In the spring of 1999 I climbed into a small Cessna in Cameroon without a moment's hesitation. Two months later I couldn't bring myself to step on a plane.
I had taken Lariam, an antimalarial drug also known as mefloquine. Most people who take it have no serious side effects. I did. It took me a long time to find out that the pill was the likely cause, and much longer to get my life back. This is what happened, and what I'd want you to take from it.
I felt unbreakable
We were fifteen university friends who had agreed to take one extraordinary trip together every five years. That time we chose Cameroon, to see the gorillas. We walked for two days through a jungle with no roads and no mobile service, and the only way out was the way we came in.
I was thirty-five and two months away from being made partner in my consulting company. My wife and I had two young daughters and a house we'd renovated exactly as we wanted it.
An iron band around my head
It started with pressure in my head that wouldn't lift, and I put it down to travel fatigue. Then the panic attacks came. I'd be halfway through a round of golf, or sitting in traffic, and suddenly I'd be breathing too fast. The pressure became constant, like an iron band around my skull. Thinking, which should be effortless, felt like hard work.
Two hours a day was all I could work, and the rest of the time I needed to recover. My daughters needed me and my wife was taking care of everything important at home. I wasn't fully there.
The question nobody had asked
Everyone assumed burnout, and I accepted that, even though I had no problem with my job and was looking forward to going back. I saw a psychotherapist and followed the usual treatments. None of it helped.
The first real clue came on a horse ride with my wife. I told the lady riding next to me that I didn't understand what was happening to me. "When did it start?" she asked. "When I came back from Cameroon," I said. She looked concerned and asked what medicine I'd taken there.
I had no idea. I'd picked up the pills at the pharmacy and never even read the label. So I went back to the counter and asked. "Lariam," the pharmacist said. What I'd been describing was a known side effect.
Odd as it sounds, I was at peace from that moment. Plenty of people didn't believe me. They thought I'd invented an outside cause because I found burnout weak. Inside, I was relieved anyway.
You don't have to take my word for how serious this can be. In 2013 the US Food and Drug Administration added its strongest warning to mefloquine, saying neurological side effects "can last for months to years after the drug is stopped or can be permanent". It also lists psychiatric effects such as anxiety and depression. That warning is about risk across everyone who takes the drug. My story is one person's experience, and I can't prove in a lab what happened inside my own head. Malaria is a dangerous disease, so nobody should read this as a reason to travel unprotected.
The years that followed
Knowing the name didn't give me a cure. I tried neurofeedback, antidepressants, homoeopathy, bioresonance, breathing therapy and Qigong. Some of it I didn't believe in while I was doing it. I sat with a device in one hand and my other hand flat on a plate, with no idea how that was supposed to help, and I did it anyway.
The partnership came through while I was ill. One of the partners said, "Eduard, maybe wait until you're better." I went ahead, and looking back it was ego. I'd borrowed three million guilders to buy in and signed for it personally. Then the economy collapsed in 2001. I was still working two hours a day and couldn't pay the interest. We put the car in my wife's name, so that if the bank came we would at least still have a car.
Food gave me the quickest relief, and over those years I slowly put on fifteen kilos. In 2006, at a partner meeting in Amsterdam, with the band tightening all morning, I told them I had to go home. From the car I called my wife and said I was resigning.
In 2008 the psychiatrist I'd been seeing for eight years gave me his verdict. He was thorough and experienced, and he knew my history better than anyone. "Your brain has been damaged," he said. "You need to learn to live with it."
I didn't get angry. I sat there with one clear thought: I can't live like this for the rest of my life.
What came next
The way out started with a colleague on a short job. I'd stopped being careful about who I told, so I told her too. "I've got a website I think you should look at," she said. It was Mark Sisson's blog. After eight years with specialists, I was taking advice from a lovely random.
I implemented everything he was talking about. Then I started following other thought leaders, and in the end it was Dave Asprey who talked about biohacking. The word immediately resonated. It was proper rigour, applied to my own life.
Over the years that followed I tried things on myself and kept reading about nutrition, movement and sleep. It went well for a while, then stalled, then picked up again. After several years the anxiety and the panic attacks had gone, and I had more in the tank than I'd had before Cameroon.
That's my result, and I can't tell you it would be yours. I still have a deep respect for medicine. It just had nothing more to offer me at that point, so I went looking.
Three things you can do today
Know what you're taking. Look up the name of anything you're prescribed before you travel, and read the side effects. Going somewhere with malaria? Ask your doctor about the alternatives as well.
Write down when it started. One question on a horse ride did more than years of treatment. Note when your symptoms began and what changed around then: a medicine, a trip, an illness.
Take that note to someone. Show it to your doctor or pharmacist. If you think a prescribed medicine is causing problems, talk to them before you change or stop it, and get help quickly if you have panic, low mood or dizziness you can't explain.
The full story, and the method I built afterwards, is in my book, More Good Years. Find out more.
Eduard de Wilde has tracked and tested his own biology since 2008. He founded NoordCode and Livehelfi, co-founded the Syntony Institute, and wrote More Good Years. He isn't a doctor, and he sells some of the products discussed in this field. This article is for information and isn't medical advice.
