Recovery Michigan

Yet those who fetishize mental illnesses are the spiritual decedents of the swallowers of lead centuries ago, so they could approximate an arty death by tuberculosis. If they could actually feel what went into that novel, painting, or album, if they had to live with the mental illness that treated this art as one avenue of therapy, they would be more careful with their genie wishes. Instead, they are hayseed tourists hucking peanuts at the freaks, jealous that they are not weird enough to be in the show.

I don’t believe my affliction is extraordinary; there are others whose mental illnesses are worse, but I would wish my depression and anxiety on no one, particularly anyone who wanted to create.

Would I give up my art for a mind more under my control? Obviously, this is purely hypothetical. I cannot make a Faustian bargain. Some try to claim medication is a fine stand-in for Mephistopheles, but my attempts at properly medicating my chemical deficits have only resulted in an increased ability to work. (I will leave it to my readers to decide if it has likewise resulted in increased quality.)

I do not think art and mental illness are intimately married, though they flirt with one another and too frequently and abusively cohabitate in the same head. Enough artists are mentally stable to sustain the industry. It is patronizing to assume the woman struggling through a panic attack just needs a paintbrush in her hand. When I am tense with anxiety, my ability to write is the first thing to go.

Yes, I cope by trying to turn my pain into something beautiful, something I can shine up to a cabochon in hopes I will one day find the right setting. If I didn’t do this, I don’t know if I would lose my mind, but I know I would no longer be myself. However, it is not the mental illness that drives me to write. I want to write because I feel I have things to say and this is the best way I have learned to say them.

It is a base insult to say that I need my mental illness to be productive, especially when it is so often the thing holding my tongue. Getting even a little better has removed some of the boulders that interrupted my streams of consciousness.

Those who can’t ‘pass’ as reasonably sane are given less agency, respect, and dignity as they navigate psychiatric care.

Maybe that nurse had a reason for getting the juice box instead of going two rooms down to check on the person who was screaming for help. I can never really know.

But what I do know is that these hierarchies exist — illustrated in many interactions just like that one — and my participation in that hierarchy, both to my own benefit and detriment, has very real consequences.

Trying to be “good” may have gotten me more blankets or special lasagna, but it says something sinister about how the stigma around mental illness operates.

Here’s what I’ve learned — and why I believe we need a more nuanced conversation about privilege and power as it shows up in mentally ill folks.

I Have (Some) Privilege Because I’m Positioned As The “Exception”

I struggle with severe mental illness and that, of course, comes with significant marginalization and strife. But because I’m so often perceived as friendly and functional, and therefore a kind of “exceptional” mentally ill person, I still benefit at the expense of other mentally ill people.

Namely, because I’m positioned as not “like them,” I am often treated better as they are simultaneously othered.

We see this kind of ableism most distinctly when we categorically divide up disabled people into “higher” and “lower” functioning — which can be a coded way of saying, “These are the people that can conform to society’s expectations of what a ‘typical’ person should be, and these are the people who fail to do that.”

I directly benefit from the ableist assumption that I am “exceptional” because I often present in the narrow way society holds up as the ideal — an ideal that expects psychiatrically disabled people to conceal their disabilities.

The overall impact of alcohol on the heart is the subject of ongoing discussion in the medical community. Researchers have found it can have both positive and negative impacts on the heart.

The positive effects of alcohol, associated with moderate drinking only, include:

• raising levels of the "good" cholesterol, HDL
• preventing platelets from forming blood clots
• reducing the buildup of plaque in the circulatory system

The following negative effects of alcohol on the heart are usually associated with heavy drinking:

• high blood pressure
• heart failure
• weight gain, leading to high blood pressure
• enlarged heart

According to the American Heart Association, although caffeine has many effects on the human body, at present no links have been confirmed between caffeine intake and heart disease.

In addition, studies have not found a link between caffeine and arrhythmia. However, reports indicate that drinking more than 5 cups of coffee each day can raise blood pressure.

The American Heart Association advise individuals with A-fib to avoid excessive amounts of alcohol and caffeine.

However, a report published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that even moderate use of alcohol increased the risk of A-fib. The risk rose by around 8 percent with each additional drink taken per day.

A third study found that two drinks each day for women did not increase the risk of A-fib, but three or more did. Another study found that the risk did not increase for men until they had more than five drinks per day.

There is some concern among experts regarding energy drinks. This is due to the high level of caffeine they contain and observed increases in the heart's contraction rate. Healthy young adults could tolerate this increase, but it could be a problem for children and those with pre-existing heart conditions.

My brain is kind of broken. That’s how I usually describe it to people, and that’s what gets the most laughs, but it’s true. My brain doesn’t do some of the things it’s supposed to! I have issues concentrating, issues prioritizing, and I’m never able to turn in work on time. I’ve gone through many diagnoses, including OCD, depression, OCPD, ADHD, and anxiety. (Personally, I think all of those might be true to some degree, but that’s up to my therapist to decide.)

My situation might seem extreme, but I’m far from alone — over 25% of college students have been diagnosed with or treated for mental illness. More and more, people are able to talk openly about mental health issues, and that’s a really good thing! Public dialogue has been shifting in a far more positive direction the last few years, but the stigma still remains. I want to help destigmatize mental illness by examining how my brain got this way in the first place — and how I can still succeed and thrive in the exact areas where I’m supposed to fail.

This surprises a lot of my friends nowadays, but I used to be known as the smart kid. I was, in every sense, the perfect studious Asian stereotype. Piano lessons? Check. Advanced classes? Check. Spelling bees, gifted programs, extra credit, you name it. To this day, my first grade teacher still has some elements in her curriculum that I originally suggested because I thought they would make class more fun. I loved school! And school loved me (until it didn’t).

The fact that I was smart ended up being my biggest weakness. I was always able to learn new concepts very quickly, so I never had to spend any effort studying or reviewing. As a quiet, lonely kid, I spent a lot of time reading — there’s a good chance I already knew most of this stuff. So, since I had so much extra time on my hands, I was free to pour all of my energy into making my work The Absolute Best.

It wasn’t enough to me that my book report was done early — I might as well copy it down in perfect handwriting and add an illustration to make sure my teacher would love it. At first this was a fun way to take pride in my work, but it eventually became an unspoken rule for me:

If you didn’t give it your best effort, it’s not really done.

Of course my teachers loved all the hard work I put into my projects. I was always the kid whose work they would use as an example. I had the best dioramas, the best models, the best posters, because I would spend hours trying to make it look as perfect as possible. As the work got harder, I started becoming more stressed without realizing it, because my impossibly high standards had to raise as well.

It doesn’t matter that the essay is done — if it’s not perfect, I shouldn’t even bother submitting it. I was a victim of my own harsh criticism.

Suicides among soldiers have increased dramatically in the last several years, up by 46 percent since the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Senior service officials recognize that the wars have affected soldiers in the form of post traumatic stress disorder and other manifestations of mental depression, but still haven't completely figured out how to address the issue.

The Army is conducting new training, handing out "buddy cards" to alert soldiers to problems among their friends, and recently announced a new five-year study to be undertaken with the National Institute of Mental Health.

But one of the more novel solutions is an interactive game called "Beyond the Front," starring Specialist Norton, a character in a kind of modern-day military morality play. The service plans to send out thousands of copies of the game – part of an Army suicide prevention program costing almost $1 million – to educate soldiers about the dangers of not seeking help when they most need it.

The symptoms and behavioral characteristics of complex trauma have been categorized into seven domains:

1. Attachment – Uncertainty about the reliability and predictability of the world, problems with boundaries, distrust and suspiciousness, social isolation, difficulty attuning to other people’s emotional states and points of view, difficulty with perspective taking and difficulty enlisting other people as allies.

2. Biology – Sensorimotor developmental problems, problems with coordination, balance, body tone, difficulties localizing skin contact, hypersensitivity to physical contact, analgesia, somatization, increased medical problems.

3. Affect or emotional regulation – easily-aroused high-intensity emotions, difficulty with emotional self-regulation, difficulty describing feelings and internal experience, chronic and pervasive depressed mood or sense of emptiness or deadness, chronic suicidal preoccupation, over-inhibition or excessive expression of anger and difficulty communicating wishes and desires.

4. Dissociation – distinct alterations in states of consciousness, amnesia, depersonalization and de-realization and two or more distinct states of consciousness, with impaired memory for state-based events.

5. Behavioral control – poor modulation of impulses, self-destructive behavior, aggressive behavior, sleep disturbances, eating disorders, substance abuse, oppositional behavior, excessive compliance, pathological self-soothing behaviors, difficulty understanding and complying with rules and communication of traumatic past by reenactment in day-to-day behavior or play (sexual, aggressive, etc.).

6. Cognition – difficulties in attention regulation and executive functioning, problems focusing on and completing tasks, difficulty planning and anticipating, learning difficulties, problems with language development, lack of sustained curiosity, problems with processing novel information, problems with object constancy, problems understanding own contribution to what happens to them, problems with orientation in time and space, acoustic and visual perceptual problems, impaired comprehension of complex visual-spatial patterns.

7. Self-concept – lack of a continuous and predictable sense of self, low self-esteem, feelings of shame and guilt, generalized sense of being ineffective in dealing with one’s environment, belief that one has been permanently damaged by the trauma, poor sense of separateness, disturbances of body image and shame and guilt.

Rumination was a tough one for me.....

Depressed individuals “don’t need to worry and ruminate,” says Professor Roger Hagen, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Department of Psychology. “Just realizing this is liberating for a lot of people.”

Hagen and NTNU colleagues Odin Hjemdal, Stian Solem, Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair and Hans M. Nordahl have recently published a scientific paper on the treatment of depression using metacognitive therapy (MCT).

The study shows that learning to reduce rumination is very helpful for patients with depressive symptoms.

Some people experience their persistent ruminative thinking as completely uncontrollable, but individuals with depression can gain control over it,” says Hagen.

The patients involved in the study were treated over a ten-week period. After six months, 80 per cent of the participants had achieved full recovery from their depression diagnosis.

“The follow-up after six months showed the same tendency,” says Hagen.

Metacognitive therapy, by contrast, focuses on lessening the ruminative process.

“Anxiety and depression give rise to difficult and painful negative thoughts. Many patients have thoughts of mistakes, past failures or other negative thoughts. Metacognitive therapy addresses thinking processes,” Hagen says, rather than the thought content.

Patients with depression “think too much, which MCT refers to as ‘depressive rumination.’ Rather than ruminating so much on negative thoughts, MCT helps patients to reduce negative thought processes and get them under control,” he says.

By becoming aware of what happens when they start to ruminate, patients learn to take control of their own thoughts.

As Hagen explains, “Instead of reacting by repeatedly ruminating and thinking ‘how do I feel now?’ you can try to encounter your thoughts with what we call ‘detached mindfulness.’ You can see your thoughts as just thoughts, and not as a reflection of reality. Most people think that when they think a thought, it must be true. For example, if I think that I’m stupid, this means I must be stupid. People strongly believe that their thoughts reflect reality.”

Treatment with deep brain stimulation can provide lasting relief to patients suffering from previously non-treatable, severe forms of depression several years into the therapy or even eliminate symptoms entirely. This is the finding of the first long-term study on this form of therapy, conducted by scientists at the Medical Center - University of Freiburg. Seven of the eight patients receiving continuous stimulation in the study showed lasting improvements in their symptoms up to the last observation point four years into treatment. The therapy remained equally effective over the entire period. The scientists prevented minor side-effects from appearing by adjusting the stimulation. The study was published in the journal Brain Stimulation.

"Most of the patients respond to the therapy. The remarkable thing is that the effect is also lasting. Other forms of therapy often lose their effectiveness in the course of time. This makes deep brain stimulation a highly promising approach for people with previously non-treatable depression," says principal investigator Prof. Dr. Thomas Schläpfer, head of the Interventional Biological Psychiatry Unit at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of the Medical Center - University of Freiburg. Deep brain stimulation is a method based on mild electric impulses that can be used to influence selected brain regions with great precision.

The eight test subjects had suffered continuously for three to eleven years from a severe depression that responded neither to drugs nor to psychotherapy or treatments like electroconvulsive therapy. The doctors implanted razor-thin electrodes and stimulated a brain region that is involved in the perception of pleasure and is thus also important for motivation and quality of life. The doctors evaluated the effect of the therapy each month with the help of the established Montgomery-Asberg Rating Scale (MARDS). The patients' average MARDS score fell from 30 points to 12 points already in the first month and even dropped slightly further by the end of the study. Four patients achieved a MARDS score of less then 10 points, the threshold for diagnosis of depression.

Some of the patients suffered briefly from blurred or double vision. "We managed to alleviate the side effects by reducing the intensity of the stimulation, without diminishing the antidepressant effect of the therapy," says Prof. Dr. Volker A. Coenen, head of the Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery Unit at the Department of Neurosurgery of the Medical Center - University of Freiburg. The doctors did not observe personality changes, thought disorders, or other side effects in any of the patients.

People who mix highly caffeinated energy drinks with their alcoholic beverages may be at increased risk for injury, according to a review in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Researchers at the University of Victoria's Centre for Addictions Research of BC (CARBC), in Canada, searched for peer-reviewed journal articles on the topic of alcohol and energy drinks published from 1981 to 2016 and found 13 that fit their criteria and were able to be analyzed. Of those studies, 10 showed evidence of a link between the use of alcohol mixed with energy drinks (AmED) and an increased risk of injury compared to drinking alcohol only. The study classified injuries as unintentional (such as falls or motor vehicle accidents) and intentional (such as fights or other physical violence).

"The stimulant effects of caffeine mask the result that most people get when they drink," says lead study author Audra Roemer, M.Sc. "Usually when you're drinking alcohol, you get tired and you go home. Energy drinks mask that, so people may underestimate how intoxicated they are, end up staying out later, consume more alcohol, and engage in risky behavior and more hazardous drinking practices."