It's not, in many studies there was no observed difference between higher dose weekly or lower one daily when it summed up to the same amount. Sometimes even higher monthly doses are used.
High singular dose of Vitamin D taken at once could have some negative effects. Some formulations are administered with Vitamin K to try to offset this risk but it’s better to just spread the dosages out rather than expose your body to unnaturally high spikes of Vitamin D.
Five years is unusually long, but your case is an outlier too. Usually it will take about 3 months to rise serum levels by ~30ng/mL on 5K IU daily, though there's plenty of individual variation of course.
It's a low enough dose that if I had to choose between taking it blindly or not taking it at all if I was so depressed I couldn't get out of bed to get my levels tested, then I would do it blindly for a month or two without second thoughts.
There are also other ingredients in coffee and tea that may affect caffeine's effect (L-theanine in many teas for example). Same with energy drinks, these will have a different effect even when the same caffeine intake is the same due to presence of taurine.
It may not be that crazy in fact, unless it's prolonged. Don't take 30k/day for several months without supervision, but doing that for a single month is unlikely to harm you if you start from deficiency. Some people may need even more than that.
In any case, keep your blood levels in check. It's cheap and easy. There are even services you can order to have your blood sample taken at your home.
I believe presenting vitamin D supplements as effective in treating depression is kinda misleading. It's rather vitamin D deficiency that is super effective at making you miserable, but it's not the only thing that can do it to you. And since a lot of us are in fact deficient (and the threshold of being categorized as deficient may be placed too low too), it will appear as being quite effective overall, especially compared to other drugs that act on less common and poorly understood causes.
Thank you. Fixing a vitamin deficiency is an obvious benefit to physical health. But does it "cure depression"? To the extent that your depression was caused by vitamin deficiency, sure. But then didn't you just cure a vitamin deficiency? I'm sure a lot of things starting improving once your body starts getting proper nutrients after years of neglect! That doesn't indicate causality.
As far as we can tell, "depression" is a label we put onto a big bag of issues with similar symptoms, but that may require different interventions. Vitamin D deficiency may very well be or lead to one of those, and it definitely doesn't help when coexisting with something else either.
It cites a study about vitamin D toxicity where the range of cumulative intake causing it was identified to be 2.2 million - 6.3 million IU. When you take 6000 IU daily for a whole year you only reach the lower end of that range, and you definitely shouldn't do that without checking your levels somewhere in between. Taking it for a few months may get you above the recommended blood levels, but is very unlikely to cause issues unless you started with very high levels already (which you most likely did not).
Toxic levels of vitamin D can be life threatening, so do keep your levels in check, but you won't get there unless you really try, so if you can't get out of the bed to have your blood tested just start taking it and check it after 3 months when things get hopefully easier for you. Just make sure to get the number of zeros in the dose right.
What makes you so sure? I'm fairly sure they eat a fraction of what AI slop does and are much more useful.
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