Category Archives: Eating

Animal rights, Eating, French, Health

WHAT TO EAT ? QUOI MANGEZ-VOUS?

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French version first. English version just below it.

 Manger ou ne pas manger des animaux

Ce qu’on mange le soir ou pendant la journée — ça compte, et pas juste pour l’individu mais pour la planète entière. Si on choisit de manger ou de ne pas manger la chair des animaux, c’est une question sur laquelle repose notre avenir en tant qu’êtres humains, et l’avenir de la plupart des espèces des animaux aussi. 

Je vais commencer avec les arguments contre la consommation de viande, ou peut-être pour mieux dire, les arguments pour la consommation des plantes seulement. Il y en a trois, principalement: la cruauté, l’environnement, et la bonne santé. 

D’abord l’argument de la cruauté: la plupart des gens ne mangent pas les animaux qui, après avoir mené une  vie heureuse dans les verts pâturages, sont tués d’une manière douce. Non, notre bœuf, notre poulet, et notre porc (et aussi notre poisson!) viennent des fermes-usines, et les animaux après avoir vécu leur vie dans des conditions épouvantables et surpeuplées souffrent d’être tués cruellement. On doit espérer que leur  mort leur apportent quelque soulagement, mais je crois que les gens qui continuent de manger de la viande ne le feraient plus si ils devaient visiter une ferme-usine et regarder les animaux lorsqu’ils sont en train d’être tués. Une telle cruauté peut exister et continuera à exister seulement tant qu’elle peut être cachée, tant que nous pouvons l’ignorer.

Le deuxième argument en faveur de manger des plantes seulement concerne l’environnement. L’élevage des animaux pour nous nourrir est quelque chose qui utilise trop de carbone, trop d’énergie, et ça coûte à l’environnement. De plus, les vaches émettent trop de gaz à effet de serre comme le méthane, et nous leur donnons à manger des céréales qui auraient pu nous nourrir. L’élevage des animaux juste pour que nous puissions les manger représente une grosse perte de temps et d’argent et d’énergie.

Le point finale concerne la santé. Plusieurs personnes diront qu’il faut manger de la viande pour la santé, insistant que sans manger de la viande on ne peut pas obtenir assez de protéines. Mais ce n’est pas du tout vrai. Chaque espèce de légume et céréale a des acides aminés. On ne doit que les combiner prudemment. D’ailleurs, on a montré maintes fois que de manger de viande nous nuit, avec trop de cholestérol, trop de graisses saturées et pas assez de vitamines et de fibre pour notre bonne santé. En outre, quand on mange de la viande on risque des maladies cardiaques et des artères obstruées. 

Vraiment pourquoi manger de la viande? Il n’y a qu’une raison aujourd’hui, le goût. Le goût est indéniablement agréable, au moins pour ceux qui ont grandi en mangeant de la viande et ont appris à l’aimer. Mais on peut apprendre à aimer les légumes autant que la viande, et on peut apprendre à réserver le goût de la viande aux occasions spéciales comme des anniversaires. Comme le gâteau, la viande doit devenir seulement une rare gourmandise, pas quelque chose de la vie quotidienne.

Enfin, on peut faire le choix d’une comportement plus humaine, de la bonne santé, de la protection de la planète, ou du goût quotidien de la chair des animaux tués, et toutes les choses qui s’en suivront. 

Alors, qu’est-ce que vous allez manger ce soir?

ENGLISH VERSION, (published in the Brattleboro Reformer 12/2020)

 What you eat for supper, or during the day matters, and not just for the individual but for the entire planet.  Whether we choose to eat or not to eat the flesh of other animals is something on which our future as human beings rests, and the future of most species of animals as well.

 I’ll start with the arguments against eating meat, or maybe better put, the arguments for eating only plants.  Basically, there are three: cruelty, the environment, and health.

 First, the cruelty argument: when we consume meat, most people are not eating animals that have been killed in a painless humane fashion, after having led lives of contentment in lush green pastures.  No, our beef, our chicken, and our pork (and also our fish) come from factory farms, and the animals are killed after living lives crammed together in unspeakably miserable conditions.  Hopefully their deaths bring some relief, but I believe people who continue to eat meat would no longer do so if they had to visit a factory farm and watch these animals being killed.  Such cruelty can and will continue to exist only as long as it remains hidden away so we can ignore it.

 The second argument for a plant-based diet is the environment.  Raising animals for food uses too much carbon, too much energy, and that has an effect on the environment.  In addition, cows emit many greenhouse gases, methane among them, and we feed them the grains that could have fed us.  Raising animals — cruelly, for the most part, mind you— just so that we can eat them is a huge waste of time and money and involves the expenditure of excessive carbon energy.

 The final point is health.  Many people would argue that eating meat is necessary for one’s health, insisting that without meat one cannot get enough protein.  But that is not true. Yes, animal flesh contains “complete protein” but our bodies have to break this cow or chicken or fish protein down to its amino acids in order to re-construct the proteins in human bodies. What is more, every species of vegetable and all the grains contain amino acids, these same building blocks of protein.  As vegans and vegetarians have shown for a long time, one need only prudently combine them to get “enough protein”.  In fact, we have seen how often eating meat causes problems, as it contains too much cholesterol, too much saturated fat and not enough vitamins and fiber for anyone’s good health. It is precisely because of these factors that when we eat meat we risk heart disease and blocked arteries.

Why eat meat?  There is only one reason today: the taste (called umami) and mouthfeel of meat is undeniably unique. Those who grew up as I did, eating meat, learned to love it. But appreciating the taste of meat is just something one learns, just as one learns to love vegetables— by familiarity. One can learn to prepare vegetables just as lovingly as meat; it is a choice we make, but one with profound consequences. We need to learn to enjoy the taste of meat or fish only on special holidays like birthdays and just like birthday cake, meat or fish should become a rare treat in our lives, not something consumed everyday.

 In the end, one can choose for a kinder life, for good health, and for the planet, or one can choose to eat meat, to consume the flesh of animals raised and killed for that purpose, and everything that follows from such a choice.  

What are you eating for dinner tonight?

———————

I would add to this also an argument against eating eggs, since that too ends with the non-laying hen being eaten and if you don’t know what happens to all the boy chickens, the roosters, if you even wonder, you should look into it. After all half of all chicks are male, and most are seen as useless…so think about that when you eat a supposedly free range farm egg. No eggs are ever truly cruelty free.

Acceptance, Art and artwork, Brain, colored pencils, Eating, Hospital, Medication, Natchaug Hospital, Psychiatric Unit, Wisdom House

Hospital Artwork

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Me as the Ogre that Ate Manhattan

I did the last two of these at Natchaug Hospital this past winter, both of which may be obvious. The first, Under Attack from All Sides, was meant to express how I felt at the time, with the fingers pointing at me literally showing what the voices do, and the red high heel with a hand, strong, hefting that lethal looking spike — well those both belong to a certain someone I cannot name who wants me deader than dead and will do anything in her power to achieve it.

The second of the hospital pieces (I did others, but alas I gave them away and so never did have a photo of them to share…) is the last one posted here, the Ogre that Ate Manhattan, which is written partly in Spanish and partly in acronym. The message is KILL the Orgre that Ate Manhattan, but I figure you don’t need to understand that to enjoy the artwork…Not quite finished yet, but there is not a huge amount left to go…

Finally at the top is In her Hands, which is not done, though it may look it. This is a partly 3-D high relief piece, and partly a flat piece of acrylic painting. In truth a lot of it is optical illusion but not as a joke. The detail shows how her hands are painted onto the globe, not actually three dimentional at all; they just look 3-D because of how I painted them. I need to write more about more “important” things in my life, but for now this will have to do. (Addendum: I realized, days later, that I must have written the text of this very late at night, and possibly after I’d taken my Xyrem, the narcolepsy night time med. Why? Because a great deal of it was so badly spelled and some of it made no or little sense at all. I mostly do that sort of thing, dream talk, if you will, when I make the mistake of trying to write after I have taken my medication and get busy and forget that I am not “with it” entirely…so I am not aware when sense devolves into gibberish! Forgive me, anyway, if I seemed somehow sloppy if not wholly out of it!)

Pam W

Eating, Medication, Prisons, Psychiatric Unit, Psychiatry, Schizophrenia, Seclusion and Restraints, Violence

Mental Illness and Authority: Part II

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I started the post below as a response to a very kind email from “Mary” but it eventually got so long and involved that it became more of an essay than a letter. I hope she will understand why I put it here, rather than sending it to her alone!

_____________________________________

First, here is her letter to me:


Thanks, Pam.   I learned from your very well written account, “On Psychiatry and Authority.”  I felt like I was in the room with you, it was so descriptive.  I recently had a call from a man who is bipolar.  He said while off his meds, he was in an encounter with his girlfriend and was arrested on domestic violence or disturbing the peace charges.  He told the officers he was a psychiatric patient, but of course, jails have become America’s answer to mental illness.  The police threw him into a cell after booking him, then released a police dog on him in the isolated cell rather than simply locking the door.  He said the dog ravaged his leg, exposing bone, and he was taken to the hospital.  There may have been a time when only black mental patients were treated this badly, but the caller was white.  I wrote about more murders and abuses against mentally challenged people in my blog – Letter to Mary Neal’s Terrorists – http://freespeakblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/letter-to-mary-neals-terrorists.html

I am still undergoing much censorship, Pam, likely because my advocacy to decriminalize mental illness is a threat to the private prison industry.  Over half the inmates in America are mentally ill.  If they are released to community care under AOT programs or treated as hospital inpatients rather than prison inmates, depending on their offenses and functionality, it would not be more expensive for taxpayers, but it would negatively impact prison profits.

As I read about your brutal treatment in the hospital, I was so sad.  Here I am advocating hospitals rather than prison, and you were treated that way by psychiatric professionals.  The only way I can continue after learning what happened to you and others who were in abusive hospital environments is by thinking about people like my caller who was not only tossed in an isolated cell naked, but a vicious dog was sent in to attack him after that.  I also think about my brother Larry who was murdered under secret arrest because police were fed up with being his psychiatric caretakers.  Although hospital care is only marginally more humane than incarceration in some cases, there are fewer permanent physical injuries and murders among hospitalized patients.

Thanks for sharing your experiences.

Mary Neal
Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill
http://www.Care2.com/c2c/group/AIMI

And my response:

Thanks so much for your email and sympathetic understanding of the traumatic aspects of my so-called “treatment” at Muddlesax Hospital last April. Such treatment was, at other hospitals especially in the 80s and 90s and even in the early 2000s, so much worse — I mean in terms of real physical violence perpetrated against me while being literally, bodily, forced into restraints — that I was almost reluctant to write about such a relatively mild incident. But the humiliation of having to put myself into restraints was almost more unbearable than the, in some sense, honorable freedom to resist! It just riles me completely…How dare they put me in such an untenable position? Then again, I suspect it was intentional.

Nevertheless, I am very much aware that in Connecticut hospitals way too many people have died while they were in restraints, and this in the not so distant past. In fact it was investigative reporters at the Hartford Courant back in the late 90s —and their article entitled, I believe, Deadly Restraint — that served as a national catalyst in getting hospitals to stop the wholesale use of seclusion and restraints. At the very least it started a national discussion about the use and abuses of force in psychiatric hospitals and (I think) juvenile detention centers. (God forbid anyone at all should care about jails and prisons however…Those people obviously deserve it, they are criminals after all… Right?)

But even though most hospitals in Connecticut claim to have reduced the use of force to the most extreme cases, (they will force medication though, through the use of forced medication hearings) I do not believe that can be so. Because I cannot believe that I alone “deserve” seclusion and restraints and yet I have been subjected to such abuse time and time again. Until 2005, I was put in S + R at least once almost every time I was hospitalized and quite often multiple times, for many long hours. After 2005, I would say the incidence was reduced by about half. That means that half the hospitals still indulged in this abuse, one of them, as I wrote earlier in this blog, employing them almost every day for a week and a half!

Of the hospitals that did not physically restrain me,  most were still abusive, but more subtle about it…For instance, they would put me on Constant Observation, but then tell the “sitter” not to speak to me. Or they would institute the common but for all the commonness of it, still abusive policy, of making the one-to-one person being ignored sleep with her hands and head completely uncovered. Now, all hospitals are freezing these days, I do not know why. But it was well known that you had to bring a sweater or sweatshirt everywhere, because the air-conditioning would be out of control and everyone was too cold no matter the season. So to have to keep your hands exposed all night was cruel. But the reason that they insisted on it clearly had nothing to do with it being “safer” for the patient. No, it was punishment. That is ALL. The whole purpose of one-o-one in those places was punishment. You could not talk to the sitter, one, and the sitter had to follow you even into the toilet. And all the while deliberately ignoring you if you spoke to her..So what was the point, if they kept the close eye on you they were supposed to, they knew you could not hurt yourself.  So the point was simply to humiliate and torment the patient so they would beg for “freedom” and pretend or at least mouth the words “I am safe.” Those magic three words were all that were needed, but you had to say them so that the nurses could hear.

For many years, I believed that this was a hospitals-wide, state-wide, business as usual policy, the no-talking, hands exposed rules, and that it was reasonable. Until I went to Natchaug and Sharon told me that Natchaug didn’t believe that one-to-one should be “punitive” in any way. And by the way, she said that word, “punitive,” not I. Nevertheless, at Natchaug, no one made me sleep with my hands outside of the covers and the sitters freely spoke with me. In fact, once they understood that I needed them not to share their own lives with me, because then I would feel the need to take care of them, something that would not be helpful to me, they wanted to find out specifically how they could help me.

But back to the use of restraints. I am only 5’ 3” and from 2005 until 2010, I weighed between 92-105 pounds. Surely I could not have been that great a threat to anyone. In fact, at one hospital, one I will not name, fearing them so much I wouldn’t put it past them to take revenge, they had a somewhat better policy of dealing with agitated patients.  At a Code Orange, staff members from every unit converged on the “victim” (sorry but that is how it felt) and  “held” her until she could calm herself. Now, this “holding” often consisted of pinning her bodily to the floor, which itself could be anxiety provoking. And at least once, in my case, a male nurse who openly detested me, tried to pin me to the floor on my stomach, which I had read was something to be avoided as people had died when held down prone, as opposed to supine (on the back)! But in general the technique worked, if the victim was held down long enough. Basically, if he fought, there were enough people holding him down to allow him to exhaust himself without doing anyone harm. And then, when exhausted, he would calm down and either take PRN medication, or assure the head nurse that he would be okay now. It worked, though, no matter what I thought about it, or of the people doing it. And it did avoid all use of restraints, though of course by itself it is already a form of restraining people, it just avoided the use of mechanical restraints. That though, still makes a big difference…

Forgive me if I segue again into another digressive subject for a minute or two, but the subject of 2010, which recently turned the decade corner into 2011, brought to mind the fact that having taken Zyprexa (most of the time) since then has caused me to gain a fair amount of weight, another subject that is near if not dear to my heart. Oh, the damage that psychoactive drugs do! How dare doctors blame us, the people with schizophrenia, for it? Don’t we have enough trouble without being blamed for the side effects of the very medications that they prescribe? Do you know that for decades, and sanctified as Truth in psychiatry textbooks, they insisted, without any reason and making less sense, that schizophrenia itself was the cause for so many of us to be obese? That was utter nonsense to my way of thinking. Every single memoir about sz that I ever read revealed that the author had been thin UNTIL she or he was treated with antipsychotic drugs, and then, blammo, food becomes the enemy. Yet the shrinks actually insisted, against all the evidence, that it was the illness and not the drugs that was behind the huge % of patients exhibiting this “signal obesity”.

Well, all along I thought they were full of shit, pardon my french. No, I didn’t just think it, I KNEW it. I had not a doubt in the world. And you know what? I was right. The latest research has borne out precisely what I’d asserted all along: when investigators looked at a population of people with schizophrenia that for one reason or another had never taken antipsychotic drugs, they discovered that this neuroleptic-naive group was thinner than average, and that it was in fact the drugs that had made us obese, sometimes massively so, rather than schizophrenia. And it just infuriates me, not just the obesity, it is not just the weight gain the drugs cause, it is the fact that we patients have been blamed for something that they, the doctors and nurses and their GD drugs, inflicted on us. Maybe it is especially difficult for me, with my history of anorexia and my intense wish simply to disappear, but what about those who will die from drug-induced heart disease or diabetes?

I know, I know, Mary, you may be on the other side of this argument, or it might appear that way, because you want more treatment to be available, not less. I do in general agree with you: Prisons are overflowing with the mentally ill, who should never have been there in the first place. In fact, I think the prisons are overflowing with an awful lot of people, especially those of a certain darker-hued skin, for little reason more than the very color of their skin! I mean, tell me why Robert Downey Jr and Lindsey Lohan, aside from their celebrity status, get caught again and again with drugs and cocaine etc, yet are sent off to posh rehab centers, with a smile. But should you happen to be an unknown, POOR, god forbid mentally ill person of a darker hued skin (and let’s face it, a light/white South African immigrant would not be treated the same way as a dark-skinned someone with Nigerian roots!) if you are that person and you offend in some way just 3 times, well, then, you are sent away to one of California’s really “posh” ha ha ha penitentiaries FOR LIFE! Things like that just make my blood BOIL. And don’t get me started on the insanity of our drug laws!

But forgive me for going so far astray. It is just that the whole subject of prisons and what we do to people in them is a really sore point with me, and not just how we treat the mentally ill there, though that is about as atrocious as it can get…Need I even mention the “extra beds” in unused supermax prisons being used to house “unruly” MI prisoners? It makes me want to scream and throw up at the same time.

Well, no doubt this “essay” is both incoherent, in the sense that it doesn’t cohere properly, and just plain incoherent! I admit to a bit of laziness, as it is late at night, and i need to take my MEDS and go to bed. So, at the moment, I am not going to polish and fix it. I am going to pretend that since this is “only” a blog I can get away with shoddy ill-organized writing, and call it a night. Which is what I am doing forthwith…Good night, and thanks, Mary N, thanks a million again.

PW

Appetite, Eating, Nutrition, Schizophrenia, Zyprex

Symptoms, Zyprexa and Recovery Again

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Zyprexa: "The miracle and the monster"

 

Yes, I am kinda sick of this rollercoaster, myself. But there you have it. If I will not or cannot take the medication, and I have no other choice, what is a person to do? I know it is a miracle drug, yet I fight taking Zyprexa at every possible turn. Why? Because, frankly, I cannot tolerate the enormous weight gain it caused the first time I took it – and for many years, off and on. I simply cannot stand being that visible, eating up so much of others’ air, intruding, in truth obtruding into their space as I do  even now…People will ask me questions about some “trade-off” as if it were so easy as that, as if THEY could easily decide, would have no trouble opting to take the drug, and die early from diabetes, which almost a foregone conclusion after becoming obese on Zyprexa. Hell, even without the obesity factor, people develop diabetes on the drug…And that’s only for starters, what about the cholesterol and triglyceride levels  that go up and up? Or is that part of the trade off too? That a person with schizophrenia should not care about elevated levels the way anyone else does…

I have mentioned here, I believe, the recent studies that have shown that people with SZ  become overweight and obese SOLELY on account of the medications. Without these medications, as a group we would tend to be thinner than the average adult. I have suspected this for many years. It would seem to me that every time I read a memoir by someone with sz, they would tell a tale of being a very slim person, until they were plied with some typical or atypical anti-psychotic, at which point they started gaining weight. Now, it was never clear to me whether or not the old drugs really helped much of anything, except to alleviate a few positive symptoms in some people.

Oh, those who disturbed the peace could be quieted, calmed yes,but no one was cured. I met very few people who wanted to take meds because the drugs actually made them feel better. Oh, perhaps they did, since if one got rid of the hallucinations and delusions of course one would feel better. But for myself the old neuroleptics  didn’t work particularly well on either positive or negative symptoms, and the side effects were awful, esp the deadening  lethargy the drugs produced. I would never choose to take any of those drugs and I agreed to take prolixin because it was the lesser evil because otherwise, they would threaten me with consequences far worse…But had I had the choice no way would I have chosen to take any of those drugs.

I’m terribly sorry, but I must stop here. I just wanted to get start on someting, but it is 4 am and I need to go to sleep, plus my eyes are so wonky all over again that I can barely see what I am doing, and at times I cannot at all. My eyes are going nuts again, crossing over or going outwards whatever! All I know is the text dances around and I cannot see through the jumble of letters frlying around. It is hard even to figure out which hand is doing what!

Well, enough for now. I hope to be back here tomorrow, but time has a way of getting away from me…

Certainly, the side effects of drugs like Thorazine were problematic enough to begin with. And count weight gain among them. How is it that any doc in state institutions could not see this correlation? But as you know, “there are
none so blind as those who will not see…”

Appetite, Blog, Eating, Medication, Nutrition, Schizophrenia, Uncategorized

My Pyramid Tracker, plus Another Medication Change

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Before I tell you about the most recent medication change, I want to let you know about  My Pyramid Tracker at  http://www.mypyramidtracker.gov, a website of the USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. My Pyramid refers to the new and improved USDA food pyramid (http://www.mypyramid.gov) which, by the way, recommends only five and a half ounces of meat or beans a day, which is just a little over a quarter of a pound. The pyramid tracker website is one I highly recommend, however, especially  if you are interested in losing weight or in keeping track of what you eat and how much you exercise. In fact, it is a website worth looking at even if you are only curious about how many calories you expend in everyday activities. You can use it  every day or once a week or on any schedule you choose, and all you need to do is follow the easy instructions at the end of any given day to see how you did, though it helps if you jot down what you eat during the day, so you don’t forget entirely. Every time you log in, the site keeps track, so you can see stats later on about how you are trending.

My Pyramid and the Pyramid Tracker are great sites for general nutrition info, calorie calculation and the general calculation of energy expenditure in your daily life. You can compare what you expend to your daily calorie requirements. That is, by counting such activities of daily life as dish-washing and childcare and yard-work as forms of exercise the site will tell you how many calories you expended on them. It also calculates your BMI — body mass index — your ideal weight, and how to achieve it as well.

Click this

If you happen to be interested solely in finding out how many  calories are in a given food, however, the Nutrient Data Lab website is great. It has a large number of brand name foods as well as fresh and raw foods as well: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/index.html

Should you be on medication that causes weight gain, or makes it difficult to lose what weight you formerly put on, check out those sites (above). They could make a big difference, or at least be a helpful tool in your efforts to keep your weight under control. But two things nonetheless are very important:

Please, do not beat yourself up if you cannot lose weight.

Remember that will power is a matter of chemistry, not bad character.

In fact, in FACT, it is your meds and the chemical changes that they produce in your brain that has caused you to gain weight. It is NOT your schizophrenia and it is NOT your fault. Do not believe whatever they say about research “proving” a close link between your diabetes and your having schizophrenia. That is utter B.S. Diabetes is on the rise everywhere in the country and its increase is directly related to obesity: one gets obese because one eats more calories than one expends. Being more than a little overweight is known to be a huge factor in Diabetes, type II (insulin insensitivity).

Now it is true that you might have been or become overweight without the meds, but I assure you that certain meds all but guarantee it. When researchers have the gall to say that somehow obesity is directly or in some sense causally related to schizophrenia, or that diabetes is genetically connected to schizophrenia, that is a load of hogwash, and I suspect those researchers are on the take from certain well-known drug manufacturers. I’ll bet that for many of you who were once thin before you took medication, whether it was the older drugs or the newer atypicals, it was only when you started taking antipsychotics (and some antidepressants as well) that you began to gain weight, sometimes massive amounts. But “they” want to tell you that it has “nothing to do with the meds” no, it is YOU, it is your illness, not the Zyprexa or the Seroquel or the Risperdal that caused the weight gain, or for that matter, not the Thorazine or the Mellaril or the Prolixin. We know better. They also want to tell us that if we die 25 years earlier than our peers, that is our mental illness speaking or our own fault (somehow) and not their iatrogenic — that is to say, medically-caused, doctor-caused —  drug-related obesity, diabetes and heart disease. I won’t even mention the generally dismissive attitude of many doctors towards the physical complaints of anyone with a major psychiatric diagnosis, it is no minor problem.

So, what to do? Well, there is not much you can do at this time, if you have found a med that works well for you and are able and willing to tolerate the weight gain and potential side effects from it. In some ways I admire those who will make this trade-off, though I worry that they will lose their new found lives early because of it, in which  case is it really worth it? But I know that for some people it indeed is, and I would never question their choices. For me, I am lucky enough to have responded to at least one less-weight problematic drug besides the miracle drug/drug from hell Zyprexa, which is the combo: Abilify/Geodon. The Geodon by itself seemed to me virtually worthless, at least it seemed to do almost nothing for me in terms of improving my cognition or creativity. The Abilify vastly increased my cognition and such, but at the expense of extreme irritability and rage. However, the serendipitous co-administration of the two solved the problems of each so that now I can feel creative and cognitively less impaired (I still cannot read, alas) and yet I am not at all irritable or enraged. Added to that is the fact that my appetite is under control again. While I have not yet started to lose weight, which is already at a decent level, according to most people (just not me) I no longer find myself raiding the fridge constantly or exhibiting uncontrollable food-seeking behavior all day, hungry or no. It feels much better not to feel yanked around by the nose by a med that never let me feel in control of myself…

But what happened to the Saphris? Well, two things: one, I simply could not sleep, and that is a weird thing for someone with narcolepsy to complain of! It was great to be awake all day, but I was awake all night as well. I would but up except for an hour or two for days on end, and it was exhausting. But worse, according to my psyche, was the fact that I ate less than 700 calories a day, walked 8 miles a week, — keeping track via mypyramidtracker.gov and the nutrient data lab — and yet after 2.5 weeks, I didn’t lose a single pound. This was so terribly depressing that I had to change it, had to go back to the Geodon and Abilify on which I got to the weight I was truly comfortable at a couple of years ago…Now, though, I have to try hard, and i will, because I am determined to get there. My father is always saying, Appetite comes in eating. Well, he is absolutely correct. But the opposite is also true, because the less I eat, the less I want, and the more I forget to eat, the more I, well, forget to eat…As far as I am concerned that is fine with me.

I think that is all that I have energy for today, because I want to continue to read Karen Sorensen’s site and blog, which I haven’t seen for a long while. Her art is so creative. It might be called, as my professionally trained artist friend said, Outsider Art, but nevertheless she has such an imagination that I feel stunned. I simply cannot let myself go and “let it all hang out” as we used to say in the “old days.” I don’t know how to do it, not graphically. Not pictorially. I am so hung up on getting my pictures and portraits perfect that I cannot relax and let my mind run free. I can do so in poetry, let things happen, and to hell with what my inner self is “really” saying, Let the shrinks figure it out! But in a painting or collage, I have to be in control, I don’t know why. Perhaps because I am so new at it…?

Thanks Karen. I love your gallery, where I can “flip through” your art works and see them en masse.

I also have to visit Kate Kiernan’s  Ying and Yang blog as her writing is as good as her art, which is saying a great deal. I am not sure which I like better, though I don’t really need to choose, as her writing is very different from her paintings. Kate is also a terrific songwriter/singer as well. On her blog you can sample all three. She is truly one of the most talented people I know.

You can find both Karen’s and Kate’s websites on my sidebar.

Appetite, Eating, Medication, Mental Health, OCD, Uncategorized

The OCD Project on VH1

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I have to tell you that I do not usually watch VH1. In fact, thinking that it was always and only a music channel, and moreover that it featured music of the sort I do not generally enjoy, I have never watched it. But I was up all night last night because I couldn’t fall asleep and I was channel surfing, trying to “bore myself to sleep,” only to come across their amazing program, The OCD Project. Yes, it is comes under the rubric of a “reality show” and the OCD sufferers featured might in fact be “on stage” in the same way that I suspect those  “Housewives of New Jersey” on Bravo Channel are (the dames in that show must be acting, they are so ridiculous!). But it is hard to believe this is the case. Even if I am wrong, it doesn’t matter, because if they are performing in any sense of the word, the enactment of the disorder of OCD is so compelling and the treatment so gritty and potentially life-changing that I am going to recommend it to everyone who happens across this post.

Please, whether or not you have schizophrenia, bipolar or Lyme and you have come to this site because of those: if you have any interest in or symptoms of OCD, check out THE OCD PROJECT at the following link. Once there, scroll down to the links to the full episodes. Click on Episode 101 first, then the clips to 102, then the full episode 103 and you will be all set for Episode 104 when it appears either on TV or on the website.

Good viewing! I think you will be impressed and may learn a lot. I know I did. Let me know what you think.

Perhaps more important, let the producers of the show and of VH1 know your feelings, because such programming about mental illness is so very important and their efforts in that direction ought to be encouraged.

http://www.vh1.com/shows/the_ocd_project/series.jhtml

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Brief update:

The Saphris and Abilify continue to do me good without causing any particular harm or objectionable side effects. Except for the pills’ bad taste and brief oral anesthesia after taking Saphris –surely a tiny price to pay for what seem to be big benefits — I can’t think of anything I would improve about it. Perhaps it would be good to feel inspired to get back to “doing artwork” again, which has not happened. Not yet.  But I think this may be due to the fact that I have been focusing on writing poetry to the exclusion of almost everything else. On the other hand, I can read, a little, which is good, though it takes some effort to sit with a book and concentrate. When I decide to make the time and do it, I can. I am also, I think, losing the weight I gained on Zyprexa, slowly but surely, which is only to be expected, since the Abilify has all but caused my appetite to vanish completely. I am back to forgetting to eat, rather than emptying the fridge at all hours of the day and night.

That brings me to the subject of another post I will write soon: how drugs affect the appetite and how my experiences with Zyprexa and Abilify make me certain that while appetite may be all in the brain, it is “brain-chemistry” for everyone, even for those who do not take medications. It has virtually nothing to do with so-called willpower.

Art and artwork, Eating, Nutition, Zyprex

Compulsive Eating and Zyprexa (updated)

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ALL EYES ARE UPON US
ALL EYES ARE UPON US

This is my ALL EYES ARE UPON US papier mache sculpture head — It should easily be finished by the time I am having a poetry reading and exhibit in Mystic on November 15th. I would like to exhibit it with the others if possible. It is the newest of my work and therefore the one I am most proud of. I am not completely clear just where I am going with it, but I do know not to worry, that inspiration will come to me eventually. Indeed, some already has; I am starting to place a tri-folded American flag underneath her ( yes it is a woman…) arms, as if she is hugging it for dear life…Why? not sure, but I believe my subconscious has a message for me there…I will decipher it and rest of it later, when I am through. However, my thoghts on the “meaning” is never the last word on it. I expect my viewers to do the same, that is, interpret the sculpture according to their own lights, according to the vicissitudes, or the longstanding truths of their own lives, not mine. It should mean whatever they want it to mean, according to their own life experiences. All of which is to say, There is no right answer, no real meaning here, only the sculpture’s evocative power to suggest this to one person and that to another.

Now regarding this post’s title, Compulsive Eating and Zyprexa: I had a rough week two weeks ago, during which I did something self-destructive though along too familiar lines with a “fagot” of cigarettes tied together with thread and simultaneously lighted. There was talk of the hospital to “keep me safe” if nothing else, but I saw no point, and indeed there was none. No hospital had ever proven they coud truly keep me safe: I have attempted and successfully hurt myself sometimes seriously almost everywhere I’ve been sent to, including breaking a carefully supervised mirror in a make-up compact and slicing my wrist open. My visitng nurse knew and agreed but made me agree to take a PRN of Zyprexa for a while. I didn’t really fight this. As  you, Readers, know, Zyprexa is a drug abut which I am extraordinarily ambivalent. It is both the single most helpful and effective drug I have ever taken, nearly a miracle medication, if not precisely that, but also the absolute pits in terms of a side effect I hate more than any.  I have not yet figured out how to tolerate this love/hate relationship I have with the drug. For instance, despite hating the single worst side effect, I very much appreciate being able to read, read, read, to concentrate and pay attention and remember..

Oh, perhaps it feels subtle the effect that Zyprexa produces, the therapeutic one, the helpful effect . In actuality, though, the change in my behavior is immense, not to mention on some very fundamental thought patterns. I don’t actually recognize at first that all of it is drug-induced: I just sit down and decide to pick up a book — that all by itself is unusual for all that it feels natural. But so too is the astonishing fact that I feel interested instead of listless and fearful that I won’t “get” it, that I wont be able to attend,  and upon opening the book, the fact that every word seems to flow,  my mind fluid and absorbent and the words just pour, the words and the sense and the meaning, well, if I weren’t so absorbed in it, I would be amazed… But I think, Why haven’t I read before now? Why,  when it is so easy, have I not been doing this all along? ( I have forgotten that it was NOT this easy until I took the Zyprexa…). But the difference between then — not reading, and now — being able to attend and absorb and read — is not subtle at all. It is marked and significant. I finish books and articles, instead of merely dabbling in them. And I remember what I read, instead of most of the content flying in one ear and out the other.

But the same effect that brings about the therapeutic effect, unfortunately and seemingly by the same mechanism, induces the unwanted and horrid side effect of an insatiable appetite. Just as subtle and my being able to read, I scarcely notice at first that i want to eat more than usual. I simply feel increased desire for food, and think nothing of it, since wanting food is normal, right? It is only when I recognize, when I realize that it is constant, and occurs immediately after I have just finished a full dinner plate that I  begin to associate it to the new medication. My weight quicky increases, but because the food desire feels like me, as if it is simply native to me, I cannot justify it as purely drug induced, but am ashamed of my new lack of self-discipline and my also new tendency to compulsive overeating. Even when I know for certain it is all “chemistry” –and begin to tie ALL obesity therefore to chemistry to the effect of body chemistry that is out of whack, either congenitally or induced by the environment, perhaps by  igesting the wrong foods themselves. What if eating high fructose corn syrup, already associated (the reasons are still unclear) with obesity, changes one’s chemistry to produce a malignant positive feedback that only induces more obesity ad infinitum as long as one continues ingesting it? Even when I know for certain that my increased and uncontrollable appetite is pure “chemistry” it doesn’t fully relieve either my shame or my latent anger at what ‘I have done to myself.”

I have been off Zyprexa for many months now, and have rarely needed or taken a PRN, but thought it makes a noticeable and positive difference, it is the already evident weight gain I cannot/WILL not tolerate  (Truth is, it showed no sign of ending even at 160 pounds the last time I took it). My friend Joe who has taken it for years developed another very common “side effect” of this drug, diabetes, on top of ALS… So I am between the Scylla of “negative” and/or cognitive symptoms — poor concentration and inability to pay attention, the lack of a certain spark in my life AND Charybdis  — the whirlpool of an uncontrollable urge to eat up everything in my refrigerator right after I have already had a full meal, the wild animal panic if I cannot, and the lack of concentration induced in its place because all my mind can focus on is “What can I eat now???” It is a panic I feel in my hands, especially along the backs of them, more than anywhere. I certainly do not eat out of even imagined hunger. I know that. I feel FULL, in most cases because when I am hungry I usually will eat sensibly… But when smitten by the drug-induced food-seeking behavior after a  full meal, I can even tell myself out loud, “You aren’t hungry, you don’t need to eat”…this piece of bread, or cheese, or fruit, whatever is in my hand. I listen too, I put the food back at once, and wash my hands, and go back to the living room to read or do my art or whatever I was occupied in doing before I was seized by this compulsion. But literally no more than 10 or 20 seconds later, another food impulse will propel me from my seat to the refrigerator, and if not consciously thwarted I will eat. And eat, and eat. Not like a bulimic, mind you. No, I take one piece of fruit or bread or cheese (I did not last as a vegan, alas, because I felt sick and dizzy living on fruit and green and colored veggies) and a knife and a plate, and sit in a chair, and cut it up and eat it reasonably slowly while I read. But soon I am finished and ready to read again “solo.” That is when the tension starts building to another threshold over which I feel it is impossible to climb in safety.

What I do instead, is follow this ritual, with another just like it a couple of minutes later, and then a couple of minutes after finishing the second and ditto the third and fourth and… Before you know it I have eaten so many calories up to a certain point, a set point if you will, where finally the switch flips off and my “hunger” goes off, and so does the food-seeking…I can now settle down and get something done. but until the threshold is reached and surpassed, I cam think of nothing but eating. The cure for it, the only remedy, is that I must be sure to short circuit the cycle by taking Xyrem and forcing myself to go to bed after supper. And I must NOT eat all day and evening except for coffee and diet soda (luckily the Zyprexa induces food-seeking behavior and not real hunger, so I am not tortured as long as I do not break my fast), until right before bed I allow myself to take a few bites. If I do not eat at all, I do not feel like eating and the cravings do not even begin. It is when I do take the first bite, just like an alcoholic, that all bets are off and all the control gates to hold back the flood open.

I still think that Zyprexa induced eating and 15 mg of Abilify-induced lack of appetite would be a great way to study the science of appetite, what causes compulsive eating and what breaks that cycle and stops appetite and interest or uncontrollable interest altogether. I would agree to be that guinea pig but I’d aso say that plenty of people could do so…I don’t see why others would not react as I do, especially a plenty of people have had the same weight gain reaction as I.

I will try to continue my discussion of this topic soon, as I want to research it a bit and I have some further thoughts on the subject. However, at the moment I needs must get other work done…

TTFN

Oh yeah, by the way, Li and I had a decent discussion abut TLE during one of my recent visits and it made me feel better about him, for the time being. At least he is going to consider it, though he told me it never rules out schizophrenia as there are always a percentage of those with TLE that concomitantly have schizophrenia as well.