I've Got Summink to Say

Tag: mental-illness

  • 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.