Into the Void

How to identify mania:

One way is to make a rough calculation of the percentage of support list email that is yours. Is half the email yours? That’s the support list equivalent of being at a party and running around in a frenzy trying to keep tabs on every conversation.

My personal favorite way to tell is to read my own posts and count how many times I begin a paragraph with the word “I”. If I write a post and every goddam sentence is about me, me, me, then I know that I should be talking to a therapist instead of taking energy from people whose boundaries are too soft for them to say or even think “no” or “you are a boring, self-involved twit.” When folks talk talk talk, it’s because there’s something that they want to say. Not the mush that comes tumbling out in idle chit-chat, but something important and maybe life-changing. OMFG, no, keep talking loud and fast so that you can’t hear it.

In case you aren’t aware of yourself enough to gauge when your thoughts are racing, you are emotionally labile, or you are feeling overly optimistic, grandiose, charitable, attractive, psychotic or whatever else might be part of your mania, then you have to focus on your behavior. Or more specifically to others’ reactions to your behavior.

I realize that gaining some awareness is the first step in being able to reduce your meds, get out and make new friends, do volunteer work or maybe even get job training, and eventually even stop hating yourself and your bipolar disorder. In a way, allowing yourself to be competent and independent is like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on if your continued access to medical care requires that you be sick enough to qualify for it.

Can you imagine being paid to stay sick?

The number one thing a bipolar can do is develop self-awareness. The ability to identify an impending crisis and take steps to prevent it makes a huge difference in the quality of your life. If a bipolar is so first-person that they don’t notice racing thoughts and they don’t have enough of a grasp of formal logic to recognize a delusion for what it is, I don’t see how meds can do anything other than make them easier to handle. “Easy to handle” is not, in my non-professional opinion, a positive therapeutic goal.

Some days I think every bipolar should be forced to take Abstract Algebra. That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, eh?

Widgetbox Neon Text Generator web widget

A flashy thingy for the manics.

Pretty much any psych med by itself will affect sex drive. I see folks taking a half a dozen of them, and then another med or two to counteract the side effects. The pdocs tell us that they DON’T because they don’t want us to quit taking them.

Perhaps we should refer to our meds as a “pharmaceutical chastity belt.”

Anything that tweaks your dopamine down is going to get rid of the emotional spark required to have something resembling a sex life. And anything that tweaks UP serotonin receptors does so at the expense of dopamine receptors. See this article, Notes on Anhedonia and SAD.

For men, there’s also the problem of peripheral blood flow - a strictly mechanical problem. Can’t get the old hydraulics to run, eh? Viagra and Cialis work by improving blood flow. Heck, coffee dilates the blood vessels too, and if you brew it at home it’s way cheaper than an ED pill. Diabetes is common cause of ED, so antipsychotics that affect blood sugar (most of the atypicals) might contribute to it.

Maybe the whole idea is to give us drugs that prevent us from breeding lots of little bipolars.

Today I learned that the Arabic word for mental illness has the same etymology as the Arabic word for evil spirits. This has an unfortunate effect on how the mentally ill are perceived in the Middle East.

Language is an odd thing. It enables you to express your innermost thoughts and feelings. BUT it almost guarantees that the thoughts and feelings you express have been totally shaped by the language itself. In the words of comedian Lenny Bruce,

“Believe me, I’m not profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me, because I do not have an original thought. I am screwed. I speak English. That’s it. I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to somebody else.”
– Lenny Bruce, quoted on Rakes Progress: Lenny Bruce is not afraid

So what’s happening is that as long as the doctors use that old-fashioned
word to describe mental illness, demon-possessed the mentally ill will remain.

Arabs don’t have a monopoly on superstition though. The following TinyUrl will take you to a google search for “mental illness exorcism.”
http://tinyurl.com/5gwe4p

Experimental interface to the Bipolar Planet mobile community on Winksite. You can access the site directly from your mobile phone at http://winksite.mobi/bpplanet/m.

Want a free Bipolarplanet.mobi QRCode t-shirt? Be one of the first 5 people to join the mobile community then pop back here and leave a comment. I’ll need your email address so I can contact you for snail mail address - don’t worry, your address won’t appear in the comments.

Technorati: mobile+community mobile+phone cell+phone .mobi QRCode free+t-shirt

A reminder: I’m an engineer. This is all my opinion based on readings in a field that is not my own. I request that as you read my posts, you also check my references.

Cigarettes are powerful anti-anxiety drugs. It’s my opinion that may smokers are self-medicating an anxiety disorder.

Nicotine has calming effects on stress-induced mood changes in females, but enhances aggressive mood in males

“Exposure to moderate stress significantly increased ratings of anxiety, discontent and aggression and nicotine blocked these mood changes in females, but enhanced them in males. This suggests that young women may start regular smoking as a form of stress self-medication, which implies that preventative and smoking cessation programmes would be more successful in women if they addressed issues of stress and anxiety, which may be core factors underlying initiation and maintenance of regular smoking.”

A bipolar most certainly will get a high score on an ADD screening test like the Copeland symptom checklist. The symptoms of ADD overlap with the symptoms of bipolar. A bipolar child scores higher on the ADD screening test that a child with ADD. Your GP isn’t qualified to make a differential diagnosis, and in fact is likely to misdiagnose you and make your illness worse.

I’m going to quote from articles about children because misdiagnosis kills so many of them. It applies to adults too, but we don’t have parents to FORCE us to continue taking ritalin when it is obviously tearing us to pieces.

Diagnosing Bipolar VS. ADHD: Similarities

“There is concern that ADHD is being overdiagnosed and bipolar disorder underdiagnosed in the population of children.”

That being said, yes, I have ADHD combined type. My psychiatrist diagnosed it after I’d been seeing him for 10 years and after an evaluation that DIDN’T included taking an ADD screening test. Screening tests are useless for bipolars. You have to be cautious.

I have been through the entire pharmacopia, or it seems that way. Every ADD med I’ve taken makes me hypomanic within a week. So how I work it is that on days I really REALLY need to focus I take it. I have tried:
Ritalin (methyphenidate) - this is the one they give our children. Somebody please explain to me why 40% of American children need psych meds?
Strattera - this was the absolute worst for me. It interferes with metabolism in the liver of SSRIs, resulting in a huge buildup of both drugs. I was up there in 3 days and in a nasty mixed state in a week.
Provigil - similar to Strattera, but takes longer to build up. YMMV! :-)
Adderall - amphetamine. SPEED FREAK! Three days in a row and I’m have “racoon eyes” and am well on my way to psychosis.

Strattera Risks May Widen
FDA,s warning about Eli Lilly’s drug Strattera causing suicidal thinking in children used for ADHD caught many parents and doctors by surprise.

“Dr. Laughren says the agency also plans to ask Lilly to include a stronger caution on Strattera’s label about its risk of inducing mania and similar mood destabilization, along with the new “black box” warning out this week. The new warning will focus on the drug’s risks for kids with undiagnosed bipolar illness, according to Dr. Laughren. In fact, “very often bipolar illness is not recognized until you [give] patients a drug like Strattera,” he says.”

Bipolar Disorder, Co-occurring Conditions, and the Need for Extreme Caution Before Initiating Drug Treatment

“Now understanding that early-onset bipolar disorder is frequently co-morbid with other childhood psychiatric conditions, doctors and parents should be concerned that a medication used to treat these other conditions may “flush out” a previously quiescent bipolar gene that can significantly worsen the course of illness and potentially wreak havoc with that child’s life. It is therefore vitally important that parents learn everything they can about their family histories, and if mood disorders (depression or manic-depression), suicide, or alcoholism come to light, treatment should proceed very cautiously. Mood stabilizers should perhaps be the first line of treatment (and it may take two such medications to stabilize the child), and attentional, obsessional, or depressive symptoms be treated only after a therapeutic dose of the mood stabilizer is achieved.”

The Overlap With ADHD

Perhaps the greatest source of diagnostic confusion in childhood bipolar disorder is that its symptoms overlap with many of the symptoms of attention-deficit disorder with hyperactivity. At first glance, any child who can’t sit still, who is fidgety, impulsive, easily distracted or emotionally labile is more likely to receive a diagnosis of ADHD than bipolar disorder. However, since over 80 percent of children with a bipolar disorder will meet full criteria for attention-deficit disorder with hyperactivity, ADHD should be diagnosed only after bipolar disorder is ruled out. While these two conditions seem highly co-morbid, stimulants unopposed by a mood stabilizer can have an adverse effect on the bipolar condition. 65 percent of the children in our study had hypomanic, manic and aggressive reactions to stimulant medications. Parents wrote to us and described some of their children’s reactions to stimulants. They said things like: “He got sky-high on Ritalin and then violent”; “Ritalin caused physical aggression”; “She got psychotic on stimulants”; “He got suicidal and tried to get run over by a car”; “He went bonkers…”

Don’t let a GP play with screening tests. See a psychiatrist.

Technorati: bipolar bipolar+disorder ADD ADHD Nicotine Copeland+symptom+checklist

Popular Science: Nano-Pollution: No Tiny Issue?

I’m an electrical engineer and a born skeptic, but through the years the medical profession has shown a particularly unscientific streak when it comes to identifying and treating new illnesses.

I have been worried about the environmental and medical effects of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is a catch-all phrase that describes microscopic man-made objects. These come in many shapes and sizes - soccer-ball-shaped cages made of 20 carbon atoms, nanotubes the thickness of a hair. These objects persist in the environment after they’ve been used and disposed of. There has been little, if any, investigation into the effect of exposure to environmental nanotechnology.

Please consider the possibility that some, if not all, cases of Morgellons are the result of exposure to tiny man-made objects. These objects can lodge almost invisibly in the skin, causing unexplained lesions. Larger nanotubes or groups of smaller ones may appear to be fibers. Many of these objects are so small that when inhaled they are carried directly into the brain using the same pathways as smells do.

Nanotechnological pollution is on the horizon. I think Morgellons is the earliest indication of what we can all expect from this technology.

It took many years for the Powers That Be to recognize the danger of asbestos. Nanotechnology is still in its infancy and not much investigation has been done into effects on the environment or on the human body. So far the environment isn’t filled with these things. The particles are molecular in size, much smaller than asbestos. In my professional opinion, this research must start *now* rather than after the technology is entrenched.

I also wanted to point out something. Everywhere I read about Morgellons online, sufferers of this mysterious illness were slathering themselves with lotions and creams to try to calm the itching. Well, nanotechnology is being used as a carrier for emollients and other cosmetic ingredients. Anywhere you see words like “microencapsulated” there is some kind of nanotechnology. Please consider creating a list of safe lotions (if there can be such a thing).

I’m not affiliated with any skin cream manufacturers either. There is a list of products containing nanotechnology online somewhere, probably on the CRN. I leave it to you folks to look into it.

I do, of course, consider that Morgellons may not be due to nanotechnology at all, but to histological incompatibility.

BTW, talc is similar to asbestos in many ways. Talc is one of the hardest substances known to man. I’m a bit suspicious of talc too. I’ve long since switched to corn starch.

Technorati: ology Morgellons asbestos microencapsulated

RealMagick Article: The Seven Shaman Principles by Serge Kahill King

Thought for the Day:

Hallucination means “your dream doesn’t match my dream.”

The Zucchini Patch » A Slave to Cigarettes

Jessica of The Zucchini Patch wants to quit smoking. This is my comment. It deals mostly with the money aspect of smoking. They don’t talk about that much in the anti-smoking ads. They talk about cancer only in very vague terms. They show little pictures of the particulate matter that coats the lungs. They don’t talk so much about the reality of drowning in your own putrefying lungs.

Oddly enough, they also don’t talk about the 20% of women with lung cancer who never smoked at all. The politics of the anti-tobacco movement is another story for another day.

Wow. I remember in 1979 saying I’d quit when cigarettes reached 75¢ a pack.

Let’s see…
$3.50/pack × 2 packs/day × 365days/year?
Thats over $2500 a year!

So your first year’s savings are the down payment on a new subcompact car. Each monthly savings after that is the car payment.

Not sure how much daycare costs. Save your savings in a college fund for Marco. In 15 years at 9% interest, the long-term average growth for the stock market, you’d have $65,536.67. (Don’t worry, he’ll get loans and grants for the rest of the cost.)

Or how about taking a week-long yoga retreat at the Omega Institute? Mmmmmmm… :-)

A trip to Paris even with the abysmal exchange rate!

20 steak dinners. Real, digestible steak, not the USDA Choice shoeleather they sell at the supermarket. If you don’t eat meat, give the steak to the dog and enjoy a decadent dessert, a mango souffle perhaps. Heck, fly me up there and I’ll eat your steak. I’m not proud.

See, this is what the cigarette habit is denying you.

I’m having a brain bubble over where you live. I’ll do the tax numbers based on my locale. Federal tax on cigarettes is 39¢ a pack so I’d pay around $280 a year. I wonder whether I can deduct that on my income tax? If Congress manages to raise the tax to $1 a pack (to fund children’s health insurance, they claim) then I’d be paying $730 a year. Hey, it’s “for the chillrun.” My state cigarette tax is $1.35 per pack, for a whopping $980 or so per year. My state income tax is less than that!

Does it seem to you that if the government actually banned cigarettes they’d be losing a big source of income? Hmmmm… almosts makes you want to think. ;-)

Ok, now for the real problem with quitting smoking. Nicotine is a powerful anxiolytic and antidepressant. When you quit, you’re not only back to your pre-smoking anxiety levels, but you also have a rebound effect. The HedWeb Good Drug Guide has a lot of excellent information on brain chemical tweaks in general, and nicotine in particular. Here’s a good place to start:
Biopsychiatry.com:: Antidepressants : Nicotine

Both major depression and depressive symptoms are associated with a high rate of nicotine dependence, and a history of major depression has an adverse impact on smoking cessation.

In other words, when you quit smoking it will feel as if you’ve quit psych meds cold turkey. Have you ever made that mistake?

So please don’t beat yourself up if it takes several tries for you to quit. It’s not a moral failing, it is brain chemicals. I’d wait until after the stressful holidays to quit.

I could go into the nuts-and-bolts of how I finally quit in 1986 or so - lots of crying, mostly - but there is plenty of good information available on the web. Email me if you want to hear about it. :-)