Baclofen and depression. Holy hell!

[Opi-ette (OP)]

Greetings ladies and gents. I want to share my experience with Baclofen with you all and would appreciate anyone who wants to share their experiences or opinions on what recently went down.

Along with Scleroderma, I have cervical Dystonia. My Dr and I have been playing around with different muscle relaxers, ie: flexeril (useless) zanaflex (kept me awake all night) soma (awesome drug but of course, anything that actually works, my insurance refuses to pay for.) Last line of defense was Baclofen. The dosage is 20mg twice a day. I was also excited to learn that it is helpful with withdrawal so I was thrilled to get a kill two birds type of medication. Actually make that three birds because it was helping me sleep as well.

So I tried it and it really did help a lot. I was surprised how well it worked. Then I started noticing that I was feeling down, but I just chalked it up to normal life events. The longer time went on, the worse I was feeling. I'll fast forward..by the 2nd or 3rd week, I couldn't get out of bed. To the point that even if I had to pee, I'd lay there until it was too painful to hold it in, then I'd drag my sad ass to the bathroom.

I wasn't getting dressed during the day, I would go a day or two without brushing my teeth. I turned my phone off because I couldn't bear speaking with anyone. This went on day after day. The only times I would have to force myself to get up was to go to my mothers and fill her weekly medicine box, and another time when the annual building inspector came.

Now, I've had the blues before and normal sadness due to certain life events, ie: Dad passing away, my diagnosis, my divorce, my baby girl Shelly getting hit by a car...etc. Normal sadness. I've never felt anything like this before in all my days. It was so fucked up I was wondering if I should check myself in to a psych ward. I kept thinking about people that deal with depression all their lives and I felt so bad for them because living like that for a lifetime is a sentence no human should have to live with.

Finally laying there hour after hour, day after day, I was back tracking in my mind about what happened the last few weeks that would suck me down the rabbit hole and the only thing I could come up with was the new med. So I googled and low and behold, a lot of people had the same reaction to it. Sucks so hard that I have to stop because it really worked wonders on my dystonia (with the added bonus of having it when my opies run out every month).

Sorry for the long winded rant but I'm just amazed what this stuff did to my mind. My heart really goes out to those with clinical depression. I'm lucky that I can just stop taking it and I'm starting to feel better already.

[Mr.pooper]

A similar thing happened to me when I took gabapentin. Hits on similar receptor sites in the brain. Once i figured out that i was withdrawaling and not just abnormally randoly sad. I stopped taking the med, only to be hit with the worst withdrawal ive ever had.

The kicking lasted months. I also suffer from a endorphin deficiency that results in suicidal depression. while going through withdrawal it gets 1000x worse. THose were easily some of the darkest feeling things ive ever experienced.

Its a shame too, because it handled my chronic pain very well, and gave me an energetic high that felt so damn good.

[limerence]

Baclofen is very close to GHB, which is a wonderful drug as therapy or fun time. Baclofen was a fun +1 to my opiates when i scored a few, for my 1st experience with it. So fun and GHBesque I went out and got a prescription but, for some reason, it lost any fun and it did make me feel worse than when i wasnt taking it (i was also very sick and diseased and this was a few months after kicking benzo habit). After a few weeks I stopped taking it. Somewhere at me mums house is like years supply of em... After Soma, favorite muscle relaxant, anyway. Strange drug, I've never found taking any muscle relaxants daily to be very fun after a week or two.