Hi everyone. As my user name says, I am no doctor. However, after a number of years of doctors not really helping someone I know and care about with his diagnosed bipolar and attention deficit disorder issues, I was asked for help, in part because complex problem solving is one of my strengths, and in part because he was very desperate for actual help to get better instead of barely coping. I have been working with him, learning a lot about these issues as we go, and we have made significant progress in stabilizing and gradually raising his mental state, mostly through ordinary vitamin and mineral supplementation, a little improvement in exercise, and in managing his doctors better. Managing his doctors better involves making it clear what the goal is (being healthy, well and happy) and what the goal isn't (collecting prescriptions like a dartboard collects darts). We have moved the marker significantly closer to the goal, while significantly reducing prescription medication. It is a work in progress with a fair amount of success in the rear view mirror and a fair amount of success ahead but not yet achieved.

Gradually progressing on those issues has unmasked one other really big problem, alcohol addiction. It was thought to be a secondary problem, but now as the other problems have begun to shrink, alcohol is the big problem. Alcohol and some other substances have been his self-medicating and escape mechanisms, and he cannot control the alcohol. It leads him to lose relationships and jobs, and prevents him from accomplishing anything constructive that he sets out to accomplish, re-enforcing a pattern of failure, depression and escape via alcohol.

He had a recent alcohol binge that cost him his job, and the trust of some of his relatives who had been an important part of his support system. It was that most recent binge, though, that led me to discover the Sinclair Method. I immersed myself in everything I could find on it, because the simple science behind it immediately made sense to me, and my skeptical self needed to investigate side effects, safety, etc. Last Thursday I talked to him about it. Having seen some gradual success with his other issues, and realizing that he has a big alcohol problem that will render all of that other progress moot if this one doesn't get solved, he was willing and guardedly eager to try TSM, even though I didn't tell him much of the details of how it works. The latter is my rough way of testeng for a placebo effect; the less he knows about what the expected effects are, and the more the actual effects that he reports align with the expected effects, the less likely the effects are placebo effects. This is what we have done with vitamin and mineral supplementation as we've progressively stabilized and improved his other issues, and it has helped discern real effects.

TSM, of course, requires a Naltrexone prescription. Seeing the difficulty most people have getting doctors to prescribe Naltrexone without other counseling and/or treatment, or at all, we decided to contact an online doctor. Within 3 hours after first logging in and requesting a virtual visit, he had a prescription and had picked it up from a local pharmacy.

My friend is now five days into his fledgling TSM path toward control over alcohol. Of course it is far, far too early to start gauging any results, other than one. He has not experienced any discernible side effects from the 50mg doses of Naltrexone that he has taken before drinking during these first few days. That's a good start. Although he is also reporting drinking somewhat less than he usually would when he drinks, it's far too early to attribute that directly to having started TSM.

I've read a number of posts here, which has been helpful to me. I consider myself to be quite fortunate, having never once been drunk myself. But that makes it impossible for me to be able to relate to how it actually feels to have cravings and to some of the other things involved with alcohol addiction. Your first hand accounts of your experiences, good and bad, before, during, ongoing, and in some cases after following TSM, help me with some of that, and in turn, that is likely to help my friend.

Thank you for providing and participating in this forum.

You're quite welcome, NoDoctor!

I'm curious, was your friend on Antidepressants as part of the conglomeration of potshots the doctors were taking? Does he have access to a psychiatrist?

If you'd like to read some more stories, check out http://optionssavelives.freeforums.net/. That board is a bit more lively, but this board has quite a collection of people's TSM journeys through the years.

Thanks, JoeSixPack. The short answers are yes and yes. The longer answer is that we are gradually getting his serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) prescription reduced, with the hope that it can be eliminated eventually, as the side effects are bad, the effectiveness is poor to possibly negative, and modest vitamin and mineral supplementation has been having a progressively positive effect so far. The even longer answer is that after a particularly bad spell, he had three different doctors tell him the SSRI probably wasn't a good thing to be on, and between the three of them they collectively wrote four different prescriptions without any of them reducing the SSRI prescription in hopes that one of the others would. I ended up twisting one of their arms to do it, and even then the new prescription was written incorrectly and took a few days to straighten out. He isn't taking any of the four dartboard prescriptions recently written, because none of them make any sens, one of them is highly addictive, and a better, lower dose version of one of them with no side effects he was already obtaining over the counter and taking at my suggestion.

So far in the first week of TSM, he has experienced no side effects while using it four times, the first two at 25 mg and the next two at 50 mg, and he thinks it is having at least a little effect in his ability to stop, but we know it's too soon to know whether this is attributable directly to TSM, extra effort, placebo effect, or some combination. There are no negatives so far, so that's good.

Good deal. I've frequently read that antidepressants in general aren't a good thing to give bipolars, as it causes them to cycle or cycle more rapidly.

It sounds like it might take awhile for your friend to get to indifference towards alcohol, but there should be progress on a month over month basis. Drinking levels on TSM tend to go up and down a lot and the old timers here say "TSM is a rollercoaster". There's often a "honeymoon" at the beginning where drinking levels may drop up to 50%, but then they rebound.

Is your friend tracking his drinks? Here's a link to a spreadsheet/graph combo for that:

https://www.cthreefoundation.org/tsm-drink-log.html

Glad to hear he's moving towards getting the bipolar stabilized, as psychiatric conditions can sometimes cause people to quit TSM if they're not adequately treated.