BLOG No. TEN

Welcome back to blog number 10 on anxiety and depression. Okay, yes, before we go any further, I did spill Chardonnay on my cat last time. And yes, PETA had me arrested for animal cruelty. But when they found out the alcohol in the wine cured my cat’s skin condition, they nominated me for a Nobel prize, and paid all my outstanding vet bills! Gotta love progressives!

In the previous blogs, we learned that anxiety and depression can be plotted on a graph, where serotonin illnesses (unipolar depression) is found on the left end while D2 dopamine disorders are on the right. Remember this from blog 9?

So, let’s start by putting in some reference points along the line to help make a little more sense of it all. For instance, just exactly where on that line would you find type II bipolar depression? Type II bipolar disorder has mostly D2 symptoms and only a tiny bit of serotonin symptoms. So it would look like this:

So when a bipolar II person is placed on an SSRI by itself, a few little things may improve, but a lot more things get worse. That’s why a lot of these patients shun medication altogether. They would rather suffer with their anger and mood changes than worry that an SSRI would make them worse. It’s very understandable.

How many bipolar patients does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but they have to be in the mood to change it!

So, how about bipolar I? This is almost 100% D2 elevation. It would look something like this:

Bipolar I patients, unless medicated with strong D2 suppression, usually are not very functional. Their brains move so fast, they have difficulty focusing on anything, making it extremely hard for them to even hold a job.

...And SSRIs not only don’t help, they can even drive bipolar I patients to suicide!

And the high D2 can also drive OCD, mood changes, or even paranoia, as if a higher power was controlling their brain with a remote. Also, they suffer from a brain that runs so fast that congruent thoughts become, at times, very difficult. One minute that powerful brain can solve difficult—even seemingly impossible problems, but in the next minute, create them! But could there be anything worse than an un-medicated bipolar I brain? Unfortunately, there is.

Take a bipolar I brain and make it race even faster—instead of 6000 RPMs, it goes 8000. At that speed, it is running so fast, at times, voices can be created by the racing neurons. Here is what it would look like on our spectrum graph:

We call this condition schizo-affective disorder (SA above). When you see the word “affective” think “mood” disorder. Schizo implies hearing voices. So schizo-affective patients are similar to bipolar I patients, except their faster brain causes voices to appear.

And there are other kinds of anxiety and depression disorders along that line, ones that most of my readers are more familiar with. But that will have to wait until blog 11. For now, the Chardonnay in my glass is evaporating and my skin is beginning to peel, so that means the cat has once again turned up the thermostat on the Jacuzzi! Bitch!

Well, until we meet again in blog 11, keep the faith!