JK24 wrote: ↑Sat May 11, 2019 5:15 am
I wanted to add my own experience if I may. I have suffered from depression on and off for the past few years, but over the last year it has gotten way worse. I took 5-HTP for a few days in January 2019 and have experienced PSSD symptoms after that.
Now here it goes: I agree with the OP and also with success stories like the one from Bunny. I also had lack of nocturnal erections and believed, this cannot be psychosomatic. However, there IS a link between hormones and thoughts. That‘s why you can treat depression both with psychotherapy and drugs! Cognitive behavioural therapy changes your irrational, twistes thoughts that causes your depression (which is NEVER based on realistic thoughts - read „Feeling Good“ by David Burns if you want to find out more), and drugs change hormones - BOTH have the effect of making you less depressed. So CLEARLY, thoughts can change hormones, and hormones/drugs can change thoughts. How could it be differently?
Furthermore, regular depression, without any medication envolved DOES cause physical symptoms! If you feel extremely tired or lose your appetite or slur your speech because you‘re depressed, those are PHYSICAL symptoms. So depression can cause physical symptoms just as much as medication can.
My view on this whole thing is that it can be treated ANALOGOUSLY to depression: by medication, by psychotherapy, or BOTH. My approach, just as for my depression, has been: I don‘t want to take antidepressants, I choose psychotherapy. And it has worked so far! EVER SINCE I started telling myself the following „I have low libido. Low libido is a SYMPTOM of depression. I suffer from depression. Therefore I SHOULD have low libido as long as I suffer from depression“ my symptoms have IMPROVED. Once during sex with my ex-girlfriend she gave me a blowjob and I felt NOTHING. But then I quickly told myself: „Loss of pleasure from activities I used to enjoy is a SYMPTOM of depression, and I suffer from depression. Therefore I SHOULD get no pleasure from this blowjob“ and in an INSTANT, I felt more! In an INSTANT, as SOON as I relaxed JUST A BIT MORE, the blowjob felt AMAZING.
The same approach worked for basically COMPLETELY curing myself from pleasureless orgasms within a few days. I had a few good days where my depresion was almost gone, and when I masturbated I just told myself that sexual anhedonia, i.e. pleasureless orgasms, is a symptom of depression, therefore I should suffer from it. My orgasm quality improved CONSIDERABLY and has done ever since, to the point where I‘ve gotten USED TO having good orgasms again.
My morning erections also started returning when I stopped obsessing.
I have yet ANOTHER argument why this whole thing is psychosomatic, that was quite convincing to me: I NEVER really found any symptom that CANNOT be caused by depression. EVERY symptom I experienced and subsequently searched for, had depression as one possible cause. No matter what symptom I had, it could ALWAYS be attributed to depression.
Now some of you might say: But some of my symptoms are hard to describe, I just feel weird, not like myself.
Well, excessively worrying about your health and feeling weird, is a SYMPTOM OF DEPRESSION. In my life, 100% of the cases where I told someone „I just feel weird, I can‘t explain it, I feel like not my normal self, I can‘t stand it, I just want everything to be back to normal again!!“ it was PSYCHOSOMATIC, and I snapped out of it at the latest when I visited a doctor and he told me there was no physical reason.
ANOTHER argument that gave me a hint that it was psychosomatic, was that my symptoms always IMPROVED after I visited a doctor and I stopped worrying about the condition for a minute. The first time after I visited my GP, my girlfriend and I had FANTASTIC sex and I thought I was cured. Then I started worrying again and it started getting worse again. Have you ever notied that the more you worry, the worse the symptoms get? That gave me the clue that it‘s psychosomatic, because no PHYSICAL illness I‘ve ever had had this property. The second time after I visited the doctor and he told me „FORGET about the 5-HTP. It‘s 99% psychosomatic but I‘ll get you a transfer to an andrologist and check your hormones anyway, if it will help you relax and stop worrying“, my symptoms improved again!
On thing I also experienced: I worried about my testicle size. Anytime I felt bad, I could almost FEEL my testicles shrinking, thinking I had low testosterone. I SAW that they looked smaller. They FELT smaller. It was so PHYSICAL, it was so REAL. Can‘t be the depression, right? You CANNOT shrink your testicles by having irrational, twisted thoughts, right? So it MUST be physical. Well, I put my belief TO THE TEST: I MEASURED my testicles every day, sometimes when I thought they looked normal and healthy, and also when I felt like they are small and unhealthy. They were ALWAYS EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE. I THOUGHT that they looked smaller, I was CONVINCED. But it WASN‘T ACTUALLY TRUE. Furthermore I looked up „average testicle size“ and concluded that my testicles were even slightly above average in size, but totally in the normal range. I STOPPED worrying about my testicles since then!
The SAME thing happened with my sperm volume. I thought that I was producing less sperm. It MUST be physical right? Well, I started measuring and quickly found out that the sperm volume was not only always the same, it was also always in the normal healthy range (normal is 2-5ml, 4 ml being about a teaspoon full). Since then I STOPPED worrying about sperm volume and started having more normal feeling ejaculations.
I could go on, but you get the gist. If you want to find out more about cognitive behavioural therapy and how your thoughts influence your feelings, check out „Feeling Good“ by David Burns. Great book!
If you want to find out more about excessive worrying about your health / hypochondria, check out Wikipedia. For me, it was eye-opening to see that it seems to be a SYMPTOM of hypochondria that your symptoms improve after a visit at the doctor - it was the same way for me!
Finally, one thing that has helped me a lot was any kind of activity where you stop thinking - especially exercise. If you go for a run, or lift weights, or swim, or go cycling, and do it in way where you FOCUS on your BODY AND BREATH, or do it so fast that you are FORCED to take a BREAK FROM THINKING AND WORRYING, this can go a long way to help you relax and feel better. For me this has worked often.
One final note on 5-HTP: Since both DRUGS and PSYCHOTHERAPY/THOUGHTS can influence feelings, I think it‘s in no wqy implausible that a sudden withdrawal from an SSRI or 5-HTP can TRIGGER such symptoms and also thoughts that cause excessive worrying, just as durgs can alleviate depression symtpoms. However, you CAN treat them by changing your THOUGHTS, just as you can treat your depression by changing your thoughts. You see what I mean? That‘s just a basic feature of mental illnesses like depression, where both drugs and therapy can influence your symptoms. For me, PSSD falls into that same category.