Recovery Michigan

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I’m Finally Finding Coping Mechanisms that Work for Me.

Right now, my body and mind are overcome with depression, anxiety, complex PTSD, and severe physical pain. I’m in crisis mode and having difficulty handling life in general. I’ve been crying more often than usual for a long time.

I don’t like to cry in public, but I had times I couldn’t control it. I’m not talking about being at a funeral where it’s acceptable to cry. I’m talking about being upset about something that usually has nothing to do with my current situation. However, if someone is rude to me, being more sensitive than most, my eyes will fill with tears and I can feel my face turn red.

It comes on suddenly and can be as easy as sitting in the waiting room for my doctor appointment and overhearing a conversation that triggers memories and emotions in me. My thoughts instantly travel back to a point in my life where I felt ashamed or scared.

I do my best to shake it off, but once the thought is in there, it continues to dig at me. As my mind relives those traumatic moments, my stomach hurts, I feel dizzy, and my breathing becomes unsteady. Soon, my heart starts racing and I feel a panic attack coming on. I can’t let this happen, especially if I’m alone. It’s so damn humiliating!

I struggle to bring my thoughts back to the present and do my best to distract myself any way possible. If the magazines are interesting, I’ll immerse my attention in an article on how best to clean your toilet, get out stubborn laundry stains, cook chicken, or anything else that will keep my mind occupied.

I’ve tried bringing my own book, but for some unknown reason, I need complete quiet to read anything of true interest, like a novel or a self-help book. I end up reading the same paragraph over several times and still cannot remember what I just read. However, reading mundane topics like cleaning, cooking, and laundry seem to hold my attention.

I’ve had to learn to tune out the radio if the office, or any place else I visit that has one playing, as some songs can trigger emotionally and physically painful situations from my past. When I’m driving, I play my own CD’s. When I was working, everyone had his or her own music playing, which can be distracting and annoying working in close quarters. I brought in a CD player and discs of nature sounds like birds chirping in the woods and waves crashing on beach sand, my favorite.

We’ve rescued a large number of dogs over the past twenty years. Sometimes I try to list them in my head the order in which we rescued them. Sometimes I get to a name and stop because I recall something special or funny about that particular dog. This can leave me in distraction mode for a few minutes, especially if I start thinking about another dog, which is good. The longer my mind remains distracted, the better chance I have of calming myself down and forgoing the panic attack.

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Have you ever woken up with an unpleasant dream?

Is it King Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Chrismas that’s doing his boring scare and scream routine again?

Did you know there are biological and spiritual explanations for it?

I had a chronic nightmare that went on consecutively in a period of 6 months and my community supported me to heal it in 2 weeks.

Read on and I’ll share the following throughout the article…

What nightmare is

Distinguish nightmares and night terrors

Spiritual and psychoanalytical explanations for nightmares

Biological explanations for nightmares

Sleep study to rule out some of the causes

Cause of my nightmares and what made a difference in healing it

Nightmares are defined as unpleasant dreams that generally occur during rapid eye movement (REM) and lead to awakening with fear, anxiety or other mentally disturbing experiences. [1]

When I looked into the research, it looks like I’m not the only one having nightmares. In fact, around 40% of people experience one nightmare per month. [2]

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It's cheaper, legal and kills more people than opioids. But public officials are much more united in the fight against drugs than alcohol.

The national conversation around addiction has been dominated in recent years by opioids. Certainly, the rapid rise in opioid overdoses, which claimed 42,000 lives in 2016 alone, is a pressing issue for states across the country. The White House has declared a national public health emergency over the epidemic, and governments everywhere are marshalling efforts to combat the crisis.

But the fact is that alcohol kills roughly 88,000 Americans each year, more than double the number of opioid deaths. Almost half of alcohol fatalities come from chronic health problems attributed to excessive alcohol consumption, such as liver cirrhosis, breast cancer and heart disease. Those alcohol-induced deaths are on the rise. Excluding certain acute causes, such as homicides and traffic fatalities, the rate of alcohol-induced deaths increased by about 47 percent between 1999 and 2015.  

https://wapo.st/2LuchfZ

Deaths from liver disease have increased sharply in recent years in the United States, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal. Cirrhosis-related deaths increased by 65 percent from 1999 to 2016, and deaths from liver cancer doubled, the study said. The rise in death rates was driven predominantly by alcohol-induced disease, the report said.

Over the past decade, people ages 25 to 34 had the highest increase in cirrhosis deaths — an average of 10.5 percent per year — of the demographic groups examined, researchers reported.

The study suggests that a new generation of Americans is being afflicted "by alcohol misuse and its complications,” said lead author Elliot Tapper, a liver specialist at the University of Michigan.

Tapper said people are at risk of life-threatening cirrhosis if they drink several drinks a night or have multiple nights of binge drinking — more than four or five drinks per sitting — per week. Women tend to be less tolerant of alcohol and their livers more sensitive to damage.

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An analysis of more than 1,000 people with and without psychiatric disorders has shown that nitrates–chemicals used to cure meats such as beef jerky, salami, hot dogs and other processed meat snacks–may contribute to mania, an abnormal mood state. Mania is characterized by hyperactivity, euphoria and insomnia.

The findings of the Johns Hopkins Medicine study, which was not designed to determine cause and effect, were published July 18 in Molecular Psychiatry. Specifically, it found that people hospitalized for an episode of mania had more than three times the odds of having ever eaten nitrate-cured meats than people without a history of a serious psychiatric disorder.

Experiments in rats by the same researchers showed mania-like hyperactivity after just a few weeks on diets with added nitrates.

While a number of genetic and other risk factors have been linked to the manic episodes that characterize bipolar disorder and may occur in other psychiatric conditions, those factors have been unable to explain the cause of these mental illnesses, and researchers are increasingly looking for environmental factors, such as diet, that may play a role.

https://nyti.ms/2Llnm2Z

Many famous studies of human behavior cannot be reproduced. Even so, they revealed aspects of our inner lives that feel true.

In recent months, researchers and some journalists have strung cables around the necks of at least three monuments of the modern psychological canon:

• The famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which found that people playacting as guards quickly exhibited uncharacteristic cruelty.

• The landmark marshmallow test, which found that young children who could delay gratification showed greater educational achievement years later than those who could not.

• And the lesser known but influential concept of ego depletion — the idea that willpower is like a muscle that can be built up but also tires.

The assaults on these studies aren’t all new. Each is a story in its own right, involving debates over methodology and statistical bias that have surfaced before in some form.

But since 2011, the psychology field has been giving itself an intensive background check, redoing more than 100 well-known studies. Often the original results cannot be reproduced, and the entire contentious process has been colored, inevitably, by generational change and charges of patriarchy.

“This is a phase of cleaning house and we’re finding that many things aren’t as robust as we thought,” said Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, who has led the replication drive. “This is a reformation moment — to say let’s self-correct, and build on knowledge that we know is solid.”

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When Nicole Lee's husband was removed from her home after she disclosed a decade of abuse to hospital staff following a suicide attempt, it took her eight weeks to get a shower.

"I had a 10-year, very violent relationship with my ex-husband who was also my disability carer," Ms Lee said.

"That day when the police decided to put an intervention order on him and remove him from the house, I was sent home on my own without anyone considering how I was going to cope."

When Nicole Lee's husband was removed from her home after she disclosed a decade of abuse to hospital staff following a suicide attempt, it took her eight weeks to get a shower.

"I had a 10-year, very violent relationship with my ex-husband who was also my disability carer," Ms Lee said.

"That day when the police decided to put an intervention order on him and remove him from the house, I was sent home on my own without anyone considering how I was going to cope."I

Almost two months later and feeling lost with who to turn to for support, Ms Lee said she approached child protection services to help lift the intervention order, inviting her husband to re-enter her home.

I suspect some of you will recognize this kind of struggle......

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Shenk relates Lincoln’s symptoms, including mood swings and at least two major breakdowns, and offers compelling evidence of the evolution of his disease, from “major depression” in his twenties and thirties to “chronic depression” later on. Shenk reveals the treatments Lincoln endured and his efforts to come to terms with his melancholy, including a poem he published on suicide and his unpublished writings on the value of personal—and national—suffering. By consciously shifting his goal away from personal contentment (which he realized he could not attain) and toward universal justice, Lincoln gained the strength and insight that he, and America, required to transcend profound darkness.

If you have any of the herpes infections, get it treated!!!

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What amyloid beta normally does in the brain isn’t clear. Robert Moir, a neurologist at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, says that many researchers have cast it as a villainous molecule with no beneficial function.  “It’s just bad, bad, bad,” he says. “But it has become increasingly obvious that this isn’t true.” Moir thinks that amyloid beta has a more heroic role, as a foot soldier of our immune system. It protects neurons from infectious microbes—and from herpes viruses, in particular.

Amyloid beta protects against these viruses by latching onto them in large numbers, imprisoning them in self-assembling cages. That’s typically a good thing, but Moir argues that if the process goes on for too long, it builds up to the problematic plaques of Alzheimer’s. According to him, amyloid beta is still at the heart of the Alzheimer’s story, but it isn’t the villain. “In our model, Alzheimer’s is caused by amyloid beta’s reaction to something else, and most likely some kind of infection” like herpes, he says.

Hints that they can already exist. One study published earlier this year tracked the health of about 78,000 Taiwanese people, half of whom had been diagnosed with shingles within a 16-year period. Shingles is caused by a herpes virus called VZV, which also causes chicken pox in children. Among adults, the study found that people with a recent shingles flare-up had an 11 percent higher risk of developing dementia than healthier peers. And strikingly, those who were treated with anti-herpes drugs had a 45 percent lower risk of developing dementia than their untreated peers.

A second Taiwanese study looked at more than 8,000 people who had been recently diagnosed with HSV–1. Over the next decade, those people were 2.5 times more likely to develop dementia than uninfected peers. But again, that risk fell by 80 percent among those who had been treated with anti-herpes drugs. “That’s perhaps the strongest epidemiological data to emerge so far,” Moir says.

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Prison employees experience PTSD on par with Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, a new study from a Washington State University College of Nursing researcher found.

Working conditions in a prison can include regular exposure to violence and trauma, and threats of harm to the workers and their families. Previous studies have shown that prison workers have some of the highest rates of mental illness, sleep disorders and physical health issues of all U.S. workers. But the rate of PTSD among prison workers isn't well understood.

The new study, "Prison employment and post-traumatic stress disorder: Risk and protective factors," was conducted by lead investigator Lois James, Ph.D., assistant professor at the WSU College of Nursing, and co-investigator Natalie Todak, assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

It recently was published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine and excerpted in Force Science News.

"Prison employees can face some of the toughest working conditions of U.S. workers," said James, "yet limited evidence exists on the specific risk and protective factors to inform targeted interventions."