Oh, Sweetheart,
It sounds like way more detox than simply fluoride and bromides. Coming off multiple substances might have put you right into detox hell. Slowing down - in other words not trying to dump it all at once may be the appropriate thing to do. Adding the Iodine could not have created this misery all by itself. So, I would keep taking it , if I were you.
Now, the other substances... forget about the water for now.. I am drinking chlorinated/fluoridated water myself. I cannot afford to get a water thingy yet. Are you taking the 1/2 teaspoon of salt in a half cup of warm water followed by a pint of water?? That will rid you of most of the halide detox.
Forget about the coffee and the white flour right now, too.. eat and drink your regular stuff.. that can wait.
The antidepressants are a big deal to come off of... don't just stop cold turkey.. ease off them and allow the Iodine to support you as you do. One of my sisters is on them and has cut them in half - AFTER she has been taking Iodine for a week.
I feel for you, felt your frustration when you posted on the Iodine Forum . You are welcome back if you apologize for the cursing... you have just about done that in this post, so that can be fixed fast.
I have faced down suicide a few times in my life. I know how it feels to want to cut and tear my own body.
I say you need to make this doable for yourself. Ratchet it down some, do less, accomplish more. It is way easy to try and cleanse EVERYthing all at once. Way easy to be distracted by ALL the problems we have in our bodies, soscieties... even in our forums.
You are not alone.

What you said isn't really considered swearing in Australia either. Actually there are alot of words that I can't say in front of my US husband cause he thinks that it is cussing. I think it is just a normal way of expressing oneself, but I respect him enough not to say it in front of him.

As for how you are feeling, I can relate. I have been where you are. I was addicted to sleeping pills for a couple years, at two seperate times in my life. After I got off them the first time I swore I would never take them again, but I just don't operate very well without sleep and so I found myself walking that path again. Getting off them was tough, but meditation music actually helped me to get to sleep. Anything by Jonathan Goldman will put you to sleep, but the one I use most these days is A Symphony of Brainwaves by Dr. Andrew Weil. If that doesn't put you to sleep, nothing will.

I see you posted in the OP forum. Does that mean that you oil pull? I have found it very helpful to me. I never OP past 4pm, I have heard that it can keep you awake. I know some people do it before bed, but I wouldn't recommend it if you have trouble sleeping.

I smoked for 20 years, so I know how hard quitting can be. I also know how worth it, it is if you can stick with it. Just keep reminding yourself of all the poisens that are in cigarettes. I still get a craving occassionally, but knowing what it does to the human body is enough to keep me from lighting up.

I have also taken my share of anti d's over the years. Aropax was my drug of choice last time. I remember the brain sparks when I weaned off them. They were really scary and sometime painful. I still take St.Johns wort for Depression and wonder if I will ever be totally free of them. But I much prefer to take them than anti-d's.

I am sorry that you felt that you got a rough deal in the Iodine forum. That forum moves so quickly it freaks me out sometimes. I go to bed and get up the next day to find that it has moved forward a page or more. I have given up on reading all the posts, there just arent enough hours in a day (especially when I still sleep about 12 of them).

Stick with it. You will get there. I am starting to feel a lot better. Good days, bad days, you know. Today wasn't so hot for me, but I am trying not to let it get me down. Tomorrow might be better and that's what keeps me going. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I have to believe that. Things will get better. One day I am going to live a normal life and be healthy just like everyone else and do the things that everyone else seems to be able to do. And it can happen for you too.

Trust!

While taking the iodine, are you taking the salt load as well (1/4 - 1/2 tsp. celtic Sea Salt in 1/2 cup of warm water, followed by 16oz. of warm water) as well as vit. c , selenium & magnisuim???
These help flush out the toxins that the Iodine have set loose in the body....

Hey, Sultankiry, I was once on antidepressants myself and was forced to quit cold-turkey. To me, it sounds as if you're experiencing withdrawal symptoms from the antidepressants: this, too, shall pass, but I agree with going SLOWLY. We are a society that wants everything right now and, when we're overwhelmed with so many choices, we sometimes feel the need to do everything at once.

I would continue drinking plenty of water, try the sesalt water flushes, and avoid attempting to do too much at the same time. Detoxing is one thing - withdrawal from medically prescribed substances is quite another. I also agree with cutting the antidepressants in half - weaning one's Self off of them.

I had never had a migraine, in my life, until I quit Paxil. And, I believe that the withdrawal symptoms would have been even more serious had I remained on them longer.

God bless you - you're in my prayers.

Anti depressants are known for many bad side effects. Many people people become violent and they can have the opposite effect which will make you suicidal. You really need to slowly stop taking these, and slow down with everything else. I know you want relief but detoxing too fast will make you sicker for a while and may be more than you can handle. Lots of vitamin c would help to boost your immune system, keep oil pulling, lots of rest and ween yourself off of the anti depressants.

Hi Sultankiry,

I don't have much to add, but I feel for you. It took me an entire year and a half to wean myself down off of antidepressants. It's truly horrible, emotionally and physically and I know what you're going through. Like they said, the 1/2 tsp of Sea Salt in a glass of water, followed by several pure glasses of water should help the headaches. You can do it again in half an hour if the first salt push doesn't work.

It also really helps me to take baths when I'm feeling like that. It relaxes your whole body. If you add a combination of Epsom Salts (this one's key) or apple cider vingear or hydrogen peroxide, and it will also help take toxins out through your skin. I take a bath every night if I'm feeling bad.

Hang in there.

M.

I really feel for you. I think that Iodine supplementation is a really terribly bad choice for you. Not everyone reacts well to iodine.

Some of the symptoms you describe after you started taking Iodine sound like severe hyperthyroidism. Are you experiencing any other symptoms on this list?
http://www.btf-thyroid.org/index.htm


After Iodine supplementing for 9 months, I suddenly became severely hyperthyroid when I switched from KI to Iodoral (iodine in tablet form that is 8000% of the recommended daily value), and I can tell you I was as close to manic as you can get and still remain operational. It was so bad, I had to go back on psych meds for a week while I waited for the iodine to get out of my system.

Depression itself can be a symptom of hyperthyroidism for some people, although I did not happen to experience it.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=161...


I discovered that I was getting over-oxidized, and I think that that might be what is happening to you. Particular offenders for me are selenium and Vitamin C, which happen to be part of the iodine protocol. For most people Vitamin C is an anti-oxidant, but there are a few of us that convert it to an oxidant.

Here is what helped me. I'm just not entirely sure how applicable it is to anyone else.

- Cut back on any mineral supplements/vitamins temporarily.

- Try Vitamin B6 separately (helps to be in a dark room or cover your eyes). At night, B6 is involved in conversion of serotonin back to tryptophan and slows metabolism.

- You could try MSM (methylsufonylmethane) if you think you have hyperthyroid symptoms. It stopped mine within two weeks. If you decide to try it, be sure to read this...
//www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=900028

- I read last week that ice water can reduce manic symptoms. You could try that. I didn't know about it at the time I had my symptoms.

Again I'm not sure how applicable this information is to you, but they are fairly easy things to try.

You stumbled into a hornet's nest in the Iodine Supplementation forum. Don't take it personally. You would have to have seen what has been going there in the past four months to know why they reacted that way. They just got their own private forum because they have been attacked non-stop by trolls since starting the forum, and they thought you were one. It wasn't so much the body part reference, it was the first part questioning their support and inferring that they are egotistical. Out of sheer coincidence, you just happened to appear to be the first troll. They did not know you were desperately seeking help, and your original posts were several pages back by then. They are actually quite helpful when they don't feel threatened, but they have quite a sense of humor, and sometimes innocent victims get caught up in their play.

You are welcome back to the Iodine forum.


//www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=901483#i

//www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=901687#i

Just to let you know sultankiry, I don't think swear words are bad, I don't take them personally and I don't consider them "swear" words either, and I am (embarassingly) born and living in the U.S. I think a lot of people in this Country think that their own $#(^ doesn't stink, and they need to lighten up. I would never ban someone just because they said a swear word. Give me a break do they think they're Holier Than Thou or that they're God or something?

I'm sorry you're going through this, and I know I've been through hell so I can empathize. Hang in there there are people (such as me) that are here for you. Don't give up, there IS hope!

SK,

I feel for you! I had those terrible, real dark and desperate feelings after my first few liver flushes. Real feelings of hopelessness and desolation that mimicked axactly some of the darkest depths of Depression I used to visit.

My suggestion is to slow down. If you're an all-or-nothing person, this is a good place to segue into being an add-things-in-slowly person, and to being a consistent one with any practice (or principle, for that matter). The danger of doing too much too quickly is that you'll burn out fast because of these feelings, and you won't be able to identify what is helping what condition, etc.

OP is a great practice for me because it's effective, easy, cheap, and I can sit here and check out posts from people I like while I do it! This forum and this practice was my first home, and I believe as a result the first therapy I believed in and stuck with, at Curezone. From OP, I have been able to venture into other protocols like Liver Flushing, for instance. But I always hightail it back here at the end of the day.

I would not underestimate the stress on the mind of stopping smoking. I don't think there is anything harder to do and I have stopped using some of the other major contenders in the addictive substances world. Stopping smoking is like losing your best friend, and your solution, and your body's wonderful pick-me-up/calm-me-down mechanism at once. So even from the smoking perspective alone, your feelings are completely understandable.

I would drink water. Others have recommended enemas (water) for flushing out toxins from the liver flush, although I would just take all of this really slowly. It may be (I have not been Curezoning lately so am not up on recent posts) that the Iodine folks were saying that antidepressants often contain fluoride? A few months ago here, there was a poster who had some real strong detox reactions to what he or she thought might be stuff like fluoride that was stored due to antidepressant use, and I wonder if the Iodine folks were saying that you might be detoxing some pretty strong stuff.

If I were you, here is what I would do. (I have not read any other posts and am sure they all contain wise advice, too.)

1. Consider not stopping smoking right now. Sounds terrible, but the stress is tremendous, as is the detox. When I stopped smoking I was getting up sh*t for months that was like tarry nastiness in snot, so to speak.

2. Let yourself normalize and detox from the antidepressants first (in my opinion, and I have taken nearly 20 different types, they are the more harmful of the two substances, anyway). Give it a few weeks.

Try daily oil pulling following the basic protocol set forth at oilpulling.com with an eye toward a slow detox rather than pushing a lot out, fast. If this is going to be a way of life for you rather than a fad, you have plenty of time here. Do the Water Cure to start really flushing stuff out, especially if you are iodining. Try to eat well. My ideal is raw and I never live up to that, but it's a good goal, at least!

Antidepressant detox is really hard and I am convinced that the chemical effects make people feel horrible, and that they then think that horribleness is the Depression coming back, so they try another one. I have a friend in Effexor detox right now and she is miserable -- went to the doctor not feeling great a few years ago, started the med, and now after 4 years the detox is even worse than she felt in the first place, with it's not having helped her while taking it, either. (She recently began a more spiritual path to serenity, or non- Depression -- I always urge people to consider this as the symptoms of a spiritual malady -- restlessness, irritability, discontent and hopelessness -- mimic the symptoms of depression, and there is far more known about how spiritual practices like meditation work, or how service to others works, than is known about, say, how antidepressants work. Scary in a way, but fundamentally a bona fide.) OP is a great thing to do as a meditative practice as it's very rhythmic and you have to focus on your breathing -- check out some of the old posts on OP and mood. I have never read anyone's post who has said that OP has made them angry or irritable or hopeless, for that matter!

3. Learn how to sleep again. I was an Ambien user for years and then I stopped and realized that apart from the physiology of insomnia, sleeping is a real skill that I had to re-learn. It takes time, being used to being bored and frustrated with being up, and also accepting the fact that unpleasant as being up late can be, nobody ever died from lack of sleep. (I can personally attest to this!)

4. Be conservative with your Iodine supplementation for a little while. That is some powerful stuff and I did not have any bad reactions, but have developed a real respect for its detox abilities throughout the body! A problem at Curezone is that we all get here in different states of being and inner toxicity. We read what people are doing -- people who may have been around for a while and who have been cleansing/detoxing/chem-free for a while -- and start doing it with the same frequency or intensity and then get bad reactions because we were not ready for that. This was my experience with OP -- that I added the oregano oil after only OP'ing for a week or so, and I was pretty pumped about the idea that I was going to get really clean, really virus-free, really fast, and what I got instead was a huge sore in my mouth that was extremely painful, sent me into the world of antivirals and narcotics, and caused me to feel that I was losing my mind and that the best solution would be to check myself into the hospital until it went away. (Which, it did.) So, anyway, around iodine someone like Trapper or another member has been hanging out here for a few years, has a lifestyle that I'd love to mimic exactly in terms of what he eats and what he does, etc., and he may have been more able to tolerate more iodine up front than someone just testing the CZ waters. I think Wombat's approach was to go from about 12 mg up to about 50 over a gradual time and she had a lot of success with that.

5. Stay close to this forum! Curezone is a wonderful place, but for me it has been easy to get lost. Have one "home" where you can regularly share and get support and suggestions. Your sense of connection and your accumulation of experience as you move through this will leave you uniquely positioned down the road to be helpful to the next person in your position, and that will be a real gift.

Good luck to you, and report back!

Laura