Taking Hydrocodone For Depression (Page 16)
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I am wondering if anybody else out there has taken Hydrocodone and noticed that symptoms of depression are alleviated? I find that many of today's anti-anxiety and antidepressant drugs come with unpleasant side effects, whereas while taking Hydrocodone they aren't there. The caveat to all of this is that yes, I know that Hydrocodone and opiates in general can be addictive. So long term use would result in withdrawal symptoms. I'm just wondering who else might agree with me on this?

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I thought they were for pain, I was on them for 10 years. Helped my broken back pain. But NOW if you take them your (not taken cause they help your pain) No your a drug head. If you ever walked in my shoes for say 15 min you would blow your brains out. Some people are smart and others are weak and greedy and want more. IF you use something the right way it works. Use it the wrong way get it taken away...

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Hi Dawn, couldn't agree more with your post. Having both lifelong depression (on ssd from that and recent Alzheimer's dx) the mental anguish is so much frickin worse. Just a thought I wanted to add, there is absolutely No reason a good compassionate doc should not give a script for pain meds, as technology has evolved they have total control with compliance. Offering to agree to a single pharmacy, contract, random drug panels, etc all but eliminates potential abuse and overuse. Sadly, most docs will not take the time or use off label for this. Very sad. Best wishes

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Yes. Opiates are a great appetite suppressant. If you take antidepressants that cause weight gain, opiates are good to piggyback on an intermittent basis to keep weight gain regulated. Excellent combination if used in the correct manner.

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Yes! I am a certified pharmacy tech and in pain management. Once my pain was addressed all symptoms of depression or inability to do anything went away and it is true...........antidepressants will cause actual drug withdrawal. Been there done that!

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Why not? Doctors prescribe off label all the time. But now with America waging it's loosing war on drugs,I doubt you would find any doctor to try. Now you can barely get them to prescribe it for it's intended purpose.

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I have been diagnosed with severe clinical depression. Have been taking Effexor 150mg along with Clonazepam for decades. I am involved in MMA and train hard. This also helps alleviate the symptoms drastically. However, along with heavy training comes injury and Vicodin has been a part of my life during various stages of training. When I take Vicodin it completely eliminates my depression. Not only that, it allows me to do things I have never done since my depression. I can go out and socialize comfortably, get much more done in a day, work harder and train better. Sleep and recovery are excellent. I look forward to my day and can actually cut back on my exercise which was killing me. Finally, somebody else with depression has mentioned the benefits of Vicodin in depressed patients. It works!

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Antidepressants and hydrocodone fall into completely separate categories. The known side effect of hydrocodone is a feeling of euphoria. This state only last the average person about two hours, and it's usually starting to work within 15 minutes of taking, whereas antidepressants can take several weeks before some feel any effects. And the effects are not going to be the same. Antidepressants will eventually have one feeling sleepy, slowed in reaction, sad, suicidal, not that if you take them as prescribed by your medical doctor and only as long as they are needed. There is really no "high" from antidepressants unless you take more than prescribed. Then you'll start seeing things and very well could kill someone and not know it. Never ever take more than officially told to. I can see why a doctor could prescribe hydrocodone as an antideep, due to that "high" but there are issues too to consider, other than the obvious, of possible addiction, which I'll,text about in a minute. Constipation is a side effect of opioids and so your doc would need to prescribe a stool softener and you need to be drinking lots and lots of water ( ugh) , more folks are allergic to opioids than antideeps. Antideeps also make some, not all,people gain weight, "happy weight" because they no longer pissed off at the world. But like I said before antidepressants take wa few weeks to work so some patients may give up and try an ovoid therapy route anyway.

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Greetings! I am a 30 yr chronic pain and depression sufferer. I agree that some pain meds help when traditional antidepressants do not. This is more of a numbing effect IMHO, and somewhat of a slippery slop. I do not know of a doc that will rx strictly for depression. Actually, having cp and depression puts my doc on high alert for any changes in pain med usage or misusage. I completely agree it provides relief, just have to be extremely careful to follow instructions to the T - showing compliance. I hope this makes sense and is of help.

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Dawn yes opiates are an excellent anti-depressant. Many of the synthetic have THEBAINE as their base, or foundation or main ingredient. Thebaine is the only non-narcotic alkaloid of the poppy and is in fact a stimulant. You said that they stopped the practice of prescribing them in the 50's for depression due to their addictive potential. Ok so I think that since they prescribe them with all the crazy monitoring for chronic pain users, they could do the same thing if they started to use them again as an anti-depressant. How can we get the ball rolling in that direction? Oh, check out the book by Dr. Robert Cochran, Opiates and the Bi-Polar, or The Opiate Cure. He had no qualms about prescribing opiates for anything because he's one of the few doctors that know they work for more than pain.

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Originally prescribed vicodin 10/325 for back pain, which it helped, but the amazing thing was the depression and anxiety I had suffered from for years was almost completely gone. I'm productive, confident and am doing very well at my job. My wife monitors my use like a hawk and makes me feel bad for taking them now that back pain is gone. But I'm happy. I'm productive, I don't wake up with anxiety, nor do I have anxiety at work. I wish I was a chemist and new of a medicine that would affect the same receptors hydrocodone does. Every antidepressant I've taken makes my anxiety worse and makes me feel like a zombie.xanax is worthless for anxiety unless I take 4 or 5 mg, then I'm just falling asleep. Does anyone know of an antidepressant that will work in my body like the vicodin?

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Good information, Dawn! My daughter was overdosed on Cymbalta by a nurse practitioner when she was 26 and developed serotonin syndrome (google seratonin syndrome--it's a nightmare!) Anyway, as a result of this, she developed horrific anxiety and panic attacks, and was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. She discovered that she couldn't take ANY antidepressant/anti-anxiety meds; many give her serotonin syndrome and others give her seizures. Then she broke her arm and was given Percocet for the pain. While it didn't make her "high", she discovered that it did significantly decrease her anxiety to a tolerable level. She was also finally able to sleep. Obviously, even though she has now lived with crippling anxiety and panic attacks for 8 years and cannot take the "usual" meds for this, no doctor will use an opioid for an "off-label" purpose such as treating anxiety. And so she suffers, year after year, struggling to get through each day in terrible EMOTIONAL pain, not suicidal but still wishing she would die.. Even though her doctor knows all this and knows also that anti-anxiety meds like Xanax help only a little and only in very high doses, all the doc does is dole out Xanax at a level which doesn't touch my daughter's anxiety. This means the doctor can pat herself on the back for "treating" the anxiety while my daughter continues to suffer. Again, I believe the US medical profession needs to get over it's fear of opioids and use them as a valuable tool rather than treating suffering people all as drug abusers and addicts. It's easy to call for the elimination of oxycodone-based medications such as Percocet or Oxycontin (or any opioid) when you or your loved ones are either not suffering or have made a choice to deliberately misuse/abuse them. It's not so simple when you observe and/or experience the tremendous value they have in treating all kinds of pain in those who respect the pros and cons of such medications and use them appropriately.

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I got an email from this site recently about a post I made back in December 2015 asking if fentanyl really was 80 times stronger than morphine for cancer pain. I never got a reply so I forgot about it. Then after getting the recent email, I clicked the link and it took me to a string of posts about people who wonder if they should be taking hydrocodone/lortab/vicodin for depression/anxiety.

Back in the 1950's, hydrocodone was prescribed for depression/anxiety on a regular basis by doctors. It did a wonderful job making patients feel better. Then, people eventually started abusing it and so doctors became wary of prescribing it for anything other than short term bad pain (like after surgery) or long term chronic pain from disease. I have been on it off and on for over 20 years and nothing has ever worked as well to alleviate my awful depression. The problem I had with anti depressants and anti anxiety meds was (1) it takes a very long time for them to work and (2) when they do work, they don't work all that well and (3) the side effects are horrendous. When I take a lortab for depression, it works very well, works immediately, and there are no side effects at all except for some constipation that I can control with lots of water and OTC stool softeners. I think it's a crying shame that people can't get what obviously works so well.

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Yes this is funny but true...back in the day I had a dr. that prescribed Percoset for weight loss and YES it worked wonders. Gave you tons of energy and the weight fell off like crazy.
He was relieved from his practice a few years later when so many people were going to him for weight loss.

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Edie I couldn't have said it any better...

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Edie-yes, yes, and more yes's.....well put!

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While it's unfortunate that someone became depressed after stopping Hydrocodone, this doesn't mean NO ONE should ever take it for pain. I've taken it several times over the decades for pain (for weeks, not months or years) and have never had any difficulty discontinuing it or experienced any post-Vicodin (hydrocodone) depression. (Oddly, it never reduced my pain in the least!) It's unfair to assume that one's experience with a medication will be the experience of everyone who takes it. This assumption could potentially leave someone in pain because they're told that these negative effects will extend to ALL who take it, which is not true. It's similar to those people who think Oxycontin shouldn't be manufactured because someone they know abused it and/or overdosed on it. We have friends whose teenaged daughter overdosed on Tylenol and died. So should we push to eliminate the production of Tylenol? Here's another side of the story--Oxycontin has saved my life, has given me a life.. It's enabled me to live beyond sitting huddled in my recliner under heating pads, praying for death because the agony is so great. It's enabled me to be active, travel, visit and play with my grandkids--in other words, to HAVE a life other than simply living in horrific pain 24/7. That's because I'm a pain patient, not a drug abuser and treat opioids as medication to be taken as legally prescribed, not as a "fun" drug. (BTW - I've NEVER experienced any kind of "high" from these!) It's unfortunate that some people have negative experiences with certain medications. It's unfortunate that some people are abusers who obtain and take these medications illegally and inappropriately. These are the people who make it hard on those of us who suffer daily with terrible, incurable pain that is otherwise untreatable and who have been saved by such medications. We need to stop punishing the victims of such pain by operating under the assumption that there is no difference between pain sufferers and drug abusers. Right now in our country, opioids are being regulated as though pain patients and drug abusers/dealers are all the same, written to supposedly decrease the amount of illegal drug use. The truth is that making the laws continually more restrictive only hurts the true pain patient who is struggling to do things "by the book" to control their pain; drug abusers seem to always find a way to get what they want. And the reality is that, in spite of continually tightening existing laws and making new ones that make it more difficult for pain patients to control their suffering, the "drug problem" is not one tiny fraction better. These actions are simply something the FDA/DEA/CDC are doing to make it appear they're doing something about all the illegal drug use in this country, to make themselves look good. And they don't seem to care who they hurt in that process. They and others who call for ceasing the production of what are "miracle drugs" to those of us in pain are the people of whom Samuel Johnson, an 18th century writer/philosopher spoke when he said, "THOSE WHO DO NOT FEEL PAIN SELDOM THINK THAT IT IS FELT." So true.

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was taking hydrocodone for menstrual cramps as it was the only thing that helped. After taking it for months I got hooked and abused it for maybe 2 years or more. I had to stop so I did and in doing so got very depressed and each day that I went without it, I got more depressed. Each day got worse and I felt so helpless. I was fighting this alone and it was extremely hard. I went through the entire process for a very long time. I wish I would have never started this med. Now I can see why so many Dr,s won't prescribe it any longer. It causes so many problems.

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Leanna4. Thank you for your concern. What were you taking the hydrocodone for? How long did you take them? What kind of withdrawal did you have?
I know of Dr. Amen but haven't read that book you referred to. Will get it. Thanks

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I completely agree but once you stop the hydrocodone...you will fall into a great depression and it is so hard....even friends I have went through it as well. It's really better that I would have chosen something else for pain. Kicking this addiction was extremely hard for me. I've been clean for a little over a year now but still fighting the depression. I'm reading a book...Better Brain, Younger Life. This is a big help. It will let you know that the only way to a better life is treating your brain right. Daniel Amen is the author. You should read it. I love this book and I've started to proceed in what this Dr. recommends after I've stopped the Hydro. over a year ago.
Life is too short and if you love it.....protect it before you loose it to a stupid opiate.

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Botero I forgot! LOL Google the article "Ignorance Kills" it's an excellent little read about endogenous deficient syndrome.....there are also books by Dr. Robert Cochran such as "The Opiate Cure", Pain and the Bipolar Spectrum, he concludes in that book with.... could we reduce opiate abuse by prescribing it MORE generously? The core reason is the distrust between patient and Doctor. We don't trust them, and that is why we have them sign drug contracts and pill counts, u/a's, etc. It is why we dispense the drugs not to the level of the patients comfort but to our comfort. This is the reason so many people obtain medicines from multiple doctors and buy them through other means. People with chronic pain do not trust their doctors. That is why they lie and use deceit. They have to. We make them do it because we view them as drug seekers. The opiate cure is out there. Unfortunately so is the opiate stigma. Patients are afraid to tell their doctors of the relief they get.

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