I began taking medicinal cannabis in the form of tea about ten months ago, to deal with complications resulting from C-PTSD. This medicinal cannabis I received in the form of 35g bags of Shishkaberry buds, after getting a prescription from a cannabis clinic with an office in my city. I was prescribed this Shishkaberry to use in the form of medicinal tea. I found instructions for its preparation on WikiHow.
In my case of C-PTSD, hyperarousal is the primary symptom. This manifests in four major ways: as insomnia, nausea, anxiety and depression. Of these manifestations, the first two are mostly somatic and the last two are mostly psychological.
Because of these complications, sleep is the foremost problem. It doesn’t take much stress before the hyperarousal gets to the point where sleep duration and/or quality are affected. On account of the C-PTSD itself, relatively minor levels of sleep deprivation can have major effects in terms of emotional dysregulation, as well as suicidal and homicidal ideation. The distress of intense suicidal and homicidal ideation is sufficient that ordinary life is impossible. Therefore, getting enough restful sleep is a significant part of the battle.
Up until recently, I had managed this condition with a combination of pharmaceuticals (which I didn’t want more of) and cannabis (which I did want more of). This combination, in conjunction with a conscious choice to live a low-stress lifestyle, has generally succeeded in keeping the hyperarousal under control.
The pharmaceuticals consisted of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. I have been prescribed five different types of each over the course of my 29 years as a psychiatric patient. Some pharmaceuticals became ineffective after years of use. Others had side-effects that were intolerable.
Pharmaceutical side-effects have included lethargy, sedation, mental fogginess, drowsiness, impotence, weight gain and digestive problems. The side-effects of the anti-psychotics are generally much worse than those of the anti-depressants. If the total effect of the C-PTSD is to make a normal life impossible, the total effect of the pharmaceuticals is not to make a normal life possible but to make the abnormal life tolerable. They do help with the hyperarousal, and therefore prevent the likely consequences of the hyperarousal getting out of control (i.e. suicide/homicide). But the side-effects are abominable.
Because of the severity of the pharmaceutical side-effects, I have often stopped taking prescribed medication. This is the reason for having tried five different anti-depressants and five different anti-psychotics over 29 years. Unfortunately, the problems with C-PTSD have proven extremely stubborn, such that life was impossible without the pills. Thus, it hasn’t been possible to escape the pharmaceuticals and their side-effects.
For these reasons, I have been excited about the possibility of being able to access medicinal cannabis, which seemed to have promise in treating hyperarousal without excruciating side-effects. Securing this access has been a 15-year battle from hell, but one that was won ten months ago. Since then I have been taking cannabis tea every night, starting with about 0.2 grams of ground cannabis buds in a tea strainer and working up to 0.45 grams.
The primary advantage to cannabis in tea form is that it provides most of the same benefits as taking it in joint form, but does not have the same side effects. Most of my medicinal cannabis consumption over the past 15 years has been in joint form. This has been great fun, but is far from ideal from a medicinal point of view.
The typical pattern when smoking a joint is to firstly experience a 30 minutes or so high of intense positive emotion, followed by a low lasting several hours, unless another joint is smoked, whereupon another high begins. Even while experiencing a low, being affected by cannabis is still good because it alleviates the nausea, headaches, suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation that is otherwise endemic to my C-PTSD experience. Thus, smoking joints, although far from ideal, is still much nicer than only having pharmaceuticals.
The great advantage that I have found with the Shishkaberry tea is that it alleviates the hyperarousal of C-PTSD without either the side-effects of pharmaceuticals or of smoked cannabis.
Drinking cannabis tea is a much smoother experience than smoking joints. The tea takes away the nausea and the psychosomatic pain, without the powerful psychoactive effects of inhalation (as fun as those are, they make it harder to get things done). As a result, when I am on the tea I don’t feel a strong desire to smoke cannabis.
Because the cannabis tea has alleviated the hyperarousal to some extent, it has been possible to halve the dose of the currently prescribed anti-depressant. This has led to benefits resulting from fewer pharmaceutical side-effects, such as some of my ordinary concentration ability returning, and some weight loss.
Currently I am enjoying the best sleep of my life thanks to the Shishkaberry tea. I therefore intend to keep taking it for the medium-long term future. The next step is to taper off the anti-depressants completely, which is made more realistic by the cannabis tea. If this is achievable then the cannabis tea would have had a massively positive impact on my life. So I recommend it to all with hyperarousal from a traumatic stress disorder.
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