CPTSD, Depression & Addiction – Three Stories of the Same Nervous System
In theory, these are three different diagnoses — separate boxes on separate forms. But in practice, they are often three faces of the same nervous system story. In this episode of Strange Life, I trace the outlines of each condition and lay them side by side — until their overlapping shapes reveal something truer, and maybe more useful, than any one explanation in isolation.
We begin with CPTSD, where “C” stands not for childhood but for complex. It describes the systemic damage caused when a nervous system grows under conditions of chronic fear plus helplessness — whether in an abusive household, a prison camp, or any place you can neither fight nor flee. What happens when adrenaline, meant for emergency survival, becomes the everyday fuel of your growth? Neural pathways carve jagged instead of smooth; commas turn into exclamation marks. The result is a brain and body tuned to intensity, one that looks a lot like ADHD from the outside — but whose texture is terror, not thrill.
When the system runs that hot for that long, sometimes it collapses. That collapse is what we call depression: the lights dim after years of overdrive, colour drains from the world, and even grief dulls to a numb grey. The Russian word toska captures it well — an abject boredom with life, where nothing tastes, smells, or feels like anything. From inside, the logic of continuing can become almost impossible to grasp.
Enter addiction. If something — a drug, a ritual, a chemical, even work or exercise — jolts the nervous system back into Technicolor or cools it enough to breathe, of course you reach for it. And keep reaching. From the inside, relief feels the same whether it comes in a blister pack or a baggie, from espresso or from MDMA. The boundary between “treatment,” “indulgence,” and “sin” is drawn not by neurochemistry but by society.
And so the three knot together: CPTSD as a body wired on adrenaline, depression as its eventual collapse, and addiction as its desperate workaround. This is my lived story too — one of hyper-arousal, recurrent collapse, and the chemical interventions (in my case, THC) that keep sensation and aliveness within reach.
To untangle them, to see their outlines clearly, is to glimpse not just pathology but the strange, fragile logic of survival.
Further Reading & References
Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery – foundational text introducing Complex PTSD.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score – on how trauma shapes nervous systems.
National Center for PTSD: What is Complex PTSD?
WHO ICD-11: Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
American Psychiatric Association: Depression
Medical News Today: What is Toska?
Carhart-Harris, R. et al. (2021). Trial of Psilocybin vs SSRIs for Depression