Posted by bleauberry on October 27, 2009, at 18:31:49
In reply to hypomania or overstimulation? SAM-e / tyrosine, posted by g_g_g_unit on October 24, 2009, at 2:37:13
I am one of the few that frown on the terms used in psychiatry, such as bipolar. It is merely a word to describe a rather vague set of symptoms that are subjectively viewed differently from one doctor to another. It could be a form of anxiety, a subset of psychosis, a type of stimulation, a variant of ADHD, or some other thing that no one has invented a word for yet! It may be something having nothing at all to do with the brain.
It is not as if any of these things have distinct boundaries. They don't. They overlap. They have similarities. It can be a piece of this and a part of that. So I personally find these labels somewhat helpful as an initial guide, but not very useful in the big picture.
I try to view it more simply. Your reaction to Tyrosine or SAMe tells me several things:
1. Your hunch that the deficit is somewhere in the NE/DA circuitry is probably close or accurate.
2. There could be a methylation problem, in which SAMe repairs it, or tyrosine supplies what the missing methylation was supposed to do without the tyrosine.
3. The doses were too high. The amount needed to overcome the deficit is less.
I am also one of the few in a camp that says doses suggested on bottles of supplements are way too high. I think 5htp for example should come in 5mg and 10mg choices, not just 50mg or 100mg. I consider those to be massive doses. I felt the same way about DHEA for years and got laughed at for my ridiculous stance. It was only available as 50mg. Well, guess what, now you can get it 5 mg. Somewhere along the line I wasn't the only one thinking this way.
I learn a lot at other forums. Real people. Real results. No science. Just experience.
How about this one. A guy found that 5htp helped, but with experimentation he found his total daily dose needed to be 13mg split into 5 small chunks throughout the day. Five different doses where the total intake of a 24 hour period was just 13mg. But tyrosine was also important. His optimal dose for that was 35mg in the morning and another 35mg in the afternoon.
Another person, 75mg tyrosine at bedtime. Yeah, bedtime. Weird, but it makes the point.
A lady who takes SAMe as needed...not continuously. Maybe every day for a few days, then once every three days, going back to daily during flare-ups. She finds SJW calming, so sometimes she switches to that for a few days instead if her symptoms call for it. In other words, she takes what she needs as she needs them, not on a continuous basis.
At a SJW forum, people find that when their 5htp seems to plateua, poopout, or fade, the addition of tyrosine fixes it. They also find that when that happens, it means now they have too much serotonin, so they stop for a couple days until they can feel their stores are running on empty and then take some more. While it may have taken higher doses and continuous dosing in the early stages of recovery, maintenance stage only required small or intermittent doses.
In this way I think supplements are different than meds. We may not need the same dose or the same ones from one day to the next, one week to the next. We need to know how they make us feel, and then use that depending on where we are. Body chemistry is continuously changing day to day, bouncing around, being influenced by food choices, light, daily events, stress, sleep, etc. Supplements can be molded to fit the ever-moving target, where meds can't.
Too stimulated? Bipolar? I don't know. All I can say is it is probably one of these two things:
1. The dose was too high.
2. The dose needed to be matched with a counterpoint agent...either 5htp, magnesium, gaba, glycine. View tyrosine or SAMe as the accelerator pedal in your car...but you need a brake pedal too. And we need to learn how to navigate with both.
poster:bleauberry
thread:922189
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20090727/msgs/922958.html