Do you use opiates to self-medicate your depression?

none of those reports showed euphoria, they all reported the same thing - drop in anxiety and worries, feeling plain pleasant. it seems to do this for everyone. thus it is an opiate with a ceiling effect. this merely makes it viable for therapudic use without the same abuse potential. doesnt suggest in ANY way that deprression these people may or may not have experienced was due to opioid difficiency, merely that this drug is good for combating depression without leading to opiate euphoria.

go on, dont hold anything back. i doubt you could show me anything i couldnt understand. im just not going to sift through the same old shit for some pharmacological reference here or there.

 

Here's an study i found on this subject. I'm not going to post the full text, i'll post the reference and abstract:



J Clin Psychopharmacol. 1995 Feb;15(1):49-57.


Buprenorphine treatment of refractory depression.

Bodkin JA, Zornberg GL, Lukas SE, Cole JO.

McLean Hospital, Consolidated Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Belmont, MA 02178, USA.

Opiates were used to treat major depression until the mid-1950s. The advent of opioids with mixed agonist-antagonist or partial agonist activity, with reduced dependence and abuse liabilities, has made possible the reevaluation of opioids for this indication. This is of potential importance for the population of depressed patients who are unresponsive to or intolerant of conventional antidepressant agents. Ten subjects with treatment-refractory, unipolar, nonpsychotic, major depression were treated with the opioid partial agonist buprenorphine in an open-label study. Three subjects were unable to tolerate more than two doses because of side effects including malaise, nausea, and dysphoria. The remaining seven completed 4 to 6 weeks of treatment and as a group showed clinically striking improvement in both subjective and objective measures of depression. Much of this improvement was observed by the end of 1 week of treatment and persisted throughout the trial. Four subjects achieved complete remission of symptoms by the end of the trial (Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression scores < or = 6), two were moderately improved, and one deteriorated. These findings suggest a possible role for buprenorphine in treating refractory depression.

 

once again, this doesnt suggest in any way that their depression was caused by an inherit difficiency in opioids

 

im definatly not an opiate person, sure i love the feeling. but i hate the "downing" effects. life is for living, therefore stimulants make you feel great, happy, confident, clear headed, and make you whant to make somthing of your life. on speed its like your more alive then youve ever been before. i love it. im sick of feelign out of it from weed and shit.


any one taken 250mg or more of codeine (or other opiate), smoked an incredible amount of weed, within like 12-20 hours of takein xtc. there is somthing sooo amazing about that. there was no more heaven literaly than what that was like... (but not on xtc, after)

repeating this method above at later times isnt even barely comparible without the aftereffects of mdma.

 

Um stoner bill, of course depression can't be caused by an "inherit difficiency in opiods". Incase you didn't read my first post, YOUR BODY DOES NOT MAKE ANY OPIODS/OPIATES OF IT'S OWN. I'm talking about them being used as a treatment for depression...Lol, let me guess Prozac works for depression because your body has "an inherit difficiency" of Prozac right? NO, prozac works by manipulating neurotransmitter levels, and guess what? Opiods/opiates cause changes in neurotransmitter levels too, hmm...

 

if youd read the posts following, you would see that you were corrected, seeing as opiod refers to any chemical which stimulates opiod receptors. such as heroin. or endorphins.

opiates do not prevent reuptake of endorphins, nor to they stimulate the release of endorphins. they mimic endorphins. it would be like injecting a drug that mimics serotonin into your brain. your body DOES make these endorphins, and the WHOLE POINT OF THIS THREAD is the possibility that forms of depression are caused when the body has some inability to make enough natural opiods.

take a stance in the arguement man, sure, but dont go makin shit up

 

My mistake on your definition of opiod.



And actually, endorphin is not a chemical formulation, it refers to a chemical action.

And, i will repeat, my interest is in treating depression with opioids/opiates, not what causes depression.

But, I found this abstract though that clearly states depression is an "endorphin deficiency disease".


Acupunct Electrother Res. 1982;7(2-3):157-72.
D-phenylalanine and other enkephalinase inhibitors as pharmacological agents: implications for some important therapeutic application.

Ehrenpreis S.

A number of compounds have been shown to inhibit the degradation of enkephalins. As expected, these compounds produce naloxone reversible analgesia and potentiate the analgesia produced by enkephalins and by acupuncture. One of these, D-phenylalanine, is also anti-inflammatory. D-phenylalanine has proven to be beneficial in many human patients with chronic, intractable pain. It is proposed the enkephalinase inhibitors may be effective in a number of human "endorphin deficiency diseases" such as depression, schizophrenia, convulsive disorders and arthritis. Such compounds may alleviate other conditions associated with decreased endorphin levels such as opiate withdrawal symptoms.


I can't get the full text online so i can't paste it, but i'm pretty sure that if that is stated in a scholarly journal, then it is more true than what "stoner bill" says.

If you actually look, there is lots of research that links low endorphin levels to depression. I don't have time to be doing research on this plus my own reasearch just in order to educate you, so stonerbill since you think there is NO evidence at all, if you actually do some reasearch on your own you'll find otherwise... To be fair, there is some research that also says there is no direct link between endorphins and depression. BUT, stonerbill, you said there was NO evidence that endorphin deficiency caused depression, and that is just plain not true. The exact cause of depression is NOT KNOWN, and endorphin deficiency very well may be a part of it.

 

Oh, and here's an abstract i found that downright refutes your claim that there is no evidence that depression can be caused by endogenous endorphin/opioid deficiences:


TITLE: The effect of naloxone on adrenocorticotropin and cortisol release: Evidence for a reduced response in depression
AUTHOR, EDITOR, INVENTOR: Burnett,-Frances-E [Reprint-author]; Scott,-Lucinda-V [Author]; Weaver,-Mark-G [Author]; Medbak,-Sami-H [Author]; Dinan,-Timothy-G [Author]
SOURCE: Journal-of-Affective-Disorders. 1999; 53(3): 263-268
PUBLICATION YEAR: 1999
DOCUMENT TYPE: Article
ISSN (INTERNATIONAL STANDARD SERIAL NUMBER): 0165-0327
LANGUAGE: English
ABSTRACT: Background. Endogenous opioid peptides inhibit the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis by influencing the release of hypothalamic corticotropin releasing factors. This study examines whether increased activity of the HPA axis in major depression is associated with reduced opioid tone. Methods. We measured the adrenocorticotropin (ACTH) and cortisol responses to an intravenous bolus of naloxone 0.125 mug/kg in 13 depressed outpatients and 13 healthy volunteers. Results. The mean cortisol response was significantly reduced (P < 0.05), and the ACTH response was also non-significantly reduced in the depressed subjects. Conclusions. These findings imply that the degree of inhibitory endogenous opioid tone is reduced in depression. Various mechanisms for the finding are discussed, including possible alteration in the function of alpha-adrenergic pathways. Clinical implications. Reduced endogenous opioid tone may explain why some depressed individuals self-medicate with opiates, and depression is associated with opiate withdrawal. Opioid pathways may have a role in the mechanism of action of antidepressant drugs, and may be of relevance in the development of novel antidepressants.

 

i will have to look into the significance of cortisol and ACTH response in implying that people with depression are naturally opioid-difficient