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DMT Addiction, Withdrawal, Depression

Migrated topic.
I thought I might weigh in as someone who's been using DMT quite frequently over the past year... Ive been using DMT (with Harmalas) to treat my cluster headaches for almost a year and I can tell you that I have never once had a craving, nor withdrawal from using this to treat my condition. In fact I often try to avoid using DMT to treat the headaches if I can. Doesn't sound like addictive behavior to me.

Withdrawal seems to be vague to me. Is he directly referring to withdrawal from DMT, or does he mean psychological withdrawal? You stated "A depressive "withdrawal"" I have never experienced this using psychedelics medicinally. Infact I usually experience what a lot of people call Afterglow, for quite sometimes lasting a month or more sometimes.

Not to say I dont take recreational trips on the DMT, I just prefer to only use it if its absolutely necessary for myself.

And ofcourse none of this is meant to be a model for anyone else, I am simply stating my own experiences and thoughts.
 
'Dr Steven Barker' is not a good enough source unless we know from where he got those ideas.

No offense at all to him, I'd ask the same about any researcher.

A lot of researchers make claims or suppositions that do not stand, or that are currently just speculations and then people take it as if they are facts (sounds familiar, anyone?). So it's important to know where that idea is from. Are the claims based on experimental data from his own experiments or someone elses? How was the serotonin release assessed, how was withdrawal measured? A link to a published paper to support his claims would be the best way to get this going. Otherwise it's like discussing Strassman's judaism model to interpret the DMT experience, fine as speculation I guess but raises a lot more questions than answers and isn't based on facts to begin with.
 
DisEmboDied said:
I haven't received a response from the Nathaniel questions, but I asked him after that first post:

"I wonder if the rebound effect is similar to MDMA?, can the same be said for other psychedelics as well?
Maybe that is why one should not take them for years..."

and he said:

"Yeah. Any drug that elevates serotonin can cause a depressive “withdrawal”. They’re usually brief.
Repeated dosing of DMT does not cause tolerance but the brain does adapt!
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Maybe you could just post the entire correspondence (with personal names/identifiers removed) rather than selectively pulling quotes?

:thumb_up:
 
I have posted almost everything, only leaving out talks about Sturgill Simpson.

His answers are almost very brief and to the point. We have been talking back and forth for about 5 years now, I have visited him at his office a god few times, but it does seem, and is kind of frustrating or discouraging, that after 40 years of studying DMT, he still has not gained much knowledge on the subject, totally with all do respect, one man can only do so much, it is all still up in the air. Not surprising, given the complexity of the experience, and how little we know about consciousness and how the mind works, but for me personally I have given up on trying to "figure it out", is it real?, etc. Science and brain mechanisms is the best we can do for now, maybe forever, but even those mechanics are in their infantile, maybe, stages.

I once asked him what is the ultimate lesson to be gained from DMT in his opinion, and he said that it shows us how little we know.

When I do drill him, he often does not answer. I understand the appeal to authority fallacy totally, but at least he is a good man-in-the-white-labcoat to appeal to, second in the line to Straussman currently. Being older though now I realize that Straussman was the groundbreaker and popularizer of the subject, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he know any more than the rest of us.

I guess for me when the afterglow goes away, after about 2 weeks, or 3, my brain seems to get depressed even though there is nothing for me to be depressed about, everything is great right now. Maybe it is just me, or maybe it is just reality, in comparison, to afterglow.

I will keep you updated. I would like to figure out if there is a reason that I need to stop, though I do not want to.
 
Nathanial.Dread said:
Most SSRIs have affinities for receptors other than the serotonin transporter, so it's impossible to be certain that SSRI discontinuation syndrome is specifically related to 5-HT or not. My hunch is that 5-HT is involved, but that there are other elements to the experience (including psychological ones associated with going off one's meds).
Ex. Sertraline is an 5-HT reuptake inhibitor, a DA reuptake inhibitor, an agonist of the sigma-1 receptor, and an a1 receptor antagonist.
Fluoxetine is SSRI, but also a positive allosteric modulator of the GABA A receptor, (again) a sigma-1 agonist, and possible have some inhibitory action as nicotinic acetylcholine receptors.

For reasons that are (imho) largely political and economic, we spend a lot of time looking at 5-HT activity exclusively when talking about these drugs, forgetting that there are 4 other major neurotransmitters, and literally thousands of more minor ones that all also help give rise to consciousness.
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Thanks for that. Great points. And one interesting thing to add here is that Fluoxetine has a much lower incidence of reported "discontinuation syndrome" than the other SSRIs, and Fluoxetine is actually used to help people who have "discontinuation syndrome" with other SSRIs. The key factor in the psychiatric research seems to be the rate of tapering. As Fluoxetine has such a long half-life it seems to "taper" itself. The other key factor is that most sufferers of this syndrome are using it for long periods. Other ways of adjusting to "discontinuation syndrome" are more gently tapering the drug.

So in addition to the complex profiles of these SSRIs and in addition to the systemic effects that they have across both nervous systems, the evidence points to a chronic/acute divide first and foremost. That is the first razor I would cut with.

So no analogy at that cut exists between an acute drug and one administered chronically for long periods of time. It is crude and not at all helpful to make a comparison between a short-lived agonist and an SSRI in terms of "discontinuation syndrome" or the tapering of a chronically administered drug of any kind.

So no, I don't find that helpful as a way to explain an underlying depressive "feeling" that comes to the fore post entheogenic "afterglow". I'd be much more inclined to explore those depressive feelings or ideations as states and/or emotional realities.

That is where therapy, interpersonal friendship and sharing, or self-analysis will imo be most helpful.
 
Nathanial.Dread said:
The downstream effects of 5-HT receptor agonism are not entirely well understood, but I'm going to echo Snozz on this one. I have a study here that shows that 5-HT2A antagonists inhibit release of dopamine in the striatum, and while that's not direct evidence that an angonist like N,N-DMT might *trigger* release, it's certainly compelling.

Another study has found that 5-HT2A receptors tend to co-localize with an enzyme that helps turn tyrosine into dopamine. The presence of this enzyme is usually considered a good indicator as to whether a cell is dopaminergic or not. The presence of 5-HT2Ars on dopaminergic neurons suggests that a psychedelic agonist might trigger dopamine release.

The big questions is: why doesn't that orgasmic feeling happen all the time? If I shoot up a bunch of heroin, I'm going to get that dopamine release (and the consequent euphoria/analgesia) every time. That doesn't happen all the time with psychedelics (sometimes you can get the opposite), which makes me think that the phamacological activity of DMT is a few steps removed from the release of dopamine, which allows for other things to have some input into what release looks like.

DMT also acts at pretty much every other 5-HT receptor, and a few receptors that are not serotonergic at all, so this is just a tiny, tiny piece of the puzzle.
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Great points. As far as I have looked into this and correct me if you have better literature, a broad spectrum acute 5HT agonist will excite/inhibit 5HT pathways and lead to acute cascading effects in different ways for different people at different times. One of the most interesting aspects of 5HT is its broad systemic import in both nervous systems?

The euphoria, if it occurs, is a sometime downstream event of an acute 5HT agonist?
 
Nathanial.Dread said:
DisEmboDied said:
Any drug that elevates serotonin can cause a depressive “withdrawal”. They’re usually brief.
Repeated dosing of DMT does not cause tolerance but the brain does adapt!
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I still have not seen anything suggesting that N,N-DMT releases 5-HT in the brain. The idea of a serotonergic circuit that modulated the release of more serotonin seems intuitively weird to me, but biology is strange, and so if you've got a study that showed increases in synaptic 5-HT after administration of a psychedelic tryptamine, I will gladly eat my words.

And I'm pretty sure that it is not true that all drugs that elevate 5-HT cause depression afterwords. There was some interest a few years ago into a drug called 5,6-Methylenedioxy-2-aminoindane that acts as a highly selective serotonin releasing agent, and the consensus I saw on drug communities was that it produced very little "high," and had no real comedown either. Of course, these were samples taken from less-than-ideal RC chemical vendors, and taken in less-than-controlled conditions, so take it with a grain of salt.

Blessings
~ND
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Good points again ND. The original comments are just too coarse and not granular enough to be useful here.
"elevates serotonin": no. DMT is a 5HT "agonist", it is not serotonin.
"withdrawal": no. see acute/chronic distinction. Withdrawal as concept is on chronic side of divide.
"adapt": so coarse as to almost have no meaning in this context.

What is meaningful may be the depressive feelings that are coming up for the OP?
 
...the brain attempts to readjust its normal “balance” but usually does not attain the same state.
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That's the whole point of all psychedelics. If there were no lasting effects, then there would be no point in using them.

Otherwise, I think that anything that is pleasurable is potentially "addictive", and that's why I've given up on the idea of addiction altogether. I'm addicted to air, food, water, sex, drugs, excitement, love, music, friendship, and learning. The problem of "addiction" is not the use of drugs, but rather it's the lack of all of those other things. (This is my non-medical standpoint)
 
Nathanial.Dread said:
If only we knew that much about the neurobiology of psychedelic drugs. The fact of the matter is, that kind of systems-level analysis has not been done (keep in mind, the amount of red tape required to give a human being a psychedelic makes it essentially impossible.

Part of the problem with determining the effects of a 'broad spectrum 5-HT agonist,' as you put it, is that there's more than one kind of agonist. Just looking at the 5-HT2Ar, there are some agonists that are psychedelic, and some that are not. Psychedelic agonists elicit a different pattern of intracellular signaling than non-psychedelic agonists [1], and trigger the expression of different genes [2].

That said, most of the evidence points, in my mind, towards a kind of 'amplifier effect,' where psychedelic drugs dis-inhibit information transmission circuits, allowing more of whatever is in the brain to come to the forefront of consciousness. If that's euphoria, more euphoria will come through. If it's fear, then the experience will be dominated by fear, etc.

I discussed the differences between psychedelic and nonpsychedelic 5-HT2Ar agonists, and their implications, in this post, which no one responded to.
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Thank you so much. I'm going to read that post.
 
Maybe I do have depressive tendencies since returning to baseline after 2 week afterglows seems bland, mundane, boring, stupid, in comparison. But I mostly started questioning the connection after Barker said that DMT blast-offs cause rushes of neurochemicals with rebound effects, similar to, but not as profound, as MDMA. He also straight up told me years ago, eye to eye, that DMT use can cause depression. I always wondered about that in the back of my head, I will ask him to clarify. Maybe it returning and realizing that "this" is the bad trip. :) , in comparison.
 
Weird. I don't notice a rebound effect to that extent. I usually feel great for a couple days and then back to my normal mood swings. Which could be characterized as common. I'm usually in a good mood with normal everyday stress to bring me slightly down from time to time, those down times usually only last a few hours with some lasting until I goto sleep.

I personally would suggest trying to increase your levels of serotonin through supplements right before you drop into depression and see if that has any effect. Then do it again a few times to see if it a reproducible occurence. Then try without supplementation.
 
DisEmboDied said:
I understand the appeal to authority fallacy totally, but at least he is a good man-in-the-white-labcoat to appeal to, second in the line to Straussman currently. Being older though now I realize that Straussman was the groundbreaker and popularizer of the subject, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he know any more than the rest of us.
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If I may ask...

Where do you get these hierarchies from? What is the need for them? Why use them?

I find Strassman's ideas to be boring and not relevant to my own experiences. Last weekend, I asked Rick why he's repeatedly stated that he feels it is important to use a monotheistic model to map DMT experiences in order to get traction with "Westerners." I asked why "gaining traction" was important in a model...isn't it important to be accurate when modelling something? Isn't accuracy more important than acceptance/traction? I asked him didn't he think it would be inherently limiting and possibly dangerous to try to use such a familiar/simple model to map something as ontologically challenging as DMT?

You know what the good doctor replied?

"I've been asked this question before and what I have to say is this. When you're fluent in biblical hebrew, have read all the kabbalistic and related texts, and have reviewed the rabbinical commentary, then we can have this conversation."

:lol:lolwut:lol:

So not only did he assume that I know nothing about my own heritage (and he could have asked whether or not I had any understanding or what level of understanding I have) but he also ignored the question while making an appeal to authority.

But here's the thing that really gets me...he said he's been asked this question before, and it seems, imo, to be a rather important question if he's proposing a model for understanding...especially when the model proposed has so many clear issues. So, IF he's been asked this important question before, why is he dodging the question rather than coming up with a meaningful response? This seems remarkably defensive and rigid.

Just because sactioned researchers play with these compounds in legal settings, it doesn't mean they have any grasp (superior or otherwise) on what's going on. I think that giving these people's ontological opinions/conjectures greater merit simply because they conduct sanctioned research is a mistake. Appealing to their authority is a poor substitute for working things through ourselves.
 
SnozzleBerry said:
DisEmboDied said:
I understand the appeal to authority fallacy totally, but at least he is a good man-in-the-white-labcoat to appeal to, second in the line to Straussman currently. Being older though now I realize that Straussman was the groundbreaker and popularizer of the subject, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he know any more than the rest of us.
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If I may ask...

Where do you get these hierarchies from? What is the need for them? Why use them?

I find Strassman's ideas to be boring and not relevant to my own experiences. Last weekend, I asked Rick why he's repeatedly stated that he feels it is important to use a monotheistic model to map DMT experiences in order to get traction with "Westerners." I asked why "gaining traction" was important in a model...isn't it important to be accurate when modelling something? Isn't accuracy more important than acceptance/traction? I asked him didn't he think it would be inherently limiting and possibly dangerous to try to use such a familiar/simple model to map something as ontologically challenging as DMT?

You know what the good doctor replied?

"I've been asked this question before and what I have to say is this. When you're fluent in biblical hebrew, have read all the kabbalistic and related texts, and have reviewed the rabbinical commentary, then we can have this conversation."

:lol:lolwut:lol:

So not only did he assume that I know nothing about my own heritage (and he could have asked whether or not I had any understanding or what level of understanding I have) but he also ignored the question while making an appeal to authority.

But here's the thing that really gets me...he said he's been asked this question before, and it seems, imo, to be a rather important question if he's proposing a model for understanding...especially when the model proposed has so many clear issues. So, IF he's been asked this important question before, why is he dodging the question rather than coming up with a meaningful response? This seems remarkably defensive and rigid.

Just because sactioned researchers play with these compounds in legal settings, it doesn't mean they have any grasp (superior or otherwise) on what's going on. I think that giving these people's ontological opinions/conjectures greater merit simply because they conduct sanctioned research is a mistake. Appealing to their authority is a poor substitute for working things through ourselves.
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Strassman is a quack. His original study was executed well, but his treatment and interpretation of data was and is callous and unscientific. I agree that just because these few lucky scientists have gotten approval to use DMT in their research does not mean they understand any more about it than any average lay person (though one would hope it were the case). Guys like Strassman are (aside from politics) largely the reason why the scientific community has no respect for research into psychedelics.
 
DisEmboDied said:
Maybe I do have depressive tendencies since returning to baseline after 2 week afterglows seems bland, mundane, boring, stupid, in comparison. But I mostly started questioning the connection after Barker said that DMT blast-offs cause rushes of neurochemicals with rebound effects, similar to, but not as profound, as MDMA. He also straight up told me years ago, eye to eye, that DMT use can cause depression. I always wondered about that in the back of my head, I will ask him to clarify. Maybe it returning and realizing that "this" is the bad trip. :) , in comparison.
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I can sympathize with depressive states, especially in relationship to "reentry". I'm well acquainted with a wide variety of depressive anxieties, states, and thoughts. In investigating the variety of depressive phenomenology or what some call "display", I find it helpful to inquire into both my relationship to that display and what that display is in relationship to. So first and foremost, I accept the depressive "pole" as a fact in my emotional life. I'm curious about it, for myself, as a real part of my experience. I find that orientation helpful. I'm not worried about my worry. I accept it a little more than I used to.

I can say with some confidence that depressive display is an aspect of my psychic life that I'd like to explore and understand and not just "push away" or "avoid". From my perspective, as someone who has not chronically used a coping chemical, I can't point to any chemical as the "cause" of my depressive displays. And I would find it crude in the extreme to use any of the language from chronically used coping chemicals and addiction counseling to apply that to an acute, selective 5HT agonist and the reentry into my usual habits of mind that occurs after a very short foray into hyperspace.

So, when Barker, bless his heart talks about "rushes of neurochemicals" with "rebound" effects or that the use of DMT can "cause" depression, I find that way too crude in the extreme. It comes off as just noise.

The etiology or "cause" of depressive states, let alone "depression", is a very complex affair that demands great care before statements are made. "Mental pain takes great care". People who work in these spaces take great care to distinguish, for example, depressive states or displays from "depression". I don't see that sensitivity in Barker's psychological language. I did not hear from you that he said, "I don't know enough about you or your personal history to say anything of meaning about what you are experiencing and why".

I don't see care in his pharmacological language either. I see rushes and rebounds and monovalent causes. I don't see systems, analogues, or probabilities, or functions, or inhibition/disinhibition.
I don't see the acute/chronic distinction. I don't see a complex discussion of the variability of mental states and mental/emotional display. I don't see qualification either. I don't hear, "I have no fucking idea, but my wild guess is, based upon the best research...."

Then again, I don't go to Barker or Strassman looking for psychological insight or for mental flexibility or richness of language and metaphor. That is not their forte. Critical readers and listeners of Strassman such as Dale Pendell have described him as a "literalist". I don't find him well equipped for the paradoxical and twilight world of everyday human psychology in general let alone the unboundedness of hyperspace. I find him rigid and monovalent. I appreciate what he has done in the Establishment and I honor his ambition and his stubborn spirit. I just don't expect him to be capable of subtle dialogue and playful and humble shared enquiry into the unknown. Especially, I would not go to any "authority" who does not know me for help on what is going on in my psyche or my "brain" or my personal life.

A skilled in the psyche individual will probably take a long time to get to know you before they ever make a statement about the "cause" of any state. They will probably not come in as an "outside authority" or talk about rushes and rebounds. Anyone who jumps in with such rough language to discuss the specifics of your individual life is probably not doing you much of a service. Their authority may be reassuring? What is the cost of the reassurance derived from the man in the lab coat who knows little of the very specific and all important reality of your very specific life?
 
Snozz: I feel kind of like Strassman (and the whole Cottonwood Foundation, really), have gone a bit off the deep end, as of late. I don't know where the whole DMT/Kabbalism thing came from but it seems totally out of left field to me.

Blessings
~ND
 
Nathanial.Dread said:
Snozz: I feel kind of like Strassman (and the whole Cottonwood Foundation, really), have gone a bit off the deep end, as of late. I don't know where the whole DMT/Kabbalism thing came from but it seems totally out of left field to me.

Blessings
~ND
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You know I agree. It's like he took a 90deg turn all of a sudden. Sounds to me like a scapegoat answer for some strange reason we aren't seeing.
 
anrchy said:
It's like he took a 90deg turn all of a sudden. Sounds to me like a scapegoat answer for some strange reason we aren't seeing.
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He's trying to sell a book...this is the world we live in, sorry to say.

Even researchers gotta make rent.
 
Well I think he should be well versed in pastafarianism before being allowed to partake in any other studies with dmt. Strassman do that and then we can have this conversation.
 
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