Recovered from marijuana addiction

[ajh151h]

If you are too lazy to read all of this scroll down to the very bottom and read the advice that I have. I have to break this up into two posts because it is too long.

I wrote on this forum a few times in august and I just want to let you all know that I am feeling 99% better, and I wanted to give you advice for those of you who are going through the hell that is marijuana addiction and withdrawal. I think that I've mostly sorted out what was real in my life while I was addicted and what wasn't, and what helped me while I was recovering and what didn't.
So, here is my story about how I got addicted to weed and recovered.

When I was in seventh grade (12 years old) I had a violent episode of depression that I am sure was a result of puberty. I would have really violent mood swings, where one minute I would be euphoric and the next minute I would be so angry that I would contemplate suicide. My family has a long history of depression on both sides, with multiple suicides on my Mom's side of the family, and after her sister committed suicide my mom became a devout believer in modern psychology. Even though I was only 12 she decided to put me on antidepressants, even though in retrospect I think it would have been much wiser to have me wait it out for a little bit.

I was taking the antidepressants (Lexapro and Welbutrin) the first time I tried marijuana, which was the summer before 8th grade. I didn't get high the first 10 or so times that I smoked, but I would feel relaxed for days after I smoked, which kept me smoking on weekends. My best friends kept smoking, and I didn't see anything wrong with it (I was in 8th grade) so I kept it up.

The first time that I actually got high was probably around December of my 8th grade year, and it was an unbelievably vivid experience, even more crazy than the time I took too many mushrooms in 12th grade. After that my interest was peaked, and I smoked every weekend, still socially, like it was a religion. The antidepressants were making me get high as hell, to the point where I would have hallucinations almost every time that I smoked.

I kept going like this, without weed taking over my life, until the summer before 9th grade, when a friend gave me a deal on a half ounce of hydro. I figured I would hold on to it for a while, and without even thinking about it started smoking every day in my room. I had a lot of money because I come from a well-off family, and I couldn't think of any better use for my money, so I just kept smoking and smoking, all of a sudden by myself. I still didn't think that weed was a serious drug, which was idiotic in retrospect with the kinds of highs that I was having.

For the first week that I had the hydro I would have hallucinations like depth perception changes, and a few times I hallucinated that my hand was going through furniture. The only time that I ever hallucinated and object was when there was a candle in my room, and it cast a shadow on the wall that looked like the body of a naked woman.


From that point on I was addicted, although I didn't realize it, and I continued to smoke more and more. My parents actually caught me that summer, and I decided I was going to stop smoking, but I came back to it a few weeks later, because all of my friends were doing it and I didn't want to lose those relationships. I kept doing this, not unhappily, for that year, and in 10th grade I was still doing it but in retrospect I was losing my touch with reality more and more.

In the middle of 10th grade I stopped taking the antidepressants. From that point on I couldn't get anywhere near as high as I could before, and I started getting paranoid when I was high, and getting extremely anxious when I wasn't high. These symptoms just got worse and worse all the way through high school, with the addiction becoming more and more of an obvious problem. I remember lying in bed in 10th grade thinking about all of my problems, realizing that they were all related to weed, and that for all of my problems to go away all I had to do was stop smoking weed. But I couldn't do it.

Fast forwarding to 12th grade, all of my friends were completely addicted, most just to weed, but some to other drugs (percoset, coke, xanex and e) and I was a wreck because of my social anxiety. I went from being the most popular kid in school to believing that everyone was constantly laughing at me behind, my back even though in hindsight that was a complete delusion. I am athletic, attractive, and extremely intelligent, I have a unique sense of humor, and ever since I was a kid I could easily move in and out of social circles, because I have an innate ability to read other people and connect with them.

Throughout highschool I still managed to keep decent grades, which shows how smart I am. I finished in the top 50 of my graduating class and got into a really good private school. I will never get over the fact that weed prevented me from going to a top 10 university. Looking back to the times before I started smoking and seeing how motivated, and how intellectually curious I was for someone at that age, makes me shudder to think about the possibility I had back then.

At the end of my senior year, I was such a wreck that I simply couldn't talk to anyone. My anxiety was so built up that talking to people made me sick to my stomach. I was paranoid all of the time, and I was obsessed with the idea that if I could simply talk to one person all of the problems would go away. I had no idea that pot can cause people to develop problems like this. I had completely forgotten what life was. All of my thinking was based around stupid abstract ideas that were a result ofover-analytical thinking. I felt socially retarded. Not smoking any more barely seemed like an option to me.

[ajh151h]

( I didn't break it up right, I am going to have to separate it into three, unless a mod helps me)
Then, my Uncle had a brain aneurysm and almost died. He was in the hospital for about a month, and every few days the doctors gave us a different chance of survival, which was almost always grim. The terrible thing was that I didn't feel any real emotion when this happened. My anxieties just kept on pressing on, and I was still thinking about all kinds of bullsh*t. Even when my uncle, who I've had a special relationship with for my entire life, was probably about to die right in front of me, all I could think about was what the people in the hospital were thinking about me.

After about the first week of this, still smoking, I realized that I would never be able to do anything or experience anything ever again if I kept smoking, and that the addiction would go on forever. So, I simply stopped, thinking that the problem would be gone within 21 days, when the thc was out of my system. This was on april 20th.

Christ was I wrong. The anxiety got worse and worse. I thought up all kinds of crazy stuff from this point on. I thought I had developed GAD. I thought I had developed depersonalization disorder. I thought that I had a brain tumor. I thought the anxiety was a sign from God warning me that I was about to die. This continued, and continued, and continued, and continued. Hope at that point was a joke. I thought that my brain was ruined.

I didn't really start having dreams again until summer. One night I was feeling particularly crazy, and all of a sudden I got really tired, almost like a trance, and I collapsed into my bed. I had an unbelievable nightmare. I probably don't remember most of it, but what I do remember I will never forget. I started pissing black liquid all over the place, then I looked in the mirror and I had black paint all over my face. I left my bathroom and I was in a castle that I used to dream about when I was a kid except there were decapitated heads everywhere, and everybody was trying to kill eachother. I was in the parking lot of my school, and everybody I knew was there, looking realer than they do in real life, and parts of them were like aliens, covered in shiny black and silver paint that was darker and more silver than anything in life. I turned, and I ran, and I saw my family, except my brother and my dad looked like giant penguins, totally covered in the paint, and they started yelling, what's wrong with you, why don't you come over here? And then I remember peeing black again, and I thought to myself, maybe I'm peeing all of the poison out, I hope to God that I'm peeing all of the poison out. When I woke up I got up without thinking about it and sat next to my parents watching TV and I felt terrified, asking what the hell I had done to my life.

That was definitely the craziest dream I had, but there were several after that. After each dream there would be a period of about a week or two when I didn't dream anything, and then I would all of a sudden get tired and I would go to sleep and I would have another nightmare like that, lots of times with people and places I hadn't seen in years. Each nightmare was less extreme than the last one, and after every dream I felt a little bit like myself, although I didn't know it yet, because I had forgotten what it felt like to be myself.

About halfway through the summer I realized that jogging three times a week took the edge off of the anxiety, and although my thoughts would still be completely disconnected from reality exercise made everything almost bearable. I would manage to keep regular exercise up for a week and a half at the most, and then for some reason I would forget about it, and for the next few weeks I would start going through hell again, and then I would start running, and so on.

A few weeks before I left for college (I was born and raised in Delaware and I am now attending college at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA) I came clean to my parents about it, and went to see the same psychologist that had prescribed me antidepressants when I was a kid, and he gave me the same dosage that he had given me before. I can't link to the post that I submitted after that visit but it is in this forum somewhere. I want to add that talking to my parents about it made me see how irrational all of my thoughts were. All of the crazy theories you have going through your head sound a hell of a lot stupider if you try to tell them to somebody.

When I was on the antidepressants I felt better, but my thoughts were still really irrational and I stopped having the dreams. I felt like my life was at a standstill, and once they were fully kicked in I felt especially strange, like I was back to having an out of body experience. So, I stopped taking them. This was about the time that I started using Theanine, which was an unbelievable help. It completely cleared my head for a couple of hours, to the point where I wouldn't even think about my problems. I think it's safe to say that Theanine took atleast three months off of my recovery time.

The main thing that the antidepressants did was take the edge off of the social anxiety, and after I stopped taking them I wasn't as socially anxious as I had been, but I was deeply depressed. This went on for about a month, with the depression getting worse and worse, until I didn't get out of bed for a day. Finally I decided to start running again, knowing that it was either that or go back on the medication, and I slowly got into the habit of going on a 20 minute run as soon as I woke up every day, which made the depression and anxiety totally go away after about two weeks, give or take a few days.

Aside from the Theanine the two biggest things that helped me in this period were work and literature. I've always loved literature, and the love I had for it died, with my love for everything else in my life, when I was addicted to pot. I started reading Hemingway stories again, and the beauty of life, the way he describes it, made me feel incredible. By chance I picked up Tolstoy's masterpiece, Anna Karenina, which is just an unbelievable book, that many people believe is the greatest novel of all time. Tolstoy's writing in that book reminded me of everything about life that I missed, showed me how backwards my thought process was, and started me thinking in the right direction. Although I knew that my thought process was messed up, that book showed me why, and gave me the ability to finally begin confronting them and changing the way I looked at people.

Where I had been totally socially anxious I started seeing people in a new light; not what they appeared to be, or what they could do for me socially, but who they were, past superficiality. How nervous I used to get in talking to people was a reflection of how superficial and immoral I was. I started building up my social skills again, and realized that I would never be the kid I was in 10th grade, who made everyone like him. I just started trying to be as honest and as nice as I could be, and although that made me stop trying to assert myself, which is my nature, it made life much easier, which is what I needed.

Working as hard as I could at school probably helped me more than the Theanine in the long term. I have never worked as hard in my life as I have in the last two months. I would get up, run, and study or work on papers all day between classes. It got my mind off my thought that I was going crazy for a few hours, and after a long day of work I would leave the library, and look around campus, and see all of the beauty that I had been missing out on for the years that I lost to marijuana.

Although at first working seemed impossible, I worked through the difficulty of being unable to concentrate. The key to doing this was to run every morning (which is a lot harder than it sounds for someone who was lazy before he became a pothead) and find work that was intellectually stimulating. If I was uninterested in the work in front of me to the point that I wasn't paying attention I would start suffering again, and I would go study something else. At first I was totally uninterested in everything school related, and for the most part I still am, but actually working on school related stuff like papers and homework got my mind off of myself.

Eventually, between the work and the exercise, I forgot about the withdrawal and the anxiety and the depression for a few days. When I realized this, I felt more satisfied than I have ever been in my entire life. Lately, although I still have moments that seem unreal, I can deal with them because I know in the back of my mind that eventually it will all be ok.

[ajh151h]

____
In conclusion, you can and will get better over time, but there are things that you can do to make yourself recover much faster. Here is the list, in order of what I found most helpful.

1.Work. If you can, find some kind of work that is intellectually stimulating, something that you have to think about and get absorbed in in order to do. If you're a student this should be a no-brainer. If your not a student, write papers about whatever your interested in. I found that writing papers helped me relearn how to organize my thoughts.
2.Exercise. This has already been covered all over the forum. I found that the only way to get myself to do it was to do it as soon as I woke up every morning, before I ate or brushed my teeth or took a shower. There is no way that I could have recovered if it weren't for exercise; none of these other things will help you if you aren't getting yourself into better shape.
3.Theanine is a wonder drug for everyone going through this stuff and it will make everything easier
4.Find something to rekindle your enthusiasm for life, whether it be a sport or a book or a hobby or something. A girl would be the best thing but that might be hard to achieve in the situation you are in.
5.Do your best to stop caring about the way others perceive you, find something else you are more interested in.

I didn't mention the things that really hurt my progress, here they are:
1.CAFFEINE. Avoid it all costs; if you are addicted to coffee, kick your addiction. The amount of caffeine in coffee will make anyone anxious. Soda isn't that terrible but I would advise against drinking it until later in the day.
2.ALCOHOL. Don't get drunk for a few weeks and see how much better you feel. Then, don't drink for a month or so and see how much better you feel. If you seriously want your brain to recover, don't flood it with alcohol. Read a book instead.

Good luck.

[Board Forum Blogger]

Hi ajh151h

It’s great to hear from you again, I have merged all your threads into a single thread and I hope you don’t mind added “from marijuana addiction” to the title of your post, I do sometimes add the odd keyword or two to the titles (but not the posts) from time to time to make them more descriptive and to give them keywords that will help the search engines find them and I really hope as many people find this posts as possible as I think it will be so helpful to so many, thank you so much for taking the time to come back and write all that it really is very kind of you, we all really appreciate it.

Well done you have done really well, I knew from your previous posts you had a good head on your shoulders and knew you would be ok, I am so pleased to hear you are feeling %99 better that really is amazing!

Thanks again and take care.

[mannyfresh]

ajh151h,


Wow so much of what you said I can relate to in my own life that it is almost uncanny. Just reading about how someone else who I do not even know has gone through so much of the same crap I have is relieving in a sense, and I suppose it puts me in a positive mindset. I started smoking marijuana in January of my junior year, and a month or two later became heavily addicted to the point where I was smoking it every day. I think it has been responsible for a lot of the social anxiety issues that I have been facing, and right now I am in my freshman year at college and after having blown a good amount of money of the drug I feel its time to let it go. I currently have not smoked for 5 and a half days, and right now am feeling intense stomach aches because of it.
I never dealt with any kind of antidepressant drugs though, but after lookin up theanine and seeing that it is actually an over the counter supplement I am interested in trying it to see how it relieves my anxiety. I can totally relate to what you said about lost potential and how if you had never smoked you would probably be in a much better educational situation. If I had not smoked I would probably have gotten into a much better college myself and would not be in the financial debt I am in right now.

I guess the most crucial thing I have recognized from being heavily addicted to marijuana is that despite how people say it is a mental addiction and it is nothing like crack or heroin (which its not) it really has a much more immense effect on the brain than people think and it is not something you can simply bat an eye at.

Kudos again for the post and know that everything youve written has at least helped one other person on their journey to overcome this creeping addiction.

[ajh151h]

Some people are more susceptible to it than others, but from what I saw while I was smoking, people who start smoking every day, for whatever reason (usually peer pressure at the college age) get addicted. Some people, once they're addicted, tend to feel the negative effects more than others, which is in a way a good thing for them, as eventually it causes them to stop.
I have several friends who I have known for a very long time that are still smoking constantly, and they find it to be a livable condition; that is, they know it is horrible, but it isn't so horrible that they are going to try to stop. They will deny that they are addicted, but deep down they are all obviously aware it's a problem. You're lucky that you aren't so foolish that you will continue to smoke even though it is destroying your life; if you kept smoking, you would eventually bottom out and you would basically be forced to quit, anyway, with a lot more negative side effects then you have experienced to date.
The theanine is a good thing to use sometimes, but I wouldn't recommend relying on it too much. Just because theanine is over-the-counter does not make it necessarily safe. There hasn't been any reliable research done on it, and there is no way to be sure that you won't experience negative side effects from it. Also, in practice, it only helps you for a few hours, and you can build up a tolerance to it, where getting exercise will cause you to feel a thousand times better for days and days.
I would also suggest not drinking caffeine, and trying to avoid nicotine if you can, because those spike social anxiety pretty significantly.

Good luck! I'm sure you will be fine.

[Tonka]

ajh151h:

SO I have read most of your threads, witch are very interesting. What has called my attention most is the relationship of pot with the pschicological balance.
Personally when I quit I started going with a Pscichologist but then I changed to a Pschiatrist and he said that I was depressed and a had OCD. I guess now that is one of the reasons I smoked cause the pot would make me feal a lot better durring high time. So he has me taking lexapro witch I read you toke some years ago. I feal uneasy about taking it. So what is your advice on this???

[Board Forum Blogger]

Hi Tonka

I am sorry to hear you have been diagnosed with ocd and depression, I have been diagnosed with both those things for a number of years now, I have had the cognitive behavioural therapy and taken many of the medications used to treat those things, including several ssri’s like the one you have been prescribed. I too self medicated with marijuana, which felt like it helped for a while but long term just made them a whole lot worse. The fact that you may have to take psychiatric medication can be a bit of a blow, but the way I have come to see it is that there may be some people who may need to take them, although that’s a personal decision that everybody has to make for themselves and may or may not be the right thing for you depending on your situation and how you react to them, but for me personally I have come to accept that they do help me and are something that I feel that at least in this point in time, I think I need. But that's just how I feel about my use of them.

Anyway well done on 6 months off that’s a really big achievement, I am sure things will get better, one thing to bear in mind if you do chose to take antidepressants is that they can take a couple of months to kick in, so try not to feel too despondent if it takes you a little while to start to feel better.

Take care, thanks for sharing and please keep us posted.

[ajh151h]

This is a difficult question for me to answer, and it would take me a very long time to truly elucidate the thoughts I have on the issue. I'll try to write the best response I can, even though I have time constraints. I assume that there have been books written on this subject, and you might find them very helpful.

Because of the experience that I've had with them, and the experiences that I've seen others have with them, I won't ever take them, and in most cases I would try to steer my loved ones away from using them.

However, I can't with good conscience tell you not to take them or to take them. I think that they are very, very highly over prescribed, as in I think there are a lot of people who are prescribed them that really shouldn't take them. However, I am sure there are some people, with extreme problems, or with certain psychological makeups, that they do help, and as I don't know you or know your situation, I can't say if you are the type of person that would benefit from them.

Having said that, I would be very cautious if I were you. Taking antidepressants for a long period of time isn't a decision that you should take lightly. If I were you I would do a lot of research and thinking on the subject before I made a decision to take them.

Depression and anxiety aren't like simple illnesses, such as a flu or a cold, that can be eradicably cured with drugs. While we know that antidepressants help with the symptoms of depression and anxiety, we also know that anxiety and depression are problems that go beyond a simple chemical ailment. I will first explain the negative effects I saw as a user, and then I will explain why it seems like most people end up being better off without them.

When I took them, at first I felt much, much, better, but over time I started to have serious doubts if taking them was the right action. While they alleviated my symptoms, and while I was able to function well (from an outsider's perspective, probably better than I had in my entire life), I did not feel like I was naturally happy, and I felt that while I was taking them real happiness would be unattainable. Although I could live very comfortably while I was on them, the things in life I used to really appreciate disappeared along with the things that would depress me. Many people who take them eventually complain that they "level you out" emotionally, so that you feel neither truly happy, or truly sad. There is definitely truth to that complaint.

In retrospect, the worst thing about being on them was that I was much, much more self-centered than I had ever been, and that while I was on them being self-centered no longer bothered me. Where I used to dislike how self-centered I was, and criticize myself for doing something immoral, I didn't care any more. And, while I was able to put up a much better front in society, and gain a lot more respect from everyone in society, the real relationships that I had had before I took them crumbled. While I was on the drugs I didn't see the value of close relationships, because I no longer needed them.

Your psychologist hopefully told you if you take them, there is a fairly high chance you will use them for the rest of your life. This is another thing that bothers me about them. I don't remember the exact statistic, but I think that somewhere around 90% of people who use them, and then get off of them, "relapse" back into depression. This shows that they usually don't solve the problem, they only alleviate the symptoms. Of course, everyone in that 90% doesn't go back and take them again, but a high percentage do, and they use them for the rest of their lives. To me this is sad, because while using them is an easy way out, they prevent you from having genuine satisfaction.

Now I will explain why I think this is so. What my theory is, and this is a theory shared by a great number of people (authors included, search for "depression religion" on amazon.com), is that depression and anxiety are caused by an age-old spiritual dilemma. Before the invention of antidepressants, people who were "depressed" turned to religion, or found other methods of spiritual healing, such as art, in order to alleviate their problem.

Lexapro causes the seratonin in your brain to have a greater impact than it naturally would. In my experience, this made me complacent with things that I wouldn't normally be complacent with; where I would normally be unhappy with my current situation, bored with what I was doing, or upset with myself, I would somehow rationalize whatever was happening so that I could accept it. The drive I naturally had to make changes in my life was gone. Instead of trying to find a way to live that I could morally and spiritually accept, I stayed frozen in one place, which led me nowhere.

Only by not taking the antidepressants was I able to have a genuine, natural recovery. What helped me was a combination of art, religion, exercise, and most importantly love. Doing things in which I could help people, like volunteer work, also helped.

"Clinical depression," from what I have seen, is a blanket term used by psychologists to describe a number of similar emotions that have always been present in society. There have always been people who became depressed, due to a general unhappiness with the lifestyle they are leading. You will find that a staggering number of people throughout history did great things as a result of their depression: Buddha and Jesus are the two best religious examples. Abraham Lincoln had depression, and Leo Tolstoy said that he wrote because he was suffering from "a deep hurt." Psychologists write depression off as an abnormal condition, an illness, even though until our age it was simply a part of life. At times people felt depressed, and they did things to change their lives and the lives of people around them.

Obviously it doesn't always lead to something positive. Very frequently, depression and anxiety lead to a cycle that causes people to suffer more and more, and unfortunately a lot of these people end up committing suicide, or turning to drugs and alcohol. However I think that experiences with depression are an integral part of life, and that it is just very very important to steer yourself in a positive direction. Religion seems like the most obvious way of doing this; if you were to truly follow the teachings of the bible, for example, your spiritual problems would be alleviated.

Your psychologist was probably quick to tell you that regular exercise is twice as effective as taking antidepressants, and that drugs like alcohol naturally depress you. So, if you aren't getting regular exercise, and if you are drinking frequently, you will probably find that reversing these behaviors will almost instantaneously make you feel much, much better. I find that hard work, and being kind to others, are the best natural cures for depression.

When I was taking lexapro I didn't need exercise, I could drink as much as I wanted, and I could be mean to others without feeling bad. I ended up with an awful work ethic, because work no longer had the same value as it did before I was taking them. Despite these bad habits, like I said, I was able to function better with other people; I was more confident, better at conversation, and so forth. If you think about it, it was very, very inhuman.

Having said all this I can't tell you for sure whether or not to take them. You might want to try using them for a short period of time to see how they make you feel, as they affect people differently. Personally I would only use them as an absolute last resort, but you might be the type of person that can really benefit from them; some people (I think it is around 10%) take them, recover, stop taking them, and continue to feel fine. It would be very fortunate if this happened to you.

Good luck, and I would be glad to try to help with any questions you have.

[ajh151h]

I also want to add that none of what I've said has anything to do with OCD, and that it deals entirely with depression.

And it is important to mention that I was taking 20 mgs of lexapro and taking a relatively high dose welbutrin, which is a totally different type of antidepressant. I never took one and not the other, and my doses were relatively high, so that would explain why I had such extreme effects. I am bias because I had a bad experience with them, take everything I said with a huge grain of salt. What Board Forum Blogger said is probably better advice than what I gave because he is experienced with OCD and I have no experience with it. However, it is for you to decide, and I would really suggest researching it and most importantly not being too quick to say that they are the right thing. For depression there is an alternative to medication, and you might experience negative consequences from medication that you don't perceive immediately. That was the point of my post.