Into the Void

I’ve been thinking about parasites.

Not the “earworm” sort of thing where you hear a bit of a song and can’t get it out of your head for the rest of the day. Not even the everyday suck-on-your-intestines nasties. I’m thinking about the kind of parasites that get into your mind and control your thoughts and actions.

For the record, I know *of* these parasites but I’m looking up the names online as I go along. Damn it, Jim, I’m an engineer not a biologist.

The sensitive and the squeamish may want to stop reading this now.

Really.

Ok, now that we’ve shaken off the fleas…

There’s a parasite that infects rodents, Toxoplasm gondii. It makes them all hyper and weird and THAT makes them easier for cats to catch. Where it gets interesting is that the life cycle of this parasite requires that it pass through the stomach and intestinal tract of… wait for it… a cat! How convenient!

I have occasionally wondered whether the active phase of the infestation makes humans more attractive to cats. Something like 40% of the population has antibodies to T. gondii. Maybe “the rat race” isn’t so far off, eh?

The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey - whose sister is or was schizophrenic and is probably somewhat affected himself - is promoting the paranoid delusion that cat shit causes schizophrenia. Is it possible that when his sister got sick he blamed Fluffy? This, my friends, is a major researcher into bipolar disorder at the prestigious Stanley Foundation. We are SO f*cked.

Oh. In other countries with the same rate of antibodies to T. gondii in the population, there is less schizophrenia and the prognosis is better. Personally I think schizophrenia is a product of industrialization and I wish Dr. Torrey would quit wasting valuable time digging in the cat box.

There are many other parasites that affect the behavior of the host. Three
more follow:

Sacculina infects crabs. If by “infects” you mean “castrates and takes over the mind and body.” This is the stuff of nightmares. Succulina injects itself into a crack in the exoskeleton and quickly grows out through the entire nervous system. Crabs that are infected can’t breed, can’t regenerate limbs, and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but feeding and caring for the parasite. They even stroke and clean the monster, which in the female crab lives in the compartment where she usually holds her unhatched eggs.

Can you imagine having some THING living inside you, changing your brain so that the thing becomes the focus of your entire life? This is the stuff of nightmares.

The lancet fluke has a fairly complicated life cycle, but the interesting part is where it infects an ant. An infected ant acts like a regular ant by day, but at night she climbs up a blade of grass and waits at the top. The next stage of the parasite’s life cycle is to become a liver fluke in a cow. How better to be eaten by a cow than to have your host sit on the top of a blade of grass at dawn!

Another fluke infects fish - the young flukes migrate to the fish’s brain and crowd around it like pigs at a trough. Fish who are infected periodically stop what they’re doing and flail about at the surface of the water. Shorebirds find the flailing fish easy to catch, and yep, the birds are part of the life cycle too. The parasites boost the bird population by making more food available, but the fact that they kill their fish hosts puts limits on how much of the fish population can be infested. Again, a very convenient situation.

Hopefully you all are getting where I’m going with this - that parasites can make you do things you might not have done if it didn’t benefit the parasite. A parasite that flat out ate us alive would be found and eradicated like the screwfly was. Most of them are merely a nuisance.

Humans are, for the most part, repulsed by parasites. I’m sure there are some parasites somewhere that are status symbols, but I sure can’t think of
any. Usually we want to avoid parasites if we can, and expel or exterminate them when we can’t.

It would be more adaptive if the parasite made humans enjoy being infested. I’ve read sci-fi stories about this sort of thing, and I remember at least one Star Trek episode where the infested feel **enriched** by the parasite and are absolutely delighted to forcefully spread it to others.

If you believe the writer William S. Bourroughs, language itself is a virus. Certainly memes, often called “mind viruses,” have some quality that helps them spread. Does anyone remember Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus” from the “Home of the Brave” video?

Oh, he did a really nice book about the co-evolution of cats and people called “The Cat Inside” or something similar. I highly recommend it for the cat-infested.

Next section of this article will be on how *ideas* influence our thinking and behavior in the same way that parasites do.

Technorati: parasites medicine medical mind schizophreniam T+gondii cat+shit William+S+Burroughs memes

Referring back to Shamanism and Talking to Dog.

We have the ability to perceive *everything* until our society teaches us to block out of our minds what’s happening on the other side of the door. Privacy is how it starts. Later it becomes political. This is the definition of sanity, sharing a world-view.

My cat always has a complete aural picture of the world outside the house because her hearing is much better than mine. Her visual concept of the world is limited to what she can see by running from window to window - a very disconnected picture of the world, don’t you think? Now substitute the word “psychic” for “aural” and “sensory” for “visual.” There is nothing mystical about it. You know what you are taught to know and you de-reify what you aren’t taught.

I have no problem with concepts that lie outside the limitations of our technology. Not until some shady character tries to take my money. New Age practices, in general, are when a bunch of slightly better educated people try to sell the rest of us something that doesn’t really step outside consensus reality. Magic, after all, is nothing but a technology that you don’t understand.

I’m also an Electrical Engineer and I graduated with a minor in mathematics. I had 4 years of science and 5 years of math in high school alone. And I’ve forgotten more philosophy than most people ever read in the first place. I can tell bullsh*t from a new way of looking at reality. I’m a reiki master, by the way.

The first thing you learn in logic is that you can’t prove non-existence. Psychic ability requires breaking your mind so that you can see the things you were taught to make non-existent.

Society has a vested interest in controlling the hidden information, and quickly punishes those who step outside what is considered sane. Therapists, then, are the gatekeepers of consensus reality.

The moral? Don’t complain about your psychic abilities to your therapist unless you want to get rid of these abilities.

About schizophrenia - schizophrenia does not equal psychic ability, though a broken brain is more likely to take a big step away from consensus reality. Schizophrenia, they say, results from an inability to categorize the world in the same way the rest of us do. Imagine if your grocery store sorted things by the size of the package instead of putting sugar in the spice aisle and dryer sheets in the laundry section. Now imagine that when you complain to the manager, he sends the cops and psychiatrists over to your house to rearrange the furniture.

Thought for the Day:

“Back in school I treated schizophrenics who were anywhere from clearly on-the-surface very different, but there were others with whom everything would seem normal until they began discussing the area of their reality that parted from everyone else’s. Sort of like talking to a neoconservative.”
– DocShiva, from an email. Quoted with permission.

Anosognosia (impaired awareness of illness): A major problem for individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

As the years go by, I am less and less impressed with NAMI. I think their agenda is to improve the family’s comfort at the expense of the patient’s autonomy. They teach the rather disturbing idea that a large percentage of mentally ill people have no self-awareness, no insight into ourselves. Like the lower animals. Anosognosia, they call it.

The article I’ve linked to above has some glaring logical errors and has terrible ramifications for the mentally ill. I’ll list some of them.

1. The article lumps bipolars together with schizophrenics as if we are all one big, happy family. We aren’t. Bipolar disorderis cyclic, often with long periods of remission in between episodes. This is not the case with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is associated with unremitting cognitive deficits. In either case, there is no “awareness of illness” modifier to the DSM-IV codes. Frankly, it is my opinion that the majority of non-mentally ill folks are wandering around with the same lack of self-consciousness. Why are we pathologizing it?
2. The article doesn’t examine in detail the cognitive effects of certain medications. Most notably, the [tag]antipsychotics[/tag] have been shown to reduce the [tag]IQ[/tag] by an average of about 10 points. In basing the sweeping generalization that we aren’t self-aware upon those individuals whose short-term memory is ravaged by their [tag]medications[/tag], the article makes a case for putting more individuals on the same meds. This will skew future research in this direction as more and more psychiatric patients are required to take meds that may cause [tag]anosognosia[/tag].
3. There is considerable evidence that medications may not be necessary during remission in bipolar disorder type II - see [tag]Dr. Fieve[/tag]’s recent book, “Bipolar II: Enhance Your Highs, Boost Your [tag]Creativity[/tag], and Escape the Cycles of Recurrent Depression.” If I state that I don’t need meds when I’m in remission, that is a treatment decision, not the symptom of a [tag]cognitive deficit[/tag].
4. The milder forms of bipolar disorder occur far more that the severe forms. That is, most bipolars never experience psychosis. I suspect that there is a missing qualifier throughout the article - a description of what population exactly they mean. That is, do the authors include the milder forms of bipolar in their 40% statistic, or is the article strictly based on their experience with the sickest of the sick, the ones who wound up in-patient? If this is so, then the authors are [tag]stigmatizing[/tag] most of the bipolar population based on a very biased sample. I suspect that the sample of bipolars in the article are folks who have never been educated as to the symptoms of their illness. Education alone makes a big difference in our ability to manage the illness.
5. The horrible possibility that we aren’t aware of our symptoms is devastating to the self-esteem of even the most intelligent and self-aware mentally ill person. Am I acting out? Should I speak up or will my words betray my condition? I feel good today - maybe that’s just a mania talking? I disagree what what X is saying - am I delusional?
6. This article opens the mentally ill to victimization by society and especially by the medical profession. The word “Anosognosia” gives society the pretense of a valid reason to marginalize the mentally ill, to victimize, to force-medicate, to control us. It enables our families, friends and employers to shrug off our ideas and opinions for no other reason than that we have been diagnosed and they haven’t. Why exactly is it that a heart patient is allowed to request that further treatment be withheld, yet a mentally ill person can be hospitalized against his will? Are we monsters?

For all its talk about stigma busters, NAMI has shown with this single document exactly what they are all about. I am not an animal. Mental illness is not a crime. And NAMI is not advocating for us.

UPDATE 4/15/2007:
[tag]Sylvia Caras[/tag] of [tag]People Who[/tag] accepted this post for inclusion on her own site. Stop over to People Who and check out the tremendous amount of excellent mental health advocacy information she offers.

If someone figures out how to “cure” genetics, let me know. You can’t exactly pick up a bottle of Grecian Formula for Brain at the local pharmacy.

Remission is another thing altogether. That simply means that you are having an extended symptom-free period. Given that the DSM-IV bipolar criteria only require that the patient have ONE episode of mania or hypomania, some folks may remain in remission for the rest of their lives even without meds.

Science *is* empiricism. I would like to suggest that a large percentage doctors are not particularly careful in their application of the science of medicine. If they were scientific, they’d test and retest the bipolar patient’s continued need for meds instead of following the bizarre rule of thumb that once you’re on meds you need them forever. The killer is that as long as the illness is masked by drugs, it is impossible to practice “evidence-based medicine” as they disparagingly call it.

None of us on meds is being treated in an scientific manner. It isn’t scientifically valid to say that bipolar disorder causes cognitive deficits if a large percentage of the patients in the study were on meds. Antipsychotics have been *proven* to reduce the IQ by affecting the short-term memory. They aren’t the only drug to cause cognitive deficits. Lithium makes you feel as if your brain is wrapped in cotton wool.

I don’t believe that it is scientifically valid to say that bipolars must be on meds for life. If the patient stops the meds and experiences a return of symptoms… well, you’ve rewired the brain. The drugs themselves create a continued need for themselves by reconfiguring the brain’s neurons to need higher levels of serotonin in the synapses. The symptoms are bound to return, and much worse than before the drug did its damage.

Another thing about remission is that so many things besides bipolar disorder cause mood swings. Bipolar disorder has periods of remission. Things like the personality disorders, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, PTSD and any of a hundred organic illness all cause mood swings. But they don’t necessarily have periods of remission, and in many cases remission just doesn’t occur.

Here - this is my particular manifestation of bipolar disorder. Three-year cycles. They come no matter what, but fortunately the meds attentuate he episodes. On the other hand, until I was on meds the cycles didn’t seriously impact my salary.

I think that it’s important, if a bipolar isn’t having remissions, to figure out why. Ultra-rapid cycling could be caused by an antidepressant, particularly in women. Newly-diagnosed bipolars often experience a great deal of fear or anxiety that might be better treated with therapy than with additional meds. Antipsychotics may ruin the patient’s ability to effectively manage the illness by dumbing them down. Sometimes it isn’t the illness, it is the meds that make bipolars disabled.

Are your drugs masking periods of remission?

Sometimes I get tired of the reverse stigma that I get for taking fewer meds so that I can continue to have a life. Isn’t that the purpose of treatment? If not, what is?

Most bipolars have the so-called milder varieties of the illness, and many of them are unfairly overmedicated and isolated from society for no good reason. It is unbearably sad to see that happening. So if I can tolerate psychosis instead of trying to medicate away every little nuance of mood or emotion, does that make me somehow inferior? I don’t f*cking think so. It isn’t pathological until it has a negative effect on my life.