Six Ways to Heal the Holes in Your Head


Do you ever feel like you have holes in your head? Actually, you do. Ventricles are the spaces between the grey matter (brain cells) and white matter (wiring that connects the brain cells) in your brain. Depressive episodes, manic episodes, and psychosis all burn up brain tissue, leading to bigger ventricles. (Image: Effects of Western diet on the brain. See companion image, Effects of Mediterranean diet below.)

This loss of brain cells hits the hippocampus (in charge of memory and emotion regulation) particularly hard. In the early years after my last mental health crisis, I talked about my “Swiss cheese brain.” At my worst, I lost bills, I lost words, I lost everything my wife said to me on the way out the door in the morning. She took to writing down what I said I would do before she got home, never more than two items.

I lost the list.

New Year's Resolution - Eat Chocolate! Or Maybe Not...

Long time readers may know of my over-a-decade-long effort to get the sugar monkey off my back. I can report that I am reasonably  successful. I don't know if it has made an ongoing difference to my mood. But a shared dessert at a restaurant will get my arthritic shoulder burning. So I keep it up.

Or maybe I have taken it too far. It's all about costs and benefits, you know. And recent research suggests maybe I should lighten up, or rather, darken up.

Chris Aiken of Bipolar Not So Much fame, also Wake Forest University School of Medicine and The Carlat Psychiatry Report, says to my sugar fast, Not so fast. At least as far as dark chocolate goes.

In the Bleak Midwinter

For Prozac Monologues readers whatever your state this holiday.



In the bleak mid-winter frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter long ago.


Bohemian Chanukah

A great miracle happened there.

 

Happy Hanukkah to all Prozac Monologues readers.
Let the light shine!

Holiday Shopping for True Happiness

Last minute holiday shopping -- I shop later and later every year. I even blog about it later each year. This year I have to do three  blogs in the week to get my shopping guides for the perfect Chanukah/Kwanzaa/Christmas present done. Here is the link for if you are mentally interesting and shopping for the normal in your life, here is if you are shopping for your diagnosed friend.  The second is even diagnosis specific. The most popular pick turns out to be a bluetooth phone for the one who talks back to his/her voices, but is trying to pass. Who knew.

But less than a week, people. Internet.  God bless the internet.

Another year I wrote a post on happiness. This post's holiday shopping picks (a updated rerun from 2011) gets to the heart of it -- where to get what makes for true happiness on the internet.  No, really!

Holiday Shopping - The Mentally Interesting Version

From December, 2009:

A friend once described what it was like to have cancer. Like having a paper bag over your head, you can't see anything outside the bag. It's all about you and your cancer.

Mental illness can be like that. Try it yourself. Put a bag over your head. Make sure it's not plastic! Do you even notice a difference? Our issues can be all consuming, our fears, doubts, grief, hysteria, voices... We lose track of the world outside our paper bag.

But outside that bag are friends, family, allies. There are more of them, and they are truer to us than we can imagine when we are inside that paper bag. The bag, our absorption in our own concerns, makes certain life skills difficult.


Like holiday shopping.

Holiday Shopping for Your Diagnosed Someone

Black Friday, the traditional start of the Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa shopping season has left us in the dust. Are you still wondering what to get for your neuro-diverse friend or relation? Here is Prozac Monologues' attempt ever to be helpful to my dear readers.  As my therapist said, Virgo -- your destiny is service.  Get used to it.  (I once had a therapist who said stuff like that.) The following is a holiday shopping list to guide neuro-typicals who want to please their loved ones.

This is a repost from ten years ago. So the pricetags have probably changed. But the links have been checked.

Crazy Meds can be your one stop shopping for Straight Jacket T-shirts, when you're crazy enough to let your medication do the talking, with a range of messages for any diagnosis, medication or level of in your face. The lettering is made by arranging real medication capsules for that homemade, from the heart touch. If you are shopping for me, medium size, long-sleeved, and black, of course.  My favorite message: Bat Shit Crazy.  In three years nobody ever took the hint, so I finally bought it myself.  If you are shopping for me, today I'll go with Mentally Interesting.  I'm still into black, and still refusing antipsychotics, so still a medium.

The following gift suggestions are targeted to differential diagnoses.

Popular Posts