Cause of death....

There are days that I think I could die of it. Wonder what they'd put down as the cause of death if you just stopped breathing in the sheer, vast, emptiness of isolation? Yeah, yeah, yeah - I know that social isolation is one of the extreme effects of mental illness, but frankly, I wonder if it isn't just the extreme effect of our social culture? Even when I'm out of my house I'm amazed at how little we interact with the people around us.

So yesterday I volunteered some of my time to help get donations for the Salvation Army and the Prenatal Care Center. Every March the Soroptimist Clubs of Anacortes and Fidalgo Island team up for a Community Baby Shower and hit the local markets encouraging folks to pick up some baby food, or diapers or such and donate it for folks that are struggling to make ends meet. It is really an easy sell; even people disinclined to contribute to the poor (perhaps buying into the idea that they must have done something wrong to be poor or homeless in the first place,) have no problem opening up their wallet for a baby. My job was to ambush shoppers at the door and present them with a list of possible contributions that they could pick up while shopping. And it was interesting to see how generally uncomfortable people are with talking to a 'stranger' - how smiling and greeting someone automatically seems to put them on the defensive. I was pretty uncomfortable, too, even though I genuinely believed that most of them would be inclined to contribute - and there were people that I couldn't bring myself to greet, as they seemed almost hostile.

Okay, so we did pretty well in the donation department nonetheless. But I marvel that anyone connects with anyone in a world where speaking banal pleasantries to someone that you do not actually know seems awkward at best. Everywhere I go I see people talking to a little square of plastic, or typing furiously on it. But where do people talk? Not at the market, not at the dinner table, not in the car, or the bus, or the train. So.... where?

As I write this I'm at home... alone... on my computer. I wonder if you can die from it...

Depression has an upside?

"The mystery of depression is not that it exists — the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead, the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence. While most mental illnesses are extremely rare — schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1 percent of the population — depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold. Every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by the awful mental state that William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . . a storm of murk.” Obsessed with our pain, we will retreat from everything. We will stop eating, unless we start eating too much. Sex will lose its appeal; sleep will become a frustrating pursuit. We will always be tired, even though we will do less and less. We will think a lot about death.

The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself.

The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain."

Read the rest of this excellent article by Jonah Lehrer here. Found this to be a great companion piece to this previous post on Virginia Woolf.

Blue Days

You can tell by the vast amount of posting I've done of late that I haven't been my usual verbose self. On the heels of the holidays, comes the natural let down - my business slows and with it I feel like I'm shrinking. Without a million gajillion things to be done, without a constant source of busywork... I slip into the blues. It doesn't happen overnight, (although sometimes it does,) and it isn't life threatening. I don't take to my bed (although sometimes I want to.) I go to work, I eat (usually too much or things guaranteed to make me feel bad about myself,) I sleep (sorta...)Everything gets... dim. Time seems to go really slowly, but the weeks can burn right by. I haven't any energy. I haven't any joy. I don't have much of anything... but a pulse and regular respiration, bills that need paying and pets that need feeding.

In the past, if this goes on long enough, or if I start feeling bad enough (where taking to my bed becomes more of a possibility) I will cave to the lure of a fix - and seek some medication. Never had too much trouble talking a doc into Prozac or Lexapro.... They love to write me a script. I know it will take the edge off of the darkness. I will feel ... better, but of course it comes with a price tag - weight gain or no interest in sex or something. And a real price tag, too, as I don't have insurance that will cover the prescription. Sometimes I just opt to wait it out or I find some project to throw my time at - volunteer work and the like - something to keep me out of my head and into exhaustion at the end of the day. And eventually business will pick up and I'll be back to working 50 hours a week at my unfulfilling, but ever so demanding job.

I'm currently still in the 'wait it out' mode of this vile cycle. I don't want medication. I'm trying the whole gamut of 'self care' that I religiously preach to my support group - get enough sleep, eat right, exercise - yadda, yadda, yadda. I've made an appointment with a new counselor - and I have mixed feelings about that. And I wonder if this is really all I can expect out of life - this eternal cycle of sort of okay, and then not okay. I really feel guilty even saying this as I know so many people who live with grave mental illness - so many brave souls who have demons that make my problems look like an ingrown toenail. I'm lucky in so many ways - I have a job, I make a living, my kids are grown and on their own, I'm relatively healthy. So is it wrong to think that I would sell my soul to wake up each morning with a smile on my face looking forward to my day? Cuz I would. I really would.

10 Ways to Reduce Anxiety... Part 1

1. Repeat your worry until you're bored silly. If you had a fear of elevators, you'd get rid of it if you rode in one a thousand times in a row. At first, you would be very anxious, then less so, and eventually it would have no effect (except to make you sick of riding in an elevator.) So take the troublesome thought that's nagging at you and say it over and over, silently, slowly, for 20 minutes. It's hard to keep your mind on a worry if you repeat it that many times. I call this the 'boredom cure' for obvious reasons, but it sure beats feeling overwhelmed by anxiety.

2. Make it worse. When you try to hard to control your anxieties, you only heighten them. Instead, exaggerate them and see what happens. For instance, if you fear that your mind will go blank during a presentation, fake it intentionally in the middle of your next one. Say, "Gee, what was I saying?" Notice how this makes no difference. It's nothing to worry about, right? I did this at a lecture once and no one raised an eyebrow. (Perhaps they weren't listening anyway.!)

Ed. note: these are by Robert L. Leahy, PhD and director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in NY, NY.

Virginia Woolf - Mental Illness Defined Her Craft by Richard Cytowic

"Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse opens in opposition, with a fragment of conversation already in progress: “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” says Mrs. Ramsay to her son James. “But,” contradicts his father two paragraphs later, “it won’t be fine.”

The novel is unbalanced from its first line. Within four paragraphs, points of view shift among mother, son, and father; then an omniscient voice reveals the thoughts of all three members of the Ramsay family, “that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that.”

Could such opposing attitudes reflect Woolf’s own considerable ambivalence? Do the author’s real-life equivocations echo in the indecisiveness of her fictional characters and her inconclusive plot arcs? In her diaries, Woolf regularly described a recurrent “madness,” referring to the disruptive mood swings that plagued her career and ultimately led to her suicide. As a doctor who has studied neurological disorders for 35 years, I recognize such periodic and cyclical fluctuations as manic–depressive illness, or bipolar affective disorder.

Woolf could not piece herself together when unpredictable mental illness fragmented her world. “Virginia could be a very enchanting person,” said Vogue editor Madge Garland, “but there were times when I felt that she was more nearly enchanted.” When depressed, Woolf took to bed and withdrew, viewing the world as meaningless and without hope. On the upswing to mania she wrote at breakneck speed, the words seeming to compose themselves.

Because the distorted thinking of bipolar individuals persists even when they are neutrally poised between mania and depression, Woolf read meaning and portent into events that were likely coincidental. This tendency may be one reason Woolf’s novels are strewn with odd, minute details that lure readers to hunt for significance in them.

Critics and therapists often presume psychodynamic explanations of causation despite lack of evidence in Woolf’s writing. The thinking goes that because the young Virginia was sexually abused, she portrayed the sexes as incommensurable, misogynistic in the way Richard Dalloway is in The Voyage Out or Mr. Tansley is in Lighthouse. The modern habit is to think about mental forces in terms of cause and effect.

What if instead one took a biological perspective and asked how the distorted perceptions and self-absorption typical of bipolar individuals might have colored the thinking of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated authors? Such a mind makes it hard to see objectively, let alone distinguish facts from its projections. Though Woolf confused subject and object most often during manic upswings, she also did so to varying degrees all the time.

From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention and hones her technique in a lifelong experiment to portray consciousness and the character of thought. Her ideas about the unreliability of language were prescient given what science now knows: that the very structure of human brains allows language to introspect only a fraction of consciousness."

Read all of this insightful article here.

Reasons to be Cheerful by Jurrian Kamp

I was having dinner with a friend when she told me she was taking antidepressants. That surprised me, because my friend had never seemed to be lacking in self-esteem or social support. In fact, she had always seemed rather cheerful and I was quite sure it wasn't the mediocre ravioli that lifted her out of existential crisis. My friend is among the millions of people around the world who take anti-depressants, a number that in the U.S. alone has doubled within the past 15 years and is expected to continue to rise.

In a recent contribution to The Huffington Post, physician Andrew Weil hinted at the correlation between the forces of capitalism and the "fact" that depression is now widespread. Among other factors, Weil blames the TV commercials which spread the message that "all sadness is depression, depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain, this pill will make you happy, your doctor will get it for you." Weil suggested that because of overdiagnosis many people who are occasionally -- and quite normally -- a bit sad or insecure are labeled as depressed and in need of a pill to quickly solve their problems.

When I told my friend about Weil's ideas to alleviate depression -- lifestyle changes including less caffeine, more excercise and a diet high in fruits and vegetables, supplemented with omega-3 fatty acids -- she didn't seem particularly convinced. In fact, she seemed almost depressed. Apparently, taking responsibility for your own health can be a tough pill to swallow. But I think the fact that we can do so much to improve our mental and physical health is a reason to be cheerful.

Ed. Note - clinical depression IS a chemical imbalance in the brain and medication can and often does bring much needed relief... HOWEVER - I personally do think that many people seek an easy answer to the ups and downs of life - something these drugs were not intended for - and needlessly put themselves at risk for side effects. Read more of Dr. Weil's ideas on depression here.

Are you an orchid or a dandelion?

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

Read the amazing article in the Atlantic: The Science of Success... here.