Sensory deprivation tank for withdrawals/recovery?

[Seedy]

I have no idea if this has been tried or not, i'd be surprised if it hasn't as it seems so damn logical. a sensory deprivation chamber, or float tank is a human sized pod filled with water mixed with enough epsom salts (that combo alone is great for withdrawals) to make the body float completely.

"This water is maintained at 34.5C to match the temperature of relaxed human skin, so the nerve endings in the skin can't sense the difference between skin,air or water. This combo of exact temperature and buoyancy creates a feeling of weightlessness and gravity seems to disappear."

"Once inside a float tank you cannot see, hear, smell, taste or feel anything. Normally 90% of waking brain activity is used to interpret info from these senses, when they are turned off the mind becomes free. After about 15 minutes or so the brain starts to improvise by imagining things."

Stress related chemicals such as adrenaline, cortisol, ACTH and lactate are removed from the bloodstream and replaced by beneficial endorphins. High levels of cortisol and ACTH are known to weaken the body's immune system and create feelings of depression, while lower baseline levels are associated with feelings of dominance and confidence.

It seems to me this would be an ideal way to deal with opiate withdrawal, has anyone tried it? here's a link to where i got my info: http://www.floattank.com/what.html (yeah, it's an advertisement, pretty convincing though!)

[KoDeInaaaae]

are they also called isolation tanks cause thats what it sound like kindof or is it like tamato tamato or whatever lol?

[EleusisII]

I doubt that it would make withdrawals much more than 10% bearable. And don't forget the skindamage from spending days in water.

The 90% of the brain thing is SORT OF an urban legend btw. You hear that figure a lot, usually from people trying to sell you something: "The human brain only uses 10% of its potential", but look at it this way: If 90 percent of your braincells are dedicated to functions such as sight, hearing, control of the limbs and so on, those braincells won't sit down and start doing equations all of a sudden, if they don't have anything else to do. Imagine a kitchen with three kitchenmachines: Blender, chopper and shredder. Each have a 5 horsepower engine. If you turn off the chopper and shredder you'll still only have 5 hp for the blender.

[Shadowsblaze]

They sound like some badass appliances, wip up some tea in seconds nobs and all lol.

[EleusisII]

See, I've always been wondering about that... How did they come up with "One Horsepower"?!? Did they take a horse and keep adding weights to its wagon until it couldn't pull it anymore, or what the hell did they do?

When I was a kid and read car reviews, I always took the HP literaly. Imagined a car with 60 or 90 horses pulling it, lol!

[SHELLEY]

they use sensory dep tanks to drive folks batshit insane, you know
i'd rather kick on the streets than in one of those

[Paregoric Kid]

yeah its an interesting idea. check out this article from Wired magazine from last week:
Out of LSD? Just 15 Minutes of Sensory Deprivation Triggers Hallucinations (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/hallucinations/)



By Hadley Leggett (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/author/hleggett/)
October 21, 2009 |
2:28 pm |
Categories: Brains and Behavior (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/category/brain-and-behavior/)


You don’t need psychedelic drugs to start seeing colors and objects that aren’t really there. Just 15 minutes of near-total sensory deprivation can bring on hallucinations in many otherwise sane individuals.

Psychologists stuck 19 healthy volunteers into a sensory-deprivation room, completely devoid of light and sound, for 15 minutes. Without the normal barrage of sensory information flooding their brains, many people reported experiencing visual hallucinations, paranoia and a depressed mood.
“This is a pretty robust finding,” wrote psychiatrist Paul Fletcher of the University of Cambridge, who studies psychosis but was not involved in the study. “It appears that, when confronted by lack of sensory patterns in our environment, we have a natural tendency to superimpose our own patterns.”
The findings support the hypothesis that hallucinations happen when the brain misidentifies the source of what it is experiencing, a concept the researchers call “faulty source monitoring.”
“This is the idea that hallucinations come about because we misidentify the source of our own thoughts,” psychologist Oliver Mason of the University College London wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “So basically something that actually is initiated within us gets misidentified as from the outside.” Mason and colleagues published their study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19829208) in October in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

To choose people for their study, the researchers asked more than 200 volunteers to complete a questionnaire called the “Revised Hallucinations Scale,” which measures the predisposition of healthy people to see things that aren’t really there. The scientists picked participants who scored in either the upper or lower 20th percentile, so they could compare how short-term sensory deprivation affects a range of individuals.
Study participants sat in a padded chair in the middle of an anechoic chamber (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/hallucinations/www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/steve/SPHGANRM7.pdf), a room designed to dampen all sound and block out light. The researchers describe the setup as a “room within a room,” with thick outer walls and an inner chamber formed by metallic acoustic panels and a floating floor. In between the outer and inner walls are large fiberglass wedges. “This results in a very low-noise environment in which the sound pressure due to outside levels is below the threshold of hearing,” the researchers wrote.
Though participants had a panic button, none of them used it. After spending 15 minutes deprived of sight and sound, each person completed a test called the “Psychotomimetic States Inventory,” which measures psychosis-like experiences and was originally developed to study recreational drug users.
Among the nine participants who scored high on the first survey, five reported having hallucinations of faces during the sensory deprivation, and six reported seeing other objects or shapes that weren’t there. Four also noted an unusually heightened sense of smell, and two sensed an “evil presence” in the room. Almost all reported that they had “experienced something very special or important” during the experiment.
As expected, volunteers who were less prone to hallucinations experienced fewer perceptual distortions, but they still reported a variety of delusions and hallucinations.
The researchers were not altogether surprised by such dramatic results from only 15 minutes of sensory deprivation. Although few scientists are studying sensory deprivation today, a small body of research from the 1950s and 1960s supports the idea that a lack of sensory input can lead to symptoms of psychosis.
“Sensory deprivation is a naturalistic analogue to drugs like ketamine and cannabis for acting as a psychosis-inducing context,” Mason wrote, “particularly for those prone to psychosis.”
We still don’t know why some people are more likely to have hallucinations than others, but Fletcher says that some researchers consider the phenomenon particularly important because it suggests that symptoms of mental illness occur on a continuum with normality.
“Perhaps this reflects different ways of dealing with sense data, which under certain circumstances might be advantageous,” Fletcher wrote.
Next, the researchers hope to study how sensory deprivation affects schizophrenic patients and people who use recreational drugs that increase the risk of psychosis.
“There are claims that schizophrenic patients paradoxically find that their psychotic symptoms such as hearing voices are improved by sensory deprivation,” Mason wrote, “though the evidence for this is very long in the tooth indeed. What happens to people who already hear voices when in the chamber?”
Via MindHacks (http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/10/hallucinations_in_se.html).

[nick]

Seedy bro,this sounds like a really hideous idea.

[mikey5string]

Seedy bro,this sounds like a really hideous idea.


i concur. just thinking about confinement/limited mobility is making me uncomfortable. not to mention not being able to see or hear.

if you roll someone up in a carpet and push them down a rocky hill, the mind becomes so focused on the pain of getting jabbed/beaten with rocks and the unrelenting dizziness/nausea that it completley forgets about the withdrawl symptoms. :)

[DreamCatcher]

Yeah, I don't really see how it would help. Most people would probably freak out if they had to spend more than an hour in that thing. As for the bright colours and all that...i suppose that could somewhat distract you, but then, it's probably easier to actually get LSD or somthing then get yourself into one of those things.

[dieselbaby]

I've been in one of those tanks before, not while withdrawing or anything. It was an intense, hallucinogenic and introspective experience - extremely powerful shit, actually. I think that being in one of those during withdrawals would be absolutely fucking TERRIFYING and extremely uncomfortable. It would be really hard to actually 'get into the mindset' that you are trying to be in while writhing around miserably dopesick.

[Eric5989]

Floating in your own shit and puke wouldn't be fun either

[Seedy]

^^ true, true, maybe it could help in paws, not accute withdrawals. and some benzos might help... yeah i didn't think that one through but i can see it helping in later stages of withdrawals. i'd try it. i'd try just about anything that might speed up recovery.

[jacky]

you could do a limited sensory deprivation chamber experience without having to use a flotation device.

a limited form of darkness retreat can produce similiar effects...although one needs to take longer periods of time to do this.

but you wouldnt have to deal with floating in epsom salt solutions for days at a time.

I am sure the sheer boredom of sitting in a quiet, dark room with nothing to do would drive one a bit nutty let alone while going through withdrawal.
although I could see how such a bit of research could be beneficial after the first week after quitting.
once you are through the major withdrawals....

a buddhist named Tenzin Wangyal wrote a book called "wonders of the natural mind" that describe dark room meditation retreats that caused visionary states to come forth....
he also explains paranormal events taking place in darkness retreats.
and quite amazingly...how certian meditations can be used to produce a softening of the fontanelle in the head, called a "powa" meditation....this is reported to actually cause a softening of the skull, and eventually an opening in the skull and flesh through which an invisible line of communication called a thigle takes place. its like a hole in the head that allows consciosness principle to transfer.......
it can take place in just a few weeks time....once the hole is formed the practitioner/student then takes a stiff blade of kusha grass and sticks it in the hole so that the blade of grass is supported, as a way to prove that one has created this opening through meditative practice.
the author reported he would sometimes forget he had the kusha grass stuck in this hole in his head...and that he would be reminded when the wind would move the blade a bit......he also reported feelings that electrical sensations felt like they were being absorbed by the grass and passed into his body...
this is all very strange and amazing if based on "real" events.....personally I dont doubt the author...but I know many people would call bullshit on the relation.

anyway, if its possible for a person to meditate a hole in their skull, and use dark retreats to travel out of body style to various parts of the universe....then I think that careful timing of the dark retreat, during a period of less intense suffering from withdrawal....could very well allow a person to experience quicker healing.
endorphin release from meditation alone probably helps.......

gets me thinking about John C Lilly, ketamine, and kicking dope.

...interesting thoughts.

it would definitely be interesting to have access to a flotation tank......if one had easy access, I could see experimenting with one while in withdrawals....its possible a few hours in the tank could ease some suffering....although usually my body is hyper aware and painful in such states....a nice warm tank and relief of not having something pressing on your skin might be very welcome.

when dope sick I would sometimes spend a couple hours soaking in a hot bathtub....but only comfortably in the large, old, claw foot tubs.

some people have a fear/disklike of water when they are kicking dope.
in a way, I was one of those people....but only when I was using heroin, and had degraded my general health so much through bad diet.
as I became more knowledgeable about how to maintain on opiates more healthily...my withdrawal attempts became easier and better planned.

the only problem I see is that some people get skin problems when kicking....and the water that you use in these flotation tanks can really irritate sensitive skin.

[duck]

Maybe for late stage WD, or if you had a bunch of benzos...but I KNOW my mind would go crazy in one of those things during WD