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If I couldn’t understand what was making me feel this way, at least I could control the people around me.
He knew she would have given anything to help share some of his suffering, but even so, he remained disengaged, bottling up his anguish the way he always had.
(“You have to look backward to see the future,”
her suffering, which she had buried so deeply, had begun to drain out of her unconsciously and onto me. The worst part was that the struggle didn’t end once the hospital stay was over; now she had to live with this hostile stranger, her own daughter, who had once been one of her closest friends. But instead of sympathizing with her pain, which certainly matched and may have even surpassed my own, I took her suffering as an affront—a sign that she could not handle how flawed the sickness had made me.
Our minds have the incredible capacity to both alter the strength of connections among neurons, essentially rewiring them, and create entirely new pathways. (It makes a computer, which cannot create new hardware when its system crashes, seem fixed and helpless.)
Sort of message of hope... brains can be changed, fixed, healed.
But doctors do believe that it was probably a combination of an external trigger, like the sneeze, birth control, or a toxic apartment, and a genetic predisposition toward developing those aggressive antibodies.
After I sat in front of that blank screen for nearly an hour, though, the words started to come, slowly at first and then like a fountain. The writing was rough and needed a lot of editing, but I had put fingers to keyboard, and nothing in the world felt better than that.
It had cost $1 million to treat me,
he posits that some forms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression are actually caused by inflammatory conditions in the brain.
Do anti-inflammatory practices (diet, environmental exposure, wellness like infared sauna, cryotherapy, cold plunges) THUS aid in reducing these psychological symptoms, regardless of the form?
When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses in the United States has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion.
He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line.
Add: counselors, psychiatrists, behavioral health professionals, primary care physicians...
