Comments
Was chatting with Gwern about this. An excerpt of their thoughts (published with permission):
Wellbutrin/Buproprion is a weird one. Comes up often on SSC and elsewhere as surprisingly effective and side-effect free, but also with a very wide variance and messy mechanism (even for antidepressants) so anecdotes differ dramatically.
With antidepressants, you're usually talking multi-week onset and washout periods, so blinded self-experiments would take something like half a year for decent sample sizes. It's not that easy to get if you aren't willing to go through a doctor (ie no easy ordering online from a DNM or clearnet site, like modafinil)...
Finally, as far as I can tell, my personal problems have more to do with anxiety than depression, and anti-anxiety is not what buproprion is generally described as best for, so my own benefit is probably less than usual. I thought about it a little but decided it was too weird and hard to get, and self-experiments would take too long.
I have now been taking bupropion for a little bit over two weeks. I'm unsure if it will continue to work as well as it does now. But if it does, I think starting to take bupropion will be in the top five most important things I have ever done, in terms of increasing my overall well-being and productivity. So thank you very much for writing this article. Without it, I likely would never have tried it.
I'm really curious about the other four!
I only saw this now. I am usually on LessWrong. Here is the list:
Now I would probably also take methylphenidate. It's even more useful than bupropion.