Blogs by panickers part 2

Welcome to the new Blogger publishing application, which allows me to use a nifty, colorful typeface for blog entry titles.

Now, to business. Here are some other blogs and blog entries by people talking about panic attacks, panic disorder, or anxiety:

This post on a blog called Child Wrangler 2, by Jen, "a 22 year old nanny in college," talks about a panic attack she had while trying to travel by airplane.

This is one blogger's story of his first panic attack, which occurred when he was just 12, and at a Cyndi Lauper concert with his dad and some friends.

This post, by blogger and nursing student Not Nurse Ratched, opens:

My life is in a downward-facing slant lately, largely as a result of intractable anxiety. I had no idea I had the capacity to be one of those people who are totally slain by panic attacks; had I considered the possibility, I probably would have assumed I would not be taken in by the idea that I was dying and that I would sort of blow the first one off and never have them again. That has not been the case, and I'm reduced to being a basketcase slinking around the edges of my life, constantly grabbing my wrist to see if my pulse is tachy or skipping beats (usually yes to both, propranolol notwithstanding). I had no idea what hell true anxiety problems were. They have taken over my life. I am now almost constantly petrified with terror that I will have another bad panic attack.

This is a look at anxiety and panic by Yet Another Heather, a Southern gal.

Nightlight is an intelligent, honest blog chronicling one woman's ongoing mental wrestling match with panic disorder.

From the blog Random Ramblings comes this post, which begins:

I am agoraphobic not as bad as some people I have read about, but still pretty bad. I haven’t left the house to go anywhere but church and the grocery store in months. Today I have an unavoidable appointment. I am breaking out in hives, and couldn’t sleep last night. My heart is racing and I am having a major anxiety attack. I know it’s pathetic. It’s so stupid, especially since not even seven years ago I was outgoing enough to move to a new state by myself and completely start my life over.

This is a discussion by London author Martin Millar of his agoraphobia.

Remember, you are not alone!

Pursued by Bears

As some faithful readers of my blog know, I suffer from panic disorder and generalized anxiety. If that sounds a bit passive (for shame!), there is a reason: That's what it feels like. It's pretty horrible and debilitating, to the extent that driving a car much past the grocery store can result in palpitations, dizziness, feelings of unreality, and rabid wildcats loosed in the passenger seat. I will win, however.

The more attention you give the thing, the more it grows. Feed it and it lives. Starve it and it dies. If you distract yourself effectively, or forget that you are driving a large piece of machinery, you can trick the anxiety down into normal levels. The anxiety and panic and fear are entirely created by you, and no one and nothing else. Medication won't cure it. Rather, replacing the bad habit of anxiety with other, better habits—including robust, intellectual diversions—is the cure.

So here's the weird conundrum. One of my "robust, intellectual diversions" happens to be writing. What should I write about? S'pose I wrote a really strange and funny memoir about battling years of panic disorder? (Oh, I have plenty of fodder. I had my first panic attack at the age of three. I decided the toilet was coming to eat me.) Or should I divert myself with the silly YA novel that I enjoy writing? But if I don't write the book about the panic disorder, will I eventually heal myself and then forget what it feels like to have panic disorder and then lose all the horrible details to unreliable memory?

Aw, hell.

I think I will call my book PURSUED BY BEARS. 

Anyway, my 7-year-old let loose with a good old-fashioned panic attack himself tonight. He started out tired and hungry, which is a recipe for disaster. He was taking a shower and he suddenly started screaming like big, black bees were pouring up out of the drain. I ran in and found him covered in suds, with shampoo draining down into his eyes, his elbows at his side in a fixed, bent manner.

"Gemme out of here!" he screamed, hysterical. "I can't breathe! I can't see! My elbows hurt!"

The kid doesn't do well when he doesn't eat right, or exercises too much, or decides that he's had a funny/weird day. Today was a vicious combination of all three—trampoline jumping, garden work, soccer—and he went quite bonkers. I hugged him tight in a towel and thought how alike we are, and about the strange sway of genetics. I heard him say: "This week has been all bad!"

I said, "No, you had a great deal of fun this week. You did so many fun things."

"The week has just started!" he corrected me. "It is Sunday, and the beginning of the week. And the week so far has been all bad. It will not get better. It will go downhill from here."

I dressed him like he was a baby, his white skinny legs goose-pimpled with cold and his hair in stiff wet spikes. It was startling how he reminded me of myself, and the untethered and fine imagination running wild, fast, and reckless to the borders of the garden, pursued by something he has dreamed and divined. Pursued by bears.

Book Review Behave by Robert M Sopolsky

For anyone who wants to understand all of the huge number of factors that influence human behavior, as well as counter overly pat, simple, or downright mythological explanations for it, I cannot recommend a book more highly than this one. Every page – and there are almost 700 of them - is just packed with enlightening information on the role of almost everything you can think of. 

These factors include genes, gene regulation, epigenetics, neurotransmitters, hormones, brain structures, neural networks, unconscious cuing and sensory triggers, stress responses and protective factors, neural plasticity, peers and social acceptance, attachment figures, brain development in childhood and adolescence, socioeconomic and hierarchical status, collectivist vs. individualistic cultures, gender, reactions to “them” vs. “us,” heritibility  vs. inheritance of traits, gene/environmental interactions,  population density, evolution (individual, kin, and group selection), reciprocal and pathological altruism, obedience vs. resistance, cooperation vs. competition, and empathy. And a whole lot more.

Can one book really be that encyclopedic?? Yes! I have no idea how he accomplished writing this. 

If you do not understand some of the scientific concepts that are under discussion, he conveniently includes three appendices in the book to help explain them. Not that the main body of the book is dry and overly technical. It is laced throughout with witty jokes, stories, and ironic observations that kept me thoroughly entertained.

Does he leave anything out? Well, yes, he does not seem to know about the effects of rapid cultural change on families which may create shared intrapsychic conflicts leading to parents giving mixed messages to their children which then trigger and reinforce their repetitive self destructive behavior. But I haven’t yet seen anyone else write about that besides me – at least not in the way I have conceptualized the process - so I wouldn’t expect that. He also doesn’t discuss the effects of chaos theory on the amazingly multi-factorial “causes” of behavior he goes into - a minor quibble.

Sopolsky shoots down behavioral and neuroscientific myths believed by health care professionals, some scientists, and the lay public alike (what mirror neurons actually do, for example) with the abandon of someone armed with an Uzi facing off against people armed with swords. Amazing.

Some of his important points: 

1.       Brains and cultures co-evolve.

2.       We haven’t evolved to be selfish or altruistic, but to behave in particular ways in particular settings. Context is everything.

3.       Genes are not about inevitabilities, but about potentials and vulnerabilities, and they do not determine any behavior on their own.

4.       Evolution has been most consequential when altering regulation of genes, not the genes themselves.

5.       Saying a biological system works well is not a value judgment – it can function equally well for those who do something wonderful or in those who do something horrific.

6.       Nothing seems to cause anything - everything just modulates something else within a specific environmental context. And changing one thing often changes ten other things as a byproduct.

7.       Any causative factor within any specified population of individuals within any specific environmental context has an average effect on behavior that may or may not apply to any given individual. There are always exceptions.

What an accomplishment.

Book Review David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

In my blog post of May 12, Are Scientists More Objective and Rational than the Rest of Us?, I related the stories of some scientists who somehow were able to “think outside the box,” to use the annoyingly well-worn cliché. They broke through the conventional wisdom, academic politics, and scientist groupthink and made radical changes to accepted scientific concepts and explanations for various phenomenon. 

I discussed Clare Patterson, who successfully took on a respected scientist who had became an oil industry lackey and who had pushed the idea that lead in gasoline was not dangerously polluting the environment. 

Then there was Elizabeth Gould, who took on neuroscience guru Pasko Rakic, who had set the field of neurobiology back a full decade by refusing to believe a lot of data coming out that disproved the prevailing notion that sophisticated animals are born with essentially every brain cell they would ever have, and that no new neurons develop during adulthood.

Another good example was German meteorologist Alfred Wegener, who first proposed – way back in 1915 - that South America and Africa had one time been joined. He was almost laughed out of academia. He even had fossil evidence for his proposition, but the geologists of his day not only mocked him but counter-proposed that there are (now sunken) land bridges to account for the fossils - without any evidence that this was in fact the case. Now all geologists accept the theory of plate tectonics.

So what makes some people able to do this? This is actually two questions, not one: First, why can some people think in novel ways while others seem stuck with the groupthink no matter how preposterous it starts to become? Second, why do some of these people succeed in creating – again pardon the second annoyingly well worn cliché – a paradigm shift in the scientific community, while others fail?

I was discussing these questions with a friend, and in response he gave me an interesting book called David and Goliath, Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell.

Malcolm Gladwell

It’s mostly about the individual and group factors that lead some people to think apart from prevailing wisdom, rather than about which of these people succeed in making a mark and which do not, but I thought it was a very interesting read.

Now of course Mr. Gladwell is a journalist and not a neuroscientist or psychologist, and his work has garnered a lot of public criticism from professionals in those fields, particularly Steven Pinker and Chris Chabris. Gladwell is above all a storyteller, but he goes on to make some interesting hypotheses about the psychology – and to a lesser extent the sociology – of the people at the center of his stories. He then speculates further about what these hypotheses could mean more generally.

Chabris accused him of “telling just-so stories and cherry-picking science to back them up,” and “presenting as proven laws what are just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behaviour.”

Fair enough, although I'm not sure I would agree that Gladwell is saying his ideas are proven. On the other hand, the belief of some psychologists in the sanctity of statistics and so-called empirical studies in the social sciences is also grossly overestimated. There are some inherent limitations in our current ability to explain and predict things, particularly in psychology. In the words of the neurobiologist Steve Rose, "It is in the nature of living things to be radically indeterminate."

I discussed the issue of “anecdotal” evidence versus inductive conclusions in a prior post. But an even bigger problem is the obvious difficulty in precisely mapping out the interactions between genes and environment, when there are literally thousands of environmental variables and a trillion constantly changing synaptic connections between brain cells, all of which interact at constantly changing frequencies over decades. No one can even come close to controlling for all of these variables in a lab experiment. This is the definition of chaos.

Sometimes the best way to eventually understand a psychological question of this sort – and one can only talk about increased or decreased probabilities of certain results given certain pre-conditions, never about anything approaching absolute certainty – is by looking at all the details in the stories of a variety of individuals. With all of the variables at work, only individual stories can provide some of these necessary details. With psychology, details matter. 

And sometimes it is the exceptions to the conventional wisdom that prove or disprove a perceived “rule.”

So with this in mind, reading Gladwell’s stories does bring up some intriguing possibilities. His major premise is that the experience of certain types of adversities can make someone stronger and far more resolute than he or she might be otherwise. Gladwell brings up, for example, the strength of the population of London during the rocket and bombing attacks by the Germans in World War II. The fact that so many people experienced what he calls a “near miss” – surviving a bombing in which your neighbors did not - can strengthen people's resolve to carry on.

He also discusses how some people with dyslexia had to ingeniously develop alternate ways of accomplishing certain tasks in order to overcome their limitations, which later helped them to be wildly successful. Again, I do not think the author is arguing that dyslexia is a good thing, or that for most people it does not impair or even destroy their attempts at success. So other variables are obviously involved.  

But that doesn’t necessarily negate the premise that sometimes weaknesses can be turned into strengths – as David did in the story of David and Goliath. Goliath was only prepared to fight someone who fought just like him, which left him vulnerable to a projectile from a slingshot.

Then there was the story of Emil “Jay” Freireich, a doctor who was a major player in the vast improvement in the treatment of childhood leukemia. The good doctor lost his father when he was quite young to a probable suicide after the stock market crash of 1929. The family was left destitute, and the mother was frequently absent in order to work, leaving him to fend for himself.

To oversimplify just a bit, Freireich realized that children were dying because individual drugs, which were causing horrific side effects, did not work fast enough. The leukemia killed the children before the drugs really had time to work. The drugs were just not killing enough cancer cells quickly enough. He knew that this meant that the children needed more aggressive treatment, and that drug “cocktails” were probably called for. But this meant that the children would suffer even more horrible side effects as the cocktails were given to them, and the medical establishment recoiled in horror at such a thought.

But Freireich had learned to persist in the face of adversity, and would not be deterred. Of course, the places in which he worked could have easily fired him for his activities, so a lot of luck was also involved. He had to be surrounded by at least some people who recognized the possibility that he might just be right. Fortunately, that was the case. Today’s cure rate for the type of cancer he fought stands at about 90%.

As Gladwell points out, “Does this mean that Freireich should be glad he had the kind of childhood he had? The answer is plainly no. What he went through as a child was something no child should have to endure…the right question is whether we as a society needpeople who have emerged from some kind of trauma – and the answer is that we plainly do.”

As an aside, Gladwell also brings up sort of in passing something that I wanted to mention because it puts an additional, very interesting new spin on the problem of some African Americans internalizing the racist, negative attitudes of Whites toward Blacks, so that they end up treating each other just like Whites used to treat them. I discussed this in my post of 8/14/2010 called The N-word. 

In some cases, apparently African slaves actually pretended to act out White stereotypes - in order to passive-aggressively harm their slaveholders! Gladwell quotes historian Lawrence Lavine about the phenomenon of the "trickster hero": 

"...a significant number of slaves lied, cheated, stole, feigned illness, loafed, pretended to misunderstand the orders they were given, put rocks in the bottom of their cotton baskets in order to meet their quota, broke their tools, burned their master's property, mutilated themselves in order to escape work, took indifferent care of the crops they were cultivating, and mistreated the livestock placed in their care to the extent that masters often felt it necessary to use the less efficient mules rather than horses since the former could better withstand the brutal treatment of the slaves."

So, when African Americans makes themselves look like a parody of a White stereotype, are they doing this on purpose to be a trickster, or subconsciously out of fears - originally concerning retribution - passed down unknowingly from one generation to the next? Actually, any given case could be either one - or even both. That the behavior can be this ambiguous shows the power of what I call the actor's paradox.

Becoming domesticated by Louise Emily Jones aged 19 years minus a few days

Turns out you can't live on beans and cheese.

Bit of a problem.

A quandry.

Such a good word.

Mum took me to Asda the other day and made me shop for myself, because I'm moving to Bournemouth in three weeks. I actually did alright in my A Levels (asterisks turned up out of the blue, uninvited. they couldn't stay away, couldn't fight it wait hold on) and UCAS said I could go to Oxbridge instead. I thought about it, but the only plus point I could conjure up was being on the rowing team, and therefore improving my chances of being in Rio 2016. Because I WILL be in Rio, 2016, winning Gold. Okay? OKAY? Good. As you were...oh right no I'm still talking. AS I WERE....

So I'm moving to Bournemouth and therefore need to learn how to be an autonomous individual, without frantically tweeting, "THE OVEN'S MAKING A NOISE HELP WHAT."

or, "AM I MEANT TO BE INSIDE THE DUVET COVER, OR IS THAT NOT PART OF THE PROCESS?"

or, "IT SAID 1-2 MINUTES BUT I THOUGHT IT WAS A TYPO AND PUT IT IN FOR 12 AND NOW EVERYONE'S DEAD AND OH DEAR." etc etc.

I would happily have bought just a week's worth of Quavers in my Asda shop, and maybe a banana, but mum said no. Then I suggested perhaps a Quavers multipack to vary the flavour. She said no. So I had to buy proper meat and put some broccoli in a bag. But I couldn't buy any meat, oh no. APPARENTLY some meat doesn't have a lot of meat in it so you have to check. .... .................... I don't get it either. So I wasn't allowed any chicken nuggets. Pff.

"You could buy a whole chicken and do a roast for your flat!!1!!!1" Yep or we can go to the Harvester. I think mum's really overestimating my culinary skills. After our shop, mum dropped the bombshell that as well as having a go at doing my own food shop, I in fact was also cooking ALL OF MY MEALS. All of them. Along with the washing, ironing, cleaning, LOVING, I had to do all my own cooking too from now on. Haha. Oh.

Oh.

No really, when I say I cannot do my own cooking, I really can't. This was meal 1...

and this was meal 2...

Mum's developing a very nasty rash that seems to intensify every evening at about 7pm (time depending on how hard I've tried to escape to a friend's for dinner). To clam her rash (can we just all agree to change 'calm' to 'clam', because my fingers really don't like putting the 'a' before the 'l', and it'll save so much hassle, thanks), my family came down from Birmingham and we ate out a lot. My mum told me to watch how the chefs present food (like really), but I was too busy watching my cousin. She's a vegan, and demolished a tomato so impressively that I was almost jealous. 'Almost' because I demolished a pollo mariano so impressively that I fell back in my chair going, "LIKE A PRO." when I finished. 

Cooking I will learn. The washing I can do. The only thing I have to get over with washing is feeling racist when I say, "I'M PUTTING A COLOURED WASH ON." I'm just too up for equality, y'know. LET WHITES AND COLOURS BE TOGETHER, MAN. No, no let's not let that happen, Louise. Stand down.

By 11am today I had put a load of light washing on, emptied the tumble dryer, hung out clothes on the line, sorted out my ironing, and cleaned up the kitchen after baking flapjacks and cookies, which varied in success. The cookies? I was so proud of them I did the cha cha slide, then I stopped doing the cha cha slide, sat down, and had a think. 

The flapjacks?

Well they look alright from this angle, if you want to eat them from this angle...eat them from this angle...

So baking I can do. Washing I can do. Ironing I can do. Look at me holding this iron with such vigour and determination. Like an Iron Warrior.

The putting stuff on the line bit WOULD have been successful, if this didn't happen (it was raining, okay, but the camera didn't catch the rain so i did this editing thing and LOOK IT LOOKS LIKE RAIN or something good okay).

I'll get there. Tonight I'm cooking lasagne. Nothing could go wrong. In the meantime, while I become a domestic goddess, let ME teach YOU something. FlatFace. You're oh so very welcome.