End of Year Musings

I’m away for a week so won’t be posting for a while. A few loose ends here.

As noted previously, the amygdala is becoming a topic of enduring news interest. It even made the front page of wordpress.com today, right at the top reporting on a Time item about its correlation with sociability. (Neurocritic has a good analysis of the sociability-amygdala link, which also serves as a general approach to reporting of brain science).The Guardian had a story yesterday correlating the amygdala with political propensities:

An experiment has found differences between the brains of progressives and conservatives.

Head scans of students at University College London, conducted by neuroscientist Geraint Rees, showed a “strong correlation” between thickness in two regions, the amygdala and the anterior cingulate, and political viewpoint.

Now, I hope it can be inferred from my posts that I have a lively interest in neuroscience and this will be ongoing. It’s where I place the interest within a wider scheme of things that I shall begin to develop. The now unmistakable shifts within culture  require attention to basic concepts and attributes connected with thought feeling, emotions, unhappiness, epistemology and also, I think, politics and economics.

I’m not ‘antipsychiatry’, not completely so anyway, but believe I’m in a relatively fortunate position which enables me to make relatively informed decisions about risk assessment, benefits and drawbacks of medication and so forth – this in a broader understanding of my ‘depression’ which sees the welcomed interventions of chemicals into mood control also as relative to a much deeper reflection upon my condition. I’m hoping in six weeks to reduce then cease my antidepressant regime, for instance, based upon a careful consideration of many factors.

One of these factors is that medications are extremely non-specific in their effect. They do not produce a ‘steady state’ mood or equilibrium, some elysium sense of wellbeing and peace: they may at times increase negative feelings, particularly anxiety,uncomfortable  hyperactivity, and unpleasant sleep disturbances.

The non-specificity has wider implications. Nobody at all understands the complex interactions of introduced chemicals into the myriad ocean of neurochemistry. Researchers have by and large ignored or barely begun to address the relationship between biochemistry and other discourses of mind – everything from the sociological gamut of material environment to the traditional descriptive analyses of psychology; then too the existential questions. These discourses, far too rich to begin to tabulate, in fact inform the history of western culture, and I think it suffices to say that for me if I want to focus sharply upon the nature of mind identity problems I’ll turn to philosophy and  some theology . More broadly I’ll look to the arts and existential philosophy, therapy and introspection.

In my post about Therapy Culture, I was trying to suggest the ways in which we have become most prone to framing our internal states and our relationships, our sense of being in the world alone and with others, in ‘medicalised’ conceptual paradigms. (Psychiatry itself, of course, is so medicalised in its current dominant discourses). Certainly such framing is in part a refraction of a rapidly growing enculturation of technological and materialistic frames of reference for explaining the human condition. As encultured beings we cannot not be subjectively unaffected by such cultural movements, although we can still react, respond, modify, resist insofar as we may still hold to a belief in a relative subjective autonomy.

It has suited me to accept a diagnosis of ‘bipolar’, even though, as I have said before, both my depression and elevated moods seem to me so mild contrasted with what I have encountered personally of psychotically depressed or manic individuals. But the other non-specificity of medication is that, contrary to the ever-increasing classified ‘conditions’ targeted by pharmaceuticals and the DSM-V, one drug seems to work (or not work) across a range of “illnesses”. There is a very good article by Edward Shorter, Professor of History of Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Toronto in the Wall Street Journal which looks at some of the implications of changing diagnoses. One paragraph suggests a little of the point being made:

Major depression became the big new diagnosis in the 1980s and after, replacing “neurotic depression” and “melancholia,” even though it combined melancholic illness and non-melancholic illness. This would be like incorporating tuberculosis and mumps into the same diagnosis, simply because they are both infectious diseases. As well, “bipolar disorder” began its relentless on-march, supposedly separate from plain old depression.

Well, yes. I sometimes think half the people I meet these days are telling me of their recent diagnosis as bipolar. Many seem to wear it as a badge of pride (that is, separately from the exhibiting of ‘illness behaviour’ as an excuse for withdrawal and refusal of reponsibility). Certainly, in the cultural mazeways of the present some diagnoses do seem to carry a certain chic cool. (The tortured artist/genius prototype I shall look at elsewhere in some detail: I believe there are factors to do with exceptional creativity and intellect that relate to ‘mental illness’ – but then again, this is true too of factors in poverty, oppression, exclusion, and so on; in any case, there are separate issues connected with adopting a ‘style’ from a cultural semiosis to advertise the facade of a tortured soul).

In my own case, I rarely think about elevated moods. For most of the past twelve years I was treated for depression. Only when I mentioned some episodes of anger ( not acted out, but thought and felt) was I awarded the label of bipolar. Funny that, since it used to be said as an axiom that depression was anger turned inwards.

Anyway, thanks for bearing with me. I’ve been in a period of intellectual activity now for five days; before that I was slumped before the television watching Hitchock movies and eating chocolate. It was the Christmas period! Sounds pretty normal to me.

Happy New Year.