Although it probably won’t be an issue, I thought I’d post an advisory to readers that, should I not post this weekend, don’t be surprised. I’ve gone digging around in my computer and rediscovered a game I haven’t played in ages (so long, in fact, that the server wouldn’t even let me log in or update my game – I had to download a completely new one). The game is called Eternal Lands (EL for short) and is a free-to-use, massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) … you basically wander around with your character, hunt stuff, make stuff, sell stuff, harvest stuff, dodge or kill monsters and spiffy stuff like that. The maps are huge, the ‘world’ extensive, and there are people from all over the world in there to chat with. It can be quite addictive, quite fun, and sometimes also quite boring.

It had been so long since I last played, I was surprised to see that my old character (Gorm) still existed. Unfortunately, my character has no cool weapons, armor or even very much money, since I gave all that stuff away the last time I played (I thought I’d be gone long enough that my character would get dropped, and I figured it would be a shame to see all my gear go to waste). So now I’m stuck with the dilemma of whether or not I want to just start a new character over from scratch, or try to rebuild money and gear with my old character. It’s pretty tough – my Gorm character can kill wolves without weapons or armor, and it takes a while to develop a character to that point (basically lower intermediate, if I’m judging correctly).

Anyway, I know all of this has nothing to do with bipolar disorder – at least not directly. Lately, especially after my post yesterday about how my mind works, I’ve been pretty unfocused and scattered. I’ve had plenty of energy, at times, but no motivation to use it. Hanging out in a game for a while, although it achieves little in the way of productivity, is still a compromise. I know that probably makes no sense at all, but like I said, I’ve been pretty unfocused and scattered ….

Ever put together a 7-foot cat tree? As I was building the thing up today, I found myself growing more and more amazed with each level. I mean, when you read on eBay how tall it is (in my case, in centimeters, which I still haven’t really developed a feel for), it’s one thing – having the thing loom over you as you put it together is quite another. However, now that Frankentree is assembled, there are some really happy kitties (now they can take turns throwing each other off much higher perches than the single 3-foot perch we had on our old cat tree).

As for right now, I’m plugged back into my headphones yet again – this time it’s Sisters of Mercy I’m listening to. I’ve got “First and Last and Always” plugged into the CD-ROM drive, and am alternating between this and Sisters videos I’m finding on YouTube (yes, I’m still addicted). The album I’m listening to has one of my favorites from this band, called “Marian,” a favorite I don’t allow myself to listen to very often because it has a powerful effect on me; while YouTube has been kind enough to provide me with a shortened version of another favorite, “Temple of Love,” a video I didn’t even know existed until tonight (I didn’t get to watch a lot of Mtv when I was a kid)!

One of the things I enjoy about blogging is reading through the terms people plug into search engines, in order to arrive at my blog. Sometimes the terms a bit bizarre, but mostly I use it as a guide to where I should be focusing my writing – at the very least, it sometimes gives me ideas of things to blog about. The title for this post, “how bi-polar folks think,” was just such a search term – and it sent me along an interesting path of research and introspection. So, whoever you were, thank you – I hope you were able to get some idea of what you were looking for and, in case you didn’t, I’ll add my thoughts to your search topic here :-)

First, I’m not an expert when it comes to the cognitive function of a bipolar person. Second, I can’t speak for all bipolar people in the world, nor would I attempt to. Since I don’t have any definitive studies on the nuts and bolts of bipolar cognition to quote, haven’t spent time in bipolar communities or support groups, the best I can offer here are my perspectives as someone recently diagnosed (but who has likely been bipolar for a number of years). If someone reading this actually has some studies that have been done on bipolar cognition, please leave a comment with some links or other references :-)

A connection seems to exist between some bipolar people and creativity. I haven’t seen anything that suggests creativity and bipolar disorder go hand-in-hand, just references that point out some people with bipolar disorder who happened to be very intelligent and / or creative (look for the link on my sidebar to the list of famous bipolar people). At the very least, I have yet to see anything that suggests bipolar disorder reduces intellect. In fact, I have read an article suggesting that one of the differences between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, as far as cognitive impairment goes, is that bipolar disorder doesn’t negatively affect IQ points (“Cognitive Impairment in Patients With Bipolar Disorder: Effect on Psychosocial Functioning,” by David C. Glahn, PhD and Dawn I. Velligan, PhD, in the May 01, 2007 Vol. 24 No. 6 edition of Psychiatric Times). Reading this article, it seems our problems tend more toward memory, emotional judgment / control, and ability to concentrate – based on the way my own mind responds, I tend to agree with this assessment.

Regarding intellect, my IQ test results in the past were reasonably high. My experience taking the SAT in high school was also interesting: the first time I took it, I went to workshops, studied strategies, ate the right foods and got plenty of bed rest before the exam; I did everything right, and scored a hundred points lower than I did the following year, when I did no workshops, stayed up late the night before the exam, and showed up almost too late to take the exam after setting the love of my life on an airplane and thinking I wouldn’t see her again for a very long time (it turned out to be over a decade, actually) … essentially, I did better when I shot from the hip with an exhausted, frazzled mind. A common complaint of mine is that my thoughts race – they race so fast that it’s really, really hard for me to think or act at times, and I’m typically very easily distracted. I think it’s possible that, up to a point, the racing thoughts are like the brain’s raw horsepower being unleashed … this might explain the creativity and intelligence that have been associated with bipolar disorder. The problem I have is that my thoughts are kind of like the cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote, with the rocket attached to his back: he can catch the Roadrunner, he can overtake the Roadrunner, and go flying out of control right off a cliff, only to run out of fuel while still in midair … my thoughts will also slow to a point where I feel like every thought and motion is taking place in a giant bowl of pudding, something I equate to the ‘dropping’ the coyote goes through when his rocket runs out of fuel. Consciously, I can’t speed my thoughts back up, no matter how hard I try – and all the bursts of genius and creativity I may have been experiencing just the day before are gone. I wouldn’t say that I get stupid, I would really equate the whole experience to my mind having drive or not having drive, and at no time really having control over it one way or the other. I think the actual mechanism of thought is the same – it’s like healthy people and I have the same hard drives for brains, but sometimes I get surges of power that make my hard drive spin faster, faster, too fast … then it has to slow way down or shut down to cool off … or sometimes the hard drive gets power, but just enough to make it spin at something like 1.5 rpm.

Linear, polarized, rigid thinking is also something I’m known for. The worst is when I somehow convince myself of something based on unsound logic: I won’t budge, and I get extremely irritated when someone tries to budge me. I’m introspective enough to see that with hindsight; but when it’s actually happening, I can’t see it. My suspicion and personal theory is that the rapid-firing of thoughts acts like the way cartoon shows work: still images that are flipped so fast that our mind accepts the reality of a moving cartoon. When my thoughts are moving at a high rate, they form their own sort of moving picture in my mind and I suspect it’s this moving picture I’m locking onto, rather than still thoughts and drawn-out logic. The problem is that this moving picture is accepted by my mind as real – it’s hard for me to grasp the difference, especially when I’m simply not in the mood to try. Honestly, the idea that there are periods when I try to stand firm on unsound logic is something that scares me much more than I like to admit.

Where I notice this racing, spiraling process or state most dramatically though is not in logical thought, but in emotion. The rocket on my back applies to all aspects of my mind, and my emotions are of course bundled with this … the rocket and subsequent drop are ‘felt’ by my emotions more than any other part of my mind. And, just as with my thoughts, my emotions are damned hard for me to control – even when I’m applying everything I’ve got to either holding back my rage or not revealing to the people around me just how dark a place my mind has gone to, I slip. Actually, I don’t think it’s accurate to speak of controlling my emotions – what I work to control are my actions. And when my emotions and thoughts are either racing or plunging, it’s powerful enough that sometimes my actions aren’t fully within my ability to control. I mean think about it: if your thoughts were racing so fast you couldn’t focus, your logic corrupted by who-knows-what, and a spiraling rage coursing through mind and body, how much effort would you need to keep from erupting? Now, throw depression into that very same mixture – that feeling that nothing you do will matter one way or another. Thankfully, that isn’t how it is for me every time I get energized – I’d say it happens that way on average twice per month. Sometimes I go into a joke and laughter mode and wind up standing in place and babbling like a short-circuited robot, sometimes I’m just euphoric and inspired with some spiffy ideas, sometimes I’m simply a pain in the ass. Other times, I’m too depressed to bother with thinking. I also have times I would say come close to ‘normal’.

With all of that considered, it’s pretty easy for me to see why concentration, memory, emotion and sound judgment can be profoundly affected by bipolar disorder. I can also see why intellect itself isn’t necessarily impaired, at least not permanently so (there are times when I feel like my ability to process and understand are impaired … but these times are temporary and not what I would call ‘normal’ for myself). Now, when you ask something like how bipolar people (plural) think, you also have to take into consideration that each person is unique. Each person’s brain is unique: being constructed from its own genetic resources, and filled with its own memories, perspectives and learning experiences. How bipolar disorder manifests itself in a person’s mind is just as unique as the individual, despite observed tendencies and scientific models of the bipolar brain. So, while the question of how bipolar folks think prompted me to type up this response, perhaps the more relevant question would be to ask the bipolar person who inspired you to research this how he or she thinks?

… a glass of soda pop. The music is AC / DC, blaring through my headphones since it’s just after one in the morning. This post won’t have anything to do with bipolar disorder, but rather with a couple tips for formatting comments in blogs (an earlier comment in here expressed some degree of difficulty with links) hosted by WordPress or Blogger. Since these services don’t offer buttons for making links, italics, etc, but do allow HTML tags in comment fields, the formatting is achieved through typing in the tags. I’m not an expert on this, but a few tricks I do know, and I won’t bore you with hours of HTML history or standards, either.

First, links. There are two ways to do this – the simple, yet not-so-pretty way is to just type the URL. Blogger and WordPress will automatically hyper-link the URL so other readers only need to click on it. The disadvantage to this is that some URL’s are really long. The way around it is to hyperlink a single word or a couple of words, like WordPress, or a really cool blog about bipolar disorder ;-) The above links would be typed into a comment like this:

<a href=”http://wordpress.com/”>WordPress</a>
<a href=”http://cerebraldiscordia.wordpress.com/”>a really cool blog about bipolar disorder</a>

If you hover your mouse pointer over either of the above links, you’ll notice a little title comes up. That’s achieved by adding a title attribute to your anchor tag (the <a></a> you use to make links):

<a href=”http://wordpress.com/” title=”WordPress”>WordPress</a>

Another fun trick in commenting is using the indented quote. The tag for that is:

<blockquote>Quoted text</blockquote>

Italics, bold, underline and strikethrough text are rendered with the following tags:

<i>Italics</i>
<b>Bold</b>
<u>Underline</u>
<strike>Strikethrough</strike>

It should be noted that for italics and bold, <em>emphasis</em> and <strong>strong emphasis</strong> are used in XHTML; but the older tags listed above are what Blogger asks for, and WordPress automatically converts the tags, so for the purposes of commenting in blogs, I don’t think it will make much of a difference.

Two other fun tags for the science-minded among us:

Superscript^²
Subscript_₃

Using tags in combination isn’t that complicated, it’s a process called nesting, and it has one basic rule: that you keep the opening and closing tags in order. If your first opened tag is <blockquote>, then </blockquote> must be your last closing tag. Let’s say you wanted to quote and emphasize a hyperlinked word or phrase:

Cerebral Discordia

The phrase would be achieved by nesting the tags in the following order:

<blockquote>
<em>
<a href=”http://cerebraldiscordia.wordpress.com/” title=”Life with Bipolar Disorder”>
Cerebral Discordia
</a>
</em>
</blockquote>

You’ll notice that the basic, nested tag order is maintained …

<blockquote><em><a>text</a></em></blockquote>
<1><2><3>text</3></2></1>

…it’s as easy as that, if you’d like to challenge yourself, try the following:

Cerebral Discordia² = Li₂CO₃

There are plenty of other tags, but these are the ones that I use most often when commenting in blogs … if you’re interested in learning more about HTML tags, I’d recommend searching around for HTML cheat sheets.

I read this article today, from LifeSite, about how assisted suicide is a legal right in Switzerland, one that extends to people who have a chronic mental illness. My first thought about this is that it’s a pretty evolved perspective for a government and community to take: if die we must, why shouldn’t people have the right to determine when and how death comes to us? Many would praise a heroic sacrifice and at the same time condemn the assisted death of someone suffering from cancer, or an incurable depression; then advocate euthanasia for animals as a ‘humane’ practice. I’m not criticizing one way or the other – I have my own beliefs, based on my own experiences, and think everyone else is entitled to their own thoughts on the matter – I’m simply pointing out that just sorting out the seeming contradictions involved in something like this, let alone making a concrete determination on the morality of it, is a pretty complicated endeavor; and I find Switzerland’s position in the matter, essentially allowing this decision to rest with the individual rather than with the State, to be a bold measure.

The article I read pointed out something from the counter-perspective, though, that I feel is worth considering: the evaluation of <inserting my own label here> death-clients, determining whether or not the wish to die is a genuine wish from a lucid and balanced perspective, or a function of a depressed state, is something that should probably take longer than half a day’s time. The article cites cases where a death-client would show up to the clinic in the morning and be dead before dinner – I think that’s a bit hasty. At a going rate of €3500, this is also a potentially lucrative field … and that kind of money could easily motivate some to push the threshold of judgment in the evaluation process, or simply bypass it.

Societal pressures, and how these pressures might eventually encourage a person to end life as a matter of social convenience is also brought up in this article. In theory, I can see where this could come to pass, and I think it’s something that would have to be more closely legislated, along with the evaluation procedures, to protect those people whom society may deem inconvenient. In the end, though, this kind of pressure can exist without a state-sanctioned suicide and the result is teenagers committing suicide because they don’t look enough like what they see in movies, don’t live up to their own parents’ expectations, or because they <gasp> dare to be individuals: the real legislation needs to be applied to the mainstream approach to what the article refers to as ‘weaker’ or inconvenient people.

If you have a community of, say, a hundred bipolar people (of the same type) living together for a year or longer, would there be a tendency for this community to experience a synchronization of mood swings?

I finished reading this article, from PsychEducation.org, about how dark therapy might actually supplement (if not actually supplant) medication for managing bipolar disorder. The author of this article falls back on a few different studies that were done, each demonstrating a link between enforced periods of darkness and a reduction in swinging moods. The suggested reason for why this happens, why people with bipolar disorder might benefit from dark therapy, rather than the light therapy given to people with SAD, has to do with our biological clocks. It was a theorized faulty biological clock that researchers were hoping to treat with dark therapy in the first study, as shown by this quote:

“They knew that the a specific part of the hypothalamus, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), has direct nerve connections from the eyes. It gets direct signals about how much light is out there. And it has been shown to be the main location of the ‘”biological clock”‘ in many animals, including humans. They thought that the SCN might get ‘”desensitized”‘ in some susceptible people by too much light, namely too much artificial light at night.”

The results in this study were dramatic (as the original article shows) – the sleep pattern and cycling (the patient for the first study was a rapid cycler) normalized rapidly, and sans medication. The problem I have with this is that there are two things I can think of speaking against the logic of light hitting the hypothalamus being a causal factor for bipolar disorder, particularly artificial light: blind people; and the fact that records of this disorder go back thousands of years before the advent of artificial lighting. I don’t dispute the results – just the assumption that artificial lighting has any role in the cause for bipolar disorder, and possibly that it was lack of light (rather than other factors) that caused these results.

The other study referenced by this article, of 32 manic bipolars in Italy, also showed a correlation between dark therapy and some reduction in symptoms – and in this case the therapy was only used for a period of three nights. While the results weren’t quite as dramatic, the fact that these patients were in a manic phase critical enough to require hospitalization should be taken into consideration – once my genie uncorks himself, I’d be amazed with the kinds of results demonstrated in the Italian study, too.

For myself, I’ve always been sensitive to light. Although it’s not as true now as it was in my youth, I still have relatively good night vision – and the headaches I get from going outside on a sunny day without any kind of eye protection (sunglasses or at the minimum a hat) can be brutal. I have almost always preferred moving around at night – along with light sensitivity, I’m also a fan of cooler temperatures. To fall asleep properly, I have to be exhausted, and in the cold and in the dark. This means it’s usually late into the night before I start thinking about bed, if I bother to think about it at all. That my Circadian rhythms are out of whack is not something I would dispute with anyone, and I would definitely welcome definitive research proving a link between bipolar disorder and light sensitivity. But with these studies, and with what I consider to be flaws in their hypothetical assumptions about light and bipolar disorder, I wonder if it was the actual routine, rather than the light, that made the difference?

While perusing the latest batch of posts at K’s Weird Cake, I happened upon this wonderful little gem:

Your Emoticon is Grumpy

Maybe you’re having a bad day… or maybe something just upset you. Either way, you’re definitely seeing red!

What Emoticon Best Represents You Right Now?

I would have been surprised if the thing had come back and called me fluffy (there was a question in there asking about what kind of weather I’d compare my current mood to … I answered with the crazy hail storm). This cuts it, though – combined with my last aura photography session showing me sitting in an orange and red ball of rage (the photographer suggested I take up drumming, lol) – I’m going to have to admit that I’m just prone to bad moods ;-)

I am actually half-ass-tempted to use this questionnaire in the future for estimating my mood – when I have to sit down and just figure it out on my own, I always manage to confuse myself.

My apologies for not having posted in here since last week. I discovered something that’s been around for a while but, like so many other things that people take for granted, I didn’t figure out the marvelous potentials for until just recently: YouTube. Yep, I was able to see music videos I haven’t seen in years (and even a few I’d simply never seen before, having been deprived of Mtv when I was a kid). I was able to catch sneak peeks at a new Kevin Smith film (Kevin Smith, aka Silent Bob to those who don’t bother with things like credits, is one of the top five people in the world I’d like to spend half a day hanging out with – the man’s a cynical genius in my opinion, and a dedicated Star Wars fan!). I got turned on to searching out other videos, mostly fan fiction for Star Wars (I hadn’t looked for anything along these lines since the days when Troops first came out) …

Then, over the weekend and leading into the beginning of this week, my motivation pretty much fizzled and I was having problems with swinging moods. When I did have the desire to get in and write a few words, I figured the desire wouldn’t last as long as it would take for me to boot up my computer; so I figured why bother? But all of that’s behind me now (or in front of me, depending on how you like to see it), and I’m sitting here online, aware, and dangerous once again (muahahaha).

I had a visit with my psychiatrist today, blood was taken to see about the possibility of increasing my Li₂CO₃ (lithi-yum-yum), and I’m still at a point where I’m hoping this will happen. In looking at my MoodTracker results so far for this month, I’m sort of all over the place – the only consistency is that I’m managing to take my medication every day. I’m still at the sub-introduction dosage of 450mg, once per day – where I’ve been for the past month – and I’d like to get bumped to a level where the lithium can actually do something. I’ll find out on Monday, once the blood results are back. Maybe then I’ll also find out about whether or not my psychiatrist will recommend a therapist for me, or if I’m going to have to hunt around for one on my own. I start to wonder about the wisdom in letting someone, freshly diagnosed and scrambled, run loose for several months on negligible doses of medication and non-existent therapy (we’ve sat down and talked together three times since the end of February – all three times combined amount to less than 45 minutes). I start to wonder about this, then I wonder what it would have been like for me had I still been in America, with no insurance and just enough money to keep me reporting back to work – I’m a lot better off here :-)

*Totters off to find what other sources of mischief and mayhem the Internet offers today, with My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult’s “Confessions of a Knife” playing in the background …. 

Not exactly the most cheerful bits of news, but at least both indirectly offer some hope of increased understanding. The first article I stumbled across, titled “Study suggests bipolar disorder may cause progressive brain damage,” covers an older study from 2003. The study focused on the hippocampus, and an amino acid involved in neurogenesis and insulation of neurons in the brain; and found that not only did people with bipolar disorder tend to have less of this amino acid than the control group, but also that the people who had bipolar disorder longer tended to have even less, suggesting a link between decreased levels of the amino acid and duration of illness. Since the hippocampus is involved in memory, emotional regulation and spacial navigation, it’s a pretty important part of the brain to progressively lose function from. The hope offered by the study is that monitoring levels of this amino acid might help to physically determine the efficacy of treatments for bipolar disorder.

The second article comes to us from ScienceDaily, and is titled “Comorbidities Common In Bipolar Disorder May Have Genetic Link.” The article – though recent – isn’t itself all that informative; but does report that more research is being done on the genetic link to our comorbid conditions, rather than just bipolar disorder itself. Along with offering possible hope in better handling of these conditions in the future, through increased understanding of their origin, I think studies like this are important in showing that bipolar disorder is not just a ‘mental’ illness, but a physical disorder that can pack cancer, heart disease, and other ailments along with it.