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Jay1

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I'd say I've recovered of HPPD by about a 70% after almost 9 months. I'd expect to have a 75-80% recovery by the year mark. Some of my problems existed before the HPPD.

 

My cognition definitely isn't as shitty as it used to be, and my visuals are down by about a 60%. No more vertigo, no more paranoia, no more burning sensations inside my skin, no more depersonalization/derealization.

 

Anxiety, depression, some brain fog and head pressure are still there though, and I'm on about 5 meds, but I'm gradually getting off them and I'll finish high school in two weeks.

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I'd say I've recovered of HPPD by about a 70% after almost 9 months. I'd expect to have a 75-80% recovery by the year mark. Some of my problems existed before the HPPD.

 

My cognition definitely isn't as shitty as it used to be, and my visuals are down by about a 60%. No more vertigo, no more paranoia, no more burning sensations inside my skin, no more depersonalization/derealization.

 

Anxiety, depression, some brain fog and head pressure are still there though, and I'm on about 5 meds, but I'm gradually getting off them and I'll finish high school in two weeks.

 

Happy to hear that bro! Still on levetiracetam? I'm doing good too. Visuals still there. But my psychological issues are almost gone with the wind :)

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  • 4 weeks later...

Meh, I have it again after recovering years ago. Its worse now, but I don't really care, It seems that I have a genetic tendancy to it. Yet I am so confident that it fades for me, I have no true anxiety symptoms. only visual distortion. sucks that I will spend the summer months mostly with hppd symptoms, I enjoy natural beauty.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey Folks, hope everything is going fine for everyone :D

So after a long time i just found back to the forum and alot happened to me in this time.

As may some of you know i did alot different drugs, 73 different ones now in total. ( i can't recommend!)

Untill February i did almost everyday all kinds of drugs, i stopped it now because i moved to Hamburg starting a new life, being a trainee as foreing language correspondence clerk.

Since March i started noticing that my HPPD is really getting better from time to time, without any medication or special food plan .

My Visual Snow kept same, but i have no trailing or ghosting anymore, no afterimages or micro/macropsia and my depersonalisation greatly reduced so much that i only notice it on some "bad" days.

As mentioned the only affecting symptoms are the VS, and Floaters, wich i only see when looking into the sky.

I defenately can say that stopping the Drugs help lot, also i don't care or think anymore about HPPD to prevent a too deep sinking mindfuck, most important is just to live your life without regreting anything.

I really have to thank everyone in this forum as it really helped me to understand and get through this rough times.

I'm on it to keep my life how it is now, and hope that my last complaints also will stop.

Big thanks and good luck people,

Dancetrooper

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  • 2 weeks later...

what is going on with all of you i think life is not worth living with hppd as there are no success stories. i wonder how one could go on working or anything else while having hppd i feel completely unable to do everything that has to do with performance i constantly feel dizzy, have a kind of slightly vibrating morphing hallucinatory state, derealization, depression and feel exhausted all day and night which is getting worse with any action ive allways asked myself why there is no euthanasia for people having hppd...i dont want to go on with that kind of torture and i have it for 4 month now   

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  • 3 months later...

I'm 4 and a half months in and haven't quite recovered yet but its definitely better than after the first month. It truly is a demon like no other. But I feel confident that maybe within a year or year and a half I will be back to normal. Hearing yalls stories gives me tons of hope!

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  • 4 weeks later...

Sounds like I'm having a similar experience. Had HPPD for 20 years after taking Acid aged 14. Was getting a lot better but, like you, I started taking coke and have had a bit of a relapse.

If be interested to hear more about these MP3s?

Several months ago I mentioned in the introduction forum that I had dealt with HPPD since about 1974 and have for the most part come through it all successfully, though not unscathed by any means. I said I'd share the list of thing that I feel helped me, with the hope that others can find some help too.

----

* Intro: My HPPD started after I'd taken many acid and other hallucinogen trips, smoked a ton of weed, and done lots of other regrettable things over the course of a few years starting at age 14 or 15. This was way before hppd was on anyone's radar. We heard stories of people who tripped and never came down, but didn't believe them. A couple weeks after a particularly unpleasant, anxious acid trip, I started to feel like I was tripping, had visual snow, trails, a feeling of impending disaster, depersonlization, all the classic symptoms. My HPPD had started.

* First stop, psychiatrist: I was prescribed antipsychotics, possibly Thorazine at first, then finally settled on Stelzine, with Artane to prevent tardive dyskenisia. For the next several weeks to couple of months, I suffered terribly with the symptoms, which the drugs did nothing to alleviate, as well as the effects of the drugs themselves. Then, on a followup visit to the Dr., he cruelly and dismissively said words to the effect that I was way more fucked up than I thought I was.

* Second, fighting back: That catalyzed me - I was going to beat this! THIS WAS THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS HEALING. I vowed that I was going to clean up, get off the antipsychotics, and get my act together. I started with all the usual "good lifestyle" choices: eat right! rest! exercise! And I think this cannot be overemphasized.

* Third, refusing to give in: So now I started a long process of simply forcing myself back to normalcy as best I could. I tried various supplements and so forth: even put eggshells in my omelettes because I thought the calcium would help. I don't think anything really did, outside the fundamentals - again: eat right, rest, exercise. I found that walking, hiking, biking was excellent therapy. These basic motor skills are unharmed by the drug effects, unlike things like reading and driving, so were a good basic fallback. Plus the release of endorphins is helpful. Do it. Do it as much as you can. When I would have bad acid trips, walking was about all that I could do, and it was helpful dealing with the HPPD.

* Fourth, getting involved: As difficult as it was, I forced myself to be in the world. I went to junior college. I got a girlfriend. The intellectual activity, and the emotional attachment were really helpful. I eventually felt that I was recovering, even though I still felt depersonalization, and still had visual artifacts, and I was able to function quite highly. I had simply given myself no other choice. There weren't any other treatment options, so I determined that if I was going to be on my own with this, I was going to just plug and plug away.

* Fifth, staying clean: All this time, I assiduously stayed away from any sort of substances. I have to emphasize this to fellow HPPD sufferers: you cannot afford to put any more psychoactive material in your system. When I got too overconfident in my recovery, I started doing cocaine ... and relapsed. After a night of partying, I looked down at my hand and it had the far-away look of depersonalization, the dawn sky was fully speckled with snow, and I cried my eyes out when I crashed into bed. It was back. DON'T DO ANY SUBSTANCES. I had to regroup, get back with my program, go clean again, and work really damned hard to regain my lost ground.

* Sixth, valium when it got bad: Eventjually developed a type of vertigo somewhere along the line, which may or may not have been related to the HPPD. It was like my peripheral vision was out of synch with my body, and it was a chronic feeling of being off balance and of the world moving. It was particularly horrible. So, I saw a vision perception specialist, and took valium - the only drug that ever helped any of my HPPD symptoms. I mention it here because even if the vertigo was not related, I assumed it meant that together with the HPPD it meant I was brain damaged. The valium definitely helped calm the panic about that. Still and all, through this I was able to complete college and live a quite reasonable existence in New York City.

* Seventh, vision therapy: because the vertigo seemed vision related I went to a vision therapy specialist, but I think it was helpful with taking my focus away from HPPD visual symptoms. Search on the web for vision therapy modalities; I just briefly looked at http://www.visiontherapyrocks.com, and it looked like it had some good links.

* BREAKDOWN * Then I had a psychotic depression. I have no doubt that the HPPD had made me susceptible. But the short version is that I ended up hospitalized, then underwent ECT and was put on an antidepressant.

* Eighth, recovering all over again, antidepressant therapy: I believe the ECT helped, as well as the medications. I have been taking carbamzepine and SSRI's (Prozac and Zoloft), and for the most part have been completely unbothered by my HPPD for many years now. Coming out of the depression was a slow road, and I'm sure it was related, but once recovered, my symptoms of HPPD no longer bother me, even when I am aware of trails, afterimages, or snow. The vertigo disappeared too!

* Ninth, PTSD treatment: after several trying years, and some unrelated traumas, I decided to look into PTSD treatment. The treatment modality was hypnosis plus EMDR (look it up). In treatment, I realized how traumatic the experience of the drug use and the resulting HPPD had been. The trauma treament I underwent made a huge difference for me in reducing the intensity of my memories of the horror of those times, and helping me integrate more fully.

* Tenth, ongoing work on my Self: I continue to work all the time on understanding my mind and feelings. My current work is around Focusing (http://www.focusing.org/newcomers.htm) and it is a useful tool for opening up to exploration of feeling impressions, and guiding one's travel through one's experience. We have worked on my history of HPPD symptoms and it has really helped me feel relief from some of the superstitious and irrational thoughts that were an unconscious burden I carried after all those years of trauma.

-----

So that's my success story - I never got totally over the HPPD, and I continue to have personality difficulties that I think are related to all the drug use at such a young age. I still can see more prominent after-images than I like, I see visual snow, I can see faint trails. But I am free of the feelings of dread, free from the depersonalization, have had several long-lasting relationships, have several kids, a BA degree, six-figure income, and am here if I can help any of you!

Recap:

1. Antipsychotics, probably not useful.

2. Fight Back! Make a committment that you are going to beat this.

3. Refuse to give up, stay on a program of eat right, rest, exercise, exercise, exercise. I found that sugary crap made symptoms worse. Do veggies! Lots.

4. Get involved. Even though you are in a bad state, try to force yourself to engage in any way you can. Chat up the grocery clerk if nothing else. Try to read, study, do things you (used to) enjoy.

5. Stay clean. Don't even think about doing a little of this or that. Even though coke is not a hallucinagen, doing it set me back years.

6. Try diazepam and related. I found no shame in relief through valium. Do it through your doctor.

7. Try various vision therapies. You can learn to change the focus of your attention, and a sympathetic vision therapist could be really helpful.

8. I underwent hard-core depression therapy, it's not something you can ask for at your Dr.'s office. But I wonder if ECT helped my HPPD! It's possible that the SSRI's and the Tegretol have helped. I just don't have clean data here, for obvious reasons.

9. Try PTSD/EMDR treatment. You are undergoing a traumatic experience, and the trauma just reinforces the HPPD as well. I believe that the PTSD nad EMDR treatments could be excellent help. If you contact me, I will provide a link to a specific practitioner who has MP3 recordings you can buy which may be helpful to you as they have been to me. If there is enough interest, I would contact this person and request a series of custom-made recordings for alleviating the stress, anxiety, and traumatic feelings that go with HPPD.

10. Try Focusing. "Clear a Space. Feel the feelings. See how you would characterise, describe the feeling. Find resonance with how you describe it. Ask yourself what makes it feel the way it does? What does the answer say about it? What does it need, and what is in the way of it feeling better?" This is somewhat like the line of thought that goes into a focusing session, but check the website at focusing.org

I hope this helps, even a little. Please let me know if you have any other questions, if you want to find out about the MP3's, or Focusing.

Hang in there. Don't Give Up!

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  • 3 months later...
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I received a direct message from a user that popped up in my personal email box today regarding a success story post I made on here several years ago.  It's one of the first ones on this thread.  The direct message actually surprised me as I pretty much altogether have moved on with my life. I saw there were others that I'd missed and I apologize to those people. I did not mean to ignore you. I was happy to see that my post had given people hope.  I thought I'd stop in here to give a brief follow up and update.  I'm now a fully functioning human being.  I'm not perfect but I don't feel like I have any disorder that didn't exist before my ill fated trip.  It's kinda crazy to say but I feel like a stronger, more independent person now post HPPD.  I'd never go through that again if I had the choice but for those of you in the middle of this, there is light at the end of the tunnel and even a chance to better yourself.  I'm now a graduate student at a reputable university working on my Master's degree. I have prospects of going on to earn a pH.D. I'm proud of myself for having the strength to go on and so should all of you that are staying strong.  I'm sorry to neglect the forum for so long but I literally had not thought about HPPD in such a long time. I hope you see that as a positive sign that one day the thought may never cross you mind except when you see an odd email in your inbox :)  God bless you all.  I thank everyone on this forum that provided support and I in turn hope to do the same.

Red

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  • 2 weeks later...

Success here I'm used to it I cope using natural herbal remedies. 

-marijuana (to go bAck into the trip and resolve ptsd)[makes visuals way worse]

-ginkgo biloba for anxiety and depression

[makes visuals worse]

-green tea to help with anxiety

 

 

And then I take my meds 

-risperidol

-depakote

(I'm schizo-affective)

 

 

3 years hppd/dp here

 

message me if u wanna talk about anything or need help with anything. Hppd/dp is more like a lifestyle than a disorder to me now

Edited by LethargicAcid
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  • 1 month later...

Honestly, I have had a mild case of hppd and hopeless that it's ever gonna fade completely after reading all these stories of it not going away. I just want to enjoy my mary jane again. Fml cause I don't want to live with visual perception distortion forever. Fml

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  • 5 months later...

Hi everyone,

After 5 years of having HPPD, I just posted my success story to Reddit. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/HPPD/comments/7sd6mh/my_success_story/

It is a story about acceptance. I always told myself I would come back and post here if I ever got better.  And I truly have :)

Feel free to message me on there.  Thanks and stay strong!

Edited by thebeessteeze
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  • 1 month later...
  • 7 months later...
On 6/28/2017 at 3:20 PM, LethargicAcid said:

Success here I'm used to it I cope using natural herbal remedies. 

-marijuana (to go bAck into the trip and resolve ptsd)[makes visuals way worse]

-ginkgo biloba for anxiety and depression

[makes visuals worse]

-green tea to help with anxiety

 

 

And then I take my meds 

-risperidol

-depakote

(I'm schizo-affective)

 

 

3 years hppd/dp here

 

message me if u wanna talk about anything or need help with anything. Hppd/dp is more like a lifestyle than a disorder to me now

Did smoking weed make your symptoms worse when you weren't high or just during the high and return to the normal level when sober? I am asking because I developed mild HPPD symptoms 4-5 months ago (visual snow and eye floaters mostly)  but I would like to continue smoking weed if possible because it brings me a lot of wellness and mental health benefits

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  • 7 months later...

Hello! I am familiar with this forum for 2+ years, but I've never posted anything until today. I've spent here many many reading others' stories, many of which inspired me to move on, so I'm deeply grateful to their authors. I would be truly happy my experience was an inspiration for someone in future. So here is my post about how I got HPPD and my further recovery from it.

TLDR: In less than 1 month the combination of Lamotrigine (antiepileptic) and Zoloft (SSRI) cured my DPDR, anxiety and depression, from which I have suffered over the year.

Introduction:

Sharing my story on forums helped me a lot to accept and move on despite my mental state. During the peak of my HPPD/DPDR I’ve been constantly searching for help within message boards and often stumbled upon  the stories just like my own: same drugs, same symptoms and same no improvement despite treatment. All the threads I have found were very old (up to 10 years) and no longer active. Although the first pages were full of lively discussion, further scrolling down led to disappointment: the latest reply was usually dated 5 or more years ago, the authors’ profiles were inactive and there was no way to reach out to any of them. All I wanted was to know was if the person got better, al least a little bit, and what helped him to improve/recover. Understanding the fact that I will never know the outcome of a story made me anxious to death. While both HPPD and DPDR disorders remained obscure and poorly studied, the real people’s experiences were the only reliable source of information and support for me. Unfortunately, I kept finding abandoned threads over and over, and it only worsened my depression. 

I don’t want this thread to be one of those neglected ones. I post my recovery story here with a great hope that one day it may become a support point for those who got in the same trouble with drugs, who also suffers from DP/DR, HPPD and/or any other comorbid disorder.

Here is my email: vjori@protonmail.com    Feel free to contact me if you need support or you want to share your own story. I am always glad to help.

The story:

I got HPPD and DPDR after taking 1/4 a tab of NBOMe (dosage unknown) during the New Year celebration in 2017. By that time I was pretty experienced in other drugs, but psychedelics were a new thing to me. That winter was the hardest time for me. I've spent a few months using amphetamines occasionally to cope with the projects and finals at the university. At the same time I was going through a protracted and painful relationship breakup with my partner, that ended up destroying me emotionally. Back then I smoked tons of weed and cigarettes, had no normal sleep regimen and was malnourished. That New Year Eve wasn’t even a normal celebration, I was alone with my friend in the empty dorm room, all our friends have gone home for celebration. But we stayed because of failing the exam. We both were tired and wanted to unwind somehow. And a strange yellow tab was all we had. Firstly, I refused to take it, saying that it's not the right thing to simply “unwind”, but then my friend ensured me it will be fun. Probably because of being very depressed, I’ve simply given up on everything I knew about psychs and,in particular, about the aftermath of being reckless with them. I ended up taking ¼ of a tab of a tab and then had 8 hours of the weirdest experience in my life. My trip was rather bad then good, in the end I felt exhausted and just wanted it to end.

The next day I felt grateful to every living thing thing for waking up sober. I felt ok, even better than before. My state of mind started changing only in 2 weeks after the trip. Everything began with a slight feeling something strange was happening around me but it felt too unclear to define as an onset of mental disorder. With time this “strange feeling” grew bigger and bigger until one day I woke up questioning myself if I was really awake. The same thing happened the next day, and the day after. In a few weeks I began to doubt the reality: it was slipping away from me and I couldn’t help it but watch. The symptoms reached their climax in May, 5 months after taking NBOMe. My DPDR now was accompanied by a constant fear of the environment together with a sense of absolute darkness hanging over me (which later was identified as major depression). Living a day after day in fear and sorrow made me desperate with no faith in the future. Later I found myself contemplating my own death as if it could be a way out of this bloody hell. Things got seriously bad, I knew it was dangerous to continue coping by myself, so I had to quit studying temporarily and return to my hometown to get an urgent treatment. My family found me a doctor though they couldn’t figure out what was going on. The day when I arrived to my homeplace and met my family after a long time being away, a slight feeling of comfort appeared. The next day I got my first visit to a psychiatrist, I talked to him directly and told the whole thing about my past lifestyle and drugs. He listened to me carefully and diagnosed me with the most common disorder - drug-induced psychosis. Of course I wasn’t truly psychotic, but I accepted that diagnosis since it gave me access to strong psychotropic medications that were the only thing that helped. After my doc prescribed pills I suddenly felt protected, like a baby who has been taken care of. Initially I was taking 2 different kinds of typical antipsychotics, that did nothing but caused hormonal imbalance, so I switched to atypical one and began the new treatment course with SSRI and nootropics.

Since then I got many different prescriptions, but none of the medications I’ve tried really helped me. The best 2 things I got from antipsychotics and SSRIs was normal sleep and appetite. As time went I got more and more used to feeling bad to the point I started accepting it as it was my “new normal”. The pills did their job well, so eventually my condition was fairly stabilized, enough for me to carry out my daily routine and return to studying at the university. But in February 2018 things turned upside down in a positive way. I found out that Lamotrigine and SSRI are widely used to treat DPDR, I could only wonder why did I discover it only on the 12th month of having HPPD.

My worst symptoms, DPDR, remained resistant to treatment. Experimenting with different meds had no success. I continued switching from one drug to another without any significant improvements. But later when I discovered that dpdr can be successfully treated with Lamotrigine, I decided to try it out immediately. And that’s when things started changing - the first improvements were instant and developed surprisingly fast. L. did something that no other drug has done to me before. Within an hour after taking my first dose (25 mg), a felt a sense of inner comfort and warmness slowly spreading throughout my body. For the first time since the manifestation of HPPD my persistent obsessive thoughts have calmed down, the fear, which have been suffocating me 24/7, and the constant state of being alerted suddenly began to subside. Even derealization that seemed impossible to beat, reduced to some extent on that day. The improvements were so rapid that I no longer doubted: Lamotrigine was exactly that “magic pill” I’ve been searching for. I still remember the feeling, when I was laying on the floor that night, enjoying the inner harmony taking over the state of fear and anxiety. I fell asleep in peace for the first time in a year. 

The next day I added 25 mg of Zoloft to the treatment course and decided to take both meds in the morning. I sticked to the dosing regimen and raised both Lamo and Zoloft by 25 mg each week. It took 4 weeks to get up to therapeutic doses: 50 mg of Zoloft and 100 mg of Lamotrigine. The medical combo worked perfectly well, I could feel my DPDR subsiding day by day, until during the 4/5th week I noticed it disappeared completely along with anxiety and depression. Since then none of the symptoms have returned. My visuals also faded greatly (halos and trails disappeared completely) after healing from the main symptoms, up to the point they stopped bothering me at all! Back then I felt the happiest person ever - I could feel love, joy, and any emotion possible again. My self returned to me together with all memories. Nothing could trigger me now, my past triggers simply disappeared as such. Finally going to the supermarket wasn’t a stress for me, using public transport and the subway felt comfortable again. I could enjoy walking around my city as its views no longer looked unfamiliar.

Summing up:

Lamotrigine in a combination with SSRIs remains the only treatment for DPDR that proved its efficacy in a number of double-blind randomized studies, and is considered the first-line treatment for this disorder. In addition, you can find people’s personal stories among the forums, describing successful treatment with L. and Z. Therefore, if you are looking for something to treat your DPDR or HPPD, I highly recommend trying this combination. Don’t be scared of the side effects: if you follow the dosage regimen, no dangerous side effects will appear. Discuss it with your doctor, and provide him the necessary information if needed. 

Links to researches and studies on PubMed:

  1. Lamotrigine in the immediate treatment of outpatients with depersonalization disorder without psychiatric comorbidity: randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21192145

  2. A placebo-controlled, cross-over trial of lamotrigine in depersonalization disorderhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12680746

  3. Lamotrigine as an add-on treatment for depersonalization disorder: a retrospective study of 32 cases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16960469

  4. Lamotrigine in the treatment of resistant depersonalization disorder: A case report: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/857f/0a4bbddf525a256ebd3b65d4f0260388648a.pdf

  5. Evidence-based treatment for Depersonalisation-derealisation Disorder (DPRD): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4269982/


 

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