PSSD: Introduction (suffering from Post-SSRI syndrome similar to PFS)

[PSSD]

Hey, glad to finally join this community ! I wanted to join a long time ago but I just couldn't register / wouldn't receive a confirmation link. I hope I'm still welcome even though I don't have PFS per se but its cousin, PSSD. I really believe both conditions have the same mechanisms since you some PSSD guys get better on TRT/PCT/Proviron and that type of stuff. The symptoms are also essentially the same if you're familiar with that condition. Here's a list of the symptoms I'm experiencing:

- Anhedonia/Emotional numbness
- Inability to feel drunk/relaxed
- Pleasureless orgasms
- Genital numbness
- No libido
- mild ED (fixed in the past by doing HIIT but it came back recently since I crashed off caffeine)
- Depersonalization (comes and goes)
- Brain fog
- Inability to focus/concentrate
- Inability to feel euphoric
- Fatigue
- Extreme anxiety (including social anxiety)
- I never have any energy - I might as well be sleeping / basically bedridden

My issues started in 2017, after I woke up from a LSD trip depersonalized. I noticed that my libido was totally gone. I wanted this to go away, so I trusted my GP. I was prescribed Effexor / 37.5mg and within 3 days, my sex life was pretty much over. I could not feel any pleasure from sex even if I wanted to... and this went on for many years until 2020. By that point I was kind of living a normal life, since I had no cognitive symptom. In october of 2020, I kinda got addicted to tobacco and what I did not realize was that tobacco contains MAOIs. You guessed it - I woke up with anhedonia and complete genital numbness (worse than just pleasureless orgasms). I would probably those were the first few weeks of my life.

I ended up meeting an individual on Discord with PSSD that was really confident the CDSnuts protocol was the way out of this mess. After doing some research, I found out that it does indeed seem to help alot of PFS guys and some PSSD sufferers that have shared their stories on SwoleSource before. It took me a while to start doing this protocol, as the supplements are very hard to find IMO. Unfortunately, the very first supplement I ingested (Pine Pollen) made me worse temporarily (I don't know if this is normal?) and I kinda got spooked. There are also supplements in the protocol that us PSSD sufferers can't take (anything that messes with seretonin or whatever... so basically no ashwagandha, no MAOI... none of that stuff). I also kinda realized I don't actually know how this protocol works... like I don't know how the supp. rotation works exactly and such. My ''mentor'' is on this Forum but he hasn't been on Discord for a long time, so I didn't know how to proceed.

I ended up not doing anything for a while, until recently. I crashed off caffeine (like I got worse... everytime I ingest caffeine it induces a 24h depersonalization episode and a worsening of PSSD). That was f*ing shitty, but now alcohol crashes me as well. I can't even feel drunk anymore. This is getting ridiculous and I really don't know what to try / what to do. I feel so lost. I have no idea what to do. I'm really desesperate.

The only thing that has ever worked is Nofap. It takes 3 months, but eventually my brain allows me to feel everything again. I go back to this shitty PSSD baseline whenever I break the streak and orgasm. That's right - I can watch porn / spank the monkey but it's orgasms specifically that ruin everything. Do you guys happen to know what exactly happens during orgasms? Am I looking at an issue with my androgen/estrogen sensitivity? Is it about prolactin being released or something? It can't just be receptors, they fix themselves naturally. You'll usually see persistant issues like this in people that have hormonal imbalances / infections / auto-immune stuff or even microbiome dysbiosis.

I'm joining this forum in hopes of finding a way out. Maybe I got spooked over something that's normal in the beginning and maybe I could modify the supp. list so it's PSSD-friendly. And hey, if pine pollen actually did something (even if its negative) then it means I was kinda messing with the right stuff, yeah?