Okay, I feel it's time to post an update here...
I'm at the end of my education and I am on my 4 week internship. Things are unfolding as usual with me not being social and not very liked which is usually always the case at new places. I've realized some things since I made the last posts here. I've been worrying that I'm getting worse but I'm not so sure, because these traits have been with me for a long time. I've always displayed some autistic traits, like handflapping or some tics and some obsessive behaviour, but nothing severe or visible enough to catch attention to it. I have a lot of times caught interest in specific things, like certain second long sequences in music or movies or other kind of narrow interests. I have some anxiety and overall I lack interest in the outer work and I don't have much motivation to interact with people, and most of the time I turn people away or they start to perceive me as weird. I can also be kind of nit picky and when I detect an error I can become really annoyed by it and sometimes think abnormally negative of people, and that's my kind of internalized, antisocial and mean kind of side, that I try to never show anyone, that I've been trying to remedy as well. Of these things the most debilitating is the lack of interest in things and in getting anything done. I have really no interest in doing anything. I haven't cleaned for months, I don't read news papers and I don't manage to put much news on the memory anyways. The work I'm at is uninteresting, but anything else I start usually stops getting interesting or never is to begin with. For example I am good at drawing, like people or objects I see, but I never do it because I have no creative output that has to be satiated, so I can't just jump onto some graphic education like that. This has to be fixed for me to move on in life.
On Fasoracetam: I later on tried 45 mg of it. I felt a little bit of a buzz but it didn't do anything meaningful. I didn't feel any substantial motivation or drive. So that's out of the picture now.
On tDCS that treonsverdery brought up: I just bought a device called The Brain Driver that arrived this monday. I've been trying out the anode on the left frontal cortex and the cathode on the contralateral shoulder some times, and once bifrontally. I'm not so sure it helps that much, at least not yet. It kind of burns on the anode and I've gotten these phosphene lightning flashes in my field of vision several times and electrical zaps when the device turns off, which I've understood is quite normal, so at least I know the device works.
Today I found this study which interested me a lot:
A pilot study of alternative transcranial direct current stimulation electrode montages for the treatment of major depression.
BACKGROUND:
Typically, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) treatments for depression have used bifrontal montages with anodal (excitatory) stimulation targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). There is limited research examining the effects of alternative electrode montages.
OBJECTIVE/HYPOTHESIS:
This pilot study aimed to examine the feasibility, tolerability and safety of two alternative electrode montages and provide preliminary data on efficacy. The montages, Fronto-Occipital (F-O) and Fronto-Cerebellar (F-C), were designed respectively to target midline brain structures and the cerebellum.
METHODS:
The anode was placed over the left supraorbital region and the cathode over the occipital and cerebellar region for the F-O and F-C montages respectively. Computational modelling was used to determine the electric fields produced in the brain regions of interest compared to a standard bifrontal montage. The two montages were evaluated in an open label study of depressed participants (N=14). Mood and neuropsychological functioning were assessed at baseline and after four weeks of tDCS.
RESULTS:
Computational modelling revealed that the novel montages resulted in greater activation in the anterior cingulate cortices and cerebellum than the bifrontal montage, while activation of the DLPFCs was higher for the bifrontal montage. After four weeks of tDCS, overall mood improvement rates of 43.8% and 15.9% were observed under the F-O and F-C conditions, respectively. No significant neuropsychological changes were found.
LIMITATIONS:
The clinical pilot was open-label, without a control condition and computational modelling was based on one healthy participant.
CONCLUSIONS:
Results found both montages safe and feasible. The F-O montage showed promising antidepressant potential.
I tried it out this evening without any situation to try it out on, and I can't tell what it is doing yet. I feel quite blunt tonight. But I will try it tomorrow morning before work and see how everything unfolds and I will update on it tomorrow or saturday. Have anyone else had success from some specific tDCS positioning?
I have also tried out a couple of new substances, PQQ, N-acetyl-cysteine, NA-R-ALA, Acetyl-l-carnitine HCL, Nigella sativa and scutellaria lateriflora, in case I would have had some mitochondrial disorder or some epileptiform activity that caused some of these symptoms. No luck there either however, except for a certain decrease in a verbal tic I usually have had where I wanted to say nonsensical obscene things in a strained funny voice. That I attribute mostly to the ALA that I have used over a longer period, however it could be a joint effort.
If I deem that the tDCS isn't working in alleviating any of these problems I'll just have to surrender and try to ask for help from the local healthcare, to try to get some SSRI or maybe modafinil or something to make socializing easier or get my drive going to make the days easier to go through until there's cures for these kinds of things. There's not so much to be done after that. I've burned so much money on all these things I almost get into financial trouble all the time...
Edited by Sleepdealer, 03 March 2016 - 08:13 PM.