i wanted to take a break this weekend, stay in every night (i did it yesterday) but today i got the worst haircut ever, the bitch cutting it wanted to ruin my life it seems and now i cant stop thinking of how i wanna go drinking and do coke to have at least a bit of a humorous time and laugh ughhhhh
i just got my nipples pierced YAAAY and OUCHHH. it hurt really bad and now it stings but pain is temporary, cool nips are forever. anyway i‘m going out tomorrow night and obviously will want to do coke, do you think it’s gonna be alright or should i at least try to refrain from coke and alcohol as much as possible. online people said alcohol is fine but idk about the coke
hello this will be a longer post without TLDR but i appreciate anyone who reads it. this is all my personal experience in this study. for anyone interested in more info on the actual study or anything else DM me. so the main theme of the study is that they wanna see if cocaine addiction can be treated with one treatment dose of ketamine, in combination with MRI Neuro-Feedback training. the neurofeedback-training is essentially the process of imagining positive things and situations in your life and trying to up your brain activity. important is, you cannot think of any situations that involved drugs. the recommended prompts of situations to think about where: food, nature, sexual fantasies, other people, i.e. you can choose what prompt you wanna use and you also don’t have to explain what exactly you imagined. in between the short imagination prompts, you have to do some math equations to basically „reset“ your brain activity. so now i‘ve had 3 of in total 6 appointments. -the first one was just a row of health check ups, including psych evaluations to screen for possible exclusion criteria. -the second was the longest appointment, which is also the one where you get the IV of ketamine or placebo drug. you also have various sessions in the MRI, first just the neuro feedback, then follows the IV that you receive, while you lay in the MRI and have to do another round of the neuro feedback. i unfortunately do think that i received the placebo drug cause i didn’t really feel high or any major changes after the IV. -the third appointment was this week and it’s just 2 MRI sessions with neuro feedback and i also had to watch 2 short films in the scanner. one was about people playing chess and in the second video people were using cocaine. ngl the video of the people using was kinda triggering but i guess that was the point and they wanna see what seeing that would do to my brain activity.
the next appointments are only gonna be interviews and questionnaires.
so my experience: i was really excited to participate and just trying to help others in the future to maybe find a more efficient approach to treat different drug addictions. i do think i received the placebo cause i didn’t feel any major changes, which is unfortunate but i did know that there is a 25% chance to not receive the ketamine. what was interesting was the neuro feedback training. you see in real time if you were able to regulate your brain activity and it was nice to see that i haven’t completely fried my brain with cocaine and that my brain does still react to other positive stimuli. also she recommended me that i could do that training basically everywhere, while waiting for the train or anything cause the more you do it, the more you strengthen those connections with this training the better your brain will actually react better to those stimuli. the only difference is obviously that when you do it at home i don’t have the actual feedback like in the MRI but you can kinda tell if your imaginations worked or not. i definetly wanna do that more. this whole experience also motivated me more that i do wanna change something in my cocaine use. i‘m not a daily user but for over 1 year now i am using every weekend up to 2 grams and i cant enjoy a single night-out without coke and i want to be able to do that again. i do wanna change something and just because i didn‘t get to try the ketamine approach, doesn’t mean i can never change anything.
anyway, i hope just by participating that i can help others in the future and that we can find new approaches on treating drug addiction and also that people are actively looking for different treatment options! it’s positive to know that people care about addicts and wanna find solutions to help them.