WE ARE NOT ALONE: POTS hits COVID patients, who get same response we do: dismissal, anti-d’s, anxiety drugs, and “…ALL IN YOUR HEAD…”

[Hip]

so she did receive a barage of "hate" mails? so what, who cares? if i do get garbage emails i delete them. its just that simple.

Well you must have incredibly thick skin, because many people are badly affected by hate mail. In Britain, we have teenagers who commit suicide because of nasty comments posted about them on social media by other kids from school. That's just nasty comments, not even death threats.

The police in Britain take death threats very seriously, they will always fully investigate.

You may pride yourself on being tough, but that may just be your personality (or so you claim to be tough, but until you are in a situation of receiving actual death threats, you can only speculate on how you might handle it).

Other people may be far more sensitive. Psychologists and psychiatrists like Wessely are usually sensitive types anyway, so will likely suffer much more stress and fear from a death threats.

The young female prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, recently resigned, citing burnout as the reason for stepping down. But one factor that apparently played into her decision to resign was the barrage of death threats she received during the pandemic from antivaxers and people against masks and lockdowns. Some were not just threats, but actual attempts at harm. That creates chronic psychological stress, which is bad for the body and the mind.

That's the purpose of deaths: to scare people, to make them worry about their safety and the safety of their family. It has a chilling effect.

because the "threats" are actually not threats but just people venting off

That is often the case, it is people venting off, with no intention to kill anyone. But the receiver of the death threat does not know whether it is just venting off, or a real threat. You don't know who the person who sent the threat, you do not know what they look like, you do not know if they are mentally sound, or an insane or unhinged person. It's often the mentally unhinged who may actually carry out their threats.

btw i also got so called "death threats"... some vicious hateful comments on the internet. you know what i did?

Hate mail is not the same as a death threat. If you get into an argument online, then someone may call you a dickhead or whatever, but that's not the same as receiving specific statements that someone is planning to harm or kill you.

 

[linusbert]

Well you must have incredibly thick skin, because many people are badly affected by hate mail. In Britain, we have teenagers who commit suicide because of nasty comments posted about them on social media by other kids from school. That's just nasty comments, not even death threats.

you are comparing adult scientists vs. teeenage kids?
well i agree! thats exactly how those people behave.

no i have thin skin. never been a tough guy. actually i am a pussy.
but i dont care what a random faceless person (or bot) has to say about me in the internet.
i did get wishes of ill sickness so that i die painfully... so i guess the person gots it wish... i used to hear this especially in online games back in the day when i was playing online games. people tend to go a bit sour when they loose a random team match. thats were the mute button comes into play.

no i do not believe them at all. i do not believe they are in fear. i do not believe that they got actual real death threats. i believe they just play the victim card.
and british instituations and system is crazy. its worse than germany. they completely lost it!
i do not take the police and what they believe DTs are serious.

why not reveal it? they shall show the evidence. shouldnt be to hard.

The young female prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, recently resigned, citing burnout as the reason for stepping down. But one factor that apparently played into her decision to resign was the barraged of death threats she received during the pandemic from antivaxers and people against masks and lockdowns. Some were not just threats, but actual attempts at harm. That creates psychological stress.

rightfully she resigned. she gets my respect for this decision. as she seamed to understand and take responsibility of the fact that she is absolutely not fit for this job.
head of countries always get death threats. its normal. if you cannot handle it. step back. get different job.
but i do not believe her either, because usually they have staff who sort this kinda material out.


you should not compare politicians and scientistis who should be able to cope with this against normal people.
if my sister who works in kindergarden gets a death threat and is down i would evaluate this differently than if head of state gets it.
this is comparison of coconuts to peaches...

if you go out in the public, if you become celebrity, politician whatever. post things in the internet. the crazy people come. always. its just a question of numbers. thats why i never want to be any public figure.
i bet that even ghandi got nasty things thrown at him.


(just to be clear, even for those assbutts i am not for hate mail or DTs. definitely no supporter of this behaviour. its nasty and not helpful and gives some people a chance to play victim and capitalize out of it)

 

[YippeeKi YOW !!]

POTS patients are not being told "it's all in your head". There is no orchestrated campaign to cast POTS as either a psychosomatic or somatoform condition, as there was with ME/CFS.

Doctors are not actually telling POTS patients that POTS is "all in their head". POTS is not a new target for psychologisation.

Dr’s have learned, after the successful preosecution of malpractice lawsuits, that blaming the patient and telling them that an illness is “ …. all in their heads …” can be an open door for a successful patient’s legal complaint. So instead, they prescribe numerous, and often devastatingly damaging and at the very least totally useless and ineffective prescriptions for mental illness issues, like depression and anxiety.

So the actual words aren’t spoken, but the direction the Dr takes in “treating” the patient’s illness and complaints as well as the medications he prescribes for them in that treatment are a strong indicator of his opinion that it’s “ …. all in their heads….”.

You wouldn’t, for example, prescribe anti-ds and anti anxiety meds to a patient with a broken arm. You’d prescribe an orthopedist.

What I think scared Wessely is that he knows many ME/CFS patients have unstable mental health,

This clarifies your stance on this issue beyond anything I can add.

 

[YippeeKi YOW !!]

this is actually a step forward. they acknowledge they do not know.

While I genuinely like your interpretation, sadly, this is often just a more legally defendable way of saying “ ….. this is a potential head case … we don’t know how to treat it because it doesn’t exist ….”

 

[Hip]

This clarifies your stance on this issue beyond anything I can add.”

My stance is to be guided by the established scientific facts, unusual as that might be these days. Anyone who denies the well-studied fact that ME/CFS patients have a lot of psychiatric comorbidities has clearly not read any of the published papers on this subject.

So instead, they prescribe numerous, and often devastatingly damaging and at the very least totally useless and ineffective prescriptions for mental illness issues, like depression and anxiety.

That statement is wrong. Mental health drugs are not in general "devastatingly damaging", and neither are they "totally useless".

Drugs for mental illness are lifesavers, and greatly alleviate human suffering. The drugs are not perfect, and may not fully eliminate your mental symptoms, and can have side effects, but they are often very helpful.

Sure, if the patient does not have anxiety but has POTS, then in some cases anti-anxiety drugs may not be appropriate. But some drugs which treat anxiety are also effective for POTS, such as SSRIs.

 

[cheeseater]

Similar to what Jyoti reports, my blood pressure will rise to unhealthy levels over time if I do not supplement modestly with potassium.

 

[linusbert]

My stance is to be guided by the established scientific facts, unusual as that might be these days. Anyone who denies the well-studied fact that ME/CFS patients have a lot of psychiatric comorbidities has clearly not read any of the published papers on this subject.

i deny the fact of questionaire studies payed by the same system which also claimed lobotomy is helpful against depression and radium containing tonics are a helpful treatment for anything.

 

[Hip]

i deny the fact of questionaire studies

Are you seriously trying to deny the fact that ME/CFS patients often have mental health issues? How long have you been reading about ME/CFS? Because such stories are found throughout ME/CFS forums.

Put into the Phoenix Rising search box words like "anxiety", "panic attacks", "depression", "anhedonia", "derealisation", "depersonalisation", etc and see the patient's own accounts of their suffering from such horrible symptoms.


It's well known that psychiatric symptoms can appear in neurological diseases, including multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, ALS, etc. So given ME/CFS is classed as neurological, you would expect there might be mental health issues. The mind is created by the physical brain, so if there are neurological issues in the brain due to the physical disease of ME/CFS, it's not surprising that mental symptoms might appear as a result.

The Canadian consensus criteria of ME/CFS describe a whole raft of mental symptoms that are common in ME/CFS, including anxiety, panic attacks, depression, emotional lability, emotional hypersensitivity, blunted emotions.

You can ask any patient on this forum whether they suffer these, and you will find many do.



Denying that mental symptoms exist in ME/CFS is to ignore the horrible suffering that many ME/CFS patients go through because of these symptoms.

For me, my various mental health symptoms (which were triggered by the same virus that triggered my ME/CFS) are far worse than my ME/CFS symptoms. I don't find my ME/CFS symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, PEM, IBS, etc cause me much direct suffering.

By my mental health symptoms such as depression, anhedonia, blunted emotions, anxiety, stress sensitivity, some very mild psychosis on some days, are really very hard to live with.

 

[YippeeKi YOW !!]

By my mental health symptoms such as depression, anhedonia, blunted emotions, anxiety, stress sensitivity, some very mild psychosis on some days, are really very hard to live with.

Those are some fearsome dragons to slay Hip, and a genuine, profound misery to live with ....

I agree, those would be at least as bad as ME to have to deal with on a daily basis, and in so many ways, much, much worse ....

Have you found anything that ameliorates them at all?

 

[Hip]

Have you found anything that ameliorates them at all?

Nothing that works universally, unfortunately, but I have found some treatments that alleviate each mental condition individually. Sometimes in the form of supplements, sometimes in the form of pharmaceutical drugs for mental health.

It took me a long time though to figure out the names of the mental conditions I was suffering from. I should have gone to a psychiatrist for help with this, but I tried to figure it out for myself.

Once you can pin the correct label onto your mental symptoms, you can then look to see what treatments are available. But it can take a while to figure out what you have. Even the professionals often struggle to accurately label a patient's mental symptoms, because psychiatric diagnosis is not easy.


The rubicon that you don't want to cross in mental health is the psychosis rubicon. Whereas when you have mental health issues like say anxiety, panic attacks and depression, they can cause terrible misery, but at least you feel that you are still fundamentally sane, just suffering.

But once you are hit with psychosis symptoms, you start to enter territory where you no longer feel sane. Lucky I only have a mild touch of psychosis, I don't get any delusions, hallucinations, or anything like that, but even my mild symptoms are horribly disconcerting on the days they appear. Your grip on reality slips, and you find it hard to interpret the everyday world, which is the most horrible feeling.

It took me many years to pin the "psychosis" label onto these mental symptoms I was having, but once I did, and once started looking for treatments, I found that very low doses of the safer third generation antipsychotics took the edge off these symptoms.

Antipsychotics have some the highest risk of serious adverse effects (like triggering diabetes), but you have to balance that against the suffering you are experiencing.

Interestingly, the antipsychotic drug I take, amisulpride, has a really natural feel to it, unlike some drugs I have tried, and also provides mood boost, reduces my ME/CFS sound sensitivity, and improves my ME/CFS irritability symptoms. So that drug was a Godsend, as it helped with several symptoms.

I also found a number of supplements work quite well to reduce my mild psychosis, most notably N-acetyl cysteine. So much of the time these days I don't get the psychosis symptoms, because my treatment keeps them at bay.


When I am experimenting with new supplements and drugs, I find many can make my mental symptoms worse, because it seems I am rather sensitive to mental side effects.

For example, I once took an SSRI (citalopram) to see if it would help my depression, and within an hour or so of taking just one pill, it plunged me into a horrendously worsened depression. Thankfully it wore off after 24 hours, but that was one hellish 24 hours. So now I am wary of SSRIs, although I have only really tried one drug in this class.

But I would not cast aspersions on SSRIs, as they work well for many people, both for depression and anxiety. Though they occasionally seem to be linked to suicide when given to depressed teens, perhaps because these teenagers experience something like I did, a paradoxical worsening rather than an improvement in depression.

I've tried a number of other drugs for depression, including the TCA class, which I get on OK with, though the mood boost does not quite feel natural. And MAOIs are good for me too, and provide a more natural elevation of mood.

On the supplement side, saffron works reasonably well for me (several studies have shown it to be as effective as antidepressant drugs), and I often use this as an antidepressant.


I find my mental symptoms seem to come and go, and on any one day, I can be hit with one or more of them. So I often find myself "firefighting" the particular mental symptoms I have been hit with on the day, by throwing the appropriate supplements and drugs down my throat.

 

[YippeeKi YOW !!]

But I would not cast aspersions on SSRIs, as they work well for many people, both for depression and anxiety.

I agree that anti-d's, whether SSRIs, SNRIs, TCAs, MAOIs or whatever they come up with next, can definitely be lifesavers, as they've been for you, in cases of entrenched depressive responses, particularly when accompanied by mental health co-morbidities. as they are in your case.

But even then. they're not for everyone, and research has proven them to be more potently problematic than helpful in many, many, even most, cases.

Again, this is not disputing the incredible help they've been for you, and for others who have genuine issues that need strong intervention to relieve suffering ....


"HEY, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU, BUT HERE'S AN ANTI-D .... NEXT PLEASE"
Where I take issue is with everyone from dermatologists to PCPs handing them out for everything that crosses their threshold, usually as a fob-off to patients whose illnesses they just don't understand, or believe, or want to investigate further. Because in medicine today more than anywhere else, time is money.

This blanket, mass prescribing is particularly dangerous, because even psychiatrists, if they're honest, admit that they have no idea how they actually work on the brain (the ridiculous and infantile story that they restore 'balance' in various neurotransmitters has been laughed out of the room and then disproven by research), but that in some cases, they really really do work.

It's why there's so much trial and error when you're prescribed an anti-d .... they have no idea how it works, how it alters the brain, that it fiddles with, or how it does that fiddling, They just know that, if they dont kill the patient first, small miracles can be worked when they hit on the right one ...

But NOT in your case. For you, it truly was a miracle, and I'm so glad that you were one of the lucky ones who found The Grail ....


"OOPS .... THAT'S .... UH .... NOT MY FAULT...."

Though they occasionally seem to be linked to suicide when given to depressed teens,

Not just to depressed teens. To moderately-to-severely depressed adults, too. Citalopram especially has been linked to an enormous number of non-age dependent suicide attempts and actual suicides, to the point where informed and ethical Drs wont prescribe it any more, unless they've tried everything else and nothing's worked.

I find my mental symptoms seem to come and go, and on any one day, I can be hit with one or more of them

Oh Hip, that's sooooooooooo hard to live with. Added to ME, it makes for daily hurdles of megalithic proportions, and again, I'm so glad that you found the answer that works for you.

By the bye, be grateful that you didnt go to a psychiatrist, you could well have wound up psyched once the psychosis had been established. And by and large, psychiatrists are the most egregious violators of the "First, do no harm ..." principle. They love to experiment, to see what this one will do when paired with that one and then magnified with this other thingy here, and they can be truly dangerous.

Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist himself, and deeply opposed to the over- and careless prescribing of psychiatic drugs, has stated categorically that there's no more dangerous thing any adult can do than walk into a psychiatrist's office.

And finally, this ....

“If you look at the number of patients who experience an increased risk of dying, committing suicide, going to hospital or otherwise come to serious harm, it appears that SSRIs increase the risk of these severe adverse events,” says Jakobsen (in ScienceNordic)

 

[YippeeKi YOW !!]

@Hip

Here's a link to a research paper I found that might be of interest as a possible adunct ....

Probiotics Alter Structural Integrity In The Brain, Reducing Depressive Episodes
https://forums.phoenixrising.me/thr...the-brain-reducing-depressive-episodes.89618/

 

[linusbert]

Are you seriously trying to deny the fact that ME/CFS patients often have mental health issues? How long have you been reading about ME/CFS? Because such stories are found throughout ME/CFS forums.

there is a difference between beeing mentally ill + having CFS as comorbidity AND being healthy, becoming chronic sick in life and out of this hell this person develops depressions, anxiety etc.
of course chronic sickness turns mental health around. but it doesnt make people killers nor does it make people suddenly psychosomatic nor does under any circumstance the later acquired mental issues somehow explain the origin of the sickness!
if people need to make a study that proofs that chronic sick people become mentally broken... this is a waste of money and time. everybody knows this. sustained suffering makes people depressed, absolutely normal!

but all this sCieNcE does is turn this around, trying to correlate cause of cfs to mental issues like mental people become cfs more often.. therefore it has some psycho origins.
this rEsEaRcH is coming from people who for like 5 decades are not able to bring anything usful to the people. even faking outcome of studies or interpreting it wrong. most of this comes from questionaire studies which are easily manipulated anyways.
it has shown multiple times that these studies are not valid or even dangerous.

the fact that chronic sick people have some mental issues due to their suffering is absolutely irrelevant for any discussion. the idea that chronic sick people somehow become potential killers - more often than general population - is outrageous.
its not even true for most mental diseases (without chronic sickness).

so yes, i deny the sCienCe of a medical community which was wrong so many times and still continues to be and is heavily financed by certain lobby groups which certainly do not have the patients health at heart.

 

[YippeeKi YOW !!]

there is a difference between beeing mentally ill + having CFS as comorbidity AND being healthy, becoming chronic sick in life and out of this hell this person develops depressions, anxiety etc.

YES !!!! THAT !!! EXACTLY !!!

I felt that I'd already gone on and on about psych meds etc above, and that I should just shut up already, but what I'd also wanted to add was that I don't regard depression, anxiety, and NORMAL responses to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as mental illnesses, and I deeply believe that the only reason they've become labeled as such is because by calling them "illnesses", mental or otherwise, the doors swing open for the medical community to rake in god-awful amounts of money prescribing exactly the drugs that so many in this community have been battered with.

I don't include the handful of members who have benefited from them and there are a few. A very few. And I'm grateful that those medications exist for those whose lives can be hugely improved by them.


BUT REACTING TO PROTRACTEDLY PAINFUL, SHITTY, FRIGHTENING THINGS WITH ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION IS. NOT. MENTAL. ILLNESS.
It is the rational response to being repeatedly battered and beaten and exhausted by it all, and not being able to always grope and claw our way to the High Road.

And treating it as a "mental illness" marginalizes another whole swathe of humanity, and misleads and damages yet another.

But BigPharm smiles all the way to the bank. And the emergency room. And the morgue .....

And the beat goes on .....


It's the rational reaction by the human mind and psyche to truly depressing, dismal, anxiety-producing things. To respond any other way would be ... bizarre ...
It's the human way to cope with the horrors that are thrown at us, over and over and over and over, until we have nothing left. At which time, if you don't react with depression and anxiety and sleeplessness, etc, you're not human, at least not in any sense that I understand 'human' to be.



EDIT ....I'm deeply fatigued and my brain's not at it's best. I've tried to express clearly what I mean, but not sure I've accomplished that ....

 

[Jyoti]

BUT REACTING TO PROTRACTEDLY PAINFUL, SHITTY, FRIGHTENING THINGS WITH ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION IS. NOT. MENTAL. ILLNESS.
It is the rational response to being repeatedly battered and beaten and exhausted by it all, and not being able to always grope and claw our way to the High Road.

THIS!

It is rational, as you say @Yippee and I would go further to add that it is actually HEALTHY. We have emotional lives for what I can only assume is a myriad of reasons, but ..... we have them. And they are not intended--we are not intended--to 'just be happy.' Animals other than humans grieve, and we understand the importance of that process. Though the American Psychiatric Association in the DMV-5 has now made 'prolonged' grief a (billable) psychiatric disorder in their wisdom.

But...can you imagine a battlefield of happy soldiers slaughtering one another? Jollying off back to base if they survived, burying their comrades with laughter and joy? We feel despair and distress in the face of things that are wrong, painful, frightening, and that is a really good thing.

Which just speaks, once again, to the importance of discernment and clarity on the part of those shepherding our various health needs and the prescription pads in their possession. When crippling despair and distress are felt in the context of a relatively secure and comfortable life, then some care and cure is needed. What that should be is debatable, but we are talking about something that is not anchored in external (or physiological) circumstances.

When despair and distress are the result of events or situations in our lives, we may still need support, but it seems to me that the key would lie in providing assistance in processing and rebalancing in relation to those situations. I think of a number of settings that do this--there are clinics for people with particular diseases (not ours) that provide wrap-around services, understanding, for instance, that someone with ALS will need a neurologist, a GI specialist, a speech therapist, an OT, a PT, a psychotherapist, a home-care team, pastoral counseling, a nutritionist--and ensuring that the patient has access to them all.

The core of that model, though, sees a physiological illness that impacts all aspects of the person's life and responds from that underpinning. It would be great if people with ME/CFS or POTS (as per this thread's initiation) had resources like this. If instead of deciding that my extreme tachycardia is caused by anxiety, I (and all of us) could be met with the understanding that having your heart race (and we know what I mean, here when I say 'race') every time you stand up to pee, IS a threat to one's well-being, and emotionally, and we are going to appropriately respond to that with some fear or over time, anxiety.

In fact, recently I was working with some adjacent brain-training ideas. Just messing around a little. My heart rate was high, and because I have POTS I know it will go up when I am up and down when I go back down. So I decided to just ride the waves of the tachycardia for a tiny bit one day, reminding myself that this happens all the time, I am safe, etc. And so I proceeded with whatever it was I was doing and ignored the warning from my body. I ended up crashing (of course) and dropping my functional level. My body was sending those signals for a a reason--to protect me--and I really hate the idea that in listening to them, we get labeled as having a psychological or emotional problem.

In closing, I guess I'd add that in my experience a lot of doctors do not have the wherewithal, the skill, the emotional maturity to be able to confront their own helplessness. And so ....they do something in order to feel better themselves, without a lot of regard as to what good it does or does not do for their patients. And the truth is--they do not have all the answers. ( ) They can't fix us yet. Be nice if medical schools incorporated some training for fledgling doctors in how to handle their own insecurities without harming patients. .

 

[Hip]

there is a difference between beeing mentally ill + having CFS as comorbidity AND being healthy, becoming chronic sick in life and out of this hell this person develops depressions, anxiety etc.

I always find such statements (which are common amongst inexperienced ME/CFS patients) somewhat illogical.

On the one hand, ME/CFS patients assert that their ME/CFS is a biological disease causes by physical factors, not psychological factors. And I strongly agree with this view.

ME/CFS in its Canadian consensus criteria description includes mental symptoms, such emotional blunting, emotional instability, and of course brain fog. But most ME/CFS patients believe these mental symptoms are caused by physical factors affecting the brain. Which I think is correct.

But then on the other hand, you often find inexperienced ME/CFS patients stating that their depression, anxiety, etc are psychologically-caused, due to the life circumstances of ME/CFS.


You'd think that of all people, ME/CFS patients would realise that mental symptoms can have physical causes.

I think the idea that symptoms such as anxiety are due to the life circumstances of ME/CFS patients is nonsense.

I developed moderate to severe anxiety after a virus infected my brain, and caused some significant brain damage. My anxiety was nothing to do with life circumstances, and everything to do with physical effects in the brain.


Anxiety has been linked to high levels of glutamate in the anxiety circuits of the brain (such as the amygdala). Glutamate is like the volume control on neurons, and amplifies their response. Not surprising then that high glutamate in the amygdala might lead to the anxiety circuits being constantly over-activated.

It's well know that during brain inflammation (which can be caused by a chronic low-level viral brain infection), the immune system pumps out lots of glutamate as it fights the virus. So in this way, viral infection could explain anxiety symptoms in ME/CFS patients. That's a physical cause, not a psychological cause.

Personally I believe that nearly all mental health conditions have physical causes in the brain, rather than causes based on adverse life circumstances.

Once you develop something like anxiety due to physical factors in the brain, then you become very sensitive to stressors. So life stressors can hit you much more strongly. But it is not the stressors that cause anxiety disorder, rather it is often the underlying physical factors in the brain.

the idea that chronic sick people somehow become potential killers - more often than general population - is outrageous.

That's an extremely odd way of looking at mental health: equating mental ill health with murderers! Talk about insulting those with mental health.

Mental ill health is very common in the general population. About 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health issue each year. These people do not become killers.

 

[hapl808]

I think the idea that symptoms such as anxiety are due to the life circumstances of ME/CFS patients is nonsense.

For disorders that we know little about (anxiety, ME/CFS, most mental illness), I hesitate at calling anything nonsense. Many of us are 'experienced' ME/CFS patients with decades of history, and we all probably have our own viewpoints. We're all still looking for answers.

The idea that emotional symptoms might be connected to life circumstances doesn't sound like nonsense to me? Much of the field of psychology focuses on various trauma or experiences leading to psychological outcomes. Maybe people develop certain personalities and attachment styles because of viral infections in childhood and narcissistic parents have zero effect, but we really can't say definitively in a field that isn't definitive.

And the idea that emotional symptoms might be connected to physiological components also doesn't sound like nonsense to me. My mental state during a PEM crash feels very different. I think many people have experienced changes in emotional state after infections and such.

I'm really not sure making binary semantic distinctions is particularly helpful. Anything that can help any of my symptoms is a good thing, but I've found few things that do. The rest is just guesswork and theories - nobody has any answers.

 

[Hip]

But even then. they're not for everyone, and research has proven them to be more potently problematic than helpful in many, many, even most, cases.

Again, this is not disputing the incredible help they've been for you, and for others who have genuine issues that need strong intervention to relieve suffering ....

Major depression is a very serious disease. You are 25 times more likely to commit suicide if you are depressed, and 50% of all suicides involve depression.

Not treating depression is thus an extremely risky approach for the patient.


Antidepressant drugs often have significant side effects. In the case of SSRIs, emotional blunting and sexual dysfunction are common. But you have to balance that against the fact that the patient lives in such abject mystery with their depression that they may well commit suicide.


I know a terrible story of a scientifically uneducated acquaintance of mine with pharmacophobia: an irrational fear and negative attitude towards medical drugs. A friend of his was suffering from depression and significant anxiety, and his doctor prescribed SSRI. But my pharmacophobic acquaintance put the fear or God into his friend, telling him that drugs would totally destroy his body.

So instead of taking SSRIs, he decided to self-medicate his anxiety using heroin. Of course it was highly effective. But eventually he became a full-fledged heroin addict, who now has a career as a thief in order to fund his habit. All because of pharmacophobia.

I don't regard depression, anxiety, and NORMAL responses to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as mental illnesses,

Lots of psychiatrists and psychologists would agree that mental illness is cause by adverse life events (they would, because they make lots of money from giving you expensive talk therapies, which have never once cured a serious mental illness).

The view that mental illness is cause by adverse life events is damaging to mental health research. We need to look into the physical brain for causes of mental symptoms, not some Freudian nonsense about you parents causing all your problems.

Some conditions like depression and PTSD can be causes by adverse life events, sure. But often even these conditions are part psychologically caused, part physically caused. For example, those with the underlying condition of ADHD are much more at risk for PTSD arising from an adverse life event.

And on the battlefield, PTSD has more recently been linked to microscopic brain damage from the shockwaves of nearly explosions. This shockwave effect likely explains "shell shock" from WW1 as well.

 

[Hip]

For disorders that we know little about (anxiety, ME/CFS, most mental illness), I hesitate at calling anything nonsense. Many of us are 'experienced' ME/CFS patients with decades of history, and we all probably have our own viewpoints. We're all still looking for answers.

The idea that emotional symptoms might be connected to life circumstances doesn't sound like nonsense to me? Much of the field of psychology focuses on various trauma or experiences leading to psychological outcomes.

I know "nonsense" is a strong word, but I think there is a hell of a lot of mental health suffering out there which we are nowhere near addressing (apart from the Band Aids of mental health drugs), because we are barking up the wrong tree.

Stress and trauma are overused cliche explanations amongst psychiatrists and psychologists. They often try to explain everything in terms of stress and trauma. If you gave them half a chance, they would even try to pin global warming on trauma!

But often it is actually the other way around: once you develop a mental health condition of anxiety or emotional sensitivity from brain issues, only then do you become very sensitive to stress, so ordinary stressors in life suddenly become far more stressful than they previously were.

I had this experience myself some decades ago: my mental health symptoms appeared after a viral infection. Before that infection, I could cope with stressors in a robust way, actually relishing stress and pressure, because it gave me a chance to prove my mettle, and I loved the adrenaline rush.

But after that virus, I suddenly developed anxiety, and then found even mild stressors (like being in a traffic jam) extremely hard to cope with, so I tried to avoid any stressors.


You see these sort of nervous breakdowns a lot. Young men and women doing very well in their jobs, handling the stress and pressure with great aplomb and loving every minute of it.

Then all of a sudden, something changes, and they find they are no longer able to cope with the previously enjoyable stress and excitement. They may then seek a change in career, or if their stress sensitivity and anxiety is severe enough, they may even stop work altogether.

In all these cases of nervous breakdowns, people very rarely make the connection to a little viral infection they may have had a few months earlier. They may have had a short flu-like illness or gastrointestinal upset a few months back, took a day of work, but then carried on, and never thought any more about it.

But that’s when a virus may have taken residence in their body tissues and organs, and soon started playing havoc with neurological function.

Most viruses we catch are harmless, and our immune systems clear them without any problems. But as ME/CFS patients know, certain viruses in common circulation have the ability to set up long-term residence in the body organs, and these sort of viruses can later lead to mental or physical diseases.


A classic example of a nervous breakdown is the founder and former CEO of the Huffington Post newspaper: Arianna Huffington. She relished all the excitement of the news office, but then completely out of the blue, had a nervous breakdown, and could no longer cope with the stress and excitement.

So she quit the Huffington Post, and set up a new business venture called Thrive Global, intended to address the issue of stressors in the office, which she thought (mistakenly in my view) were the cause of her demise.

What Arianna does not realise is that stress was likely not her issue; she actually relished in the news room excitement before. Then something changed in her body and brain, and she could not handle the excitement anymore.

I think it is likely she caught a virus or bacterium at some point, which insinuated itself into her body, as many viruses do, and then altered her brain’s ability to handle stressors, so then they became a problem. So she blames the stressors, but does not appreciate it's a breakdown in the brain’s ability to handle stressors which may be the real issue.


Sadly, the psychiatric profession make the same mistake, assuming that when people are suddenly no longer able to handle stressors, then stressors themselves must be the cause of their problem.

But that's like blaming sugar for type 1 diabetes!

We know that sugar has got nothing to do with it: the person was previously able to handle sugar, but once their insulin system broken down (which incidentally is linked to viral infection), they suddenly cannot handle sugar anymore.

It's the same with stress in my view: people actually enjoy stress and excitement. That's why they like scary elevated funfair rides! But once the stress-handling system breaks down, stress become a nightmare to avoid at all cost.

When I was mentally healthy, an elevated funfair ride was very exciting. Now I would not touch such rides with a barge poll.

So I don’t think everyday stressors are the cause of anxiety disorder and nervous breakdowns; I think usually the cause is that physical changes happen in the brain, typically via the acquisition of an infectious pathogen in the body, and it’s only then that the stressors become an issue. Y

ou may then have to quit your job, because you can no longer handle the stressors you once dealt with so easily.

 

[hapl808]

I think that is a reasonable theory, but I have no way to know if it's true or to what degree. Does a pathogen account for 50% of psychological symptoms? Or is it 90%? Or is it 100%? Or is it 10%?

My point is just that I think pathogens undoubtedly play a role, as do life circumstances. There are likely several other factors as well - maybe various genetics, physical injury, childhood experiences, and so forth. We cannot and should not diagnose from a distance. And in reality, I don't think physicians or psychologists are equipped to diagnose any of these things, either.

So I think it's great to keep in mind all these possibilities, but not to move on to dogmatic thinking where every interactions is seen through a single predetermined lens. This is the problem with physicians sometimes, and I think flexibility in thinking is important, particularly when dealing with things where we're only examining shadows on the cave walls.

Personally, even after my ME/CFS, I kind of loved professional stress and mentally thrived on it but physically suffered. I was still able to keep that up for over a decade until a further decline made it so even though I still thrived on the professional stress, the crashes became unbearable. Even now I love the 'idea' of professional stress, but I'm aware of the toll it will take (only took a couple decades to learn).

My mental outlook definitely became worse once I finally came to terms with the likelihood that I will never climb out of this. For 20+ years I kept believing I would manage or figure out a way to somehow get better. Once you realize that optimism was misplaced, a certain negativity can set in. Is that because of a new infection, or just a two decade in the making realization? Who knows.

Anyways, this is just me parachuting in as usual to disagree whenever I see people 'absolutely convinced' of anything. Whether it's DNRS or CCI or jaw cavitations, I don't think anything is nonsense. We're all guessing and doing our best.