substitute

"It isn't all biochemistry, but it all starts there. Everyone forgets the organic cause. Right there in the DSM-IV it says 'Having eliminated any organic cause', but no one reads that!"

ENFJ? Hrmrrmrmr.

( MBTI kinda thing )

Posted by a del.icio.us spammer in the "biofeedback" tag stream today:

Biofeedback best for common type of constipationSunday 9th April 2006 23:38:28

Reuters - in fashion YORK (Reuters Health) - Study findings testify that biofeedback is far more effective exclusive of laxatives present-time relieving choking caused by unhappy languishment or unintelligence in passage to consider the circumstances the pelvic floor muscles during defecation -- what doctors ...

It's on one of those circle-jerk search engine jamming sites, but the odd part is the language. The poster is Korean but the news item appears to have been telephoned through multiple languages. Sorry about the unintelligence in passage.

I think it's time to get my dietary stuff back in line right now. I had no breakfast, no lunch, and two dinners today. Mind you they were good dinners and a right amount of food but this isn't going to work.

Saw Stuart play and some friends tonight. Everyone was cool but for some reason I felt totally socially awkward, like I wasn't wearing pants. Weird. I think it was just me, though.

Then salome_st_john put up the bat signal that she was about to murder her room mate for reals so I galumphed over there and we went to Kappo Honda (dinner #2). I have to say that lotus root tempura and pumpkin croquette are two of Japanese civilization's great contributions to the world.

I love this rain.

Once again this week (not in this forum) I've run into the triumphantly ignorant mindset that mental illness and neurological problems aren't diseases, that people with these problems are not worthy of medical attention, that anyone who hasn't triumphed over head problems by sheer force of will and/or approved religious or 12 step methods is a weakling, and that people with mental problems are making up stuff.

These people are almost exactly equivalent to those who think that homosexuality is a choice. Somewhere between that and the people who don't believe in germ theory because germs are really small and you can't see them.

I can identify a few fallacies that keep recurring when I run into this mindset. Most of them are variations on generalization. They are:

• Mildly neurotic people annoyingly claim mental problems as an excuse for their behavior, although they could in fact be less annoying pretty easily. Therefore, everyone who has bigtime head problems is also doing this and should just stop being weird already.
  
  
• My own experience with drug addiction/neurotic behavior/weird mental blocks was resolved with 12-step groups/just getting over it/moving to a different town and therefore any other person's head problems, no matter how different or how much more extreme, should be solved this way too. Otherwise they're not trying.
  
  
• Drug companies make a lot of money selling lifestyle drugs, and often create new ailments or over-market medications. Therefore, anyone who takes medication for any neurologic or psychiatric problem is making a mistake, because nothing sold by these companies is useful or necessary.
  
  
• I knew someone once who had a lot of head problems and she tried a lot of things to fix it and nothing worked and she didn't get better and was really annoying. Therefore no kind of medical or psychological intervention works and people with mental problems are tiresome losers.
  
  
• People with head problems are choosing this lifestyle to get sympathy and because it agrees with them somehow, and they're using medications as a crutch instead of choosing to be healthy, like me. Therefore they are weak and worthy of scorn.
  
  
• Problems that affect behavior and personality should not be treated as diseases or treatable problems. They should be treated in the old-fashioned way as character flaws and sins, and people who exhibit them should be punished, shunned, shamed, and mocked. Only deluded softies and hypnotized idiots believe otherwise. Nothing like this has ever happened to me or anyone I like, the problem can't be seen with the naked eye, and I keep being told by authority figures who annoy me that it's happening. Therefore these problems don't exist, and I'm a unique and beautiful snowflake for standing up to this nonsense. I know this is true because a loud person on the radio said so.

This is all medieval horseshit. I'd like to find the source of it, because it's both pre-scientific and new. It's as though someone merged L. Ron Hubbard and Bill O'Reilly and treated this mutant as a medical authority.

Admittedly everyone is insane to some degree about mental health, the way everyone is insane about food and sex and education. But this shit is just off the map. It's aggressively proud ignorance. I want to collar all these people and take them to a "Scared Straight" tour of the local mental health facilities so they can see how bad it gets.

"Bipolar" isn't your moody ex boyfriend who used that as an excuse for the time he fucked your sister. It's people driving from San Diego to Maine for no reason and changing their name eight times along the way. "Phobia" isn't that woman at your office who hates spiders. It's someone who has to spend two days in her room if she sees one. And "depressed" isn't the showy Goth you went to junior college with who wrote sad poetry in large black letters. It's people who can't get out of bed or clothe themselves or do anything except wish they were dead for years and years on end. This shit is real, assholes, and it kills and ruins lives.

Shitting on the people it's happening to just because their lives are outside your cramped imagination is quite literally adding insult to injury, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You should also put down the talk radio and read a fucking book now and then.

I love and hate early mornings.

It's a beautiful time of day even in ugly places. The light of the first hour or so paints things nicely. And when I'm up very early I have a feeling of excitement and possibility. The day stretches ahead to infinity! Anything can happen! The coffee tastes good, I like other people, things are tingly and effervescent. At the same time, things are calm, there's no anxiety, and the quiet is beautifully relaxing.

Unfortunately, I'm almost always dog-tired too. Even if I went to bed and to sleep in time to have a nice 8 hours of sleep, 5 am is a big cup of exhausted. The exhaustion and the calm elation balance neatly and I feel as though I stayed up all night. I will almost always require a nap by about 10 am, or be fighting sleep the rest of the day otherwise. When I had to get up early to take a crosstown bus to a day job, I would hit a wall at about 10:30 and not come out of it until afternoon coffee at 2 pm or so.

I have a couple of dawn images that always come up when I think about mornings. The first is from childhood. We had a 28 foot sailboat and would go to Catalina Island (26 miles off the coast here) for trips in the summer. We'd moor at Hen Rock Cove. In the very early morning, I'd go up topside. The water in the cove was nearly flat, with the tiniest waves rolling in from the fogged-over sea. The only sounds were the creaking of the boat and a few bird cries, maybe a very distant sound of some other boat running a motor. If I looked down into the clear cold water I might see a bright orange Garibaldi fish. Time just completely stopped. Until it was time to have cereal out of the cool little boxes, or toast made on a stove!

The second one is from college. When I first started doing radio shows on KLA, they were the least favored shift, 3-6 am. I'd play my favorite records to 1.5 people and then stagger home just as the rest of school was waking up for their 8 am classes. UCLA is a particularly pretty campus at dawn, with all that rosy brick lighting up and trees everywhere, and lots of cobbly pathways. A bit dazed with sleep deprivation, I'd toddle back to the dormitory and eat Captain Crunch and scrambled eggs while the PA played shitty Top 40 and everyone else was hurrying to get something in their faces before class. Then I'd go up to the 7th floor where I lived and sit in the lounge for a while watching the sun hit Bel Air and the tennis courts. I was so tired, but it was a little magic time.

I hope that this brain work I'm doing offers the opportunity to wake up earlier and enjoy it more. That's supposed to be one of the goals, and it would be great to see more dawns, and feel less down-the-bone exhausted while doing so. One good result of NFB so far is that I feel that "morning calm" more often, when I can just look at what's in front of me and sit, and not need to be reading-talking-typing-driving-thinking-zooming all the time.

Scientific American Mind: Train Your Brain
Mental exercises with neurofeedback may ease symptoms of attention-deficit disorder, epilepsy and depression--and even boost cognition in healthy brains.

The "johari window" mostly has complimentary or at least non-pejorative adjectives in it. This is good because people are more likely to be honest if they don't have to avoid bad adjectives (capricious, drunk, totaly retarted) and partly because it's less likely to cause fist fights.

Unsurprisingly the person with the least complimentary set of adjectives chose a pseudonym.

At the Ralphs tonight someone had brought an entire binder of coupons. It went on and on and on. There was only one checker. Coupons Galore was a large round young woman with a blonde ponytail, accompanied by a short round young woman and a large goofy guy with hair all over the place. They looked like they were on their way to an Insane Clown Posse show or just to get arrested. But she was a coupon nut. The poor checker was starting to lose his cool, and the line was stacking up. The guy behind me cracked "Coupons are illegal after midnight". It went on and on. A few minutes later the dark-haired woman shot me an angry look and mumbled at me. "Eh?" I said. "It's just COUPONS. What's funny?" I said "I have no problem with coupons." "Well what's so FUNNY?" The guy behind me said "Coupons are funny." She made him repeat it twice and then said "WELL WE COME IN HERE AFTER MIDNIGHT BECAUSE WE FIGURE NO ONE'S HERE." She was looking at me for some reason, and I recalled now that she was glaring at me in the aisles earlier too. And now she was getting all street, yo, and throwing some Angry Mexican Girl vibe. "If you don't give me any attitude I won't give you any, how's that?" I asked cheerfully.

Then another checker arrived and we all went to him. The end.

In the horrible mall down by where Bave and Dethya live, the one that looks like the Sherman Oaks Gallery turned into a half-solved Lament Configuration, there is an "italian" restaurant called, no joke, VER-SA-CHEE.

I love sitting at the bar at D's chatting with Michelle. She's so great.

I keep most of my psychologically related stuff on the brain filter now, but here are some recent factoids of interest that have come up from my own situation.

One theory for the effect of NFB is that it replicates the twilight states of the brain, the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states of going to and coming from sleep. The theory is that the brain does a lot of "figuring out" emotional issues and trauma in those states, and that inducing or prolonging them is helpful.

Digestive health has way, way more effect on mental health that many people realize. An ounce of Metamucil is worth a ton of neurochemical intervention.

Mindfulness is hard. Oh, you knew that, though.

I offer a general apology for my behavior, which has been erratic and damaging to others lately.

Physical changes in my brain and associated emotional distress have at least temporarily warped my personality. My current view of the world is so obviously distorted that I can't say definitively what is going on. Some of you have had similar experiences and may understand what I mean, but you don't have to; you can just say I'm nuts, and that'll do.

I've been an egotist, a professional patient, and needy to the point of requiring unavailable levels of reassurance. I've been quick to anger and easily triggered into huge floods of emotion by things that other people have found trivial. Much of my behavior only made sense in a context I can't expect anyone else to share.

No one is required to accept my public or private apologies, or to put up with me at all for that matter. I've been angry, demanding, suspicious, deeply depressed, irrational, and completely terrified for a long time now, beyond the capacity of most reasonable people to accept. For a shorter time I've been open about those things here, which in retrospect was a terrible mistake on many levels. I would not fault anyone for writing me off, as painful as that might be.

Some of you have been privately critical of me, in the best sense, without damning but without finessing the point. It wasn't easy to hear some of those things, but harsh truth was better than easy. That's seriously the most valuable thing any friend has given me, ever.

It's not assured that I'll survive this experience at all, much less that I'll emerge as someone you'll want to know. Wish me luck even if you're wishing me goodbye.