Better Living Through Chemistry: Notes from Chemically Induced Depression Part 5 of 6 (A Fall leading to a Second Face of Depression: Vimpat™.)
Having escaped the world of the damned and back on a clumsy, but effective seizure prophylactic, I waited until my brain healed from the neurosurgeon’s saw and scalpels. Once the swelling receded and the scaring was set, I was given an EEG that, if clear, would let me say goodbye to phenytoin, be drug-free once again. As I had been for seventeen years before the rude growth under my temporal lobe slapped the epileptic label back on me.
In the neurologist’s office, electrodes were pasted to my scalp. Read More
Better Living Through Chemistry: Notes from Chemically Induced Depression (Part 4 of 6: Inscrutable Chemistry and the 6%.)
Only recently has the concept of decision fatigue as a form of mental exhaustion become a subject of psychological study— decision fatigue acknowledges that
- decisions take mental energy
- that any given person has only a certain amount of mental energy
- that each decision a person makes uses some of this limited resource, and
- once this resource is exhausted, decision making turns to avoidance—
choosing the least effortful action in every case regardless of possible outcomes.
A recent study (2011) looked at boards granting parole in Israel.
Better Living Through Chemistry: Notes from Chemically Induced Depression Part 3 of 6 (Having to Think Slowly)
This pervasive, grinding ennui exhausted me.
It also challenged most of what I thought I knew about clinical depression, which I had studied while getting an undergraduate Psychology degree. I’d read about the exhaustion, the feelings of pointlessness, but had always conflated that with what I had personally experienced as feeling down, blue, bummed, hurt, let down, disappointed, fearful—yet my current state bore no semblance to any emotion I’d faced. To any emotion whatsoever.
Rather as I moved limply through the hours of my waking day, I felt nothing at all. As if emotion had been severed from me—all desire, all displeasure, and every shade of feeling in between. Read More
Better Living Through Chemistry: Notes from Chemically Induced Depression Part 2 of 4 (The Choices We Make)
So, life hands my new wife and me a choice between three options, each involving some chance of me dying sooner rather than later and in some more or less gruesome way:
- either develop ever worsening double vision and stroking out in the next decade;
- or give myself brain cancer to get rid of a benign tumor;
- or have someone cut a 6 square inch flap of my skull out with a small saw, poke his fingers and sharp metal instruments between my cerebrum and cerebellum, cut out 2 cm diameter chunk of flesh out, and hope that doesn’t turn my new wife into the star of a Lifetime channel movie—woman finally meets the man she wants to marry, marries, gives birth to their son, and then finds herself a single mother and widow, all within two years.
The odds on that last one were stacked heavily in our favor with 98% chance I’d avoid becoming a sad movie cliché.
Better Living Through Chemistry: Notes from Chemically Induced Depression Part 1 of 4 (1978 vs. 2005)
Owing to an odd confluence of events and circumstances, I recently spent roughly 4 days with chemically induced depression.
Read More
Self-Publishing Part 12: the Book Hunts for 500 Buyers or A Marathon, Not a Sprint
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
Speaking of marathons, A Perfect Blindness has been out for about 6 months.
Sales?
Not nearly what I wanted, hoped, nor planned for. I’m creaking along with about half of what I need for the first milestone (with an asterisk explained later).
Likely owing to that I’ve avoided doing what’s important. By which I mean the hard parts. Been busy as hell. But not getting what I need to get done: outreach. The letting people know the book exists part. The scary part. Read More
Agency Pt. 1—Neurology, the Temporal Lobe and the Self
With recent advancements in neurology, especially the ability to see, real time, what areas of the brain are activated when humans experience specific feelings, neurologists have shown that agency is active most strongly in the parietal lobe.
How Mumbley-Peg and Bloody Knuckles Help Explain the Headlines, Pt 1
“pwn”, which a misspelling of own, and describes achieving such a major victory that one cannot help but gloat, such as defying essentially every political pundit who wrote a word about the 2016 presidential election from the Iowa Caucuses until 11:00 pm on November Eighth.
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