// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

Uma explicação matemática de por que você, que tem mudanças de humor, euforia e depressão, mas não foi diagnosticado

Nah, I don’t mean the red pill stuff, or the associated political analogy. I have derealization and depersonalization symptoms. They’re mostly flashes, but sometimes a really hard crisis happens. It’s even often really pleasurable,  as an amorphous wave of pleasure. Once in a while, it’s some specific, disturbing fantasy that feels wonderfully perverse at the moment. Like the time I first heard “Luscious Apparatus”, being by my own in the dark waiting for the bus — I felt I could actually carve poems into my body since it wasn’t really my body and its skin was thick enough I could carve it out without bleeding.

  I have strong memories of that particular crisis whenever I listen to that song, and even really mild DR/DP flashbacks. And that was a pleasurable one, but DR/DP can be terrifying, and I had a really strong case of the bad ones this tuesday.

I was just leaving home for work. Having missed my bus, I had to walk for ten minutes to get to the bus that takes you to the subway. And then I lost most of my sense of context — I had a very very thin string tying me to my sense of self and didn’t know where the hell I was. All I knew was that I had to walk for ten minutes and get into the bus that takes you to the subway to get to work, so I did that in an automatic sort of way while I tried to get my sense of self back, trying to find music on my iPod that would remind me first of my childhood, then late teens and early 20s. And even when I had a clear picture of who I was, I didn’t feel like I was who I was. Thirty or fourty minutes had already passed, I was already on the bus and knew how to get to my workplace, and still I didn’t recognize anything or felt like I knew who I was.

All the drugs I’ve taken for most of my psychiatric life — except for that brief contact with bupropion — have been anticonvulsants. And I’ve actually been okay, oscillating between mild hypomania and no hypomania at all. Remember, I started psychiatric drugs because of depression, which hasn’t happened for more than a night or two since I started treatment.

Then somehow I got into the (hypo)mania that wouldn’t stop. I’d take 6 or 8mg of clonazepam and still be awake all night. Spending massive amounts of money in luxury stuff like $250 headphones or a 160gb iPod. So we finally entered the strange world of atypical antipsychotics. I had learned a lot about anticonvulsants, but this is brave new world to me.

For a while I though they were horrible drugs that silence the chatter inside your head. 1.5mg o risperidone made me smart — as in shutting out all other stimuli that made it difficult to concentrate on the smarter stuff. 2mg made me a bot.

We’re phasing risperidone now and introducing Seroquel. Like with risperidone I’m quite liking the effect — which is very different — but I’m not at the final dose yet. OTOH, I’m still on risperidone, so I might be on the right track regarding antipsychotics.

I’m getting pleasure waves around 6PM everyday, and my first theory was that that could just be the Seroquel (which has a half-life of 7 hours only) wearing off and leaving the 4mg clonazepam that’s still on my daily cocktail. But, hey, I’m on minimal doses of Seroque, and that’s supposed to hit your H1 receptors first, which could mean I’m only getting a sedative — or maybe it’s enough for the antipsychotic effect to kick in — and no one in the world can tell. And I’m on risperidone as well.

OVERVIEW

“Juno” is essentially a movie around a soundtrack, and in accord with the overwhelmingly positive attitude of the film, there isn’t a single dark note in this acoustic guitar-based collection of Barry Polisar’s attempt to be Belle and Sebastian, peppered with the lighter, acoustic guitar-based pieces by the likes of The Kinks, Belle and Sebastian itself and Sonic Youth. Yes, they manage to find or get them to produce a Polyanna-spirited Sonic Youth song. The only non-acoustic guitar-based moment is a brass solo during the Belle and Sebastian tune. No, really. And the B&S song is the only song with a nice strum pattern and a nice chord progression to it. (And they could’ve just used “Lazy line painter Jane”, whose lyrics already fit!) The rest is just plain, even the Sonic Youth tune!

Juno is all about this girl who gets pregnant by accident and decides to go with the baby-making process in order to give it to adoption to this cool family who really wants a baby. You can’t write a spoiler for it — the publicity material gives away the movie and frankly there’s nothing to give away at all. There is no drama, no conflict, no nothing. It would almost be an experimental movie if it wasn’t for the glossy Sundance-like production.

AS WALKING MUSIC

This is good music to listen to in heavy traffic or while walking/standing next to heavy traffic if you have a pair of good insulating headphones (like the Sennheiser PX-200, which I can’t recommend enough). If it’s quiet and/or sunny outside you plain don’t want this — the sun will achieve the intent of this soundtrack better. It’s been around there for billions of years so it accumulated some experience, you see.

So I find myself in an algebraic imbroglio. Basically — if there’s a basic way to explain this — there’s this beta coefficient that’s obtained through magic methods involving a random variable. See, there’s Y = A + bX, but X and Y data won’t always fit no matter what choice of A and B we make so we add a looseness random variable Y = A + bX + e and declare e to have (stochastic, which means “scary shit”) mean 0. And do magic stuff. When the magic stuff is done, you have a theorem guaranteeing that when Y is the mean of all Ys (even if it’s not an observed Y) and X is the mean of all Xs, then e is actually deterministically 0 and the Y = A + bX equation actually deterministically fits. Oh, and of course, estimates for A and B. See? The worst explanation of linear regression analysis ever recorded.

All this can be done with multiple variables. Trust me on this, if you’re turned on by matrix notation I wanna have sex with you but if you don’t know what that is, stay the heck away until you figure out the meaning of life and all.

Anyway, researchers will often not publish their raw data, instead showing off their fancy A, B et caetera coefficients because they are quite useful, where raw data is, well, a raw mass of numbers.

A snippet of the book-in-progress:

 Triangular wheels have always been much more entertaining, and when some of their scent managed to find its way down to the lowly lands of earthlings, they have even been some of a chick magnet. I’ve always been desperately interested in things that are way too complex for me to handle superficially. I basically lost the only real intimate relationship I had with a woman to functional programming, and I shall not bore you today with the fascinating intrincacies of Bird-Merteens calculus, Martin-Löf types and Girard logics because I wish to drone on to an anecdote that’s much more relevant to the case at hand because it involves directly atypical bipolar mania in all of its atypical manifestations, with atypical grandeur, atypical delirium and borderline atypical psychosis. [...]

I NEVER SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN THIS POST. I was manic, trying to drug myself out of it, and I used broken, terse english that recquires extra reader attention to get the point. Antpsychotics are not nootropics. Risperidone won’t make you smarter. I addressed these points on a comment, but this has become the primary driver of traffic to this website, so it should be STRESSED OUT.

Risperidone makes me smarter.

This is not the first time a drug is introduced in my cocktail for circumstantial reasons and has deep, nontrivial effects. Apparently antipsychotics make me smarter, and since I’ve been taking more of them than I should — even though they make me depressed and I’m only supposed to take them for two weeks ending thursday — I’m switching to Geodon, which is supposed to work the same, not mess with your hormones (making me smelly and even more girly) and be a mild antidepressant too.

So, wait, is this just for bipolar people who were really really smart to begin with, but had their wits fogged down by the illness (something which I have felt), or is there smart sauce in antipsychotics which is being kept from the general population as part of a giant conspiracy?

I think it’s pretty much obvious from the phrasing which version I subscribe to, but what if more people are just fogged down and can be cleared up with antipsychotics?

Is this another “Psychiatry is underutilized” rant? Yes. Is there even such a category? It seems so .. obvious, so generative. Anyway, more young people who feel their (even mild) emotional problems have fogged their brilliance over the years should consult psychiatry.

And that symbol in the title is a bad attempt at a turnstile.

We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. [...] A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.” This is not some abstract, mystical notion of life but a life, a specific yet impersonal, indefinite life discovered in the real singularity of events and virtuality of moments. A life is subjectless, neutral, and preceding all individuation and stratification, is present in all things, and thus always immanent to itself. “A life is everywhere [...]: an immanent life carrying with it the events and singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects.” (Gilles Deleuze: “Immanence: A life”. Hat tip: Roundtable )

I haven’t been really-really down for quite a while, and it’s all a matter of whipping up the energy to do what you’ve been planning for the day -– update the blog journal or write the section of the book about anonymity and coming out of the closet.

Yeah, well, just plain whipping up the energy isn’t always plain whipping up the energy, and while there’d sure be energy for running three miles if I needed the money or was in need, keeping the motivation for a longer-term goal can be complicated to say the least -– and remember this is no darn book of poems; I’m trying to tackle complexity here.If I just had put that hypomania to optimal use…

And yes, much of the problem comes from never getting to learn how to use your human skills because in hypomania you don’t need them and often everything that needs to get done gets done gets done in hypomania anyway.

But hey, I’m trying to start a marketing campaign, which can’t just mean post-once-and-run. I should blog journal more often. And this is prime time for the section about coming out of the closet because the number of people who know about my manic-depressive illness is reaching critical scale.

Mostly it’s the marketing campaign timing. I should really stick to good marketing timing or I’ll never leave one-post-three-hidden-chapters. And the very fact that I am worrying about marketing timing shows that I am not that depressed. I just have no fucking idea of how to go about things not being hypo.

Keep in mind this is all very preliminar — in fact, it’s a dictated-not-read (though I did type it myself). Everytime I read these manuscripts through I find horrible flaws, and I like to blame it on the fact that they’re written late at night, where both I’m tired and stressed out and have had all kinds of mind-altering drugs — benzodiazepines, newer anticonvulsants, antipsychotics. So all kinds of nitpicking are welcome — both grammar and fact-checking/querying. Am I even making sense of things? Some people love me for having such a knack for entertaining them all night telling them stories, while others tell me I keep leaving logical gaps that shoud be made more evident even if they are inferrable from the surrounding information. But anyway, enjoy gnawing your logical gnaws at this, because most snippets will be two or three paragraphs at most. Butterflies in my stomach time. Here comes nothing…

PRODIGY People trying to discuss the upside of bipolar disorder, if there is an upside to it anyway, will often quote a random list of prodigies in various areas supposed to have been afflicted with the illness. Most of these are fake or presumed; some are based on really good biographical analyses -– there’s basically no reason to believe Vincent van Gogh wasn’t one and Beethoven does sound real but some are just variations on “ tortured genius”. But isn’t the whole point of the bipolar prodigy angle that these people were in really nice hypomanias when they got their mojo going? I mean, I’ve been to the online bipolar forums and I just can’t believe how many people can’t get basic reading comprehension or critical thinking going, let alone manipulation of somewhat complex concepts. Maybe that’s just dain bramage either/both from the illness and the meds. Maybe it’s just Sturgeon’s law. But maybe there’s some bipolar/genius correlation beyond the normal proportion of really intelligent people in the equator people that’s not due to really nice hypomanias allied to the deep insight on the fact of life from depressive phases that’s due to burn-out before bipolar disorder even surfaces as something recognizable or bipolar disorder itself. My very first memories are about being really fucking impressive. The really-fucking-impressiveness factor just gradually wore down, and though I still was quite impressive by my teens, as a wee tot I was a force of nature: an eight months-old piece of meat talking articulately and asking weirdo questions about the position of the moon and the etimology of words and whateverelse my parents couldn’t even answer. By age two I could read pretty much anything; by age three, when we had moved to Brazil, I was translating newspapers from portuguese to spanish because my parents’ portuguese wasn’t all that good. Simultaneously, too. They pay grown-ups to do that. So I basically find myself right now in a median-to-good status in the intellectual ladder of things -– not a professor, not a middle school teacher: suffering through a white collar job in the intellectual side of the scale, doing econometric analysis and suchlike, despite having dropped out of my masters’ after taking all my classes because I just got bored in the middle of my dissertation. But I will always consider myself a failure. Because the wee tot reading by age two promised jesuschristness and now I’m nothing. So maybe what would be needed was a longitudinal study of really fucking impressive babies over 25 years to see how many develop schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and generally uberspazzlich condition. Yeah, like that was gonna happen, or even be useful. “ Your kid is very smart, and there’s a p% chance that he’ll turn out like the author of the “ Inverted Truck” . Or, you know what? Let’s maybe not do that. Let’ s maybe let really-fucking-impressive kids just go on and break their own noses and develop their very own bipolar disorders. I mean what are the odds that a healthy family will deliver a smart kid anyway? (…)

No, really, this was way unexpected. And I’ve had no stinkin’ antidepressants either, just old’ school anticonvulsants; this week I took my first non-anticonvulsant med and it was an antipsychotic. I’ve been depressed all my life, mostly the dysthimic, “soft” kind of depressed comparable to the chinese torture where they tie you down and let a tiny droplet of water fall on your head every ten seconds.

But with some random lashes of the real stuff too. And then, when the last straw broke, maybe a year ago, a psychiatrist (whom I shall refer as my shrink) diagnosed a case of “soft” bipolar II and gave me anticonvulsants with a soft, very soft antidepressant edge. Then I fliped out. Not like now, anyway. They never expected the spanish inquisition that even though I’d get better from the depression and have longer and longer periods of stability and an improving overall functioning (a better social life, an actual job), I’d be getting these progressively higher crises of [hypomania.

Thinking back, I've had a couple of [hypo]manias before treatment. Guess I am bipolar after all. I shall refer to them all as manias; apparently you only get to call them manias if you spontaneously self-combust from the sheer self-destructive behaviour, and as long as you have a shred of consciousness you don’t get to be manic.

I have a shred of consciousness. I’m here at work, where everyone’s wearing a suit and I’m supposed to be preparing for an important meeting in two hours, and I’m in my “KILL YOUR POP STARS” t-shirt setting up the blog journal for the book I’ve been writing for a few weeks now. But I noticed that. I’ve not gone psychotic, I’m just having fun.  Because contrary to what jaggerian though proposes, I can always get what I want.

Vocês querem saber? Daqui pra frente, comentários abertos! (Para os posts antigos não, por pura preguiça). Moderados, e eu escolho quais publicar. Eu sou foda. Vocês são meros leitores.

(Como ganhar amigos e persuadir pessoas: passo 1 — rebaixe-as e insulte-as)