Mental Health Update

I sent Gavin for a 3-hour trial lesson at The Montessori Playroom yesterday. It has been four months since he went to school and I was worried that he would exhibit some separation anxiety. But he ended up liking the place a lot and that prompted me to want to sign him up for a longer term programme. But guess what? I was told he wasn’t quite ready for the school yet and it would be better to sign him up next year! Oh, what a shame!

And nearly every week, it seems, imaging researchers announce another finding, a potential key to understanding depression, attention deficit disorder, anxiety.

I was damn nervous about my surgery. Fortunately I work out my anxiety before the surgery and am totally calm when the surgery happens, but by the time I arrived home after stopping at the pharmacy I was exhausted, and in a lot of pain.

5. Focus on what you can change and let go of what you can’t change. When faced with a distressing situation ask yourself if you can control over the events. If you do, change what you can. If you don’t, learn to let it go and move on.

There are various situations that I end up not knowing whether I am happy. Sometimes, it gets so confusing I even feel that half of me is jumping for joy while the other half is in depression. Yeah, I may just have bipolar disorder. The recent *PMS Matching is one good example of such a situation.

It was all this turmoil that made me recall borderline teacher, a blog about, well, a borderline teacher. It’s interesting stuff provided you’re interested in reading about a complete stranger’s issues. (But hey, if you weren’t you wouldn’t be here, right?) The lady behind it is a 28 year old French teacher living in a therapeutic community. She suffers from borderline personality disorder and self harms. It can tend towards the overemotional at times and there’s plenty of hugging and touchy-feely stuff from the folks who post comments but I’m hardly in a position to judge. Like I said, it’s an interesting read and this bit

I am back to blog. Having been away for quite some time. Living in isolation. Depression became my uninvited guest in the house. It made me feel so dreadful of so many things -- of everything.

1. Never Give Up Hope: There is one piece of advice for anyone who loves someone with bipolar disorder – keep the faith and never give up.

Today was a lazy day. I slept in and then did my usual chores of laundry and cleaning. I had a weird dizzy spell that forced me to sit down and pray that I wouldn't pass out with my head between my knees. It was so bizarre because I broke out in a sweat and my breathing was all strained. I think it may have been an anxiety attack that hit hard and fast. It passed fairly quickly and I drank some water and had a sandwich afterwards. I felt much better a few moments after I ate. I think maybe I shouldn't have had corn pops for breakfast. I think I should start with protein and add the sugary crap later if at all. For some reason, what I eat first thing in the day seems to matter.

I was sitting at gate 21 in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport waiting to make way back to Springfield after attending the A2 Conference at Willow Creek. The waiting area was crowded. Everyone sat patiently, waiting for the plane to arrive so we could board and get on our way. A plane pulled up to the gate and we all watched as the passengers were unloaded and headed on their way. You could see people working to get ready to take off and bring us home. A few minutes before boarding time I began to get a little nervous…there was nobody at the gate to let us on the plane. Boarding time came and went and there were no people from the airlines to begin the boarding process. You could feel the anxiety rising as we waited 5 minutes…10 minutes…still no call to board the plane. Finally an off-duty pilot went down to the plane to find out what was going on. Apparently the airline had forgotten about us and had failed to send anyone to the gate to help boarding of the plane.

I do suppose that South Asian earthquake is a little more pressing than my screaming exam anxiety. Apparently the current estimated death toll is sitting at 38,000. That's impressive, in a way that aids the realization that it's not all about me and triggers empathy for strangers. A ton of rubble on ones head versus the anticipatory anxiety of having to pretend like I know something about politics and history. Yeah, I'm a whiney bitch and I need to do something about that unhealthy relationship my head has with my arse.

Me and Tony have been doing good this week. He was such a trooper on Friday taking care of all the bills and actually laughing again. I love it when he laughs. It reminds me of the Tony that I met and the reason I love him. He's wanting to go to the doctor to help with his anxiety and at first I was hesitant about it, but now, I know he needs it, so I'm all for it. God, he deals with so much. I couldn't even begin to imagine what he goes through to get through the days.

So it must be my mind, I thought! My mother was suffering with end-stage Alzheimer’s disease and the disease runs in my family. I decided to see a doctor. My doctor though it may be Alzheimer’s also, and he put me on Alzheimer’s medicine to see if it would help. (It didn’t.) I was scheduled for psychological tests to determine if the problem could be Alzheimer’s, or Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, or a Learning Disability.

The above approach, while not being full-blown 'advocacy', at least attempts to reconcile 'high introvert' to the mainstream. As Schizoid Personality is only sometimes coupled to full-blown schizophrenia with psychotic elements, it seems reasonable to see it as just another base personality type, without need to pathologise it. OK, so somebody who is Schizoid will never be Mr Popular, nor will he necessarily be good in Customer Services, though that need not be a real problem. Admittedly, there will be times in life in which Loneliness sets in, there was the time - in my early 20's - when I realised I was irreconcilably different to everyone around me and I also realised that this would more than likely stunt my career prospects.

My doctor prescribed me the same anxiety drugs, but now I have to take one during the day and one during the evening to calm my ass down and make me feel better. I does relieve something in me, and makes me concentrate better. The fury inside of me calmed me down also, the mood stabilizers are doing the job, I do not get so pissed and want to rip someones throat out anything.

This position is founded on three rather convincing arguments. (As with the Sufficiency of Scripture position, here I am seeking to present this position from the perspective of those who embrace it. I am not necessarily advocating for it.) First, the Bible does not address many psychological pathologies, for example, Tourette’s Syndrome, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and anorexia to name a few. What do counselors using only the Bible do when a schizophrenic exhibiting psychotic behavior walks through the door? Often what they do is admit the person to a psychiatric unit for psychological and psychiatric treatment.

According to the York Dispatch article, the "Bush administration yesterday proposed to eliminate cow brains and spinal cords from feed for all animals, including chickens, pigs and pets." With aspirations of Mad cow prevention, the Food and Drug Administration says that not utilizing cow brains and spinal cords to feed any animal will reduce the risk of contracting the disease by 90 percent. That is a pretty substantial reduction! Despite this new discovery, the stipulation for producing animal feed will not take effect until sometime next year.

This time though it might be worth recording. Despite my ongoing depression I still honestly try to get better. I’m doing a caffeine detox now. I figured if I were to sleep well at night and break the cycle (depression causes insomnia and insomnia causes depression) I’d need rid myself of anything that can disrupt my sleep. One of them is my coffee addiction.

After some thought, I think I’ve isolated one of the major sources of my depression.

EVer since being diagnosed as an adult with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), I've been actually pretty cool with the idea--it lets me multitask far more easily than my non-ADD compatriots, and I've always enjoyed the creativity that goes with an imagination run wild.

I googled the words "cybernetic schizophrenia" and this article (treatise, essay, I don't know what to call it) was in the search results. I actually got the idea for the search after reading through another extremely dense philosophical treatise by Michael Hoffman at egodeath.com.