Vitamin D? Wow. You just swallowed all the pills in the morning at once and bang got high or how exactly should I imagine this? And was it D3 or a complex? How much was your body weight? This recommends 80 IU per body weight kg, so for 125kg people that would make it 10000.
D3. I take the pills in the morning. The effect is… interesting.
Thus far I’ve gotten two other depressed people to try D3. Their reactions, paraphrased for some amusement value:
Day 1: Huh. I’ve had a good day. X and Y and Z have gone right for me. Yeah, I started the vitamin D today, but I need an objective day to see whether or not it’s actually responsible.
Day 2: Wow. Two days in a row. This is making it difficult to assess how the vitamin D is working.
Day 3: Wait… wait… is it really the vitamin D doing that? Can’t be. X and Y and Z happened, that’s why I had a good day.
Day 4: OH GOD I’M A SACK OF CHEMICALS
Having been on vitamin D for about a year now—after a few months the effect stops being so dramatic; the first few weeks are ecstatic. You get adjusted to a new base level of whatever is going on, and your internal happiness levels compensate. Things are still overall better than they were before for me, though.
The other thing I’ve done which had a substantial effect on my overall sense of well-being was meditation. (I’ve also once been able to go directly into a lucid dream through meditating as I fell asleep. I forgot I could teleport in dreams, however, so I spent most of the night struggling to control my mind enough to make flight work reliably.)
ETA: On dosage, somebody—I think on Less Wrong, actually—mentioned a study about how 10,000 IUs was used, with some success, to treat depression. I tried that figure, without consulting body weight recommendations, and it worked. I’d guess, without strong medical basis, that depression isn’t caused by a deficiency of vitamin D, but rather that at higher dosages vitamin D treats the symptoms of the underlying cause of depression.
Interesting. After reading your comment on Friday, now it is my third day on 5000 IUO, I did not really dare to try 10, so far not much of an effect. Probably masked by having visited a rural friend on Sunday who always has homemade brandy ready, well, I guess I won because he fell asleep and I didn’t, still, there is hangover :)
You male? Heard about Vit D and testosterone being connected and T shots being used to treat male depression with some success. To test this: combine it with zinc, zinc deficiency is also fairly common and can be a T bottleneck.
On causality—I tend to look at these things differently. For example when they treat depression with exercise, it is more useful to look at it the opposite way: any natural animal would get a lot of exercise. Lacking it must cause some sort of a symptom, depression being in this case. And perhaps the same thing can be said about sunlight, the most natural thing for an animal is to run around in it, spending our lives in artificial caves must have some sort of an effect.
Vitamin D? Wow. You just swallowed all the pills in the morning at once and bang got high or how exactly should I imagine this? And was it D3 or a complex? How much was your body weight? This recommends 80 IU per body weight kg, so for 125kg people that would make it 10000.
D3. I take the pills in the morning. The effect is… interesting.
Thus far I’ve gotten two other depressed people to try D3. Their reactions, paraphrased for some amusement value:
Day 1: Huh. I’ve had a good day. X and Y and Z have gone right for me. Yeah, I started the vitamin D today, but I need an objective day to see whether or not it’s actually responsible. Day 2: Wow. Two days in a row. This is making it difficult to assess how the vitamin D is working. Day 3: Wait… wait… is it really the vitamin D doing that? Can’t be. X and Y and Z happened, that’s why I had a good day. Day 4: OH GOD I’M A SACK OF CHEMICALS
Having been on vitamin D for about a year now—after a few months the effect stops being so dramatic; the first few weeks are ecstatic. You get adjusted to a new base level of whatever is going on, and your internal happiness levels compensate. Things are still overall better than they were before for me, though.
The other thing I’ve done which had a substantial effect on my overall sense of well-being was meditation. (I’ve also once been able to go directly into a lucid dream through meditating as I fell asleep. I forgot I could teleport in dreams, however, so I spent most of the night struggling to control my mind enough to make flight work reliably.)
ETA: On dosage, somebody—I think on Less Wrong, actually—mentioned a study about how 10,000 IUs was used, with some success, to treat depression. I tried that figure, without consulting body weight recommendations, and it worked. I’d guess, without strong medical basis, that depression isn’t caused by a deficiency of vitamin D, but rather that at higher dosages vitamin D treats the symptoms of the underlying cause of depression.
Interesting. After reading your comment on Friday, now it is my third day on 5000 IUO, I did not really dare to try 10, so far not much of an effect. Probably masked by having visited a rural friend on Sunday who always has homemade brandy ready, well, I guess I won because he fell asleep and I didn’t, still, there is hangover :)
You male? Heard about Vit D and testosterone being connected and T shots being used to treat male depression with some success. To test this: combine it with zinc, zinc deficiency is also fairly common and can be a T bottleneck.
On causality—I tend to look at these things differently. For example when they treat depression with exercise, it is more useful to look at it the opposite way: any natural animal would get a lot of exercise. Lacking it must cause some sort of a symptom, depression being in this case. And perhaps the same thing can be said about sunlight, the most natural thing for an animal is to run around in it, spending our lives in artificial caves must have some sort of an effect.
Hm. I’ll try adding Zinc and see what effect that has, if any. I’d guess my zinc levels are pretty low, but I’ll have to check my vitamins.