Guided Imagery, Snake Oil, and the need for Love

 

 

Guiden Imagery and relaxation improves allergice response  

"Our study confirmed a positive and clinically relevant effect of FR(functional relaxation) and GI(guided imagery) on total serum IgE levels"

 

Ok so I'm doing all this research on inflammation in the body and brain which seems to be at the root of a large portion of illness and also seems to be deeply relatied to hormones which seem to be deeply related to emotional stress and trauma.

 

We need more research on these kinds of therapiesbut I truly think they will have genuine application.

 

Something about yoga: I've seen people with mental illness get worse. I saw a correlation between both people having mental illness and being attracted to exotic esoteric spiritual practices and people who didn't seem all that messed up get so obsessed (insert fanatic diet, movement therapy,yoga, random philosophical jargon) that one has to wonder if they weren't implicitly seeking to INCREASE or even CREATE a manic state that wasn't already there.

 

When I say this: I'm thinking along the lines of "crazy like us". People have x pathology--- they are looking for a way to present symptom sets such that they can be seen. I think people tend to intentionally albeit subconsciously CHOOSE activities that will increase a mentally ill state in an attempt to present to the world that they need support.

 

One theory as to why the placebos are helping people with mental illness MORE now than they used to is the change in the amount of service, support, and attention that people participating in the studies are given. People need to be seen, and they need to be seen at the specific level of the root of pathological problem. (I'm not going to bother looking for a more appropriate term and assume you get what I mean.)

 

You can over stimulate the "spiritual" areas of the brain to complete mania and the reality is that is actually the goal of a lot of the esoteric practices.

 

My point with all this is that I believe that people can bring themselves back into a balanced state. And when I say that, I mean even from extreme conditions. I think that MOST books on this subject are over reaching-- IE they get overzealous with positive results and write books saying, "You can fix your genes with meditation!" when this is a pretty wild claim (albeit one I believe worth researching)--- that has NOT been verified.

 

It's akin to telling someone in a hospital who can't walk, "You CAN walk, you just have to believe and you have to push yourself and it going to hurt but you have to do it."

 

On the one hand-- this might actually help the person walk. On the other hand, if the person can't walk-- you're torturing someone.

 

And on the ... er... third hand... if the person could walk but they need other interventions, you may have just prevented them from getting better support by pressuming they just need to "exert their will more forcefully".

 

One thing I've really been getting into is research on the nature of how supportive people in life-- meaningful relationships, etc etc--- have a protective factor in physical and emotional health. If that process has been disrupted in early life, it doesn't just get fixed when you add supportive people.

 

There's something to knowing that ultimately if you really need people they will disappear that changes you. People can say, "Sure, I'm here" but if you know, "Yeah but if I was helplessly dependant (a child) you wouldn't be there." and it changes how you relate to people.

 

The reason this is relevant to me is that a fundemental tenant of the self help industry (american style) is that all you need is yourself. I don't believe that is true. I believe that truly genuinely, for real health we need meangingful relationships, we need to believe there is an external reason for continuing through a painful existance, and in general, that kind of purpose usually comes from being needed/wanted/appreciated in a meaningful way by the external world. We also need to know on some level that if we fell apart there would be someone to carry us.Most of us don't fall apart in a permanent debilitating way.... so therefore most of us can have a sense int he back of our minds that "people are there for us" simply because that is how it worked in our lives. When we really truly were in need, we found someone.

 

For people who found themselves really truly in need of meaningful compassionate empathy and support and found the world bone dry--- creating that "false" pressumption that "people will be there for us if we really need them" is particularly difficult, because we know it isn't true. When a therapist tries to convince a person to trust the world--- they fail because they are being paid.

 

It's fundamentally NOT a case of someone agreeing to be there for you if you fall apart. It's a case of a person doing there job and tolerating your presence and giving some research based feedback because they want to be paid.

 

i'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm working on it. : )

Dissociation and Mental Health Disorders

Dissociation requires a physical process to occur in the brain (and very likely body). People who have near death experiences often report a sensation of feeling above their bodies watching what is happening below. So too, do some people who report dissociating from traumatic events. Interestingly, the temporal lobe seems to be affected both by sexual abuse and by near death experience. It's also considered the home of the religious experience in the brain (as usual other brain regions are involved as well-- modular brain models are problematic so we are told).


Dissociative experiences can involve other bodily sensations of "not existing". The parietal lobe is considered to be the part of the brain most responsible for the bodies awareness of itself and spatial awareness. The resulting temporal and parietal lobe epileptic activity whether full siezures, pseudoseizures, or partial siezures seems to be correlated with dissociation during sexual abuse. According to the following study, somatic, not psychological dissociation was most correlated with subsequent siezure activity.




http://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Abstract/1999/12000/Dissociation_in_Temporal_Lobe_Epilepsy_and.2.aspx


"Also, PES patients significantly more often reported sexual traumatic experiences." PES is pseudoepileptic siezures. This begs an interesting question of whether pseudo siezures are a result of the brain deliberately dissociating from an event identified as too stressful to fully feel--- and perhaps ES is more rooted in... something else (But What?!!)


Just wanted to call it first. Somatic dissociation is going to be highly correlated with abnormal funtioning in the parietal lobe.


The angular gyrus is also highly correlated with out of body experiences.

But where are we going?!

Another aspect of these studies are the implications they have for other neurological disorders which are currently (badly) diagnosed as psychiatric illnesses with disregard for the biological processes and traumas that are going on. (Yeah I'm looking at you shitty DSM whatever edition)

For example "Borderline Personality" is highly correlated with altered functioning in these brain regions. Why, oh why, did they claim these adult women "with histories of severe abuse" are "borderline personality disordered" women and not that they have PTSD? Why would they say this:

"Compared with control subjects, BPD subjects had significantly smaller right parietal cortex (−11%) and hippocampal (−17%) volumes. The parietal cortex of borderline subjects showed a significantly stronger leftward asymmetry when compared with control subjects. Stronger psychotic symptoms and schizoid personality traits in borderline subjects were significantly related to reduced leftward asymmetry. Stronger trauma-related clinical symptoms and neuropsychologic deficits were significantly related to smaller hippocampal size."

And not conclude that BPD is more likely a traumatic disorder than a "personality disorder" at all?

Fucking scientists.

Further more medical models of treatment with drugs will miss the point. If a person wants to escape their body you can't pump them full of meds and make them stay. A person has to make a conscious decision to be fully present in their body and increase their capacity to face the suffering in the reality of their life. The deeper the capacity to withstand the suffering and the deeper the drive to exist despite the suffering and be fully present, the more normalization of these kinds of symptoms you're going to see.

Time Travel Experiment

Excellent!!



When I was a wee little sophomore in highschool I began to get curious about whether or not time travel would happen in the future and how that would work with keeping it a secret from people in the past. (Basically I watched 12 Monkeys.)

Cooooole don't diiieeee!!!   (How depressing!)



So I created a brilliant experiement to determine if time travel will be possible in the future. Scientifically.

Here was my procedure:

1. Obtain diary.

2. Write super cool message sure to impress someone in the future who is CERTAIN to read my diary in 6897 AD.

"DEAR PEOPLE OF THE FUTURE. I AM WONDERING IF TIME TRAVEL IS REAL. IF TIME TRAVEL IS REAL WOULD YOU COME BACK TO MAY 23rd 1996 AND WRITE A MESSAGE TO ME ON THE WOODEN TABLE AT LA MADELINE ON XXXXXXXXXXX ROAD? I WILL KEEP IT A SECRET IF YOU DO."

3. Go to wooden table at Le Madeleine and see if message from the future has been written.

ABSTRACT:

Steps one and two were completed as described. The following day, wooden table at Le Madeleine was visited. No message was found on wooden table other than a previously existing carved sentence "Suck my dick, bitch." It was determined through detailed analysis that this message did not come from the future.

CONCLUSION: Due to ethical delimmas of allowing peoples "of the past" to be aware of time travel technology "of the future" results may or may not indicate that time travel is impossible. Our time traveling descendents of the future may have moral constraints and possible laws preventing them from contact with people "of the past". Another possible complication of the experiment is that said journal was lost, possibly preventing time travelers of the future from having awareness such an experiment took place.

The Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis

The what?

Sounds far out.

I was reading about the controversies in what the placebo effect actually is, whether it affects biological function at all, and by what mechanism it functions and came upon this paragraph:


"Collectively, the findings of the neuroimaging studies reviewed here strongly support the view that the subjective nature and the intentional content (what they are “about” from a first-person perspective) of mental processes (e.g., thoughts, feelings, beliefs, volition) significantly influence the various levels of brain functioning (e.g., molecular, cellular, neural circuit) and brain plasticity. Furthermore, these findings indicate that mentalistic variables have to be seriously taken into account to reach a correct understanding of the neural bases of behavior in humans. An attempt is made to interpret the results of these neuroimaging studies with a new theoretical framework called the Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis."


The Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis? I love it when you talk dirty to me like to me sciencey writers. So what is this Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis?


Roy J. J. Pereira, a Jesuit priest working on his Ph.D. at the Philosophy Department of Boston College, tells us this:


"I .... make use of Beauregard and O’Leary’s Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis (PTH) which posits that ‘the mind (the psychological world, the first person perspective) and the brain (which is part of the so-called “material” world, the third-person perspective) represent two epistemologically different domains that can interact because they are complementary aspects of the same transcendental reality."

Ah I get it. So thoughts are spiritual phenomena that can't be measured by science because they don't exactly match neurological measurements of thought process. I admit, I find this fact infuriating. You mean you haven't mapped out the location of my thoughts yet oh scientists? But surely they must have  a a specific location, I can feel them happening in my head!! Where are my thoughts happening in my brain?!

I'll have to look into this matter further because this is simply unacceptable.

Cedar Pollen of DOOM

Do you see that? That cloud that looks like smoke emanating from the tree (hint: it's a cedar) is cedar pollen. Evil, evil, cedar pollen. The cedars in central Texas tend to hurl this insiduous substance at us from December through February. Three months.


Three months of sinus headaches, puffy head, foggy brain, itchy red eyes, waking up with eyes glued shut, and sinus infections, sinus infections, more sinus infections and sneezing. Oh the sneezing.

But as it is the nature of myself, I get to wondering, just what sort of an impact does cedar allergy, or any allergy, have on school performance, mood, and over all mental and physical health? (Further more the precurser, what the fuck is off in the body that causes this shit.)


It has to do with IgE so they say. That's THE explenation. Clearly there's a lot of research indicating it isn't that simple, and I am not satisfied with simplistic answers so we'll do more with that later. For now this brings us to brain inflammation.


" if chronic depression is proven to be a neuroinflammatory condition, then anti-inflammatory treatments should also have some antidepressant effects. Several small trials with depressed patients have already been published that support this possibility, though Markou cautioned that much more specific research and larger clinical trials are required."


Cool. Can you guess what their proposed anti-inflammatories will be? Probably not DHA. (That stuff in fish oil.)


Which is a shame because DHA actually has shown some promise:


Docosahexaenoic acid supplementation increases prefrontal cortex activation during sustained attention in healthy boys: a placebo-controlled, dose-ranging, functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Selective deficits in erythrocyte docosahexaenoic acid composition in adult patients with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder

Docosahexaenoic Acid Suppresses Neuroinflammatory Responses and Induces Heme Oxygenase-1 Expression in BV-2 Microglia: Implications of Antidepressant Effects for Omega-3 Fatty Acids

In case you didn't get all that IF that research were done correctly it would imply that:


DHA improves focus
DHA improves Bipolar and depressive symptoms
DHA reduces brain inflammation.


But I can't tell you if that research was good or not because MY BRAIN IS INFLAMMED AND I CAN'T THINK.


All I want to do is destroy these evil cedar trees. Yeah. That's what those little motherfuckers look like. Fuck you cedar!

A rant about Bi-Polar and Hypersexuality: You're Not Normal

I have always been a horny motherfucker. Look, I'll just be honest. And in taking a few psych classes and hearing teachers procclaim with certainty, "young children are not orgasmic and their play is not actually sexual" I kind of got to wondering... so what the fuck was up with having orgasms every night since I was five? Not going with suppressed molestation as there is really nothing of significance to suggest this is a solid possibility.


So what's up? This isn't normal? I've talked to many women who say this was their experience as well, and I've talked to many women who say this is not their experience at all and clearly I was hypersexual child for some mysterious reason. We could go into sexual fantasies about machines but that'll take up a whole post and would detract from the point I want to make here.


This article comes up about vasoppressin and oxytocin in hypersexuality and many other things and of course I can't read it (grrr) but I have to mention:


"Future studies should profitably focus on pharmacogenomic and genomic imaging strategies facilitated by the ease and efficacy of manipulating AVP-OXT neurotransmission by intranasal administration."


Why, oh why, does it always have to be pharmaceuticals and gene manipulation? If I read one more sentence saying, "This opens up fascinating possibilities for genetic therapies" I will puke. (That's going to mean I'll be doing a lot of puking.) Genetic therapies are the trend right now but I don't believe we're in the clear for safety. Nor are we with pharmaceuticals. With all of these diseases we are looking at chain reactions of responses from entire systems of organs and glands and brain regions. If you're not addressing the root of the problem, it won't be fixed. You can give someone lithium to reduce brain inflammation and reduce bi-polar systems, but if in doing so you're fucking up the liver and adding to inflammation there, you're chain reaction of responses will ultimately be causing more inflammation in the body. Fighting fire with fire?


But a quick search turns up that hypersexuality is claimed to be a diagnostic factor in a controversial new diagnosis called "childhood bipolar disorder". I have big problems with childhood bipolar disorder diagnosing but for the sake of time we'll focus on this hypersexual/bipolar connection nonsense.




"Hypersexuality was significantly less common than any other symptom or associated feature of mania, and it manifested in fewer than half of all cases in all samples with relevant data."


Hmmm. Ok so it's not particularly common, why then are we dooming masturbating kids to a bipolar diagnosis? I find it interesting that in studies like these they spend a lot of time focusing on symptomology, claim this symptomology is "biological" and spend absolutely ZERO time on what is happening in the brain and body biologicaly.


Aren't scientists missing something here? If this is a biological problem why aren't we studying how inflammation in the liver, brain, wherever is affecting these symptoms? Why aren't we studying the levels of neurochemicals? Why aren't we doing brain research on this phenomena? Why are we just hurtling meds at people without studying WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE BODY?


If this is a biological condition-- than this is a field for neurobiologists. Psychologists can step the fuck down. But neurologists don't want this because the reality is that these issues are a complex interaction of environment, biological processes and emotions that may not BE rooted in biology. Biology may be AFFECTED but in order for the root cause to be a biological malfunction you're still going to need to find a cause for the malfunction. Find the genes, find the organs that are struggling. What areas of the brain are functioning differently and what is setting them off course in the environment meaning, diet-family life-social life-exposure to toxins-allergic reactions in body-lower functioning digestive system, hormones------


What is going on?


Since scientists seem so determined to continue throwing drugs at people rather finding out what in their environments, diet, activities, social lives, and hobbies could improve their health-- I'ma have to do this research myself.


It sucks that I suck at research don't it? That'll just have to change.


And another key point--- what if hypersexual kids develop differently because they feel bad about themselves? What if their entire sense of self is confused because they are exploring their sexuality when others aren't and they are being shamed for it? What if hypersexual kids are having an allergic reaction and using their sexuality to give a relaxation response in their system? (Not to be all TMI but masturbation totally lowers my allergic symptoms). What if masturbating a lot in and off itself changes hormones in the body and the neurochemistry itself? Where is the exploration of the myriad ways that "symptomology" could be rooted in different things and setting of chain reactions in the body and brain?

She-Ra's Castle in the Ink Blot

What exactly are the benefits of the ink blot test? Back when I was a wayward student falling off the path of decency, I was recommended for some testing to see if I had developed any "learning disabilities". This involved some testing that all seemed to make sense, auditory, IQ, attention span. All things one would assume make sense to explore in order to determine if there was a learning disorder.


I did brilliantly, and so fucked my get out of jail free card. Well, all except the Rorscache test.

Apparently, you can fail at those. Did you know it? They found the results unsatisfactory because my responses to were "too immature" and "too humorous".


You're thinking I said penis. I totally did not say penis! They more often look like vaginas anyway. Honestly I can't remember what I said they looked like other than distinctly remembering one looked like She-ra's castle. It really did! I was taking it seriously, it just fucking looked like She-Ra's castle. I loved that castle, how does that mean I'm not taking your Rorsache test seriously? If you want to aske me what sorts of issues are fucking up my life, why don't you ask me what's eating me inside? "Oh my dad's always gone, I hate myself, I'm failing at everything, I have no friends, I have a horrible secret case of sexual masochism, I'm a perpetual disapointment and have no relationship with my parents..." I could have rambled on about any number of things for you to analyze, but no you ask me what a blot of ink looks like and expect that to unravel my psyche. Well, there you have it. You discovered that I think She-Ra's castle is fucking awesome. What more did you want?

So does the Rorscache test really work? It makes sense that surely one could make vague assumptions by studying the various ways that ink blot responses match up to known psychological or neurological conditions and as one can imagine there are people who get REALLY INTO this field of study. However, is it really a good basis to make a diagnosis? Someone comes in with a case of mild depression and does a Rorschache test and the Doc says, "I'm sorry to let you know but you actually have schizophrenia. So says the Rorsasche test. Let me just write up a prescription for some high doses of anti-psychotics before you get yourself into some trouble now."


I don't have any more problem with people using the Rorsasche test as a fun way to explore their answers and find out trends in other people's responses, any more than I have a problem with people getting Tarot card readings. (TAROT CARDS ARE FUN SHIT!) But I wouldn't recommend Tarot card readings for mental health diagnosis despite that I am certain you could do research on trends in Tarot cards for various disorders and conditions and probably find results that looked like usable results. That doesn't mean psychologists should pull out their tarot cards as a diagnostic tool:

It looks like you're schizo-effective sir.



More on problems in Rorsasche research to come. But seriously, it really does fucking look like She-Ra's castle.