Logical fallacies? Politics? I’m glad it’s just a concept you can intellectualizeAHunter3. I don’t have that luxury. You see, almost one out of four of us will commit suicide.
I really wasn’t thinking about whether whether what I was feeling was a “fallacy” or the “politics” involved when I considered either picking up the knife or picking up the phone.
You need to give people the benefit of the doubt, and not be so damn judgemental. I’d rather deal with a Drama Queen friend than see her/him dead. Remember, you’re the one saying the docs can’t crawl inside someones head and say for sure something’s really wrong. Well, can you, with no training at all, crawl in and say for sure nothing really IS? I’d rather err on the side of caution, thanks.
Not everything is an excuse for a damn political tirade.
I’m embarrassed that you felt the need to apologize. On the contrary, I appreciated your input. I was just wondering if you had any gained any “oh by the way” external medical knowledge (as opposed to a personal, internal knowledge) from discussions with your health care provider.
…
Auntie em, information regarding a correlation between intelligence/creativity and mental illness seems to be somewhat muddled.
Here we appear to have blanket denial of such a correlation:
Then we have this well-researched layman’s article presenting the counterpoint:
The pendulum swings the other way here in a transcript of an online Q&A session with journalist David Jackson, who had covered the Ted Kaczynski (aka “the Unabomber”) trial for Time magazine:
The scholarly article CREATIVITY, MENTAL HEALTH AND SOCIAL PRESSURES by Ralph H. Ojemann, director of Child-Educational Psychology and Preventative Psychiatry for Educational Research Council of America (and also a professor at Kent State and Cleveland State Universities):
Finally, further down on the same web page as Ojemann’s article, in his paper CREATIVE FUNCTIONING AND MENTAL HEALTH, University of Georgia psychologist E. Paul Torrance expounds on the following thesis:
sorry, that last post of mine was a reply to ultrafilter above me. Forgot to quote him.
All right, I see where you’re coming from. I’m gonna think about this for a while.
Bueller . . . ? Bueller . . . ?
Sorry.
More to the point: yes, I had written a post to this effect yesterday afternoon (about how there perhaps needs to be an adjustment in terminology so that people don’t make glib/incorrect assumptions about clinical depression. But the hamster was hungry, I guess.
At any rate, I second (third?) the thanks for the enlightenment on this issue from those with experience.
I think she wrote “bitch be whack!” on my chart.
But seriously. The doctor explained that I could be suffering from a dopamine deficiency, which, while I don’t know what triggered it or caused the deficiency, most likely lead to my binge eating of carbohydrates (potato chips, bread, pasta, french fries) while also contributing to fatigue and depression.
But that’s about all I know.
“Compellingly false”. Observable states of emotional misery are caused by outside influences as well as internal ones. If your Mom dies, you become profoundly sad - that’s understandable. If nothing of the sort has occurred, life is good, and you become profoundly sad ~ that’s a problem. If your Mom dies and you don’t feel much of anything but a kind of detachment ~ that’s a problem too. You measure the situation based on outside influences, not the other way around.
On preview I see that you said basically the same thing in a later post…
The popular media doesn’t help much.
Take for example recent commercials for Zoloft. The “mascot” is a little sidewards cartoon egg-head. When the egg-head puts on a frowny face, that’s meant to depict DEPRESSION in the mind of viewers. Yet I find the net effect of this depiction is to greatly trivialize depression. The egg-head, after all, just looks gloomy, not self-destructive. The egg-head is not shown going through, say, a frightful episode as described in OpalCat’s posts. No self-mutilation, no running head into wall … just a frowny face.
No wonder Joe Average is saying to himself “Honestly … who really needs a pill for garden-variety gloominess?!?”
From “New Hope For People With Bipolar Disorder” by Jan FawcettMD, Bernard Golden Ph.D and Nancy Rosenfeld
**pg.17
Kay JamisonPh.D, and Frederick Goodwin, M’d, have presented a reasonable theory that supports the theory of bipolar “advantages,” more commonly referred to as "fluency of thinking."They have shown a high correlation between creative personalities and bipolar illness. Elements of of creative thinking , many of which are associated with cognitive changes that take place during hypomania or mild mania, include:
*word fluency
*associational fluency
expressional fluency
ideational fluency
An artistic temperament and imagination, the by-product of such creative assets, have given rise to many celebrated and distinguished individuals. Among these talented people we find poets, writers, artists, buisness tycoons, political leaders, and scientists.
“One must harbor chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”
- Nietzsche
I don’t know about intelligence, but there is a strong correlation between this type of disorder and creativity. A VERY high percentage of the greatest artists, writers, and musicians were bi-polar, depressive, or something similar. That’s probably why they did freaky things like cutting off their ears 
Witch:
Now look, goddammit!
When I was in eighth grade and miserable and lonely because people were picking on me without mercy and treating me like some kind of freak and calling me “faggot” and stuff, and the guidance counselors proceeded from the assumption that my problems were due to things that were wrong with me, that added a thousandfold to my very real and concrete miseries.
I needed someone or an institutional policy or something to defend me from the violence and harassment; I needed someone to listen and validate what I was going through and care. I got labeling and medicalization.
Years later, I figured a big chunk of it out on my own and got very excited and started trying to explain it to people and received an invitation to speak to the psychiatrists across the street. I knew they had some concerns about whether I was OK in the head but I wasn’t intimidated about talking to them (I figured they’d listen and maybe even see why I was so excited about what I’d figured out; if not, at least they’d tell the university folks to quit worrying about my head). I signed a paper that purportedly agreed that I would talk to the psychiatrist. (I figured, makes sense, you see a physical ailments doctor you agree to get treated; in the psychiatric profession the consultation visit is considered “treatment”). Found out I’d committed myself, thank you very much “informed consent” standard! Locked up and forcibly medicated against my will. The walls of my lunatic asylum were pretty damn concrete, and while I was too enthused about what I’d figured out for even this to put a damper on my mood for long, this was very real non-abstract oppression. I was locked up in a place with bars on the windows and locks on the doors and subjected to mind-altering chemicals against my will on the basis of feelings that thoughts that weren’t even bothering me but were thought by others to be symptoms of “mental illness”.
My pain is as real as your pain. I’ve felt misery and despair like unto any that you’ve experienced, I’ll warrant! In my post I made serious and sincere effort to explain that I was not waving away what you’ve been through. Now reciprocate. This is not some silly-ass ivory-tower abstraction of an ideal-driven pipe-smoking academic geek. Automatically psychiatrizing emotional distress causes real suffering and real pain and real oppression and it’s fucking morally wrong to do it.
The difference here is that most of the medications we are talking about have no effect if your brain is already chemically balanced.
Tee, replying to me about interior versus exterior causes:
Go back to the long post, reread, paying particular attention to the use of words like “some” and “all”. They are very important in this context.
That’s actually a good bit to go on. It lead me to the article below, which appeared in the journal Biological Psychiatry this past October.
Dopaminergic abnormalities in amygdaloid nuclei in major depression: a postmortem study
The article is pretty dense, but I was able to glean the following:
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Dopamine deficiency can be chemically measured as either a lack or a surplus of given proteins in the amygdala.
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It seems that this work has been performed on only human cadavers and rats. That suggests that research on live subjects is for now problematic. Imagine if this barrier is lifted in the future, and a CD or BP sufferer could somehow monitor their own brain chemistry as diabetics monitor thir glucose levels.
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It confirms that neurochemical symptoms of depression have been observed in another mammal (viz, rats). Of course the manifestations in other mammals of dopamine deficiency are certainly different than they would be in humans (but likely still self-destructive, as in self-starvation).
Thanks, bordelond! This is all so interesting to me. And I know I’m jumping around like a frog on fire, here, but the Nadolski article got me thinking about another possible cause-and-effect relationship that has sorta-kinda not been discussed here. I’ll have to give you an anecdote first:
I have a cousin, whom I’ve known since my birth, who is a wonderful, talented, caring person in my eyes (and is, for what it’s worth, very gifted at drawing). However, he’s had quite a few brushes with the law (involving prison time) and some serious problems with drugs.
He’s been out of prison for awhile now, and really seems to be getting his act together (in terms of avoiding illegal activity of all types). Only now he’s been diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy.
So one day, I was out with the friend I keep mentioning (Uber-Genius), and we ran into my cousin. We chatted for awhile, went our separate ways, and my friend remarked what a nice guy he was. I told her a little about his problematic history, and remarked how much it sucks that his MD diagnosis came just at the time when he was really trying to get clean and get his life together (which has to be discouraging).
Her theory was that his drug use probably stemmed from the early, undiagnosed stages of his MD. She thinks that he was probably subconsciously aware of the neurological glitches, so to speak, that (years later) turned out to be MD, and was therefore (also subconsciously) using drugs as a way of self-medicating.
She applies this same theory to her own (excessive) use of recreational drugs before her Bipolar Disorder diagnosis.
Now don’t get me wrong–I know that people with chemical imbalances or neurological misfirings are not the only people picking up needles, and I’m certainly not lumping all drug use under one “Big Bad” category. It’s just that to be honest, I don’t know which specific substances either of them favored before any official diagnosis occurred.
Nonetheless, I’d like to know what some of you think about this theory; I find it interesting, because it seems to be that the typical cause/effect correlation between drug use and the brain usually goes the other way around (i.e., the famous Fried Egg Analogy).
More thoughts?
For the curious, here is a list of famous people with BPD:
Err… “poets” and “writers” are two different lists. I managed to not put a new line in there.
I am truly very, very, sorry about what you went through. I am literally seething with anger for the young man you were, and the man you are now. What was done to you was nothing less than …evil. I hope this was a long, long time ago. Please Gods. And I hope you are OK.
But let me ask you this.
Do you have a chronic, incurable disease? That can blind side you at ANY time? Do you know that you have a 20% chance of killing yourself? Or that 9 years have been knocked off your life expectancy in any case? Do you have to live with the guilt that you’ve passed the shit gene onto your son who suffers 10 times worse than yourself?
Do you?
OpalCat
While I’m capable of being wrong (I’m no neurologist), this strikes me as unlikely. Most of the pharmaceuticals available for the various mental illnesses, far from being perfectly calibrated little “magic bullets”, are chemicals that either interfere with the uptake of neurotransmitters or neurotransmitter inhibitors or directly inhibit neurotransmission. (A common example being Serum Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs).
Some of the natural chemicals that are affected directly or indirectly by the pharmaceuticals may be more present or more relevant to cognitive and/or emotional processes, or may be more present or more relevant to brain neural tissue than, say, to spinal or motor neural tissue; but it is my understanding that the entire nervous system of everyone – motor neurons, tactile sensory neurons, brain tissue, spinal tissue, etc – is going to be affected by neurotransmitter-affecting agents; and that this is true for the hypothetical Average Joe on the Street as well as for the hypothetical Mental Patient with Certified Chemical Imbalances.
If you are aware of any clinical trials that were performed on a double-blind group in which half of the recipients had no known mental illness, and which indicated no effect on the control group, I’d like to read it.
I don’t have any studies, sorry, but I’ll toss out lithium as an example of one that I know of.
Also, the drugs don’t have the same type of effect as recreational drugs. Taking a Paxil doesn’t give you a “happy buzz” or anything. In fact it takes several weeks to build it up in your system to even have it level you out. This makes it quite different from needing a joint before class as well.
Oh, and SSRI stands for Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors 