Why it all doesn't work

After a few months of research of various scientific studies, mind/brain theories and experiences of various disorders posted on the forum, mostly in the personality disorder department, attacking this from all angles and perspectives I have come to the following conclusion.

Medicine is in the wrong track and has been for years. That's why they don't work.

The basic root system that causes most of the issues is the fear/desire(approach/avoid) system, this is obvious but they don't seem that focused on figuring it out or are just plain stupid(I suspect myself of cerebral NPD, please dont mind). It an evolunionary very old system and newer more conscious brain regions piggybacked onto it. So, if we ask the question what comprises the basis of the fear/desire system there is no straight answer from medicine. Dopamine is still beleived to be the main desire facilitator while fear isn't even recognized in such a "neurotransmitter" way - thus, there is absolutely no treatment for fear itself except - various sedatives and drive depleters. Similarly there is no treatment for anhedonia as anhedonia is caused by fear. This brings us to the reason why no medicine really works. Most disorders stem from fear and anxiety. No pharmacological medicine touches fear itself. It seems most scientists do not even consider a neurotransmitter responsible for fear as they propose dopamine is the reward chemical.

I will explain why this has happened and how it actually works.

Fear/reward system basic neurotramsitter/receptor networks are based on mu opioid and kappa opioid receptor networks. The opioid receptors have been researched exclusively for pain management. They are a taboo for anything else, thus the constant blunders with the likes of dopamine/serotonine etc. Only recently the kappa opioid system has been found out to be related to fear rather than reward. And this should have really set the ball rolling but it didn't.

Fear response is coordinated via dynorphin and kappa opioid receptors. kappa opioid receptors facilitate many functions depending on brain/body region. In the body, they cause analgesia, just like mu opioid. This is analgesia to prepare for a feared event. In the brain they inhibit dopamine in the mesolimbic structures(decreases perception of reward as we'll see later). This causes acute anhedonia - to distract from rewards in the face of fears. The main function of interest of KORs for me is associating memories with fears. Dynoprhin, by activating KOR (kappa opioid receptors) in the hippocampus causes fear memory recall. Fear memories are recalled and dumped onto the pre-frontal-cortex for resolving a fear avoiding solution. This proces of resolving the fear avoiding solution is also "modulated" by dopamine, just as desire aproaching solutions. Dopamine is perception control. The more dopamine, the more the feared memories seem fearful and the desires seem more desired. Dopamine increases focus on the "task at hand" be it a fear or a desire. Dopamine increases black & white thinking because it increases valence of the memories used to resolve strategies. It also increases the perception of strategies. Dopamine is just a perception control "tool" neurotransmiter. It is drive. Dopamine is the first neurotransmitter to appear in evolution. In single cellular lifeforms level of dopamine is relative to distance to food source(chemical sensing). In humans for example in one brain region dopamine is highest just BEFORE orgasm and plummets as orgasm STARTS. Dopamine is expectation/perception control. Dopamine is involved even in movement. A person moves his hand not by flexing the muscle until the desired position is reached, but by imagining the desired hand position and the "lower tool" networks do the work of flexing the muscle. Dopamine controls the vigor of movement through perception of where the hand needs to be and how soon - when. Dopamine is used to singal "distance to expectation" which results in modulation of drive. This is how dopamine is involved in skeletal muscle movement and why parkisons move the way they do.

Dopamine infact has a single general function in the body and dopamine networks are used by other networks for this function. Dopamine is perception control. Changing perception causes drive. Imaging the hand to be up causes drive for it to happen. Imagining a pot of gold behind the rainbow causes the drive to get it. Imagining a ghost in a dark room causes the drive to exit it or turn on the light. It performs the same function actually in all systems. Thus, playing with dopamine(l-dopa, ritalin, concerta, wellbutrin, amph...) always causes sideeffects, it just depends how the drugs penetrates where and what is the natural level in your body in ceratain systems. Increasing dopamine in a fearful state increases anxiety as many users of the above drugs know. It also often causes compulsive gambling and stuff like that. Decreasing dopamine(antipsychotics) causes various sideeffects, worst of all is tardive dyskenisia but the regular one is numbing of general life drive.

Mu and kappa opioid are systems two sides of the same coin - fear/desire. They compete with each other for "drive"(remember how fear disables dopamine in the reward part of the network). They cause drive by increasing perception of feared/desired possibilites using the dopamine networks. All this is then dumped onto the conscious(prefrontal cortex) for resolving.

Not only do they compete with each other but they also regulate each other asymetrycaly. A reward can seem greater than a fear and override the feeling of fear - acutely, causing the chasing of a reward and ignoring the fear(thus drug use). Long term - the fear system will upregulate because it is not normal for rewards to keep overriding fears(thus long term stimulant use always leads to paranoia and eventualy psychotic paranoia). Reward system is there to prolong life(feeding, breeding and in mammals - playing/friending has piggybacked onto this), fear system is there to stop end of life(destruction). Thus the fear system upregulates to match the activity of the reward system. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work the other way around and this is infact quite logical. Being in a fearful situation does not validate upgrading the reward system to "comfort" you. Death is threatening, even if it is a chronic threat, the reward system will not upregulate to "match" - this would be maladaptive in nature.

So, this is important with addictions. Addictions keep abusing the reward system, causing the fear system to upregulate. Once the drug/whatever is out of the system the fear system remains upregulated and you have depression/withdrawal because of it. You need the drug again to override the upregulated fear system. Fearful people, PDed people tend to "self medicate" with drugs rather than just use them for fun. This is why it happens and why it helps. The fear system downregulates slowly over time. but disordered people cling onto childhood fears that are subconscious and never let go. these fears are triggered simply by being around people, or having to do something another person will judge. they cause lifelong maladaptive thinking.

The fear-kappa opioid system is responsible for fear memory recall and storage. This infact facilitatetes fear acquiring and fear extinction. In reality, amygdala doesn't forget fears. PFC learns contexts in which it can/should inhibit amygdalas fear. The contexts are the "fear related memories". When standing on the edge of a tall building you inevitably feel fear. If there is a big cushion below - this doesn't really help much with the fear. All this happening is memorized and related to the fear via kappa opioid receptors and dynorphin. When you jump and survive, this too is memorized and associated to the fear by the same receptors. Thus, the same receptors memorise the fear before and after, they memorise the context of extinction, they memorise that the cushion helps to survive. Next time you'll fear less and less becase the recall will invoke the memory of survival and that will reduce the drive to avoid it. But only in that situation. Standing on some different edge of a building with no cushion will invoke the full fear.

So, researching chemicals that effect kappa opioid receptors and reports of use actually confirms everything I postulated. Kappa agonists salvia divinorum and ibogaine cause massive fear recall and extinction visions, even preverbal fear memories. Both cause an afterglow of calmness and content although ibogaine is quite more advanced and epic in its action. Ketamine also touches kappa and is able to provide a few days to a week of nondepression from a single acute use, just as salvia. All three cause instant depression release AFTER they're out of your body. no drug does this. no other drug is able to come near their effectivness even after months of constant use.
Salvia and ibogaine(and i believe ketamine) are the only known substances to actually reverse drug tolerance. Any drug tolerance. Salvia can do it by low dose periodical kappa tickling. Ibogaine can do it in one 36 hour session!!! Ketamine also through low dose periodical kappa tickling. Although noone realises this connection of ketamine to salvia and ibogaine, the effects of ketamine are eerily similar and only after much digging I did find that ketamine does infact also agonize kappa opioid receptors. Main and most researched action of ketamine is basicly NDMA antagonism and it has been noticed that NDMA antagonists reduce the speed of tolerance acquirement(memantine is popular for this) - this is a secondary way to do it - it interferes with LTP processes but is not able to revers tolerance, just slow it down by inhibiting the low-level LTP process that facilitates it).

But the key are much ignored kappa opioid receptors. They connect salvia, ibogaine and ketamine. All three plague the internet with reports of instant antidepression effects of even the treatment resistant depressions. People have resorted to electroconvulsive shocks and failed only to have their depression releived completely after a 40 minute ketamine session. Salvia can often induce the same effect and ibogaine as well. All this is uncontrolled use so there's all kinds of reports, but find me a single report of any medicinal chemical actually treating depression without after a SINGLE use and causing the person to be depression free for the next period of 3 days to a week without any drug in their system - and thus WITHOUT ANY SIDEEFFECTS. No official drug can ever dream of doing this not in 1 case of a million.

Experiences people have on ibogaine > salvia > ketamine confirm all this. Google it. Read erowid. Try and find stories of people who did not use it to get off heroin but to fix mental issues. Unfortunately, neither of these can be patented so... not much profit in research.

Furthermore kappa antagonists have been recently developed and are being tested in animal trials. They can be patented so there is progress. While I do not think simply inhibiting the fear system is better than resolving the fears themselves - the kappa antagonist are very interesting as well. One account of use of JDTic from some person kappazappa sounds insanely good. Google it. The person was in a very bad mental state, wasnt talking or leaving his room. Day 1, first pill, of trial he was happily walking around talking to people looking them in the eyes, feeling connected with them and sharing love, also spontaneous erections(he was ED before). After a few days he developed an urge to finish college and find his calling(!! compare that to a prozac/zoloft/whateverSSRI course, after a few days the suicidal ideation begins - does that really sound like it's going in the right direction?). Only one other account is of the psychonaut dave pearce, he says it's a good nootropic - well, he may not have a PD to solve with it.

Anyway, this is why it all doesnt work, they're on the wrong track for years. They're abusing the lower level control systems like dopamine and serotonin and creating side-effect after side-effect.

Most of my reasoning is gathered from pubmed studies of pharmaceuticals and neurology and theories of mind(theory of mind, empathising-systemising, freud, klein, perceptual control theory) and also trying to pair it up with evolutionary progress. I can't really be bothered to refind all the resources and put urls but I'll be glad to find and provide proof for anything anyone finds suspicious as a fact.

ASPDs have less fear than most people, at least so it seems.

They never really claimed to have drugs for the PDs, yet they insist on treating them with antipsychotics and antidepressants anyway. Anxiety drugs too.

I'm BPD. DBT has helped with alot of things. Psych drugs didn't help. And I'm looking into trying reparenting. It's a strange idea, but it might help me to work through my interpersonal relationships problems.

What is reparenting? I haven't heard of that.

Furthermore, let's see the implications for mental disorders.

desire
-> unsupressed internally
-> approach
-> success in acquiring
-> reward


desire
-> unsupressed internally
-> approach object
-> failure in acquiring object due to obstacle
-> anger at obstacle
-> unsupressed internally
-> success in destruction of obstacle
-> reapproach object
-> success in acquiring object
-> reward

desire
-> unsupressed internally
-> approach object
-> failure in acquiring object due to obstacle
-> anger at obstacle
-> supressed internally by fear
-> envy
-> destruction of object
-> reward

desire
-> unsupressed internally
-> approach object
-> failure in acquiring object due to obstacle
-> anger at obstacle
-> supressed internally due to fear
-> envy
-> destruction of object supressed internally due to fear
-> failure + hate

desire
-> supressed internally by fear
-> envy
-> destruction of object
-> reward

desire
-> supressed internally by fear
-> envy
-> supressed internally by fear
-> fantasy
-> reward


etc...

i can write more and start from fear... but dont have the time now.

there's all kinds of combinations all stemming from fear and desire being surpressed at several levels (ideally all three id-ego-superego). each supression causes a transformation of the drive. we identify this as distinct emotions but as you see - they are all various combinations of fear/desire resolving into a variety of drive modes(anger,envy). The first level of drive mode is probably resolved by the id itself. desire to acquire an object can be stiffled by fear of the objects owner. if it is not stiffled, the object is aggresively acquired. if it is stiffled by fear it leads to first level id-envy. superego then perhaps censors the envy as inappropriate redirecting this drive inwards - into hate and fantasy. i beleive ego has a play in it to, but suffering from NPD it's hard to resolve this as my ego is nonexistant. anyway, that's how it all works pretty much, i may have missed something or not, but it is obvious that we do not really have so many emotions. we have two basic emotions actually flip sides of the same coin. they interwene and resolve into complex schema emotions but all this is still run by the same systems. there is no neurotransmiter for envy or brain center. it's just a complex PFC emotion schema that we learned to feel differently but is fueled and created from the basic fear/desire systems.

having said this, i believe there is perhaps another basic emotion - a mammalian one, and that is the emotion or dimension of affiliation/familiarity. can't really talk about this one with NPD. i believe this again is a piggyback system and it does also use the reward/fear system as its tool(reward of affiliation, fear of losing it). this system, also by complexing in the same way with fears/desires i think provides the feelings of security, truest, content, love, beauty, sadness etc - the "weakling" emotions that NPDers never feel.

Anyway, point of this post is to underline the importance of the fear/reward system as the origin of so many disorders. It is time for science to stop messing around like blind fuktards they are. Why on earth is someone researching what dopamine does in some remote brain center and then determines that when you cut this brain center off the person cant move his left foot and remember even numbers. All this seems really useless, directionless, pointless. I can't begin to explain my digust with the fact that inspite the obvious source of all these mental malaises they are still fiddling around the brain parts and neurotransmitter as if they knew nothing about nothing.

minotauros wrote:ASPDs have less fear than most people, at least so it seems.

More prominently ASPDs have impaired temporal reasoning. They have fear, they just can't plan, resolve strategies. In other words, and ASPD can feel fear in the moment where it is caused directly by the environment around them, as in standing on the edge of a tall building. But lets say you're on ground level and you say to an ASPD that if he does something he will be thrown of the edge of a tall building - there is no immediate fear so the ASPDer doesn't care, he does what he wants until the danger is immediate and cued/triggered by environement threats, not by planning consequences.
The ability to plan and resolve long term strategies is I think a feature exclusive to humans and great apes. This ability is impaired in ASPDs. People with mPFC damage - they also act ASPDish, especially if the damage is done in childhood. ASPDers and people with mPFC damage both suck at iowa gambling task. Look it up if interested. I'm not sure if this is a criteria for ASPD but it should be.

They never really claimed to have drugs for the PDs, yet they insist on treating them with antipsychotics and antidepressants anyway. Anxiety drugs too.

I'm BPD. DBT has helped with alot of things. Psych drugs didn't help. And I'm looking into trying reparenting. It's a strange idea, but it might help me to work through my interpersonal relationships problems.

I probably have primary NPD with BPD and SPD traits. It's all just a garble of symptoms anyway. IMO it's all fear induced maladaptive thinking patterns manifesting as various traits that group together in a few usual ways bringing forth the stereotypes for the various PDs. infact it seems everyone overlaps in some way or another.

minotauros wrote:I'm BPD. DBT has helped with alot of things. Psych drugs didn't help. And I'm looking into trying reparenting. It's a strange idea, but it might help me to work through my interpersonal relationships problems.

reparenting is an idea on the right track, unfortunately i beleive it is doomed to fail.

the childs developing brain offers little resistance to teaching while your fried brain will not want to learn. furthermore you are filled with fears/sadistic super-ego shame etc etc all stopping you from dropping the mask, letting go... and you need to if you want to reach the state where your mind is open to emotionaly learn and establish a stable ego.. the deep burried fears the "inner child" clings onto to create these protective avataras are almost impossible to surface to conscious in therapy. AFAIK it was NEVER achieved for NPD, not sure about BPD.

my idea is kinda similar. ibogaine session reseting my brain, reintegrating my ego by extincting repressed fears that split it. this is the start, a clean sleight and a basic integrated personality and most importantly - no stupid fears. the following months the ibogaines metabolite - noribogaine keeps BDNF in key brain areas high. this causes accelerated learning and readapting, coupled with the exctinted fears making you receptive to emotions i think this could work. 2-3 months in a very healthy environment after an ibogaine session seem like a possible therapy for me. unfortunately i cant afford 3 months off work so i'll have to do this in an unhealthy environment... ill at least try and get a good period of the year to sync it up, like christmas although all my family is PDed, but still...

What about when it DOES work? I 'm just curious. I tried for years and years to build a good life unmedicated, and medication changed my life. It's a given there are plenty of people who shouldn't be medicated, (forced meds are a whole other debate.) but what about the people it DOES work for? It works for me. I'll be medicated for the rest of my life. Happily. My life was hell before meds. Been hell on some meds, worse than unmedicated. But the right med saved my life. So, because it didn't work for YOU, it's all a scam, evil and no good? Shouldn't be available for those who actually benefit from it?

Which med and which diagnosis? If it isn't too intruding?

tallis wrote:What about when it DOES work? I 'm just curious. I tried for years and years to build a good life unmedicated, and medication changed my life. It's a given there are plenty of people who shouldn't be medicated, (forced meds are a whole other debate.) but what about the people it DOES work for? It works for me. I'll be medicated for the rest of my life. Happily. My life was hell before meds. Been hell on some meds, worse than unmedicated. But the right med saved my life. So, because it didn't work for YOU, it's all a scam, evil and no good? Shouldn't be available for those who actually benefit from it?

Who said 'its all a scam, evil and no good'? I've only read that allot of ppl here are unhappy about being 'forced' to take something and not choosing it for themselves. Just beause it dosnt work for some ppl that dosnt mean 'its a scam', they are saying that the chemical imbalance theory is actually not been proved and big pharma has a huge role to play in psychiatry. Where did someone say that ppl that find that psych drugs work for them, should not be allowed to take them? and what about the ppl who it does work for? good on them, and that should be their choice. Alternatives to psychiatry should start becoming mainstream, that's what im saying, if u *choose* to go to a doctor, that's your choice, or if you *choose* an alternative, that should also be a respected choice.