sense of smell) were really the only senses I had that i could trust also thankfully though i've been through some big peaks and valleys, my uncontrollable visual hallucinations have diminished dramatically. I used to see people sitting in the shadows and running between shadows when my head was turning.. not even shadow people mind you.. i hold that in a completely different class.. but just people.. there.. sitting in the shadow.. i'd be driving at night and every time id drive under a traffic light i would see someone sitting in the space in front of the passenger seat.. crouched holding their knees.. nowadays the only times i really get the vivid hallucinations are when im trying to sleep and if im actually actively trying to see something as part of my (less call them attention and visualization exercises instead of meditation since that seems to cause a fuss ) .. the things i experience there are for a completely other discussion . i've been able to keep these confined to when im in a safe environment, and usually only when sleep has ceased to be an option for the night. it's a far cry from a normal life and i hope above all else that one day I wake up and it all went away.. but it doesnt seem to be likely for me.. but it's better now then a decade ago.. even 5 years ago.. so you never know.

i didnt imply... you inferred. there is a difference. I can't help how you form your opinions... but dont act like you werent attacking.. need i quote here : " Fortunately, it appears that the first sentance is not something he believes. If it were it would be too stupid to contemplate. And alternative medicines are called alternative because there isn't any evidence that they work. If there was then they would not be called "alternative medicine" but simply "medicine". I don't what you mean by seeing the whole picture but I have taken everything you have said into account. And if you are going to make claims about things that do and do not work etc. then they have to be judged and evaluated, and you can't get defensive when people try and do this." This isnt an attack? This isnt your personal opinion making a decision for everyone else in the world that may believe or utilize some form of alternative medicine? and tell me.. who are you that you get to judge whether something i say works for me actually works for me? No you havent seen my whole picture because you keep treating what I say like I'm selling people something when all I did was INTRODUCE MYSELF EXPLAIN HOW I GOT HERE AND WHAT I'VE TRIED. It's not your job nor is it your business to push me to prove my claims, so stop acting like it is. If you want to argue do it with someone in the you know.. debate forum. you're bordering on troll territory and for what.. to show the new guy whose boss? what point are you trying to make that I havent already said I agreed with? If you're going to argue just to argue then dont bother.. I'm not replying to anything further you have to say, and the second this site fixes it's ignore function you're ignored. trolls gotta troll and i'm not biting. I have enough things to deal with in my life without having to worry what some judgmental forum dweller has to say about it. you have no interest in my opinion or view so why bother pretending to? If you want to waste your time any further please go right ahead, will just prove my point that the only one with an agenda here is you.

Chirs.... Let me be clear. I'm not here to start an argument with anyone. And your first few responses to me I politely replied to. But I will cease being polite. If I'm defensive it's because you've been attacking me since your first post. You have been trying to prove I have some agenda and making yourself to seem to be the one with the agenda. You are clearly not reading nor trying to understand my point of view because you continue to try to twist things I've said to "prove" your point that I have some kind of agenda. I owe you no proof nor explanation because.. well lets see.. I'm posting in an introduction thread where new users are supposed to come and share their experiences with how they got here and what theyve tried, which was all I tried to do. I've made every peaceable attempt to respond to questions but I will not respond to attacks. You are not the hppd police, and if this is how you treat new users who have come to a site called HPPDSUPPORT not ChrisSupport... well then shame on you. I have not once said any of my opinions are the only way nor have i said I do not believe medication should not be tried by anyone nor have I said my form of meditation is the only choice nor have I claimed I'm not willing to consider any other way... But these are all things you have now repeatedly tried to accuse me of. If you had a question about my beliefs or the things I've tried that's fine, I would gladly answer questions asked of me civilly wand without accusation. But to assume I have some kind of burden of proof that I owe you about the things that work for me... Well sorry buddy but you're just not that important. If you don't like what I have to say then dont read it. This isnt the debate thread and you aren't winning any arguments here. You have your opinion and thats perfectly fine. You are as entitled to that opinion as anyone on this planet. But if you expect to have anyone respect that opinion then you damn well better respect that others are allowed to have theres as well. If you can't do that, then I'm saving myself the trouble and just ignoring you now. Its sad that for a group of people who should know how crappy outside judgement feels all too well, that this is how you treat new members to the community. To everyone else..Odisa, ghormeh, thanks for the comments and believe me I didnt feel attacked by you Odisa. I dont mind being questioned or challenged... I do mind close minded people who attack before trying to understand.

if you are going to claim things do not work because you simply do not believe they do then I have nothing further to say to you

maybe it's from my lengthy posts that led to confusion.. but I never once denounced medication completely for all people.. nor for myself. I actually tried to very specifically state that I could only speak to what has worked for me and it may or may not work for others... and Chris.. considering that a lot of people here have dealt with pre judgment from all across the spectrum.. maybe you should try to see the whole picture in what I'm saying before passing judgements which you've done since your first response to me. I'm not here to try to convince everyone I am the light and the way... I'm just sharing my own personal experience. the conversation I had with that yogi had nothing to do with what techniques I ended up practicing.. all it did was help me to understand I was at bottom and needed to do something about it. either way I'm not here to convince you or anyone to believe anything I say nor should I need to explain myself to someone who doesn't want to hear what I have to say. if I wanted that kind of treatment I'd be at a psychiatrist. I'm here because this was supposed to be an open forum for people to share their personal experiences and that is all I tried to do. if from everything I said you still are convinced I'm trying to spread some message on the evils of medicine or to say only meditation can work... then that's your problem because that's far from anything I've said. and if it turns out nobody has any interest in what I have to say, and that I'm going to get the same judgements that have been levied against me for years from the people I thought would best understand me.. then maybe this forum isn't the place for me.

oh and one other quick note... the meditation in its current form is a relatively new thing.. I started towards doing it when first trying to figure out how to sleep again 13-14 years ago, but i didnt really start devoting time to it properly until 5 years ago after 9 years of the hallucinations getting worse. I did a good job of hiding how bad it was for years, but 5 years ago was a really low point in my lie. I was at a point where I felt my only options were to have myself committed or kill myself. I was constantly paranoid, I couldnt tell if the things I saw were real or purely hallucination.. My friends wanted nothing to do with me. It was a perfect storm of suck. But when I was at my worst I had a discussion one night with a deeply religious yogi who practices khundalini. He somehow saw through my bullshit and knew exactly what was wrong with me, and told me outright if you don't set yourself on a path to fix this within 5 years you will be dead. Whether or not what he said was just him trying to get me to pay for his yoga classes or him just speaking a universal truth to me in a form I would listen to.. it did the trick. I started just slowing myself down and listening to myself, and sicne I started doing that I've reversed a lot of the uncontrollable aspects of what i was going through that had been building up for the 9 prior years. Since then I'm more productive at work than I ever had been. I've finally started rebuilding a social life. Even if I cant stop the visual noise I can almost completely ignore it for a large majority of the time. Thing I had for a long time though would never be possible for me to do again. Whether or not anyone else would have the same positive results. Couldnt say. For me it came down to will, and a natural curiosity and talent for visual thinking. I've had people I've discussed my meditation techniques with who have tried the first stages and had never been able to get past them, so for them it would have never helped. But if I can even help one other person whose never had luck with any medications and it on the edge like I was 5 years ago.. Then its worth it to me to share those techniques with anyone interested. and unlike the yogi I'm not charging

to be clear, my issue with pharma isnt the doctors moreso the companies who push the doctors to push certain things. It's gotten better for some areas of treatment for sure, but some medications just arent worth the minimal gain for the potential risks. again if treatment is working for people I'm not going to call that treatment a bad thing. like all medical issues theres a range of severity that I think any treatment will live or die by. here's a good example. Anti-depressant called imiprimine. It's been around many many years, but it was considered ineffective at smaller dosages for actual depression. In the past few years though they've found that imiprimine actually functions to aid sufferers of IBS (of which I'm one of) in both helping to alleviate the chronic pain IBS can cause, and to aid in reduction of stress signals the body fires off that can trigger an IBS "bad day" for lack of a less disgusting description. Up until 3-4 years ago there was a SEVERE lack of any kind of safe medication for male sufferers of IBS. The most common treatments for women caused severe side effects in men. The most common treatment for men... Belladonna... Aka nightshade . A plant toxic and extremely deadly to humans, but used in small dosages numbed the sensation of pain in the users stomach. Needless to say I'm not a fan of using a deadly poison to alleviate a symptom and not fix the problem.. Thats my issue with a lot of medications, not all.. But sometimes in treating the symptom the actual cause is left to get worse. And for whether meditation is a better option, it depends on the purpose. Some of the people in our boots are flat out scared to jump into medications because we may have an extremely addictive personality. Everyone has to do what works for them, and to me the most important thing for anyone to do is to commit to whatever choice they make. For better or worse no medication is going to fix every problem if the person taking it isnt committed to fixing that problem. And for alot of us who got here because of an over-inquisitive attitude towards experimenting with hallucinogens.... Who keep experimenting and digging and digging even after the hole is above their shoulders.. (I've unabashedly dug too far myself.. and find it hard to stop digging sometimes).. may be harder then others to commit to that healing process. As far as the chemicals in the water thing goes though.. I'm not falling into any fallacy. Public water sources in the US and around the world are so filled with anti-depressants from human waste processing that it is impacting wildlife and causing damage to fresh water fish species, among other lower rungs of the food chain. The company I work for had environmental engineering / hazardous waste / air quality / yadda yadda work all over the place. I get to see all of the fun stuff we deal with every week and the results of some of the enviro sampling and analysis performed. It's getting worse all around the US and it's definitely linked to the anti-depressant boom over the past 2 decades. We've only just begun to understand the environmental impact from the chemicals we ingest on the other way out. But anyways thats all off topic and just a personal quibble. I drive an suv so i cant be all enviro crusader on anyone. I've just over a lifetime of not quite the best experiences with doctors and medicine in general tend to have a negative outlook towards it. On the flipside I have nothing but admiration for someone like Dr Abraham who is going out of his way to address and attempt to help fix something that the public in general has no clue about, and psychologists in general treat as us being full of shit or delusional. It's someone like him who will lead the way to a fix if there is one to be found, and I wish for nothing more then him or someone else figuring that out. Until then I'm just doing what I can for myself to get through each day without being so medicated highschoolers are licking me to get a buzz. I already take the imiprimine for my stomach , ambien to get the little bit of sleep I can manage to get on that, daily zyrtec to hold back an immune system based allergy that causes half my body to break out in rashes, naproxen to keep both my shoulders and knees able to move without painful grinding (neither shoulder has remaining cartilage as I've managed to dislocate both shoulders too many times to count and after the last surgery was told by the doctor theres nothing more to reattach.. and my knees have been screwed since I was 15 but theres not much any dr has been willing to do to help me there).. and then good old fashioned advil to keep back the headaches I get from all the other meds :| ... Within 2 years I need to start taking a medication to deal with unavoidable immune system issues, that will likely kill me before I turn 50.. and since that medication is going to screw with my blood pressure I was told I need to take blood pressure medication as well to regulate it. i'm sure you can imagine why I'd not care for medications .. im 33 and i'm a walking pharmacy just to keep dealing with symptoms. my immune system issue is genetic though and will never go away. i'm hesitant to add anything else to that long list not knowing for sure if it's going to even scratch at the surface of the hppd issues I have. I remember all too well the hell I went through trying to battle back the IBS until my doctor finally stumbled on the imiprimine. But the more I read of successes the more likely I will seek it out myself. Even if the medication being tested now doesnt help me, any result would provide more data to the cause for those researching it. and sigh... i rambled again.. i apologize.. I'm sure anyone on these forums can appreciate the problem of the brain not turning off once it gets itself rolling :\ and yes.. medication meditation mediation ... could throw in a few more there that are too close for comfort..

more akin to integration and filtering than tuning per se. the distortion is always there but I've learned to relegate it to an overlay of sorts that for the most part I can ignore.. an example would be when driving. I'll see blobs of color and shadow in the peripheral parts of my vision that cue me into motion of cars and lane openings and such. I have horrible depth perception which I learned to compensate for over the past few years by using these blobs as cues.. on the one hand I know the blobs themselves are a hallucination but my brain is using them as a way of gauging contrast that I'm lacking due to damage in other areas. another example is how I plan out programs I write.. I'll be in a meeting engaged with coworkers and as ideas are brought up I kinda call up this 3 way split screen in my head using the visual wash to sort of layer the 2 side screens over my normal vision. one screen I'll be running visual designs, planning out layout and functionality of the program.. the other side I visually write out the code necessary to produce the data and manipulate it into the layout.. so by the time the meeting is over, I go back to my desk and fly through the programming because I've already written and tested it in my head.. again.. all this stuff is the product of long years of hard fought struggle with meditation and madness. it's not something all of those afflicted with hppd could "master" per se, but a lot of the techniques I think could work to help any of us out with restoring some calm to the wash. one of the easy ones to explain.. eye rotation. with your eyes closed and establishing a relaxed breathing, simply rotate your eyes.. doesn't matter in the beginning which direction, all your trying to do is let your brain pick up on the changes that occur as they rotate..20-30 minutes of this is usually my calming routine for the day. for the other question regarding medication I've tried.. yeah pretty much just those listed, and actually thorazine way back 13 years ago when I was getting no more than a few hrs of sleep a week still. I'm not an all around fan of pharma any more. I think too many of the health problems we face are made worse, not better, by the copious amount of chemicals we are fed by doctors not to mention what of that that winds up in our water supply. I'm not adverse to trying something proven effective but part of me feels the best thing I can do is let my body heal itself or at the least adapt to survive.

no agenda here... more than anything I'm happy to have an open forum where I wont immediately be judged as being full of crap which is the response i've experienced most often when talking to anyone who hasnt experienced the extent of lingering hallucination that I have. Thankfully I have a few close friends who have been through similar situations though not to my extent who I've begun to be more open with lately. my candidness is more a lack of wanting to shake the boat too much here. talking too directly about seeking a non-medicinal method almost to me feels like walking into alcoholics anonymous and telling everyone the solution is to drink more. I mean that's not what I'm trying to do by a long shot, but to some people advocating exploring their hallucination state instead of necessarily trying to be rid of it completely, almost seems tantamount to that. I definitely would like to share everything I've learned and I will try to at least in parts. Its rough to condense 14 years of trial and error into a cohesive narrative without getting a little lost along the way, but I'll try start the sharing with this much (and I apologize if I start getting term-babbly.. alot of the things I've tried I've had to make up my own wording for).. The key to my success at least has been in using the form of meditation I've explored for myself to learn how to once again separate outside stimuli from internal stimuli from internal visualization/imagination. After years of struggle I realized the visual hallucinations I had could be broken down into 3 layers. Things that moved with my eye movements. Things that stayed in played when I moved my eyes. And things that moved completely independently. I would sit and devote at least 30 minutes a pop twice a day to just allowing my CEV's to play out, and making small movements like twiddling my fingers, or specific set of breathing, or keeping my eyes closed while watching a particular scene outside (like facing a wooded area and observing with my eyes closed where the border between sky and treetop met).. Even if I wasnt etching every observation into my memory, my brain would be absorbing them. The elasticity of our brains is what got us into the whole mess but it plays both ways. Just by the repetitive action of observation over time my brian sorted out what stimuli was external from my environment, what was internal from the activities of my body, and what was purely imaginary/visualization. Understand the differences was key to me understanding how to manipulate these layers of the visual soup. Think of it like a tv screen. At first when the damage is done, we have no control over the image. The pixels fire off at random and we simply process the stimuli as one mixed up layer in our visual pathways. But the more separation of the layers that I obtained, the more control over the pixels I gained. Using my visualization/imagination to start turning pixels on and off, eventually I gained a measure of control over all of the pixels. And the deeper I dove into the meditation, it was like moving from an old black and white crt to a modern 4k tv, where at the point I'm at now when I exert effort I have control over every pixel , but at the same time can keep that layer completely seperate from the layer of external stimuli. This is where it starts getting harder for me to describe things without a back and forth to see what whoever I'm talking to understood of what I've said. It starts getting into things like attention and focal points, and utilizing eye motions to simulate rem, and almost hijacking the visual hallucinogenic state to supplement our own natural visualization processes. There are things I've tried that no doubt would work only for me, but that others would be able to approach in a similar methodology and gain similar results if not same results. Again I've been going through the trial and error on it for years, and the more I push the harder it is to turn off the noise as it were.. But I do have a goal in mind for myself that drives me to keep pushing, and its a rather simple goal.. I'd like to be able to see black again.. or blue.. or any solid color for that matter. Because they no longer exist for me. I look at a solid expanse of black and I see red-green .. some blue-green.. and some swirly pinwheel circles of shimmer. and I dont mean i see red and green.. nooo I see a color that can only be described as red and green at the same time without being a mix of the two. Like my mind cant decide which to pick. It is this that keeps sleep away from me. I can't shut my vision off, ever. No matter what medication I've tried (whole range of anti-depression, benzo, etc etc... that one would come across when trying to go through the psychiatric world without outright saying, "oh yeah and my real problem is i took 42 tabs of acid".. ).. I can't revert my vision back to a baseline that allows me to see black... so my goal with the meditation has from the beginning been to re-learn that state... to be able to effectively identify all levels of stimuli that reach my brain through my visual pathways, and learn to block out everything that is caused from my internal malfunctions. And I've come close. In some serious deep meditation sessions I've been able to black out my CEVs for a few seconds at a time. It takes incredible focus for me to do so, and I know I'm still far off from being able to hold it without effort, but I feel one day I can get there. And if somewhere along the line, especially as the product of the research I had only heard about since the new yorker story, someone figures out a medication that offers even a temporary respite, then I will definitely give it a go. anything that offers even a brief period of relief would be a god send. But personally knowing the extent of the damage I've caused myself, I do not hold out hope that more chemicals are the answer for me. We're a species hardwired to be rewired. We've been doing it to ourselves for thousands of years, and it's made us very resilient though subject to being easily fooled by the stimuli our eyes rely on. And although the subject of my topic says otherwise, I dont believe any state that affects our brain needs be permanent.. but for some of us it may be a lot harder then for others to effectively make those changes, by medication, meditation, or time. and just as an example of the resiliency of the human brain. when i was 8, after having already been tested as having an off the charts IQ.. I suffered brain damage at the hands of a pitbull attack that almost cost me an eye and put a hole through my skull. For a year afterwards all I ever dreamed about was the pitbull lunging at my face, and then I'd wake up. This would lead to the onset of numerous emotional and psychological problems for me, but even with measurable brain damage, my intelligence grew. I'm not trying to toot my own horn as I'm not a prideful person, but I credit the elasticity of our brains with the simple fact that not only did i survive the brain damage, but in my brain rewiring itself to survive I gained a deep proficiency with visualization long long before ever touching my first psychedelic. It's very likely that this was also my undoing as it left me vulnerable to hallucinations in a way some people will likely never understand, but I know that among the people here I can very likely find those who not only do understand but share in the reality of my situation. anyways I've rambled on once again... which is kinda another reason I avoided typing too much out with my first post. If you let me go on I will go on for paragraph upon paragraph, and eventually I'll lose any semblance of narrative flow. but I'll end the post with this much. No matter how bad it gets for anyone, even if the permanent solution is not yet available to help us all, there's no reason to give up. If I was able to drag myself back kicking and screaming from a situation that should have landed me locked away in a padded room, then anyone can bring themselves back with some effort. The most important thing is never giving up the will to fight, no matter how hard it may be. Learn to slow down your world and phase out the things that overlap and overlap to saturate your mind with too much stimuli. Learn to focus on only what matters and let your body and mind try to find a way to heal itself. And find yourself someone to talk to even if that person cant possibly understand everything you've been through... Those are the things it takes to survive when the idea of a static reality is questionable.. Also, dont take 42 tabs worth of acid in one shot... 42 may be the answer to life the universe and everything.. but its also way too much acid for one person to be taking in one shot :\

Hey there... I'm not used to talking about this with others as it's been a rough topic to breach even among friends who knew me most my life, but now having seen this entire community built up around the same issue I've suffered for 14 years now.. I think it's time for me to talk. First things first... all stories have a beginning, and mine started well before I touched a single drug. I'm what you would refer to as an eccentric genius. Tested with an IQ in the 160's when I was in grammar school. Nearly full scholarship to johns hopkins. 10 years straight of straight a's.. etc etc ... but more undiagnosed emotional and psychological issues growing up then you could shake a stick at. I still had a strong enough will and mind to get through the bulk of them, but after an extremely rough (emotionally and psychologically) 1st year at hopkins I descended a bit into depression and dove headfirst into the world of the psychonaut. Experimenting with any hallucinogen I could get my hands on, which was a lot as some of my best friends at school had connections jerry garcia would have been envious of. After 2 years of heavy experimentation, I would make a decision that would change my life forever. Cut to the night before my 19th birthday. Me and 4 friends decided we would celebrate my birthday by taking a large quantity of acid and go camping at an old abandoned rock quarry. By that point I was regularly taking between 5-8 tabs worth a trip, and doing so often, so this night our plan was to up that. We would split between the 4 of us a half sheet. Up to this point the acid we had gotten was never tremendously strong. The mistake we made would be to assume that would stay the course. To our bemusement and my horror, that night the acid we got wound up being triple dipped.. a birthday present from my source, of course he neglected to tell us this. As I had taken the extra 2 of the split.. I ended up taking 14x3 drops worth in a 2 hour period.. To describe all of the events of that night would take too long and I'm sure I would be treaded some well worn territory, so instead I'll give the cliffnotes version. 1st.. I had a full on psychological breakdown.. While at the quarry I blacked out for 15 minutes. This would turn out to be the last sleep I would have for the next month. Over the next 4 months total.. I would get no more than 8 hours total sleep. My body had forgotten how to sleep. I would have constant auditory and visual hallucinations. Sleep was but a long distant dream to me as I couldnt force my mind to slow down enough to achieve any state of rest. Nobody around me knew something was wrong. I was as good an actor as there could be, just worked my quiet job in the dairy box of a supermarket, nobody knowing I would see shadow people jumping out from behind u-boats, and get tunnel vision that would turn an aisle into a mile long moat. How could I tell anyone? They'd lock me up was all I could think. So I lived with it. Lived with a 4 month long full blown never stop peaking trip, after taking the equivilent of 42 tabs of acid in one shot. What finally changed things for me was the help of a friend's father who knew what I was going through. He himself suffered serious complications after having a construction beam fall on him shattering his spine. He was on so many medications that to keep him sane he popped anti-psychotics like they were candy. And it was one of these pills that finally let me take the first night sleep I had had in months. Once I finally had the one major break in my sleeping problem, through sheer force of will alone I started to fight back. This is a fight that to this day I still am engaged in. A fight that has had it's extreme ups and downs, and for some time I was really so far gone that I lost all of my friends, and my health started degrading to the point where I let my teeth chip and break because I just couldnt care. Many nights I spent praying I would one day wake up and still be at that rock quarry and everything that had happened after was just a bad dream. My worst years emotionally I pray are long behind me. Again through force of will alone I have finally brought myself to a sort of equilibrium, not by seeking to fix the problems caused by my persisting hallucinogenic state, but by embracing some of the things it allowed me to do. Devoting the past 5 years to the mastery of my own personal form of meditation, I have learned to harness the closed eye visuals I had permenantly been saddled with, and use them to afford myself a depth of concentration few could understand. Instead of trying to rid myself of the peristant visuals that would plague me while my eyes were open... I instead sought a way to control them, and alter them, and layer them over my true vision. Almost giving myself a HUD over my vision where my visual thinking layer would use the distrotions to give myself "extra screen space" as it were... It's helped me push myself to become a major software developer for a major engineering firm, and single handedly designing accounting software for a company of thousands.. But before you think I'm pitching hppd as the solution to the worlds need for focus.... The downsides are once again showing me that there is no take without give. After years ago finally teaching myself how to sleep again, for I had truly forgotten how... I find myself once again at a point where sleep is being taken from me more then I care to admit to anyone who does not know the things I have been through. Without taking ambien, I would get approximately 8 hours total sleep a week. At best. Even with ambien I can only managed 3 hours max in a night. And who knows how much longer that will work for me before I'm once again at the precipice of a sleepless existence. And perhaps even more troubling is how my body is adjusting to the lack of sleep, by engaging in dreams while I am fully awake. Too often in the past few weeks I will try to go without taking ambien for more than a few days in a row, with no luck sleeping, and by the 3rd night I'm sitting there wide awake watching a dream unfold while watching myself sit up in bed.. praying for even a few minutes sleep. Reading the article in the new yorker a few months back.. It was like someone handed me a million dollar winning lottery ticker. Here I was for year afraid to talk to anyone, afraid to tell any doctor for fear of being locked up or having my drivers license revoked (and really I wouldnt be able to blame them.. who would want to drive on the same road as someone who admits to hallucinating 90% of their waking life) ... And now I see hundred of people sharing similar stories and showing similar pains. And for once in my life.. I don't feel so alone. My problem now... I believe I've gone far beyond what you would call high level hppd... there is no medication that will undue the damage I've done to myself, both in that initial night, and in the subsequent years of trying to take control over the problem on my own. To a point, I fear I've also made myself incapable of wanting it all to be fixed, purely from the effort I've put into pushing the limits of my mind.. Efforts that would have only been possible after the damage I had caused.. But on the flip side, I no longer feel the crushing depression that had come with feeling so alone for so long. The thoughts of suicide that would hit after a week straight of no sleep.. thinking to myself that a bottle of pills would take me down long enough to get a few minutes rest... That part of my journey is now behind me, and while I don't believe I can fix myself, my true hope is that maybe I can help others in a much less perilous position as me. If I could by will find a way to come back from something that should have killed me years past, then perhaps I can help others come back a ways too. So I offer to any of you out there who are still afraid of going through the medical pathways.. who are getting tired with cramming pill after pill down your throat to help you find some equilibrium which may or may not ever show... I can't promise you I can change your world, nor would I every try to make such a claim.. but theres things I have tried to ensure my survival these past 14 years now, that I am more than willing to share with those interested. And maybe helping each other out we can push to help some doctors find a more permanent solution. The simple fact is by choice to consume or a combination of uncontrollable factors, our brain chemistry has changed, and our lives have changed because of it. Our choices are live with it, take control over it, or give in and let it control you. I personally choose to take control. Anyways i've rambled for a good long bit, skipping out some tremendous chunks of the story that are best left for another time and place. I look forward to being a part of this community and offer my help wherever it may be useful. To anyone else who thinks they may be too far gone for it to ever get better, trust me. If I can still be here today, breathing and living a productive, slightly insane life... Then you can come back from it too. -D