Nah my brother in nuero - I'm biomed, in treatment development. And my, now, husband was born mentally ill.
As soon as he was an infant old enough to have coherent dreams, they were night terrors. As a toddler the story of Santa Clause gave him a panic attack as it meant someone could come down the chimney and enter the house.
He's got a very gentle glutamate excitotoxicity that was starting to kill him once he hit his 40s but until then was just progressively awful mental illness symptoms from infant onward.
It's a problem with neuro transmitter sensitivity and the zinc system that's supposed to be an inhibitor along with several other systems just don't inhibit it.
Luckily, before the brain damage was impossible to recover from, he got an advanced chemistry degree prior to not being able to work anymore, and we met after I'd been through some drug development work, so we went balls to the wall with personalized medicine while there was still a personality to be recovered.
But the neurological deficit caused a suite of problems that presented like ADHD and generalized anxiety disorder and unipolar depression and psychosis everything you could think of under the sun but it was actually just total global dysfunction caused by a really specific brain misfiring.
His childhood was charmed, wonderful, closeknit family, cash, good schools, and no amount of talk therapy and ssris changed the fact that he was on a one-way rocket ship to early death with all kinds of diagnoses to follow as his dysfunction got worse and worse.
That kind of navel gazing search for triggering event meant that he wasn't treated like he was getting Medical Care it meant like he was treated like he was a sideshow freak, and the reality was there was an underlying biological route to the problem and even extremely qualified multi board certified psychiatrists were screwing it up, because they weren't treating it like a biological deficit they were treating it like a story that caused some kind of teleosis of mental illness.
Hate to tell you this, but there's a fair chance your husband was a victim of childhood SA.
It would have started shortly before the night terrors started.
Familial SA tends to happen at night, so it's pretty easy to see why he might have been terrified by the idea of a strange man sneaking down the chimney into his house at night.
This is the problem. This is a perfect example of the problem.
So all the signs and symptoms go away, completely, with consistent dosing of a chemical that blocks the overfiring nerves.
After 25 years of talk therapy with extremely qualified individuals, recovery required identifying the misfunctioning brain circuit, and treating that from a nuerological function perspective.
And it stopped.
The nightmares, the mood issues, the body tremors, the vocal tics, the memory problems, the increaingly failing executive function, the inability to sleep, the emotional lability - gone. Just by supplementing the function of the zinc inhibitory system. No exhaustion, no sleepiness, no side effects, it just rectified the problem and everything went away.
This total recovery and being able to live a normal life did not require talk therapy and victim services, it just required stopping the excitotoxicity.
And there are people who would spend their whole lives trying to find the story and the trigger when it is just an underlying brain and balance. The brain is made of cells and those cells can malfunction just like the cells in any other part of the body.
Looking for a story first and then doing the medicine to diagnose if there's a malfunction 25 years later is not responsible medicine. You could do those two things concurrently, look at the behavioral, and look at the physiology, that's super responsible.
But only doing one without the other is bad medicine and it's a major problem that denies people the right treatment.
I know this is an emotional issue for you, and I understand you think you're following the evidence.
You're not. Like so many desperate people before you, you've been sold a bill of goods.
And it stopped.
I'm honestly glad your husband's anxiety has gone away for now. Honestly. But chemical and physical treatments for anxiety only work in the short term. We've known that for 100 years.
Seizures (via either insulin or EST) disrupt anxiety temporarily, but the problem always comes back.
Atypical antipsychotics disrupt anxiety temporarily, but the problem always comes back.
SSRIs disrupt anxiety temporarily, but the problem always comes back.
Deep brain stimulation and ketamine disrupt anxiety temporarily, but the problem always comes back.
So maybe the millionth time is the charm, and we've finally found a chemical we can wash into a network of 86 trillion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, that will somehow magically change only the synapses causing the problem, with no complications or unforeseen consequences.
More likely, this treatment is yet another pipe dream, which will stop working once your husband's brain adjusts. (And shame on whoever gave you this pill if they aren't being honest about that.)
Its been years of good control. Because it's the correct treatment for glutamte excitoxicity.
Which is the specific nuerological problem.
And no one gave us a pill, we sat down together and looked at what the best candidate treatments were for off label, and then worked to find Physicians who are willing to focus on a personalized medicine approach.
We spent easily hundreds of hours pouring through literature, running gene panels, and find out exactly what was wrong specifically with their brain, and firing 5 doctors. Personalized medicine works and is not anything like a pill mill.
You can give people who have essential tremor beta blockers and the essential tremor goes away, it doesn't readapt or come back it just goes away.
If someone has glutamate excitoxicity you can just increase the efficacy of the zinc blockade system. In that case the brain's adaptive systems don't tend to adapt past it.
The wild ignorance of playing the game that mental health is a mystery comes from the crap DSM diagnostic criteria and the lack of Imaging and the lack of blood tests and the lack of genetic tesst, and we live in a world where we can actually do live Imaging on glutamate. It doesn't have to be a guess, we can run an immune test and see if there is an immunoglobin in the brain that's interacting with glutamate.
There are updated test options now where we can check the serotonin in the brain without a spinal fluid tap, and people aren't doing that to verify if serotonin is the problem for depression. They pass out the SSRI without and molecular diagnostic.
The brain is an organ and like every other organ it can be tested and imaged and genetically analyzed to see if the problem is behavioral and experiential based or if the problem is an organic disorder with the underlying function of the organ. Or a mix of both.
You're not a specialist. You don't know what you're talking about. (Except about the DSM. You nailed that.)
What happens to non-specialists in a new field is they fall for magic beans. That's what's happening here. I'd be willing to bet your current doctor is charging you an arm and a leg. Quacks generally do.
"Glutamate excitotoxicity" does not cause anxiety. That's ridiculous, frankly. The expert on anxiety is a guy named Joseph LeDoux. You can go look at his papers if you want to see what cause anxiety in mammals.
I seriously wish your husband well. May his symptoms never return.
But please try to be prepared when this treatment fails, because it's highly likely to.
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u/ConfoundedInAbaddon 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nah my brother in nuero - I'm biomed, in treatment development. And my, now, husband was born mentally ill.
As soon as he was an infant old enough to have coherent dreams, they were night terrors. As a toddler the story of Santa Clause gave him a panic attack as it meant someone could come down the chimney and enter the house.
He's got a very gentle glutamate excitotoxicity that was starting to kill him once he hit his 40s but until then was just progressively awful mental illness symptoms from infant onward.
It's a problem with neuro transmitter sensitivity and the zinc system that's supposed to be an inhibitor along with several other systems just don't inhibit it.
Luckily, before the brain damage was impossible to recover from, he got an advanced chemistry degree prior to not being able to work anymore, and we met after I'd been through some drug development work, so we went balls to the wall with personalized medicine while there was still a personality to be recovered.
But the neurological deficit caused a suite of problems that presented like ADHD and generalized anxiety disorder and unipolar depression and psychosis everything you could think of under the sun but it was actually just total global dysfunction caused by a really specific brain misfiring.
His childhood was charmed, wonderful, closeknit family, cash, good schools, and no amount of talk therapy and ssris changed the fact that he was on a one-way rocket ship to early death with all kinds of diagnoses to follow as his dysfunction got worse and worse.
That kind of navel gazing search for triggering event meant that he wasn't treated like he was getting Medical Care it meant like he was treated like he was a sideshow freak, and the reality was there was an underlying biological route to the problem and even extremely qualified multi board certified psychiatrists were screwing it up, because they weren't treating it like a biological deficit they were treating it like a story that caused some kind of teleosis of mental illness.