BODY WEIGHT:

11.5 st

Firstly, some background. I am what I guess could fairly be described as a heavily experienced psychonaut, although previously – before maturing a little over the past few years – I would have been more accurately categorized as a balls-out wreckhead. I have had multiple experiences, often in combination, with Cannabis, Hashish, Amphetamines, Cocaine, MDMA, MDA, LSD, Psilocybin Mushrooms, 2C-B, 2C-I, 2C-E, 4-ACO-DMT, Changa, Ketamine, MXE, Nitrous Oxide, Mephedrone, Ritalin, BZP, Salvia Divinorum, Diazepam, Alprazolam, Vicodin, Piracetam, 5-MeO-DALT, Kratom…and almost certainly many more that I’m unable to think of now. (Not that there’s any particular need to, I’m sure you get the idea. The point of listing as many as I did was to give you, the reader, as much of an indication into my understanding and experience of altered states as possible.)

I have suffered from depression and anxiety all my life, and had taken 5-HTP occasionally, sometimes in an attempt to alleviate the MDMA comedowns, other times just to stabilize my mood generally. The only effects I ever noticed were mild at best, excluding one day when I pre-loaded before a Mr Scruff show and spent all day dancing around my bedroom, alone. (By the time I was at the club and on MDMA, I was burned out. I don’t think I pre-loaded correctly – a lot of reports suggest taking the 5-HTP every day until the day of the roll, whereas I just kept on going into the day. You live and learn.)

About two years ago I started taking Citalopram, which quite dramatically resolved my depression and anxiety issues. During this time I started meditating, a practice I continue to this day, and finally got around to training to be a teacher. Roughly six months later I was off the SSRIs and teaching in a foreign country, feeling excited about life and most importantly I had the confidence to try all the things I’d always wanted to do. Fast forward another year or so, though, and my depression and anxiety had started creeping up on me again. I bought some 5-HTP and tried taking 100mg before bed for a few days – all I remember was it making me feel very nauseous, upsetting my stomach tremendously and placing me into a constant state of fatigue. I discontinued using it, and soon after found Piracetam, which initially worked wonders; it gave me clarity of thought, a markedly improved memory and made me much more playful. When people asked me to describe it, I always told them it puts a spring in your step, which I think is an accurate description. Eventually, however, I became too dependent on it, and the charm wore off, leaving me grumpy and unable to think whenever I didn’t have it. After a few stop-start, stop-starts, I finally decided it had run its course and have now been piracetam-free for around two months.

Which, finally, brings us up to date. Ten days ago, I arrived back to the aforementioned, undisclosed foreign country (the one I was – and still am – teaching in) from a consistently drunken visit to my home country, and was plunged straight back into a busy work schedule. I always experience a bit of a lag with my jet lag, and four days ago I was feeling grumpy after a night or two of very little sleep, so decided to dig up the 5-HTP I had and take 100mg before I went to bed. I did this for two reasons: Firstly, I’d felt for a long time like I was lacking in serotonin, so wanted to give it a little boost to see if that improved my depression; and secondly, I was aware that some people take 5-HTP for insomnia, and I hoped it could help me get over the jet lag. Things could barely have gone more spectacularly wrong.

I took the 100mg dose shortly after dinner in the evening, and put on the movie Gravity. During the next 90 minutes, I started feeling very warm, particularly in my forehead, with slight nausea and my stomach making some strange noises. It was not dissimilar to a mellow MDMA high. My mood improved a lot – I felt very content with everything – and there was vibrancy to all sensory information, strong colours in particular. (Needless to say, I enjoyed the movie, despite the cheesy dialogue and nauseating self-help overtones, but that’s all beside the point, apart from maybe the nausea which was building quickly by this stage.)

My girlfriend – who I will now enter into this tale – and I decided to try to get an early night, but just like the previous two nights we found it impossible to sleep. Since taking the 5-HTP I’d been feeling that familiar desire-for-sexual-contact-but-concern-I’d-be-unable-to-perform that often accompanies an MDMA experience – that muscle tightening excitement of arousal, constant arousal, but with…pilly-willy. Which is nice in its own way, really, but can obviously be very infuriating. Unless, I remembered, you could get past pilly-willy, and then you were on course for some of the best sex of your life. Which is what happened, much to both of our delight, not only for the inherent virtues of amazing sex, but also the ease of sleep that we both find usually swiftly follows a good romp.

Except this time, for me, there was no ease of sleep. I was totally wired, my mind ablaze with previously forgotten memories – none of which I can remember at all now, only that there was a golden sheen about them, and something about my Mum in the kitchen. (Which is again beside the point.) I felt much like I had that day I was dancing around my bedroom before the Mr Scruff show, only this time I was lying in bed next to my now firmly asleep girlfriend, muscles twitching, fists clenching (well, off-and-on), feeling weak from lack of sleep but at the same time propelled to LIVE LIVE LIVE. The warmness inside my forehead felt glorious, like a missing component of my brain had finally been restored, and my thinking was so clear, so seemingly supernaturally acute that I felt like, as Rust Kohle says in True Detective, ‘‘I was mainlining the secret truths of the universe.’’ I also felt extremely creative, which lead to me writing a short story called Jet Lag on my phone, and on a 3am trip to the bathroom killed two cockroaches with an expertise I never usually manage. (Ordinarily I have a slight phobia of them and spend a lot of time terrified of making an attack.) All this while the nausea and upset stomach I mentioned were increasing, painfully so. After much more tossing and turning I finally managed two hours of half-sleep between 5.30am and 7.30am.

I woke up feeling weirdly fine despite the lack of sleep, but my body ached a lot. All day I felt a chronic need to vomit, but failed to do so every attempt. I also had no appetite, which is an extremely rare occurrence for me so I ate what I would usually have eaten anyway. As the day went on and I struggled to keep my body going at work, I became extremely nauseous and tired. I knew that two hours of half-sleep was not enough, but somehow I was mentally more able to do my job than usual; it was only my body that showed any signs of fatigue. My girlfriend and I got an early night, expecting to fall asleep immediately.

Yet, come 2am, I was still wired, and this time not enjoying it at all. I’d started having vicious thoughts and nefarious hallucinatory disturbances, my skin was scorching but I was shivering and I felt cold and empty inside. My body felt crippled from tiredness – I felt like I could feel even my inside organs straining under the pressure – and I was sweating ferociously. Scared, I woke my girlfriend up and asked her to feel my heart rate – it was painfully fast. Concerned that I hadn’t really slept for two days and had clearly had quite an extreme reaction to 5-HTP – a reaction that had lasted for over 24 hours by this point - my girlfriend rang a taxi and took me to hospital, where my symptoms were all explained away as an ‘emotional disturbance’. (Probably correct, although when I mentioned my concerns over serotonin syndrome or something of that ilk the doctor said only that they couldn’t test for that, which was interesting and not at all comforting.) I was injected with Diphenhydramine (dosage unknown, I was fairly delirious at this point), which calmed me down slightly, and was sent home with a prescription to fludiazepam.

Back at home, I had a brief interlude where a cockroach fell onto me as I opened a door then flew next to my face before I was able to kill it and calm down again. (Cockroaches fit well thematically into this, only their inclusion was entirely non-fiction and not of my own doing at all. I have been down the ‘Cosmically punished for something or other’ rabbit hole many times before, but this time, as I’m supposed to be calming down from a state of high agitation, I’m willing to chalk the fact I had to face three of them during this whole terrifying episode all up to the law of high numbers.) I finally got to sleep around 4.30am, and since then have been attempting to break the World Records of The Most Defecations in One Day and The Most Pain Experienced in the Stomach by One Man. I was also zombified by the fludiazepam (0.25mg, three times a day), which I have now discontinued.

Although I wrote this report with a light-hearted tone, I want to take a little time at the end of it to say that the entire ordeal was truly terrifying. The second night, when I was again lying in bed unable to sleep, I was having frantic, mortifying visions and my girlfriend was worried sick over how hot my skin was. Scariest of all, though, was my heart rate, which the doctor confirmed was very high. The nausea I experienced was also very intense, and my stomach is still in pieces four days later. I am keenly aware that sleep-deprivation in combination with/as a result of jet lag can bring on a lot of the symptoms I had, but the nights preceding my single 100mg dose of 5-HTP were very mild and I managed to sleep within a few hours of going to sleep. Everything went very, very wrong after, and only after, I took the 5-HTP. I also want to note that the brand of 5-HTP I consumed was Now Foods 100mg Vcaps, not to disparage the company or the product (which has a rating of 4.5 stars after 526 reviews on [website]) but just to provide as much information as possible. (There have been reports of some people reacting to certain brands of 5-HTP differently.)

Ultimately, I wanted to write this as a warning to be careful at all times with self-medication. I wrote the experience in a light-hearted tone because that’s the way I prefer to look back on painful experiences – with a sense of humour. The reality, at the time, was anything but funny. I have since vowed to stop being so arrogant about drugs and always consult with a psychiatrist before attempting to stabilize my depression and anxiety with strange chemicals, and I cannot suggest this approach more strongly. I firmly believe 5-HTP can work wonders for people – it has done for many friends of mine – but always dose low at the beginning, and be careful.

Exp Year: 2015	ExpID: 106957
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 25
Published: Nov 15, 2024	Views: 26
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Tryptophan - 5-HTP (196), Sleep Deprivation (140) : Difficult Experiences (5), Depression (15), Multi-Day Experience (13), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), Small Group (2-9) (17)