Tinnitus, Depression (Trying Ketamine Therapy), ADD and ASD — History of Exposure to Loud Noise

As per request, an introduction:

My tinnitus takes the form of constant, very high pitched tones (I think about 8 kHz), right in the center channel. Most of the time it actually sounds like two of them, ever so slightly out of phase. In those increasingly rare moments when it goes into some kind of remission, it reduces to a simple high whistle, mostly in one ear.

I'm in my early 60s. I think I had precursors to my current full-blown tinnitus decades ago, when I started noticing that I always thought I heard the phone ringing when I was in the shower. Something about that rush of sound triggered what felt like an auditory hallucination.

I used to work as an audio engineer, and have attended many loud concerts in my life, as well as monitoring mixes with pretty high amplification. I have no doubt that this contributed, not only to my present deafness above 10 kHz, but my current condition.

I am also ADD and ASD, in that range of what used to be called Asperger's, and have been so all my life. This makes me emotionally sensitive (as opposed to experiencing hyperacusis) to persistent noises. This reinforces my experience of tinnitus, by making it nearly impossible to mask or ignore, raising my anxiety, which in turn probably makes the syndrome worse.

Over the past couple of years in particular, it has gotten to the point where it drives me to hysteria at times. Sometimes I'm able to push it back a bit, but in general I'm incapable of enjoying anything any more, even music, because of the constant, increasingly severe irritant.

A final note, because I've seen this topic come up here: I've recently started Ketamine therapy, for treatment-resistant depression. In my case, I think it makes the tinnitus worse, by reinforcing my hyperfocus on the condition. While having the Ketamine experience, pretty much all I'm aware of is the grinding shriek, which makes it impossible to get anything positive out of it.

I think that covers it for now. Thanks for having me.

 

I've struggled to review my history over the past few years, during which the tinnitus has become so much worse, and find something, or aggregate of things, to which I can correlate this condition. The failure is distressing.

It changes day to day, and I can find no reason why. I take the same meds, live the same life, eat the same foods, follow pretty much the same routines. But some days it's really not so bad (today is a good day, for instance... only a kind of high distortion of any sound), and others it's a shriek.

On the good days I try not to jinx it. Learn to live in that moment, hold to whatever it is that may be keeping it at bay. But then the bad days always come, and I never know why or when.

I'm using bone conduction headphones now, and experimenting with different sound and music inputs. It's partly out of desperation... music having been a very important part of my entire life, I want to have what I can of it, before deafness sets in, and perhaps the tinnitus finally blocks everything else out.

I'm tapering off some meds to see if there's any effect to be found there. Nothing consistent so far.

Some meds, that have acute action, I've learned to just deal with. Ketamine treatment, for example, makes me hyperfocus on the experience. Maybe the time between intakes has something to do with it?

I just can't tell. And not being able to assess any correlation at all makes this just more frustrating than ever, because it doesn't suggest any lasting relief.

 

Hey there @rhosyn, nice to meet you -

I can relate. I'm relatively early into mine (almost 4 months now), but, on my bad days, it's seriously irritating, and it's hard to get an ounce of relaxation and enjoy anything. I try to mask it some to reduce the severity, but it's just a band-aid solution. Still trying my best to accept my condition and try to live with it.

I have good and bad days too. My good days are rather good--only some mild reactivity. On my bad days, I get this annoying hiss in my right ear. I wanted to ask you: Do your symptoms on your good and bad days last the entire day? For me, what I wake up to is, with high probability, what I'll consistently experience for the whole day.

 

Bad days always stay bad and usually get worse as the day progresses. Good days are a mixed bag. Sometimes things stay reasonably well controlled most of the day, sometimes it just ramps up until by the evening it's back to the regular air raid.

In some ways, good days are emotionally taxing in their own way, because they give me something resembling hope, which I know will be dashed soon.

 

I can totally relate. It is anxiety-inducing. The good days giving you this false impression of recovery but with an uncomfortable premonition that a bad day is soon to follow. It's hard to set aside the worry.

My bad days are like yours, they tend to stay consistently bad for the whole day, and get worse in the evening, where I just want to sleep to escape. On rare occasions, a bad day randomly turns good. Have no idea what causes that, wish I did know.

My good days pretty much always stay good except a slight uptick in the evening if I stay up too late.

How much exercise do you get? A doctor I spoke with that specializes in tinnitus told me to get a lot of cardio exercise every week.

 

I get no exercise at all, which I know is very bad for me in all respects. I've heard that it can also affect tinnitus, and my recent experience of increased anxiety over it suggests that I should get over my barriers there and really try to get into it.

Does anyone else have the experience that on good days, the sound tends to settle more into one ear than another? On bad days, it's full stereo awful, but on good days it's much more of a kind of slow wave of tone in one ear.

Also, I'm having real issues with the Ketamine. It appears to be suggested as a tinnitus treatment, but I find that when I'm dosing, the tinnitus gets much worse. I can't tell if it's because I'm more focused on sensory experience, or whether it's an actual chemical effect. The real trouble is that the effect lasts for a couple of days. It's making me begin to dread the Ketamine dose, which in other respects I think is actually helping.

 

Hopefully others can chime in, but I do want to say that I have something similar. I have mild reactivity in both ears, but I experience my main annoying tinnitus in only my right ear. On my bad days, my main tinnitus is so loud, and so I thought the other reactive tinnitus went away. But it turns out, that it's always there, but I don't hear it because my main tinnitus is so loud. I guess I'm curious whether you have 2 components to your tinnitus, the slow wave tone and the full stereo one.

 

Two components may account for what the normal experience is like. Usually, I seem to have a kind of high pitched phasing sound. When it diminishes, and is more like a single tone mostly in one ear, the phasing is less pronounced, which suggests that the paired tones, when both present, are responsible for that phasing.

Which I don't understand at all, since this is a neural effect, and phase shifting is something that occurs in physical (acoustic or electric) signals. I really need to learn a lot more about this condition's etiology.

 

You bring up an interesting point. For me, I don't perceive phasing with the two components I hear, maybe because one nearly drowns out the other.