cygnoir.net the black swan with digital wings

After taking Effexor for four years, I quit it just about a year ago. Not being on something was really bad so I did some online research and ran across The Way Up and have been doing really well for a year now taking 250mg of 5-HTP each night. That along with plenty of B-Complex, B-6 and B-12 (all sublingual for best effectiveness) and the L-Tyrosine in the mornings has really worked out well for me. I feel tons better than I ever did on Effexor.

Oh, I should have pointed you to the page with the complete program.

My wife and I have been down this particular road before. 5-HTP didn’t help, particularly. The one thing that has is a non-tricyclic, non-tetracyclic antidepressant called trazodone. If you’re trying to use 5-HTP to raise your serotonin levels, you might want to avoid dosing with b-vitamins at the same time. The b’s will metabolize the 5-HTP to serotonin faster, but they’ll do it in the bloodstream. You want the 5-HTP to cross the blood-brain barrier and then turn into serotonin to have any psychoactive effect. If you’re loading on b-vitamins, most of the serotonin isn’t going to make it to the brain.

There’s some crucial info missing in your description:
1.) There are small numbers (about 3%) of people who did not consume tryptophan from a contaminated batch who got EMS anyway. Many never recovered.
2.) People taking related supplements (niacin, hydroxytryptophan, L-lysine) have also developed EMS symptoms.
3.) Saying the batch was “contaminated” is a misnomer. It had higher than usual levels of a chemical called 1,1 ethylidenebdis (aka Peak E). However there isn’t a strong enough correlation between development of EMS and ingestion of increased levels of EMS to say that it definitively causes EMS. (it appears to increase the likelihood of developing it but not to be the causal agent)

L-tryptophan isn’t banned because a company made a couple contaminated batches; it’s banned because it can cause a chronic debilitating disease that we don’t currently understand.
Many folks in the medical community lobbied against making 5-HTP an over-the-counter medication because it also can cause ENS-like conditions. But it does so more rarely and health supplements are a big business in the US, so now 5-HTP can be sold over-the-counter with no warnings about the potential danger of taking it. The story here is not so much the evil FDA banning something with mild common side effects and allowing something similar that has worse common side effects. It’s about using congress to do an end run around the FDA’s attempts to protect consumers.

Er, ingestion of increased levels of 1,1 ethylidenebdis.

If you’re trying to use 5-HTP to raise your serotonin levels, you might want to avoid dosing with b-vitamins at the same time. The b’s will metabolize the 5-HTP to serotonin faster, but they’ll do it in the bloodstream. You want the 5-HTP to cross the blood-brain barrier and then turn into serotonin to have any psychoactive effect. If you’re loading on b-vitamins, most of the serotonin isn’t going to make it to the brain.

Right, I take B-6 Coenzymate along with L-Tyrosine 30 mins before breakfast; I take the rest of vitamins (including B-complex conenzymate and B-12) either after breakfast or after lunch. I take the 5-HTP before going to bed.

As always, everyone’s milage will very when it comes to treating depression. Other people, for example, have been greatly helped by Effexor but I’ll never be convinced to take it again.

It sounds like you and I suffer from the same variety of intermittent depression — a sort of high-anxiety paralysis. Liquid kava kava from The Herbalist is my drug of choice — other brands have proven ineffective. I was on St. John’s Wort for a while but quit immediately when I read that it reduces the efficacy of birth control pills by 50%. Five-HTP didn’t do anything for me in the long-term but don’t let that discourage you from giving it a spin.