I've Got Summink to Say

Tag: mental-health

  • My Latest Compulsive Obsession

    WARNING: I am not a medical professional, scientist or nutritionist: please do not act on any of my posts carelessly if you suffer from any sort of diagnosed mental health condition without speaking to professionals first.

    I’m going to start this post with a link to a youtube video from Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University which touches on the topic of this post; Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

    If you find this post of any interest I recommend watching up to the point when he moves on to diabetes, it’s not so long and in my opinion Dr. Sapolsky is really quite brilliant and engaging.

    I started thinking about OCD because I can recognise traits of the disorder in myself, although I manage to reconcile myself with them in that they don’t seem to cause me any real harm. I am a bit of a hoarder, I have around 5,000 music CD’s, but then music is a big part of my life and may be related to the need for sensory stimulus stemming from being on the autistic spectrum and I collect art and ceramics which may also be linked.

    At first when watching Dr. Sapolsky I started wondering whether there was an evolutionary reason for human OCD and it seems a reasonable argument.

    My theory was that the OCD trait may be more prevalent in those people whose ancestors were either in occupations that required a lot of discipline and/or who lived in environments where survival itself was often precarious.

    Thinking about the ancestors I know about, on my father’s side there were small tenant farmers, a fairly long history of forces men and women and coal miners and servants. All occupations that would have needed and expected strong discipline.

    There is quite likely Jewish ancestry on my mother’s side although I don’t know of any obviously Jewish names as far back as I have gone, but once again this is a group which has often lived precariously as a minority amongst frequently hostile populations. That may have led to a desire to accumulate for safety and security – a way of buying yourself out of trouble if need be.

    But watching Dr. Sapolsky’s video he talks about religiosity and learned behaviour as being driven by the amygdala and I wondered, once again, whether there weren’t dietry changes which may help me control my impulsive tendency to accumulate things I know I don’t really need.

    A quick internet search revealed that the main neutoransmitters active in the amygdala are glutamate ones and inhibitory GAMA ones and the vitamin or vitamins that affect these: vitamin B6.

    That led me on to look for sources of vitamin B6 and I found the site below which is worth a look.

    30 Foods High In Vitamin B6 – Nutrition Advance

    I wonder then should I be eating more tuna or spinach and then see if I don’t have to buy that shirt in the charity shop that I never really needed in the first place.

  • Curioser and Curioser

    WARNING: I am not a medical practitioner, please do not take any action based on what you read here unless recommended by your doctor.

    I’ve perked up a bit tonight thankfully and feel I am having interesting thoughts again, whether they can also be considered intelligent is for those more knowledgeable than me to decide.

    I came round to writing this post after reading a couple of fellow bloggers’ posts about the Alice In Wonderland Syndrome that can affect migraine sufferers and thought how on its own it could be mistaken for the delusions common in schizophrenia. This is not the topic of tonight’s post but is related.

    While wondering whether there really was any merit in my theory of nutritional changes to help treat serious mental illness I started considering scientific articles I’d read that suggest both the flu and covid could lead to psychosis in some cases and also how an expectant mother who contracts flu during the first trimester of pregnancy may have a child more likely to develop serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

    Looking at the development of the organs during the first trimester all of the liver, kidneys and brain start to function near to the end.

    But then what if the mother contracts flu during this time? Could a combination of the resources the mother’s body needs to fight this infection coupled with the debilitating effects of being unable to function during this time end up starving the placenta and hence unborn baby of much needed nutrients for healthy brain development. It seems so.

    Maybe there is a lot more to the old saying “feed a fever, starve a cold” than there first appears.

    This all makes me wonder whether pregnant women should be having more frequent blood tests to check essential vitamin levels or regular tests for viral infection.

    I know I’m trying to teach the medical profession to suck eggs on this one but it was interesting to me to find out for myself with a bit of research.

  • Just Because You’re Paranoid…

    It’s not quite 4am here and having been put back on 40mg of Depixol I have found that I am getting increasingly stupid in thought, many of the things that I had great pleasure in reading and trying to understand, anthropology, philosophy, poetry, foreign languages, science are becoming a memory so this morning’s missive from the massive is more of a bitter rant at the injustice of it all and the corruption that permeates my life.

    In the previous incarnation of my blog I posted that I had been diagnosed as having autism spectrum disorder (whilst on remand in the psychiatric wing of Pentonville prison of all places) and given family history and my own understanding of myself it seems like a good assessment. At 53 I’m only so bothered about the diagnosis, I’ve got by this far one way or another but did want the diagnosis formalised simply because I am considering trying to return to work next year and can blame everything on myself without HR being able to do a damn thing about me.

    But this is where I come on to the main subject of my post: who the hell is out to get me?

    It sounds paranoid, particularly from someone who has spent time worrying that MI5 had taken an interest in them some years ago. On that front I would say that the reason for that was time I spent arguing the toss online over the Blair administration’s policy of mass open door immigration and multiculturalism which I never approved of, preferring a smaller, targeted immigration policy. The point is I appeared to occasionally have an appealing way with words and got picked up on and quoted by the conservative press (Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail). That is, my fears that I had come to authority attention were maybe not entirely without foundation.

    But on the other hand as far as I can see I’ve also led a largely blameless life, trying to get by the way I was brought up to, an ordinary day’s work, a trip to the pub after with friends and colleagues, none of whom were likely to have been any bother to anyone themselves.

    That brings me on to NELFT mental health services. Firstly I would say I truly regret trusting the NHS and psychiatry, they have ruined important years of my life and having ended up in a dispute with them at a time when they are under intense scrutiny for the parlous, sometimes fatal, standard of their care and their reputation for corruption, crime and cover ups I wonder whether once again they haven’t decided to far exceed their legal powers to brush me aside.

    For example a large amount of important paperwork from them has simply disappeared from my room as has my passport (I was exploring the possibility of leaving England to claim asylum elsewhere to escape the NHS). I will now have a far harder time proving many (but not all) of their lies and falsehoods, a number of which are criminal in nature.

    Also, although I am trying hard to like my new psychiatrist I’m not convinced she’s playing with an entirely straight bat and inconsistencies which stop being deniable if assessments are voice recorded are starting to crop up.

    I do not wish to take antipsychotic medication any more, when I got off it fully the hard way I was in fantastic mental and physical health, but fear there is an attempt at damage limitation, writing off the last two disastrous years as merely a medication problem whilst trying to hide the fact I never should have been on antipsychotics for any of the previous years.

    I’ve chosen paper mache

  • Smoking Sensation

    Please note: I am not a medical professional or nutritionist, these are only my own ideas. However, I’m willing to bet your Doctor would tell you it was fine to bite the head off a live bat if it stopped you smoking.

    I’ve been feeling generally a lot more positive lately and I am hoping to make it my new year’s resolution to quit smoking (I managed to quit for 14 years cold turkey when I was younger but eventually started again).

    Working with the knowledge that improvements in health and nutrition are vital in keeping the body’s hormones balanced I started thinking of a few changes that I could make to help which goes back to some of my earlier posts.

    I intend to also have nicotine replacement therapy to hand, I’ve found a couple of these effective in the past, particularly the mouth sprays and inhalators but if you want to try NRT find the one that suits you, there’s also patches and gum.

    But on to the dietary changes I think could help me bearing in mind that nicotine stimulates dopamine in the brain.

    Looking at the Nicotinell website the fruits and vegetables they are recommending are all summer fruits and vegetables. My theory (untested) is that these will lower dopamine and make quitting harder (I have a theory that dopamine and acetylcholine may work in opposition to each other to balance out).

    What to eat when quitting smoking | Nicotinell UK

    This is what I’m going to try then:

    To start the day with a strong coffee in the morning before breakfast and a couple of squirts on the mouth spray. A glass of orange juice after breakfast. A glass of orange juice after a lunch with winter veg, and some nuts in the evening. I intend to use the mouth spray as required and I’m certain positive thought will help, it’s known to.

    Of course it makes a lot of sense to listen to your body so if you crave an apple, eat one.

    You and I will just have to wait until at least February to see how I get on.

  • Food for Thought?

    WARNING: I am not a medical professional or nutritionist so please speak to either or both before stopping or starting any prescription medication.

    I said in my previous post I’d expand on my theory of the mind and body relationship and I intend to do this below as best I can.

    Having discovered that dopamine is produced in the gut and adrenal glands I started wondering what foods would help the body produce dopamine and which wouldn’t and the action of sunlight and vitamin D and nutrition in mental illness, both depression and mania/psychosis.

    First I looked for foods that are rich in dopamine producing compounds and here are some of the results:

    Lean protein, dairy, eggs, leafy greens and seeds, legumes and nuts

    My theory was eating more of these types of foods would help with the depression inherent in much mental illness, perhaps in conjunction with getting more natural sunlight and even vitamin D supplements.

    Then I wondered what foods were low in dopamine producing compounds for the mania/psychosis if someone is prone to mania/psychosis and found the following list:

    Beef, eggs broccoli, chicken, oily fish

    But the way I arrived at the second list was purely by chance when searching on a new drug treatment for schizophrenia which is a type of acetylcholine agonist which also suppresses dopamine which is what makes it work.

    The point is all of the foods in the second list are rich in cholene, a building block of acetylcholine.

    A lot of this is simply established science but what doesn’t seem to have been suggested before is changing the diet seasonally according to the traditional harvesting and availability of each type of food before mass importation out of season or based on the severity of symptoms, particularly in parts of the world with pronounced summers and winters.

    So my theory is it is better to eat more of the first list in winter and the second list in summer. Coupled with careful regulation of natural light, covering up in summer and getting out more on a fine winters day a diet based on traditional seasonality as well as good nutrition may help alleviate the worst symptoms of even the most serious mental illness.

    I won’t go into the reasons why I think we love a traditional British Christmas feast so much but it’s not just because mum made it.

    Robert David Jackson

  • Delusional or Deficient?

    WARNING: The below post is just my theory of the potential causes of mental illness based on the limited research I have done. If you suffer from any diagnosed mental health condition please speak to your health professional before acting on anything you have read in this post.

    I’ve been reading a lot about the hormone dopamine recently and its role in mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder and have come to the conclusion that it may be possible to alleviate or even cure altogether these illnesses with changes in diet and lifestyle or that mental illness may simply be the result of an underlying physical health condition or hormonal imbalance that could be treated without the use of powerful antipsychotics.

    Firstly I would state that I am convinced that dopamine, it’s excess or deficiency in the body is the cause of these illnesses having been placed on way too high a dose of antipsychotic medication for a couple of years.

    I also believe that dopamine may be a far more important hormone in the overall functioning of the body than currently seems to be considered.

    I’ll go into more detail and try to back up my argument with science.

    I first started with where in the body dopamine is synthesised, it seems obvious that if you have too much or too little the body is either producing too much or too little and I found two key areas: the gut and the kidneys or adrenal glands.

    Dopamine and the kidney – PubMed

    Role of Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis in Regulating Dopaminergic Signaling – PMC

    Knowing about seasonal affective disorder and the fact that this can be treated with sunshine and hence vitamin D I wondered whether bipolar disorder is also a seasonal illness and it appears that it often is.

    Bipolar Disorder Changes in Winter and Summer

    Then I wondered about vitamin D and what parts of the body it is produced in, and once again I found the adrenals via the liver, the adrenals are also where dopamine is synthesised.

    Vitamin D – Health Professional Fact Sheet

    Vitamin D: A potent regulator of dopaminergic neuron differentiation and function – PubMed

    And then I started thinking is schizophrenia just a different presentation of these illnesses, the symptoms of bipolar and schizophrenia are so similar that they may just be two presentations of the same imbalance in my opinion. Even seasonal affective disorder and psychotic depression are on this spectrum.

    So to make a brief conclusion, it seems possible that poor diet and nutrition and vitamin D and possibly a poorly functioning liver or kidneys may be behind the diagnoses of the most commonly recognised mental health conditions.

    In my next post I’ll go into what I think could help in terms of diet and lifestyle, not just eating healthily and living well, but eating the correct foods at the right time of year.

    Robert David Jackson