drug testing

I stopped taking Zoloft a month ago because as SSRIs always do, it stopped working.  I understand a lot about how drugs and physiology work now, and it's frustrating how wrong so much of the conventional wisdom is.  If you take any drug every day, your body will get used to it.  It will build up in your system, you will both become dependent and develop tolerance.  You can increase the dosage, making the problem worse, or you can stop.

SSRIs are especially bad in this regard, because they must be taken every day, and must build up in the system to work at all.  So, their functionality is inherently antithetical to efficacy.  Another point worth mentioning, is that cross-tolerance is also a thing.  If you switch from one SSRI to another, you'll have an immediate tolerance to the new one, also.  These drugs are extremely similar in what they do, and slight variations don't bypass tolerance much.  You can try SSRI after SSRI, looking for the one that works, but surprise, none of them are ever going to work, without a good long tolerance break.

This should be common knowledge, but instead psychiatrists will look at me like I've got three heads for saying it, because it's not what the pharmaceutical companies tell them.  Yes, these highly educated professional authorities are wrong and I am right.  Absolutely.  Still, I've been seeing my psychiatric nurse practitioner, in the hopes of working something out.  He finally agreed to let me try dexamphetamine, but it comes with this long list of demands because it's a highly controlled substance.

I get it, most people are retarded children that would abuse it, without question. It's highly effective, even if you don't really need it, so people will take it every day, more and more, until ruining its usefulness and undermining their health, both physiologically and psychologically, in the process.  The same way they do with caffeine, but caffeine works very differently and has much less harm potential.

It's annoying, but most of it is easy to accommodate.  They want to count my pills regularly to make sure I'm not using more than prescribed and the like, but they also needed to do a urine test.  I told my nurse that I self-medicate with cannabis every day, so he knew I'd test positive for it, but the demand was that my numbers come down over the next few weeks.

So... THC Metabolite reference range < 5.0 ng/mL

...my results > 1,000 ng/mL.  LOL

Self-medication isn't just another way of saying abuse.  It means that whatever I'm medicating will no longer be mitigated.  I will stop vaping for a few weeks, but that means becoming more anxious and suicidal, with nothing to protect myself from that.  I'll try getting more meditation and exercise in, but I'm not terribly optimistic about being in a state of mind conducive to that.

This is an appalling and irresponsible approach to mental health treatment, the likes of which I blame for Jenny's suicide btw, but I have to go along with it, because I'm desperate.  There is a chance that once it's out of my system, which takes a few weeks, I'll realize that I'm better off without it.  I guess it's about time I find out for sure.

Unlike SSRIs, Dex can be taken as needed, work for a few hours, and then it leaves the system.  So of course, they want me to take it every day because they're fucking morons.  THAT'S NOT HOW STIMULANTS WORK.  I'll be taking it three times a week, at carefully chosen times to maximize efficacy and prevent tolerance.  However concerned my nurse is about addiction and whatever that means to him, I'm both more concerned and more knowledgeable about it all.  Number one, DO NOT TAKE IT EVERY DAY.

Most of my life, I've promoted the concept of self-acceptance, particularly in regards to mental health, and the same applies here.  Psychoactive medications are tools that can temporarily help us rise above our endogenous limitations, but they can not change who we are.  If you try to use a drug to escape who you are, you will fail.