When Bad Meth Trips Never End

With methamphetamine and cocaine, it's more the drug, not the person that contributes to the psychotic symptoms.

Cocaine addicts often fall victim to paranoid delusions surrounding the drug -- where is the cocaine? who hid the cocaine? who stole it? -- but methamphetamine addiction is worse, Miotto says.

"With methamphetamine, they're just plan bizarre," Miotto said. "[Methamphetamine users] can think people are after them -- that their child is trying to poison them."

They can go through "a prolonged or persistent psychotic reaction that doesn't end with the 12 hours in the emergency room," Miotto said. Moreover, even if methamphetamines don't cause a permanent psychosis, drug users risk developing depression.

Changing the Brain

Former methamphetamine addict Buffie Cross, 39, started using drugs when she was 26.

"The feeling would start with a rush -- it was euphoric," Cross said. But after only a week she remembers feeling a range of psychological symptoms.

"There were some stuffed animals sitting on the floor, and those things got up and started dancing," she said. "You think you're being followed, or they come out from behind the trees and stuff."

"I became where I obsessively wrote random crap," said Cross, who remembers her writing obsession lasted for two weeks at a time.

Alongside hallucinations and delusions, Miotto says methamphetamine can induce traits similar to obsessive-compulsiveness called "tweaking" on the streets.

In Cross it appeared as writing, in others it shows up as the need to constantly pick things apart and try to put them back together -- usually unsuccessfully.

"If you ask police, they'll tell you 'we can tell it's a meth house because the washing machine is taken apart in the front yard,'" Miotto said.

Even if a methamphetamine user gets treatment for his or her addiction and recovers without a permanent psychosis, depression may soon follow.

Stimulants like methamphetamine deplete dopamine, which is the primary chemical in the "reward pathway" of the brain, Miotto says.