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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 4 of 4. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Hugh on February 3, 2025, at 13:59:18
Posted by Hugh on February 4, 2025, at 12:00:36
In reply to A Psychedelic Journey on CBS 60 Minutes, posted by Hugh on February 3, 2025, at 13:59:18
This is a companion piece to the report.
Posted by SLS on July 13, 2025, at 20:08:47
In reply to A Psychedelic Journey on CBS 60 Minutes, posted by Hugh on February 3, 2025, at 13:59:18
Hi, Hugh.
How are you doing? I have no complaints. Are you in an ill state? I really no nothing about your history.
Marriage is working out well for me. My wife is my Angel. She helped me get through a rough time.
My expectations were to respond, get well, and go on my merry way. Then something very unexpected and dramatic happened. I began having episodes of violent crying that would last for as long as 30 minutes. The pain was such that it made my face contort. It is hard to convey the experience, but I was easily triggered. *All* of the frustration, struggle, and pain closed in on me at once as if it were a single memory. This was the consequence of getting well!
That's a pretty weak description of the experience, though. Depression is an altered state of consciousness - as are all mental illnesses. When the altered state of depression evaporated and normal human perception and cognition emerged, the shock was devastating. So many years. Ages 17-60. I lost half of my adolescence and my entire adulthood. What do you do with that?
I think I reacted as would someone with PTSD. When I was a research patient at the NIH, one of my evaluations used the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). It is an old, but incredibly effective tool. I was at the NIH between 1992-1993. I was 32 at the time. The clinical research staff remarked that I rated unusually high on the prisoner-of-war scoring.
Looking back at my experience adding Nardil to the lithium, lamotrigine, and nortriptyline I had been taking, It took almost 12 weeks (3 months) before I began to respond. For a drug to take this long to start working is very unusual. If I remember correctly, if one doesn't respond by week 6, the likelihood of responding thereafter is very low.
Shortly after feeling insanely better for an insanely long period of time (for me), I felt the need to re-introduce to people the concept of latency of effect. It was no longer part of Babbelers' mindset. I never doubted that to respond to traditional monoamine antidepressants, an "incubation" period was necessary. Unfortunately, desperation can compel people to do things that are counterproductive. It became the habit for Babblers to begin taking a new drug, and judge its ultimate effectiveness after only 3-7 days. It was astounding. It was tragic. No one had any chance of getting well with those drugs. I have had impatience get in my way in the past. I was my own worst enemy. I know desperation.
I think my first set of posts on this topic used the term, "bad habits". Certain people were unknowingly sabotaging other people's chances of living a life worth sticking around for. My language was rather kind at first, but it became less tame as more people ignored or challenged the idea of the necessity for patience. I certainly took the onus off of people who got lost in this circular trap. This was almost inevitable when depression is severe enough for long enough. I guess my presentation wasn't of the type necessary to influence people's decision-making processes. My intervention would turn out to be the final blow to Psycho-Babble, which is ironic. I wrote copiously. At some point, I might have become elevated in the direction of hypomania. It was still early in my course of remission, and Nardil has done this to me before. I'm really not sure.
Anyway, I haven't been paying much attention to the research pipeline. I have no need. You do realize that America (I'll avoid specificity) has essentially fired perhaps half of its medical research scientists. Most of them are now in Europe. France so much as made an official announcement that fired American scientists were welcome. A brain-drain of this magnitude takes the United States out of the game.
I'm more than just glad that you hung out here for so long long after the forum collapsed. You have a talent for finding and explaining novel treatment possibilities. I hope PB people have created or joined another support group elsewhere.
If you still happen to correspond with anyone from PB or a are part of a forum, please let people know that I hope they all found their miracle, whether they took my sage advice or not.
Take care.
- Scott
Posted by Hugh on July 16, 2025, at 12:34:09
In reply to Re: A Psychedelic Journey on CBS 60 Minutes » Hugh, posted by SLS on July 13, 2025, at 20:08:47
Hi Scott,
It's good to hear from you. Psycho-Babble has been a lonely place for the past several months. Congratulations on your wedding. What wonderful news! It shows just how far you've come. I've heard that after many years of illness, whether it's mental or physical, getting well, and adjusting to the new normal, can be quite a challenge.
Try not to be so hard on yourself. Any damage you did to Psycho-Babble was slight compared to the havoc wreaked by the troll whose name won't be mentioned. For many years, you were one of the pillars who helped to sustain Psycho-Babble. You did your best to help others.
I've been doing all right. Thanks for asking. I'm much better than I used to be, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. I continue to research novel treatments, hoping that one of them, or a combination of them, will finally get me into long-term remission.
One of the novel treatments I'll be trying is described in this thread:
http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20230117/msgs/1122401.html
At the PROSOMNIA Sleep Health and Wellness clinic in Miami, they use a combination of propofol and EEG to keep people in a super-dream state for one hour. It costs $500, but one treatment is all it takes to give people significant and lasting improvement. There's so much interest in this treatment, other propofol clinics might be opening around the country in the near future.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06644573
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/inside-the-emerging-world-of-anesthesia-dream-therapy/
Before I try propofol dream therapy, I'm going to try Vibrotactile Coordinated Reset Stimulation (vCR therapy). This new and extremely effective therapy will become available very soon. Most of the research on it has been done at Stanford University.
Two engineering students at Rice University used Stanford's research to develop their own vCR therapy gloves, which they plan to make available by this fall. The Rice University gloves will be sold at a price that is far lower ($250) than what the Stanford gloves will cost.
https://news.rice.edu/news/2025/rice-students-develop-low-cost-vibrotactile-glove-help-treat-parkinsons-disease
I pre-ordered the Rice vCR therapy gloves (no payment is required to pre-order) by scrolling down to the bottom of this page:
https://kinnections.foundation/buy-a-glove/
On the following website, the Rice engineering students published complete instructions on how to build your own vCR therapy gloves:
https://oedk.wildapricot.org/Treatment-Glove
Most of the vCR therapy research has been done on Parkinson's disease. This video shows a Parkinson's patient before he was treated with the gloves. Then it shows him at the end of the first day of treatment. Then it shows him after six days of treatment.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSjv6m4xLH0
The gloves could be used as a therapy for many other neurological conditions, such as stroke, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, depression, anxiety, insomnia, addictions, eating disorders, epilepsy, essential tremor, dystonia, ADHD, OCD.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7EX4GgLBlA
There are some things that set vCR therapy gloves apart from other vibratory therapy devices. The gloves' vibratory stimulation is only delivered to the fingertips. This is because the fingertips have a huge cortical representation -- far more than the legs or the torso. Other vibratory devices use continuous stimulation. With continuous stimulation, the brain can become habituated to the stimulation, making the therapy less effective over time. The vCR therapy gloves don't use continuous stimulation. They deliver 100-millisecond bursts of stimulation, followed by brief periods of rest.
And instead of stimulating all of the fingers simultaneously, the fingers are stimulated one at a time in a staggered manner. The vCR therapy gloves' intermittent, staggered stimulation prevents habituation to the therapy from developing. The frequency and the length of vCR therapy sessions can be greatly reduced over time.
News stories about vCR therapy gloves:
https://med.stanford.edu/tass-lab/media.html
vCR therapy gloves were developed by Peter Tass, a German physician with a background in mathematics and physics. He's a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University. Tass says that the vibrating gloves "change the connectivity in brain regions that are producing abnormal activity. ... We really massively change brain activity on a long-term basis." Among other things, vCR therapy gloves cause a significant decrease in the amplitude of high beta (21-30 hertz) brain waves, which, in excess, are associated with anxiety and many neurological conditions.
In the following video, Tass compares deep-brain stimulation (DBS), an invasive treatment, to vCR therapy, which is non-invasive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xACrVSZeAag
The full text of one of Tass's studies:
This is the end of the thread.
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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
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