Re: Massive mental benefits from fin and prog

Reply to a poster reporting strong mental benefits from finasteride plus progesterone. Powers theorizes that PFS/PSSD may involve neurosteroid excess rather than deficiency — the traditional deficiency theory, he says, was pushed for 20 years with essentially no clinical gains. He proposes finasteride exposure triggers compensatory upregulation of neurosteroid-synthesizing enzymes or downregulation of degrading enzymes, and that blocking 5AR reroutes progesterone metabolism through other enzyme pathways, changing the metabolite distribution; in this androgen-depleted patient, that retuning raised neurosteroid levels above their prior baseline and helped. He uses a dam analogy: damming a tiny creek creates a beneficial oasis, but damming a river floods towns — androgen burden determines whether the same mechanism heals or catastrophically overloads. The poster's emotional instability and anger, he notes, is the inverse of PSSD emotional blunting, consistent with neurosteroids dampening emotion. He warns the effect could run in both directions, that he cannot yet predict who would benefit versus be destroyed by a 5ARI, and explicitly advises PSSD patients not to experiment with 5AR inhibitors.