You maybe asking the same question, but as a clinician and as a psychiatrist, let me say how I put it together.
There are lots of drugs, either illegal or legal, that cause things like hallucinations—things like LSD. There are things like PCP that cause hallucinations. PCP can also cause long-term problems. One thing that confused me initially when I was looking at it..... We knew about the insomnia, the bad dreams, the anxiety and the hallucinations. That was pretty obvious back then. More recently, we've learned that people will actually pop two or three of these drugs because they want the hallucinations. We knew about the technicolour dreams.
In the medical and psychiatric literature there is a lot of information about the neuropsychiatric side effects of all these things I'm talking about. What we are just beginning to put together in the literature are the neurological side effects and chronic psychiatric side effects specifically of mefloquine. Although, again, we know that with other things like PCP, you can have flashbacks and insomnia for a long period afterwards.
One thing that confuses many of us, perhaps, is that we got PTSD after the end of the Vietnam War. To remind you, we all know that the symptoms of that are flashbacks, the feelings of being numb and distant, and intrusive thoughts. What we haven't totally sorted out is that in Vietnam, many of our veterans were also on variations of the quinolones. We don't know if that actually confused the picture and we didn't recognize it back then. We labelled it all PTSD.
As I've gone along on this journey and learned more about the neurological side effects, the distinction between psychological and physical becomes blurry. It's all in the brain, whether or not it's the damage to the neurons, which we're seeing more and more of. Is it the psychological trauma? We're going down the road that this is really a toxin to the brain.
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