Has anyone used high dose vitamin C therapy against anxiety? I had quite success with it. It is my favourite thing. It takes few hours to feel significantly better, but one must use many many grams to get saturated. As much as possible and buffered C is better for this approach. Many bugs produce many toxins and vitamin C neutralises it. So if that is the reason of our anxiety or depression, this can help.
Funnily enough, Lala,
high-dose vitamin C was the first thing I found that worked a little for my hyper anxiety. I used to take 5 grams of vitamin C in a large glass of water, 3 times a day. My mental state at that time was pure hell, a
Dante's Inferno of constant torture. Vitamin C, plus some transdermal magnesium took the edge off this dire state a bit, but only a bit.
I tried
SSRI drugs for my anxiety state, but they made me feel truly terrible: SSRI's put me into an intense suicidal mood (SSRI's are known to precipitate "suicidal ideation" in a small subset people, and I turned out to be in this unfortunate subset). Within a hour of taking just one SSRI tablet, I had this intensely bad suicidal ideation trip lasting for half a day. I tried one more tablet some weeks later, and got exactly the same effect (I understand SSRI's can work well for a lot of people with anxiety disorder, but they do not work for me).
I kept experimenting with other supplements, to see if I could find some other way to treat this anxiety disorder.
After some time, I figured out (by trial and error) that the
anti-inflammatory supplements (described at the beginning of this thread) worked pretty well for me, and I switched to using these for a long time.
Then I started to hypothesize that some gut or kidney infection was influencing my mental state, creating this biochemically-caused anxiety (I get a recurrent kidney infection, and have IBS symptoms, possibly due to SIBO - Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth). So I went through a lot of antibiotics, just to test them, plus dozens herbal and essential oil supplements that have antibacterial effects. I got some slight improvements in my anxiety from antibiotics / antibacterial supps, but not much. And they did not help my gut/kidney infections all that much. I tried some probiotics at one stage too, but these had little influence in general.
Finally, more recently, I started experimenting with high dose
PREbiotics (not probiotics), and remarkably, these have probably had the greatest impact so far in tackling my anxiety. I would almost say that I am am now cured of this anxiety (but not cured of chronic fatigue syndrome, although my energy levels and brain fog have also improved with these prebiotics). I have read studies that indicate that prebiotics and probiotics can help eliminate recurrent kidney infections, even where potent antibiotics have failed. So it seems that fixing your gut can improve your kidney health, quell long-term infections, and in my case, fix my desperately-mlafuncitoning brain biochemistry. You would not have thought this possible, but there are substantial gut-brain connections. Infection in the gut leads to gut inflammation, and there is research that indicates this gut inflammation then remotely triggers brain inflammation, thereby generating the anxiety state biochemistry. Anyway, in summary: I highly rate taking high-dose prebiotics.
Having been stuck in that Dantean Hell of unrelenting anxiety for about 5 years, now that I seemed to have escaped this anxiety state, I want to pass on this treatment info, in the hope that it may help others in this situation. I can live with fatigue, brain fog, and all the other tribulations of CFS (although I don't of course want to); but severe anxiety is hell.
I would suggest that anyone with anxiety that has resisted treatment try the anti-inflammatory supplement approach, and/or the
prebiotics approach; you can use both approaches together.
PREbiotics work much better than probiotics, in my view. I understand that very often probiotics don't even make it through the stomach. Prebiotics are a much more effective way to boost your good bacteria: they help feed the good gut flora, and starve out the bad gut flora. You will have to take prebiotics long term, to maintain benefits, but they are quite cheap.
Also, anyone subscribing to the gut dysbiosis theory of CFS would do well to try high-dose prebiotics (with perhaps some probiotics too, for good measure), rather than antibiotics.
RE: "Ecklonia Cava Extract"
I tried Ecklonia cava extract a few years ago, and I found it was vaguely helpful in my case, but not dramatically. It does have a good reputation for treating fibromyalgia especially, as well as CFS and anxiety. However, due to its high price at the time, I only took small doses of EC. Perhaps larger doses would have been better. I have noticed that EC is getting cheaper now, however. Swanson for example now do Ecklonia cava extract for around $6. I might try EC again at some point.
