Posted by med_empowered on February 21, 2005, at 17:42:50
In reply to Re: I CANNOT CALM DOWN! BUT ITS GREAT!!, posted by snapper on February 21, 2005, at 16:39:40
Hey! As embedded as the notion is that "mental illness is a brain disease," the idea is actually relatively new (became firmly entrenched in the 1970's), and, unfortunately, not yet proven. Its a cool hypothesis, but it isn't yet established as FACT that the mentally ill have physical abnormalities in their brains. Some studies have suggested abnormalities, especially in schizophrenia and bipolar, but most of these studies also found that the "normal" control group sometimes had similar abnormalities and that many in the "sick" group did not, so the observations are more or less...useless. Factor in the usually small sample size, lack of a truly RANDOM sample (this is oh-so important), and the fact that some brain "abnormalities" are caused by long-term exposure to psychiatric drugs, especially the neuroleptics, and you can see why these studies aren't terribly helpful. Sooo..basically, if you get a brain scan of any sort, you may come back normal, or abnormal. Even if your brain scan comes back abnormal, this can't really help make a diagnosis, since we don't understand very much about the brain...especially when looking at relatively subtle "abnormalities". Brain scans are best used to look for MAJOR problems, like tumors/abnormal growths, heavy brain damage, etc. Your "issues" do sound like the bi-polar diagnosis BUT..I'm also concerned that maybe you monitor your mind too much. Having odd thoughts doesn't make one "crazy," but constantly monitoring yourself for "craziness" and freaking yourself out will, I think, stress you out and make you "crazy," if only because you'll constantly be searching for a diagnosis to explain your "odd" thoughts. Here's the deal: "weird" thoughts aren't "insanity," or "psychosis". They can be fun, entertaining, and sometimes even enlightening, both for yourself and others (trust me, I'm the king of "weird" thoughts). Usually, when people talk about the "insane," they're talking about those whose mental illness is severe and involves straight up hallucinations. If, on a regular basis, you hear voices that others don't, see things that others don't, or (rarely) have physical sensations (bugs crawling on your skin, for instance) without a reasonable cause, you may a reason to be concerned. If you have "odd" thoughts that alter your sense of what is "real" to the point that you are unable to function reasonably well in everyday life, you may have a problem. If you have both of these "issues," you may very well have a problem. Lacking that, I'd recommend that you try chilling out, letting your mind run wild, and seeing what happens. I'd also recommend that you, while you relax and just let your mind do its thing, you also just relax and see if your mood changes seem to cause any undo impairment in your day-to-day life. If they do, you may want to seek some sort of assistance. If not, relax some more.
poster:med_empowered
thread:461323
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050217/msgs/461465.html