Published on 12, July, 2020
I have been running a small group of academics for suicide prevention in autism for a few months now and I feel we may get something useful. Included in the group are Prof Simon Baron Cohen and Sara Cassidy. We share ideas , but I seem to be coming up with the major ones.
there’s a group of autistic people which has met to discuss this and concluded we are never taken seriously, drugs are pretty useless, psychiatrists response is poor and inappropriate.
I have been trying for funding and help to have an autistic arm to the Stay Alive app. The app seems well researched and well supported
We could include a Database studying online suicidal ideation in Autism as well as specific routes of advice.
my big idea is to have an Alexa type artificial intelligence system to offer an online reply consultation with the computer. No humans involved as I have found Samaritans etc, kind but always avoid advice.
This system could give research based advice as my experience of mental health services are thats they are terrible with suicidal ideation in autism
what do you think?
"Drugs are pretty useless". I'd have to disagree.
I (accidentally) found a mix of methylone and mephedrone a few years ago that obliterated my suicidal ideation instantly.
Seems to have been a "one shot deal" too...
Wonderful. Well said.
I think we’re on the same page and I have now got a small group of world experts to listen to what people with lived experience have to say! So I’m in a good position to try and move this forwards with PWLE
From my knowledge of psychedelics gained entirely out of curiousity, and a little bit of childhood rebelliousness (for me my "childhood" ended only with my diagnosis!) you roll the dice somewhat. I personally know of several drug casualties associated with large scale personal LSD use.
Although "great fun" I evaluated the effects as "more dangerous than alcohol" a driug that has so far blighted the lives & dulled the minds of more people I know than other drugs have, but more poeple use it..
I would advise you to treat psychedelics with respect, and have plenty of time inbetween experiences. If you are a "take action" kind of person, be very aware that a psychedelic experience should be passive rather than active for the individuals safety. Often recreational users have an experienced "safety officer" or two to hand who do not ingest the psychedelic drug, but are there to try and prevent them from doing anything really stupid. (A bit like a forum administrator!) My adult child rang me up and asked me how to do that last month when she took on the role for her housemates.
Well said and I concur. There are G.Ps who genuinely want to help but since everyone is indeed their own expert and the G.P profit from prescribing certain drugs, the individual really does have to be their own G.P. I studied the concept that psychedelics are useful in the treatment of depression/anxiety. Trial will be coming to Scotland soon but there a currently trials in London. I'm tempted to find my own way but am also fearful because of the scaremongering in the media claiming that such drugs can cause schizophrenia. My buddy has schizophrenia and I wouldn't want to have their challenges as well as the ones I currently have. I also am not sure as to whether I trust these documentaries either as the media does have a hidden agenda much of the time.....
Typical medical profession response. "Your input is irrelevant because you don't have a medical degree".
MY suicidal ideation was way more flipping dangerous than the drugs I took to help ameliorate it!
And you are right, I didn't; get much help off any other drug or combo I may have tried, a little relief for a few hours maybe, but THIS WAS DIFFERENT. I experienced a true one shot cure. I've felt miserable and had bad thoughts since then, but not that strong long lasting ideation that was driving me to act on it.
In short, it appears to somehow left my serotonin levels PERMANENTLY a smidge higher, than when I started.
But my little discovery came from outside of the medical profession & I don't have a big drug company behind me to PAY people like you to take it seriously, so yeah, it stays with me.
Because you are right, Drugs ARE dangerous (especially prozac, I did try the professional medical route first, and for me, (like many others report) it was disastrous. My G.P. clearly had no clue what the stuff actually did to you, or how fast it kicks in!) So whilst I was willing to risk my own health, seeking a solution that "worked" outside of the captured and tight box of "official" medicine, I can't recommend it for others.
Who knows, what the side effects of mephedrone/methylone combo could be? (At least spell it right, if you are going to poke vague aspersions at the chemical, and that's all you have, vague aspersions) because YOU don't know what the stuff does either. There's no money available to look into it (even if there was the interest) and evidence collected by illegal users is automatically disallowed, because, well, it's illegal!
But for the record, here's what I worked for me:
150Mg methylone orally, then 1 hour later 150Mg methylone orally again, then 1.5 hours later approximately 200Mg of mephedrone in 100ml water. (I split the "recommended" dose of methylone in half on safety grounds because I'd never tried it before, and took the mephedrone, because the methylone did not seem to be delivering any real effect, and I did at that point have a working knowledge of what to expect from mephedrone.
The whole point about novel drug use whilst feeling suicidal, is that your life has become an unbearable burden, and you are seeking a temporary lifting of that burden. The illegality and danger is really not so important at that point...
And no-one with any critical reasoning ability who has been alive for a few decades believes the medical profession any longer when it comes to drug safety. They told so many easily disprovable lies about cannabis and MDMA for so long, that my generation takes your advice as "just a guide" (which admittedly works really badly, when it comes to antibiotics.)
I'm scathing about the medical profession with good reason. Despite having benefitted from its prowess on several occasions, too! You all seem to think you are our masters, and not our highly paid servants.
However, things are changing fast now... Despite all the dire warnings & propaganda on the TV real people more often than ever, are finding real solutions to problems their doctor deemed intractable, by doing it themselves.
No-one NEEDS 6 years of study to understand just ONE medical problem, so people are becoming their own "specialists" now via the internet. MY GP's lack of knowledge about how my Autism works is SO obvious, because out of the two of us I am the specialist!!
Expertise, they say, is gained after 5000 hours of work, I've currrently been working on MY problems for 438,00- hours!!
I go to the GP hoping that in his mere 21,900 hours of general medical training, and (maybe) reading the periodicals and updates he MIGHT have an aswer, for my specific problem, and I don't mind if he doesn't, but I do mind when he pretends to have knowedge, (such as you just did with regards to the hazards of methylone) because I simply do not trust easily disproven "liars".
Don't get me wrong, there are the occasional doctors I meet who are really in it for the chance to actually heal someone, and not ot have prestige and money and look down their noses at everyone else. I've had doctors who will work with you to diagnose and treat a particularly sticky ailment, but they don't seem to be the majority and in fact appear to be declining in numbers, and if you get one under the NHS, they are soon replaced with a rubbish & patronising one.
Oh, and I've worked "back office" in the NHS. I've had an opportunity to study many hundreds of NHS facilities & absorb the "culture" as a fly on the wall.. I.T. people are just like flies, actually everyone tries really hard to ignore them... Oddly enough though, outside of their area of "expertise" GP's are as unable to stand up for themselves as any patient. The I.T. department I was gracing with my prescence wat F*&king uselss. It took a doctor TWENTY MINUTES to get a log on, before even attempting to use his machine. Their I.T. was venial (that's exactly wthe right word) but so was the leadership.
It's easy to criticise and much harder to deliver good service, but we aren't getting anything LIKE value for money out of the medical profession as delivered by the NHS. And it's becoming obvious to the man on the street now. Once there is a universal medical encyclopedia, with a decent AI front end, and a suite of you tube videos showing the public exactly where to poke and what to feel for, DIY medicine will really start to "fill its boots".
A small fraction of the public now knows that Cannabis Oil (a Class A category drug) is both benign (compared to the alternatives) and efficacious against certain cancerous growths. Cannabis sellers are now selling a lot of oil based product, not only for recreational use, but for DIY oncology! And some of us end users are managing to sneak our results into the proper medical literature... (well I did anyway, when it worked on my cat!) Cannabis definitely treats aspects of my Auism ADD related problems, (it's why I still use the stuff) yet my Doctor and Psychiatrist both tell me that there is "no treatment for Autism".
Who's the effing expert in what works for my problems here? Yet there are actual laws that say I CANNOT CLAIM the things I know work are efficacious without being a Doctor. (Of course, making such claims as a practicing Doctor which go against big pharmas interests, will destroy you credibilty (and if you keep it up, your career,) real fast...
Doctors. They're good, (sometimes) but they aren't as great as they are on the T.V. set. Caveat emptor!
I was lucky. No-one else will be, there will be no investigation.
It was so long ago that I'm struggling to recall the dose. I remember the ratio though.
They say MDMA has therapeutic uses, this was stronger and felt far more specific to my base state of suicidal ideation at the time. (I was actively collecting parts for my "end of life machine", now no longer required, unless I get some hideous wasting disease) It had a long lasting effect.