“Doctors are always telling you some torturous way to live your life; it’s not like they know everything ever. Hey man, I went to college, too.”
An overdose of lithium is not a way to die, but for quite a while it was the only way we knew how to treat the runaway and broken brain:
Momentary Happiness, which we might define as a function of mood, conscientious, and raw mental horsepower has some set point for every person. The three inputs obviously have hunger, sleep, horniness, status and a hundred other factors as inputs, but the set point is basically something that the brain will correct towards like a PID controller*.
The problem it seems is that PID controller can get fucked up. You see, a PID controller is based off three functions that control the “P” the “I” and the “D”. Having a weak “P” function might mean you reach the set point slowly. Having a strong “P” function means you might never ever hit it. People get paid six figures because they’re really good at picking these three numbers.
But, evolution isn’t paid six figures.
To an mechanical engineer/data analyst, the stories that Kay Jamison describe are a heartbreaking- but enlivening- tale of the human PID controller gone terribly wrong.
Manic-depressive personality disorder (how Kay refers to bipolar disorder, which she thinks is a PC term) is ultimately a mechanical issue in the brain. We know this because it is *obviously* genetic, and because it is so readily treated with medicine. It occurs rhythmically: A swelling of energy, focus, and mental stamina are followed by damning dissipation of the very same.
This sounds to me like a controller trying to get to a set point and simply trying too damn hard. “I want to be happy” it says when sitting in bed for months before shooting like a rocket into space- where the air is too thin to breathe, but thick enough to pull you back down.
The power of An Unquiet Mind as a memoir is that it is, as they say, “From the donkey’s mouth.” If a fucking doctor in psychology can’t keep herself on her medicine for a decade, how are the rest of us -even those of us who read psychology books for fun- supposed to do it? How are the rest of us supposed to get medicine? To actually see a therapist? Kay’s madness isn’t “oh, I’m going through hard times right now”, she’s actually sick as fuck on a molecular level. How are the rest of us with relatively mental colds or flus supposed to react?
We’re not.
Kay’s book is littered with helpers. Truly, this book is more of a “thank you for helping me survive” book than a memoir of bipolar disorder. Lovers, brothers, and mothers are the powers that shoves lithium down her throat at a *healthy* dosage. There is the odd asshole who, despite studying the human mind thinking “suicide is selfish” **, but, in general, Kay is able to find human relationships building her up and keeping her together when her mind’s motor is spinning to explosion.
This book is a great read and I strongly recommend it for anybody that thinks they know people (or might be dealing with themselves) mental health issues. In person and on a day-to-day basis, the fundamental attribution bias has us assign feelings and values to people who are strongly controlled by mushy and messy computers very much out of their command. Kay’s own journey through the disease is a story that teaches us, “The Mind is not the Brain”***. Thankfully, she wrote this enlightening book for us to figure out the distinction.
*Proportional, integral, derivative
**What a dumb fuck
***I wrote a shitload of words a few weeks ago about the elephant and the rider, a concept from Jonathan Haidt. This is a different idea, that Kay makes clear when comparing “psychotherapy” to “psychopharmacology”. The Mind is the conscious thing that you are and the story that you tell yourself. It is the “You” that creates a coherent vision of the past and future. The Brain, however, is the actual physical thing. If it helps, the former is the operating system and the latter is the hardware (of a computer). The two are related, but the key to the difference is that the two methods of repair work on them separately. Therapy works on The Mind- it “defrags” and cleans up the files of our thoughts. It’s a patch, an update, a loading bar that brings the brain from the Blue Screen of Death towards functionality. Medicine- Prozac, lithium, etc- are hardware updates. They’re extra RAM, SSDs upgrades, and pressurized air blowers. They make the machine function the way 6 million years of evolution intended.
They’re both powerful, but neither should be dismissed compared to the other. This is a super key point in the book, and another reason to read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment