How to Give Yourself Schizophrenia

If you've ever been curious about how schizophrenics experience the world, trying taking PCP or ketamine. No really. The experience of being on these drugs create symptoms identical to what 1% of the worlds population experience every day while coping with their condition. These symptoms can be as pleasant as euphoria, but more likely, they result in paranoia, hallucinations, suicidal impulses and aggressive behavior. If you're trying to get some insight into schizophrenia, you might want to try it. There is however one type of person who should never experiment with these drugs (or any) and that type is someone who a family history of schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia isn't quite genetic and it isn't quite environmental, but more or less a combination of both. If someone in your immediate family has it, you have about a 10% chance of developing it yourself. Even if you have an identical twin with the disease, the chance rises to only about 50%. Imagine, with almost exact genetic material it's still hit or miss. What's also known is that people who are related to those with schizophrenia are much more likely to be highly creative thinkers. What makes the leap between being 'highly creative' and schizophrenic could be substance abuse.

Take for instance this story of legendary science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. Dick's writing had always had themes of shifting boundaries, universes, times and identities. He's one of my favorite authors because you can't predict which way the narrative is going to turn and once you find out, you never know what hit you. Dick was a well established writer prior to 1974, but in that year he was prescribed sodium thiopental for pain relief following the extraction of a wisdom tooth. The thing is about sodium thiopental is that it isn't exactly a pain reliever. It's used most frequently to medically induce comas as well as for euthanasia. What's most interesting, however, is that it's also used as a truth serum as it's in a barbiturate class that decreases higher cortical functioning and since lying involves more energy, it can get people to talk. Because of this, it's frequently used in psychiatry.

While under the influence, Dick answered his front door and noted a fish symbol on the pendant of the delivery woman who was delivering more analgesic. Dick would never be the same. He began having visions; sometimes they were laser beams, others times they were geometric patterns, and still others were brief scenes of Jesus and Ancient Rome. The visions grew longer and more frequent and eventually Dick began to lead a double life, one as himself and the other as 'Thomas', a Christian persecuted by ancient Romans in the first century AD. You can read all about his experience in his semi autobiographical novel, Valis, but prepare to be unnerved.

Even a drug as seemingly benign as marijuana has been shown to worsen schizophrenic symptoms within a few hours. While marijuana users experience an initial and pleasant high, their hallucinations are forever made worse. People who are already at risk for mental illnesses have been known to be pushed over the edge by marijuana abuse, such as going from schizoaffective disorder to full blown schizophrenia. According to research conducted by The Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, schizophrenics are also far more sensitive to the positive and negative aspects of the drug. These findings might explain why schizophrenics who are marijuana users require more hospitalization, respond less well to medication and have more trouble with memory tests.

Around 50% of people with schizophrenia abuse alcohol, marijuana or cocaine, thereby making their symptoms all the worse. Abstainers however get along far better than users and in fact, behave no more violently than the rest of the population. I don't think we need tougher drug laws and I would never say that drugs lead one down the path of damnation, but we should recognize that just as people with a family history of diabetes should make an extra effort to watch what they eat and people who are pale should limit their time in the sun, people with a family history of psychosis should avoid engaging in behaviors that alter their minds irreparably. Consciousness expansion is desirable for those of us who were born with brains that more or less function normally, but for those who already have a hard time recognizing fact from fiction, this can alter ones life permanently and for the worse. Taking PCP might be a powerful and worthwhile experience, but living that way forever most certainly isn't.

Start Exercising Today: Obesity and Diabetes Linked to Brain Diseases

Heart disease, which is largely preventable, will account for 26% of American deaths this year, making it the number one killer in the country. Compare this to all combined forms of cancer which will account for around 23% of deaths. While we don't know exactly what causes cancer, we do understand that eating low fat and high fiber natural foods and having an active life style all but eliminate the risk for heart disease. What is seldom talked about, however, is how being overweight and obese not only destroys your body, but it's becoming increasingly clear that it also affects how well your mind works. Here are just a few recent examples:

Diabetes and Schizophrenia: In March of 2009 researchers at the Medical College of Georgia discovered that people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia (regardless of whether they are being medicated or not) are at an increased risk for type 2 (lifestyle choices) diabetes. They found that in a group of people who were newly diagnosed with schizophrenia or a related psychotic disorder with no other known risk factors, 16% had either diabetes or an abnormal rate of glucose metabolism or blood sugar. In the general American population, only 7.8% have diabetes.

Obesity and Alzheimer's: In May of this year, researchers at Boston University School of Medicine, lead by Sudha Seshadri found that middle aged people with an excess of abdominal fat may be at an increased risk for dementia. Notice in the picture below how the 250 lb person has yellow spots in their brain (fat) and also how much more black area (liquid erosion) they have, as well as how much smaller the overall brain is. Once the body has fat packed into all other areas, excess fat starts to develop around and lean against the brain. Having so much extra weight on the brain put you at risk for burst blood vessels, also known as strokes. The researchers measured BMI, hip to waist ratio, waist circumference and abdominal fat. They then measured both brain volume and function. The correlation was stronger in older participants then younger participants which means that if you are overweight and young, you still have time to work off those pounds and save your brain.

Dopamine and Insulin: Scientists don't need to tell you that when people experience a drop in blood sugar, they get mean. It stands to reason that this is an evolutionary response triggered by your body being afraid it's dying and therefore becoming less compassionate and more selfish. The complex reasoning behind this, found by Dr. Aurelio Galli at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is that insulin, the hormone that regulates glucose metabolism (blood sugar) in the body, also regulates the brain's supply of dopamine. Dopamine as far as your brain is concerned is the nectar of the gods. It regulates such varied and critical factors as motor activity, pleasure, sociability, and pain relief. Dopamine signaling problems have been associated with Parkinson's disease, depression, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).


We live in a society that sets us up to ruin our bodies and therefore erode our minds. Fast food industries have far too much of a hand in food production and because of that America is in an incredible obesity crisis that drain us not only of ourselves but also taxes the health care system in such detrimental ways that it's impossible to afford to pay for everyone. If you don't already work out on a regular basis, start today. You'll not only live to meet your grandchildren, but you'll even remember their names.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090330165808.htm
http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics
http://www.healthcentral.com/alzheimers/news-515419-98.html 
http://www.betterhealthresearch.com/news/overweight-patients-more-likely-to-develop-dementia-2-19793265/

Your Mind is Showing: Analysis of Writing Predicts Alzheimer's

It’s debatable whether your can spot mental illness from your friend’s depressing Live Journal posts or your girlfriend’s hot and cold text messages, but Ian Lancashire, an English Professor at the University of Toronto believes that it may be possible to detect Alzheimer’s by analyzing the way in which a person’s writing changes over time. He does this by making concordances or alphabetical lists of all the words used and the contexts in which they appear in a body of work. He’s studied many of the great English writers, Shakespeare, Milton (who never used the word ‘because’), and Chaucer, but in the mid 90’s, he decided to turn his attention to a less esteemed writer, but certainly a no less prolific one – Agatha Christie.

Lancashire amassed 16 of Christie's novels, written over a more than fifty year span and fed the text into a computer program. The program computed the numbers of words she used as well as the frequency in which they appeared. When looking at the data for her 73rd novel (written when she was 81 years old), Lancashire made an interesting discovery. Her use of nonspecific words, such as ‘thing,’ ‘anything’, ‘something’, and ‘nothing,’ spiked. At the same time, her overall vocabulary dropped by 20%. One fifth of her original vocabulary was simply no longer in use. After two years of running the data by statisticians, linguists and pathologists, Lancashire concluded that the data supported the view that by the writing of her 73rd novel, Christie had developed Alzheimer’s.

It’s a hard theory to test because Christie was never officially diagnosed. In fact, don’t writing styles change over time? Isn’t it possible that her editors and publisher wanted a simpler more accessible text to attract a younger demographic? We’ll never actually know, but there is a lot of good evidence to support the Alzheimer’s view. Christie often complained of an inability to concentrate in her later years, and friends reported that she would have fits of anger (an almost telltale sign of the disease) and that she sometimes wouldn’t make sense in conversation.

This isn’t the first time that linguistic research has been used to speculate about Alzheimer’s. In 2004 Peter Garrard, a cognitive scientist at University College London, found similar changes in the last book by British author Iris Murdoch. Shortly before his study was published, Murdoch was diagnosed.

In the “Nun Study” of 1990, David Snowdon of the University of Minnesota looked at the biographies of 678 nuns, all over the age of 75 that were written upon entering the order, when they were, on average, age 22. His team evaluated the essays based on grammatical complexity and idea density – the average number of discrete ideas contained in every 10 written words. What he found was that sisters who scored poorly on those two measures were much more likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Sisters within the lower third of the sample with respect to idea density were 60 times more likely to develop the disease than a sister in the upper third. In fact, using the essays, the researchers could predict with 92% accuracy whether the brain of a particular sister, investigated after her death, had been damaged by Alzheimer’s. What this is suggesting is that a writing taken in your early twenties may be able to predict what could happen to you fifty years later. But we don’t know exactly how. Do sentences with simpler ideas mean that a person, even in their early 20’s already has a less healthy brain than someone who uses rich sentences? Or does this mean that people who create idea dense sentences are stronger readers and writers and that this is what keeps the brain fit and healthy?

The cruel predicament that those who have Alzheimer’s are in is that as the brain deteriorates, one is left with just enough wherewithal to understand that something is being lost. It may sound silly, but I just turned 25 last month, and I seem to remember in earlier years having a much richer vocabulary, and I even remember typing nonstop for pages and never once making a mistake, where as now when I type this, I don’t go so much as a paragraph without struggling to find a more descriptive word, or going back to fix something underlined in orange. As a young, healthy woman, I can only begin to imagine the hell someone must go through when their brain is actually in physical decay.

In Christie’s 73rd novel, Elephants Can Remember the main character is a female novelist who is struggling with memory loss as she tries to help Hercule Poirot solve a long forgotten crime. Perhaps Christie needed to pen it to come to terms with what was happening in her internal world. When Lancashire read the book, he couldn’t help but see the tragic irony of the tale and imagine Christie fighting the terrain of her own mind. Of her continuing to write, he says, it “struck me as heroic."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127211884

As Your Brain Lays Dying

 It isn’t hard to find anecdotal accounts of Near Death Experiences (NDE). We can never know how many people imagine it, dream it or simply fake it, but what we do know is that something peculiar is happening in the brain upon its death.

Dr. Lakhmir Chawla of George Washington University used electroencephalograph (EEG), a device that measures brain activity, to monitor seven terminally ill patients. He did this to make sure that his patients, suffering from conditions such as cancer and heart failure were sedated enough to be out of pain. What he found, however was that moments before death, the patients experienced a burst in brainwave activity lasting from 30 seconds to three minutes, and this surge traveled slowly from one end of the brain to the other. As it turns out, upon death, a brain doesn’t simply stop, but rather it releases all of its energy in a cascade as it runs out of oxygen. After the surge runs its course, the patient is pronounced dead.

Doctors believe that this unusual surge of energy making its way through the brain as it dies, could account for the vivid and intense experiences reported by those who are literally brought back from the dead. Whether it is a bright light, a religious experience or the unshakable feeling of floating above ones body, a dying brain, releasing all of its energy would certainly account for some highly usual experiences.

This research, published in The Journal of Palliative Medicine is thought to be the first to suggest that Near Death Experiences have a particular physiological cause. Dr. Chawla, however, isn’t attempting to use his findings to disprove the idea of life after death, “Our findings do not really tell us anything about whether there is an afterlife or not. Even if these near death experiences turn out to be a purely biochemical event, there could still be a God.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7785944/A-cascade-of-brain-activity-as-people-die-could-explain-near-death-experiences.html