 Hi there. Welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. Now I want to do a video about ADHD and depression and the differences between or my experiences of the differences between ADHD stimulant medications and a drug called Wellbuter. Now, before I go any further, I do have to make the disclaimer that I'm not a doctor and you shouldn't rely on anything shared in this video for the purposes of diagnostics or treatment. If you are concerned about your mental health, I highly, highly suggest you go to your doctor and they will try as you and put you into the right system and that's all you have to do to get to get going with it. It's quite easy. Okay, so I have to say a couple of things and this is this video has been something I've been planning to make for a couple of months now and just been busy with other things, especially trying out this new medicine. So, firstly, I made a few videos about vivants water and vivants water is basically just putting vivants into water. It's really it's arguably not was not worth making a video about. Essentially, vivants is to the best of my knowledge, the only water soluble ADHD medication that comes as a powder within capsules. And what my psychiatrist told me to do when I was coming on it was to actually use this method to titrate the drug. So, because here in Israel, we only have 3050 and 70 milligrams of vivants, we don't have the 2040 and 60 capsules. So what you told me to do was pretty sounded a bit hackish to me, but it's actually something a lot of doctors I've heard recommend put that into water, drink two thirds and there you go. You've just managed to make a dose of 20 milligrams vivants out of 30. The technical name for that is it's a water. It's a volume. It's a volumetric titration. It's a water based titration. And you're just playing around with its water solubility to make fine adjustments to the dosing quite a clever system. So I made those videos and I took them down from YouTube effectively last week. Now, the reason I did that was because I'm no longer taking vivants and those videos were generating quite a number of comments. Now, let me just explain my rationale with this. It's definitely not to boost my YouTube channel because to reach the monetization threshold, this is shooting myself in the foot because these were among my most popular videos. The reason is this. I do not want to have videos talking about my own experience with vivants, get people excited about it. If anybody were to check out my other videos or leave comments, I didn't want to have to burst people's bubbles repeatedly by telling them that, oh, I'm no longer taking this drug. So my rationale was vivant water. I've written a blog about it. There's a how to on the internet. It probably didn't require a video to demonstrate how to put a pill into water and fill it up to a certain level. So that is why those videos are no longer available. Now, the broader thing I wanted to discuss today was to compare the two. Now, I was on vivants for about eight months at that dosage and I was doing it for a while alongside a drug called Zoloft, which is an SSRI and at some point I got 100% convinced that vivants and this is something I've heard a lot of vivants people report. I was convinced that this stuff was like gold dust. This was like the absolute solution to all life's problems. Now, I would not say I was manic, but I was certainly quite energized. And that's really what I was thinking. It was actually more coming from a place of confidence that I thought that, you know what, whatever is causing my depression or these issues that I have, I just need something to stimulate me enough to work through the day. And I'll get those out of my way and I'll continue through life. So it wasn't really coming from a place of let's say mania. And I don't even want to use that term because it's got a specific meaning in psychiatry. It was coming from just that place. But unfortunately, I had to accept and I'm making YouTube videos because it was actually somebody else's YouTube video that got me back in the door of my doctor's office. And that was basically I just sat down one day at two in the morning after another productive day cleaning my apartment. And I said, I am pretty miserable. This is making me more depressed. I'm very, very productive, but this drug does not make me any happier. It's making me very edgy. And I just could not relax. There was, which as a self employed person, freelancer, however you want to call it, is a very, very bad combination because there's always more work to do. There's always more inbound marketing. There's always more marketing. There's always more work. There's always something there to do. So I was just kind of working around the clock and not really eating. That was that was actually due to a completely separate thing. It's kind of related to this whole journey of my gallbladder surgery has caused a lot of digestive problems. And that was actually what got me in the door in the first place of a psychiatrist's office, because for years and years, I was self medicating something with an abundance of caffeine. And I was getting through life pretty okay. But I still knew there was something that just was not right. Like, you know, most healthy people do not need coffee. People do like coffee and people make jokes about their caffeine addiction. And they go through caffeine withdrawal, but I was on a kind of a different level with it. It was kind of more like, if I could have an IV drip installed, that would, I probably would have said great, you know, not, not, not really, but just, just to demonstrate and balancing that with a little bit of alcohol, a couple of nights a week, not much, but it just, I knew I was doing something, I was treating something poorly. So it was after my gallbladder surgery that when my digestive system sort of decided to stop working for me, that was really a blessing in disguise because this system basically was no longer viable. So what I want to talk about in this video is Vyvan's versus Wellbutrin and my perception of them. Now, what I'm taking these drugs for, when I first went to the doctor after this thing I described, the diagnosis is kind of muddy. Now I thought at the time that that was quite unique, that I was a doctor house case. And that is not the case. It's quite common for people to have some sort of ill defined mixture of ADHD, depression and anxiety. So my initial, I think I have a little bit of both. My depression is a dystemic type depression. I've never been very depressed. I've never been unable to get out of bed. But if you really want to know the thoughts that go around my head every day, I do struggle a lot with a sense of low self esteem, hopelessness. And that's been a long standing thing for me that just kind of got a bit pushed over the edge with corona and with my gallbladder surgery because it's kind of depressing being bloated all the time. So again, a blessing in disguise that got me into it. So ADHD as well. And that's the interesting thing about these two conditions and why it's so important to go to see a psychiatrist or somebody whose day to day work involves sorting out these complicated psychiatric pictures because to them I'm sure this stuff is a breeze. The different mental health conditions, depression, anxiety, ADHD can throw up the same symptoms in terms of if we take the kind of stuff I was struggling with, which was without caffeine, I had trouble. It was really getting motivated to work. Once I was working, I was fine. You know, energy, motivation, focus, that kind of a thing. And that can be a fact, that can be a manifestation of depression. That the lack of focus can for sure be a manifestation of ADHD. And it's also possible that you're so anxious that you can't focus on what you need to do. So that again, that's why you go to a psychiatrist and they do stuff like give you questionnaires and take a detailed history. And then they can unpack that process. Sometimes the unpacking process occurs through medicine medication trials. And that's kind of what I went through. It was a bit like the matrix when I went to my psychiatrist. And he, the first time, which was last summer, did the intake evaluation. And at the end, he said, well, I can suggest two things for you. One is Ritalin, which is ADHD medication. The other is Prozac, which is a SSRI. And it felt to me a bit like the matrix, the red pill, blue pill, kind of a thing. And I went for whatever the red pill is in that example, the ADHD med, because those drugs scared me far less. I was terrified of taking an SSRI. Absolutely terrified. I read so many horror stories about them on the internet. And when I finished with this video, I'm actually going to do just one more mental health one today, because coming off Zoloft was easy. And I was terrified of that. I was on it for about six months. Another medicine I tried. And I just I don't think anyone's come to YouTube so far. A lot of people have come to talk about how bad the brain's apps are. I'm not sure anyone's done a video to say it was actually pretty okay. And that was my experience. For about a week, I was kind of a bit bummed out, felt a bit nauseous, but it really wasn't that bad. Anyway, so this is the reason I'm unwell buterin is essentially I got depressed, taking every stimulant thus far. And SSRI made me very tired. And this is a second or third line treatment for depression, bupropion. Now, just want to firstly say a few words about what this is. And again, this is coming from my perspective as a patient, and not as a doctor, but just to kind of contrast these two different drugs. So it's a weird one because it's not classified in there with the stimulant drugs with the methylphenidate and with the vivants. It's kind of its own thing. It's not an SSRI. It's not an SNRI. It's Neurotransmitter classification is an NDRI. It's a norepinephrine dopamine reuptake inhibitor. And it's used for smoking cessation because it also has activity on the nicotinic receptor. So again, this is my attempt to communicate the science. It could be getting it wrong. But what's interesting to me about that is that from based on what I understand, there's a lot of overlap between the neurotransmitter systems that vivants et al work on and that bupropion works on. But the interesting thing is that their indications are different. Wellbutrin is licensed for or really used for depression. And it's considered quite poor for ADHD as far as I know. And stimulants are not really used for depression only for people are really stuck with energy. So in one sense, and this is what I am a hard time wrapping my head around. On the one hand, these drugs are very similar. On the other hand, they have different effects. Now the effect I feel so far on Wellbutrin for insomnia, this stuff is horrible. Now there's only three dosages of Wellbutrin 150, 300 and 450 milligrams. And that 450 limits actually quite rigid. And the reason for that it's very you'll have a hard time finding a doctor today who'll sign off on more than that. Now the reason is that one of the concerns surrounding Wellbutrin was traditionally that there is considered a high seizure risk. They lower the seizure threshold. And above 450 milligrams, I believe the evidence says that that seizure risk begins to really, really increase significantly. So it was originally used at dosages like 600 milligrams width was withdrawn from the market for a while, and then came back at these lower dosages. So that's what Wellbutrin is. And there's a few forms instant release, sustained release, and extended release, which is the longest release formulation. These are the extended release. Now in terms of how they feel in terms of my experience going through them, what it would say is this, I find this crazy stimulating. I just jumped up to 300. You might be able to hear that based on how quickly I'm speaking. I've just jumped up to 300. And I know I'm going to basically hardly sleep for the next week. And I just want to do this because I want to feel better. And I definitely do feel better. But it's very stimulating. Now my experience, I feel like these are 90% the same as Vi-vans. That's my experience. They feel, it feels like a very stimulating drug. When I took this for the first day, I was like, this is a stim. This is the same side effects of stimulants, the anxiety, the same benefits of stimulants, the energy, let's say, and also the same adjustment period. Because when you start on Vi-vans and you go up in a dosage, you also get this period of feeling like a wound up hamster. And then that kind of just mellows down, which is what I expect is going to happen with this dosage for me in probably a couple of weeks. So yeah, they have definitely those, those similarities. But the difference, the difference is that this somehow works as an antidepressant, despite it, the neurotransmitter systems being, I think quite similar to Vi-vans, despite the feeling as a patient, subjectively being very similar. One does just make you stimulated. And the other gives you energy and somehow also makes you less depressed. So this is a unique drug. I'm not sure that psychiatrist understand. And again, this is based on me interacting with the very, very useful Ask Psychiatry Reddit. I'm not sure psychiatry understands why this stuff is antidepressant has antidepressant qualities. I think a lot of it's mystery. But all we can do as patients is work with the drugs that our doctor has prescribed for us. And I will say based so far, I'm very, very bullish slash confident about well-buttern. Because if there's one thing I hate from any medication that I find intolerable, it's fatigue and brain fog. I guess I just like to use my brain as a writer. And when I get my brain slowed down, that's like, I'd rather get like unrelenting headaches than have my brain feel like it's mush. And that was kind of a bit of the feeling I got on as Zoloft. So this is my attempt just to kind of explain a little bit here about how ADHD and depression, firstly, they can be comorbidities is very common. They can both cause symptoms that look similar. And even for clinicians, it can be hard to pull those two conditions apart and identify which symptoms are coming from which or even from both. As I say, it's really something that you need to work with the doctor for because doing all this stuff is complicated. And they're an objective person who can take notes of your different experiences on the drugs and identify the best one for you. So well-buttern, this is my attempt besides that to also talk about well-buttern, well-buttern and vivants. One is a long acting stimulant. The other is a atypical antidepressant. I find them feel quite similar, but this definitely has a marked antidepressant effect that I did not experience with vivants. In fact, the opposite, the more I was on it, the more depressed it actually made me, which I think from people with ADHD who turn out to actually have depression, that stimulants aggravate a untreated mood disorder, I think is relatively commonplace. And that's what I experienced basically. It made me very, very functional, but kind of depressed. Anyway, I hope that video was useful. More videos coming soon on the topic of mental health to this YouTube channel.