Manic Introversion
Posted on June 15, 2010 in Hope and Joy Mania
The excesses of impulse that characterize most manias do not apply to me most of the time I am in episode. Thoughts stream through my head. Incredible schemes surge across the two hemispheres of my brain. I keep these to myself, sure that if others see them they would prevent me from realizing my dreams. I know that I mad but I am curious to see where it will take me. It exalts. It enthralls. It feels better than any narcotic I have been prescribed and superior to alcohol and marijuana. I call this secret state of mind my manic introversion.
Corrolary to this is this principle: the fewer people I feel accountable toward, the better I feel. I don’t feel the pressure of Brahma with his many faces — a nexus of truths and lies calculated to protect my vulnerability.
The lying isn’t sociopathic but an impulse to conceal that I am dashing off set, hiding from the inquisitions of those around me. Trusted people can make me admit it, even when the mania rages. It’s best to hide during my episodes so I don’t have to be Brahma the polymorphous deva of creation or the madly dancing Shiva, Lord of the Beasts — just a man.
The Urge to Pick the Skin
Posted on June 14, 2010 in Body Language OCD
The urge to pick the skin off my fingers overwhelmed me a couple of weeks ago. The two spots I prefer had lost their scars, but these are back now. I had gnawed through the skin to the muscle on the left index finger ((This has nothing to do with the numbness in that hand)) after I had my tooth pulled and renewed the blemish on my right index finger while chewing on the corners of my mouth.
I believe it was the pain following my oral surgery that compelled me to chew and pick. Then I kept at it because it relieved some of the anxiety.
Now I am resisting picking the fingers once more though the skin is getting dry around the vacancies that once were the sores. These are so subtle that only I notice them: only when I write about them are they magnified so as to betray a pathology.
Lithium and A Big Head
Posted on June 9, 2010 in Mania Psychotropics
Descriptions of mania done by the performance artists we all turn into when the waves of emotion overwhelm us can include hands going to our temples with the cry “It feels like my head is going to explode!” Theatricality reveals truth if we observe what researchers have discovered in the course of revealing why lithium works to bring us down:
Inflammation in the brain, like other parts of the body, is an important process to help the brain combat infection or injury. However, excess or unwanted inflammation can damage sensitive brain cells, which can contribute to psychiatric conditions like bipolar disorder or degenerative diseases like Alzheimers.
It’s believed that lithium helps treat bipolar disorder by reducing brain inflammation during the manic phase, thus alleviating some of the symptoms….rats given a six-week lithium treatment had reduced levels of arachidonic acid and its products, which can contribute to inflammation.
In addition, they also demonstrated, for the first time, that lithium treatment increased levels of a metabolite called 17-OH-DHA in response to inflammation. 17-OH-DHA is formed from the omega-3 fatty acid DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and is the precursor to a wide range of anti-inflammatory compounds known as docosanoids
I doubt that I ever told any professional about the sense of puffiness or bloating that I felt when I was manic. My head felt like a balloon. My emotions drafted up on winds of madness. Pressure in the temples and at the back of the skull marked the episodes, pressure that was without pain. I did not experience head aches, but I often wondered if there was a tumor growing. Would the sutures of my skull hold against this force? There was always a sense of living just before a great pop. I had to get thoughts realized, I had to display the great zepellin of my imagination before it was too late. That Hindenburg of consciousness was always aware that there would come a precipitous meeting with the docking tower, a ruin of my mind in depression.
If I am not imagining this, then I have discovered for myself an important, physical sign of mania.
Now Mobile-Friendly
Posted on June 3, 2010 in Site News
I have just installed mobile-service for this web-site. If you view it with your i phone or your droid, it looks different
Dream
Posted on June 2, 2010 in Dentition Dreams
After cruising the streets of Salt Lake City, I find myself in a dentist’s chair. The dentist reviews the care I’ve received from six different professionals. He focuses especially on one, whose treatments I found especially palliative. A graphic illustrates what I think was done to my mouth — the good spread clear across the palate touching all corners. Then he shows me that it was only a single tooth. The light that was that tooth disappears. I tremble so hard at the thought it was all in vain that I wake up.
The Hole and the Deficit
Posted on May 31, 2010 in Body Language Dentition Neurology
My jaw aches very subtly, as if it were grieving for the tooth, its lost child of the bone. A broad hole spans the reach from cheek to tongue, a hole that’s getting filled in with flesh. In a few weeks, there will be a pink, flat spot between the bicuspid and the second molar. The pain will be mostly gone except when a large chunk of cruchiness falls in the gap.
I wish my fingers were not so invisible. Lately, the little and ring fingers of the left hand have balked at the simple tasks I once employed them for. Typing leads them astray: the little finger seems to sometimes lose its memory for the location of the “A” key and reaches too far, hitting the caps lock instead. This is especially bad on the laptop — which I am not using now. More distressing is the deficit I experience when I seek to button my pants. For no reason I can fathom, this is a difficult task at times. I have to put an extra effort into the wrist to get it done. The thumb of my right hand pushes the button through the hole while the left struggles to hold the hole in proper alignment.
Everywhere I look for shortcuts, for ways to avoid over-laboring my digits.
I don’t remember much of the content, but I do know that I have been dreaming a lot of doctors recently.
Just Letting You Know About It
Posted on May 26, 2010 in Blogging
I have a secret blog that I keep irregularly updated. Not many know about it, but it seems to catch a more antic — if not manic — side of me.
Click on the picture to catch the latest installment.
Demon Vicodin
Posted on May 25, 2010 in Medications
What does House see in [[Vicodin]]? Sure there is a fleeting happiness and some pain relief. But afterwards you turn into a pathetic bit of rot floating in a cesspool. The loneliness of the night becomes an intransigent gulf of despair.
The white lozenges seem harmless enough. You can imagine chewing them. (I don’t.) I’m not sure if the pain truly goes away or if you are merely rendered too jolly to care about it.
This time the druggist forgot to attach the warning label which urges you to devour your painkiller with food. I remembered past regrets and put on a little weight downing bottled smoothies every time I swallowed. One incident stands out in particular: I took the meds without eating. When the nausea hit, I decided that the smartest thing to do was to avoid eating anything until it blew over. During this torture, Lynn took me to her grandmother’s house where I politely declined a meal and lay on a couch. On the way home, the uge to blow overwhelmed me. Lynn pulled over and I just opened the door, leaving a puddle outside the old cemetery in Menlo Park. At home, the warning label clearly rang out: take with food. That incident served forever after as my reminder to respect the Demon Vicodin.
So it amused me when, in a recent episode of House, Taub and Foreman chomped down a few tabs each on empty stomachs. They felt the exhileration but neither of them threw up. Demon Vicodin came out of myth and winked at me, secure in the knowledge that television will always distort and outright lie.
Of crashes and comments
Posted on May 21, 2010 in Blogging Site News
The other day this site was down for a few hours. The reason? We had exceeded our quota. This puzzled Lynn and me because we don’t see that much traffic on our blogs. We’ve slapped down the spinning of spiders and steeled our site against bandwidth pirates. Our provider assures us that we’re being read: So where are you? Why don’t you speak to us?
Treatment Resistance
Posted on May 15, 2010 in DBSA Support Groups and Conferences Depression Psychotropics Stigma
Before I went to DBSA National two weeks ago, when I ran into a person for whom the meds weren’t working I had one response and that was to think “There but by the grace of God go I.” Encounters at that conference and with some of my own members have changed that reaction. I met — for one — a writer who had lived with depression for nearly twenty years. None of the medications she has tried — and she has been on them all — has worked, so she has chosen to take no meds at all. Members of her support group have told her that she is on a wicked path: if you don’t take the meds, they say, you are being noncompliant and willfully resisting treatment. Secretly, I suspect, they worry that some of her stand will rub off on them and they will stop taking their meds, returning to the dark lands of depression and mania from which the medications saved them.
I’m on her side here. The reason why I take medication is that the benefits they offer in the stabilization of my moods outweigh the side effects. But if they don’t work, all you get are the side effects. So why press her? She told me that she will keep trying new medications as they come out. Hope for a medical cure remains alive in her heart.
One of the speakers at the convention was Paula Kamen who wrote an interesting book about her experiences fighting a fifteen-year-plus-long unending headache (([amazonify]B002BWP68G::text::::All in my head – An epic quest to cure an unrelenting, totally unreasonable, and only slightly enlightening headache[/amazonify] by Paula Kamen)) writes of the different ways that people responding to those with untreatable chronic conditions fail to help. She gives several examples including the case of a Dallas, Texas neurologist who told his patient that the reason why her course of treatment wasn’t working was because she didn’t believe in God enough. Others will refuse to prescribe narcotics even when the pain is severe and all other remedies have been exhausted. Alternative healers with their kneejerk diagnosis of a “lack of balance” will often belittle patients when their poking, prodding, and remanipulation of the spinal column yields no relief. Of these, she writes
Don’t insult us and belittle us with the argument that pain is all a result of the body trying to communicate a message, like we’re too angry. If you told someone with cancer or diabetes that, you would be considered cruel and even stupid. This is a double standard for people in pain, another version of dismissing the pain as purely “psychosomatic”….don’t assume that the mind always has “control” over the body, that it is just a matter of changing thought patterns.
The control argument is often used as a hammer to goad those suffering from intractable depression. I know of one woman living with bipolar disorder for whom no antidepressant measure worked for six years. She enjoyed a period of remission, only to see it followed by the commencement of yet another episode. Psychiatrists attempted to pressure her into [[Electroconvulsive_therapy|ECT]], but she would have no truck with the notion of zapping her brain. When I visited her at the Quaker meeting house that she calls her spiritual home, I spent about half an hour talking to someone who felt that the solution was to get her off her medications. Yet doing so would lead to a catastrophic cascade of moods. She remains on the medications because despite their shortcomings, they do allot her a measure of relief. If this is not part of your equation, you have little business advising the person to choose one therapy option over another. You have no business at all warning against psychiatric or alternative health “conspiracies” if the person in question is finding acceptable comfort from therapy.
As for changing thought patterns, I have found that in my personal experience this can take the edge off of a depression, but it has never cured one for me. The woman who I met at National feels this to be true as well. She described a life where depression sits in her lap every day. She can’t dismiss it because it is potent. The Beast (as I have called it) can only be tamed by cognitive therapy to a certain degree for some of us. If the medications or other therapies work, then we live full lives. If they don’t, then we must eek out our existence doing what we can with tools that can blunt but never rid us of the sword.
To say to people with untreatable depression that they have failed in their drug regimen or their exercise program ((One symptom of depression is that sufferers just don’t feel like engaging in physical activity. Walking a mile can be more a sign that the depression is lifting than a cure.)) or herbal medicine or their thinking is insensitive and barbaric. Hope can go a little way. But what is most lost in any kind of pain is a sense of belonging to the human race. Friends don’t like to hear about our failure as we battle deterioration from disease. Yet their love is vital.
Waterboarding Charlotte Lewis
Posted on May 14, 2010 in Abuse PTSD
The Cause for the Canonization of [[Roman Polanski]] took a big hit today when English actress [[Charlotte Lewis]] came out and hinted that he had taken liberties with her during the filming of Pirates in France. It’s important to get clear about what this means: the Los Angeles District Attorney will not and cannot prosecute Polanski for something that happened in France. Nor can the French press charges for child molestation because sex with a sixteen year old girl is legal in that country.
The allegation is not without its ramifications. First, Polanski’s supporters have claimed that he only did it once. Lewis’s story upsets that myth. Second, this revelation can be introduced during sentencing. It doesn’t matter that the act was legal in France: from what I have read, it doesn’t sound like it was consensual which is just as much a crime in France as it is in California. I have no information about the statute of limitations for rape in France, but the case remains open in California because Polanski ran away before he could be sentenced. It matters if Polanski is a serial rapist both in the California court and in the greater court of public opinion. In the first he should receive a harsher sentence under the law which he was found guilty. In the second, he should not receive any more pity.
Polanski’s defenders on Twitter and at the Huffington Post have already begun to do what they can’t do in a court because of rape shield laws: attack the alleged victim. They say that Lewis’s story is not credible because she has only now come out. Those who have suffered the trauma of abuse while in their teens can empathize with her reticence to allude to her experience: when a teenager is set against an adult, the younger person can be readily intimidated into silence and shame. The fear can last well into adulthood.
Then there is the accusation that she is doing this to save her career. “No publicity is bad publicity,” says one Huffington Post commenter who in an earlier post challenged another participant in the thread to “show documentation”. Mark this as a desperate attempt to discredit and to intimidate her by alluding to her age and slow career activity. No court in America would allow this line of reasoning without solid evidence for it. They can’t make any kind of case that Lewis has this motive, so they are reduced to spiteful rumor.
A few have hinted that we shouldn’t take the word of a former Playboy model seriously. But here they have walked into a confrontation with psychological fact. [[Rape trauma syndrome]] has been well documented for many years now. Along with the unsettling of the sense of personal safety and hesistation about entering new relationships
Sexual relationships become disturbed. Many survivors have reported that they were unable to re-establish normal sexual relations and often shied away from sexual contact for some time after the rape. Some report inhibited sexual response and flashbacks to the rape during intercourse. Conversely, some rape survivors become hyper-sexual or promiscuous following sexual attacks, sometimes as a way to reassert a measure of control over their sexual relations.
This shines a different light on Lewis’s sexuality . Her alleged relationship was not a wondrous moment of intimacy between teenager and older man, but distorted. Many a nice woman has turned into a bar slut because she felt ruined by such encounters. The more we look at Lewis’s post-Polanski behavior, the more we may see to affirm her story.
Finally, let’s return to the “it happened in France but it is not relevant” line of bull. I put it to a liberalish ((Mind you this progressive does not feel Polanski deserves our pity. First he ran away. Second, no matter how crushed he felt by losing Sharon Tate to the Manson Family, it does not give him license to become sociopathic.)) defender of Polanski that this was the same kind of reasoning that was used to ship Guantamano detainees to Pakistan and Egypt. Torture was illegal here in the United States making it a bad thing for our own boys to do it. But if we sent them to countries where it was legal, then it was suddenly all right. The “Polanski did it in France” argument is every bit as pathetic. Nevertheless, his champions now step forward to waterboard Charlotte Lewis for outing him as a not-so-nice lech who seduced and maybe raped teen-aged women.
Notes on a Neuropathy
Posted on May 12, 2010 in Medications Neurology Psychotropics Sugar and Fat
My endocrinologist took my left hand and pressed the finger nails. They turned white beneath her touch, then filled with pink blood as she released them. She compared these findings with the numbers from my blood-work. The blood sugar had fallen steadily along with my weight. There would be no amputation.
I have good days and bad. Today was slightly worse. The little finger possesses an odd numbness — it is not tingly nor in pain. The nerve-death has spread to the ring finger and down the side of the hand.
Her word that it was not a [[neuropathy]] due to diabetes comforted my wife who had thought of this possibility the moment the specialist at Mission Hospital declared the likelihood of a stroke next to nil. I have decided to learn to live with the deficit as long as there is no threat to life or limb. It seems that I an already medicated against any pain: [[carbamazepine]] which I take to steady my madness is a frequently prescribed comfort.
