So my current concerns for my mental health mainly started about 5 months ago. After having spent a fair bit of the last year doing quite a bit of drinking and weed smoking (nothing overly- excessive) and some cautious drug experimentation (mostly with benzos and opiates although I never got into any kind of habit), I read about the recreational value of the drug Lyrica on the internet. For some reason I didn't research it nearly as much as I should have, and I pretty much only read about positive recreational experiences on reddit, so I thought I'd get some for a long-haul plane flight I had coming up.
Over the course of about 3 days I ended up taking what I think was upwards of 2000 mg of pregabalin along with truly excessive amounts of alcohol. For some reason I just kept taking more. I don't think I would have exceeded 900 mgs at once but I really can't remember. I judged how much I'd taken by what was missing at the end. Obviously I recall very little from these three days, just a few glimpses here and there but I do know that nothing bad happened. I ended up throwing the rest of the pills away, however I continued to drink quite a bit during the next week, which I noticed would make me black out a lot easier and I'd often completely forget about an hour before going to sleep. Obviously my memory and cognitive functions during this time were completely shot, and I still noticed some of the most obvious cognitive and memory issues after about 10 days.
Over the next few months I basically ignored any of these issues, and my memory and cognition seemed to improve quite quickly, but I was still noticing some occasional lapses and there definitely a sense of unreliability and fuzziness about it. The thought of any permanent damage basically popped into my head at one point and I spent hours upon hours researching it on the internet, and after reading some horrible anecdotal reports about about people experiencing permanent damage after just short periods of taking it I was struck with a horrible sense of guilt, anxiety and regret that lasted for about a month before it finally subsided, but the thought is pretty much always in the back of my mind and I still get waves of anxiety.
The main issues I'm noticing at the moment is with memory recall- especially with names, but occasionally with words. I believe this is best described as 'tip of the tongue syndrome'. This literally happens multiple times each day.
I stumbled upon this thread the other day where someone explained the exact same issues with memory that I'm having, except for him they were as a result of memantine usage:
http://www.longecity...nitionmemory/
Like him, I seem to struggle to recall what happened the previous day, and the memories seem slightly more distant and inaccessible and I would have trouble remembering whether something happened yesterday or the day before. It's almost as though the memories that are there less organized. I also feel like long periods of time go by a lot faster. From what I can tell this sounds like an issue concerning NMDA or glutamate, or both. All of which Lyrica and memantine have an effect on. I remember making a note of this effect a few weeks after I took the drug, and it doesn't seem to have changed very much since then.
I also seem to have a lower threshold of the the amount of alcohol I can drink before I start 'browning out'.
I basically just want to know if it's at least possible that I could have done any, however insignificant, permanent damage or change. My long term memory used to be insanely good, and while I realise that my previous history of marijuana usage can't have helped, issues from that are generally regarded as being reversible, and I was comfortable with my mental state immediately prior to this incident. I've asked around a bit on reddit but people don't really seem to know what they're talking about. I realise I sound like a massive hypochondriac, and I wouldn't usually think that a drug could have any long term effects after 3 days but I really have noticed these effects.
I'm currently taking 250 mg of UMP orally, a fairly high dosage of a good b-complex with folate and about 1200 mg of DHA, and have been for about three weeks now. I haven't really noticed any profound improvements but I'm not really expecting to yet, but my sleep quality seems to be suffering so I'm not sure if I should keep taking it. I've also ordered some ALCAR and chelated magnesium and I'm considering taking something like Bacopa. I'm generally looking for things that have a residual positive effect when taken in the long term so if anyone's got any other ideas please do comment.
