You're All Fucked in the Head!

Kitsune · 03-01-2004, 11:57 AM

...but who isn't? I know I've got my issues, some of them serious. I've seen immense spillings of depression and life stories on this board and the 'net in general and, in all, I think it is a bit of a good thing. It always feels good to get stuff off your chest. So, here's to mental issues!

What are the issues in my head? I went through some depression mixed with anxiety, but I was able to get through it. It was not fun times and, for awhile, I was quite sure I needed to see someone about it, as an unusual fear of death became a little too overwhelming at times. While I never went to see a shrink concerning my days in the dumps, I did see a cardiologist about my heart pounding all the time and the occasional skipped beat. He kicked me out, told me to not come back, and to find something that made me happy and take my mind off of work. I elected to not go the way of drugs and I think it was a wise decision -- too many people, I know, are on various doctor issued drugs for their problems and I've seen a lot of people changed for the worse because of it. Many of them lost their creativity and interest in having fun when they started taking pills for ADD/depression/etc. They were very much changed people, almost as much as someone who had become addicted to illegal drugs.

Insurance companies, by the way, are real assholes when it comes to dealing with all of the above issues.

My other issue is one that made my childhood days really difficult -- I had a hard time explaining to teachers and other students various things concerning math, numbers, and music. The problem was bad enough that I was nearly held because because of my inability to concentrate and comprehend. It wasn't until years later that I began reading about synethsia, a disease in which the pathways in the brain cause senses to be confused or crossed, that I found parallels and an explanation for what I was experiencing that no one else seemed to understand. I associate numbers and letters with specific colors (2 is blue, 3 is yellow, 4 is green, 5 is a deep red, etc) and if numbers or letters are presented in colors other than what I know it becomes very distracting, almost unpleasant. Flashing lights have sounds depending on the color, the rate at which they blink, how fast they fade on or off, etc and, inversely, music has shapes and almost tangible features when I listen to it or remember it. When in the 2nd grade, my class was asked to close our eyes and listen to a ballet piece played on a tape player and then describe what we saw. The usual answer was that students "saw people dancing", while I got disturbed looks from the teacher when I described a landscape with twists and turns, mountains, spirialing staircases, and the texture and color of the grass on the hills.

"Cool! You have LSD trips all the time!"
"Not quite."

So, you think you got problems? I think everyone does!

jaguar · 03-01-2004, 12:27 PM

Can I join in the fun or do we have to take tickets before we can let it all out?

Kitsune · 03-01-2004, 01:10 PM

Can I join in the fun or do we have to take tickets before we can let it all out?

Tickets? Unimportant. Just spew.

staceyv · 03-01-2004, 01:11 PM

it's always good to know you're not alone..here's to mental issues, kitsune...so, what do you do for a living and have your unique senses had an impact on it?

Kitsune · 03-01-2004, 01:22 PM

what do you do for a living and have your unique senses had an impact on it?

What I do for a living is the primary cause of issue #1 -- the anxiety. Carrying a pager around and having it go off at all hours of the day and night was bad, while the calls and problems that the pages led to were horrible. There were nights sleep didn't happen because I was getting paged so often to log in and handle technical problems. Very shortly after taking the job, I began admiring people that worked jobs that ended after a certain hour of the day. So while you might not enjoy waiting tables, your work is over with once you are off shift. Mine didn't stop and it soon became some kind of rule or bad luck that the moment I tried going to sleep would be cause for the pager to go off.

"PLEASE JOIN BRIDGE. CLUSTER DOWN. EMERGENCY", it would usually read, which was enough to get my heart going, knowing that some director or VP had also been woken from their sleep and paged to the call because of the severity of the issue. After awhile, sleep wasn't possible, so I didn't. I was unable to relax. It was then that I developed something that used to be called "soldier's heart" because palpitations, skipped beats, and feeling your heart beat all the time were usually seen in people that had been in combat situations and were stressed out because of it.

The synethsia was only an issue when I was really young. After awhile I learned to simply keep my mouth shut about it.

staceyv · 03-01-2004, 01:30 PM

that would drive me insane...are you still working there? and if so, what has helped you to overcome the anxiety?

Kitsune · 03-01-2004, 01:47 PM

that would drive me insane...are you still working there? and if so, what has helped you to overcome the anxiety?

First, I stopped taking the job so seriously. I realized that if a server was down or something wasn't operating correctly that people were not dieing and the world was not ending, despite the way in which some of the directors would hype up the problem on the call.

Another change I made was to find something to do during the times I wasn't on pager duty, at work, or when I wasn't on a problem call. Once I found something to do that allowed for quiet time, I stopped becoming so freaked out when the pager did go off. Photography and sketching became very enjoyable ways to pass the "dead time", even during the strangest hours of the morning. Campus police came to know me and would check up on me as I roamed around with my tripod. The first stop was for suspicious activity, after they found out what I was doing with a camera at 2:30am, they would just wave or drop by to see what images I had collected over the night. Some of them even gave suggestions for good subjects and ideas.

The third thing was to not grab the phone the moment the pager went off. Pager beeping again? No rush -- finish some more of the sketch or shoot, then join the problem call when an opportunity came along.

Lastly, and the most important item, was that I learned to laugh at problems at work, even when they were my screw-ups. To this day, anything that seriously blows up or becomes a huge issue I treat as a funny story to tell others in the future. What if the problem was one I caused and got in trouble for? That makes for an even better story. I quickly found that if you treated a problem as you would if you were looking back on it, the problem became insignificant.

And that is the way they should all be.

limey · 03-01-2004, 04:20 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Kitsune [snip ...Lastly, and the most important item, was that I learned to laugh at problems at work, even when they were my screw-ups. To this day, anything that seriously blows up or becomes a huge issue I treat as a funny story to tell others in the future. What if the problem was one I caused and got in trouble for? That makes for an even better story. I quickly found that if you treated a problem as you would if you were looking back on it, the problem became insignificant.

And that is the way they should all be.

GREAT advice.

(is that how you spell great? Looks wierd to me ...)

Shattered Soul · 03-01-2004, 07:57 PM

Synethsia....you know, that sounds like it would be interesting. I can see how it would cause problems, but damn, it would be cool, too.

wolf · 03-01-2004, 08:06 PM

Kitsune, I have to commend you for your ability to adapt ... finding a balance between your experience of the world and an interpretation of it that allows you to remain functional is nothing short of amazing. How it works is far less important than the fact that it does.

One of the things that I do appreciate about my job is that once the day is over, and I'm out of the building ... it's done. Paperwork does not follow me home, neither (hopefully) do patients. I do occasionally take "on call" as well ... luckily not as anxiety provoking as what you've had to do, essentially I just give a thumbs up or thumbs down to commitment petitions filed by families when a commitment officer is not available in the building. I do occasionally end up with consults regarding royally screwed up cases, but more often than not it's just like handling them in the building, with someone else following my instructions — I don't have to go in or get my hands dirty.

Kitsune · 03-01-2004, 08:44 PM

finding a balance between your experience of the world and an interpretation of it that allows you to remain functional is nothing short of amazing. How it works is far less important than the fact that it does.

I really didn't have to adapt to anything, there's just a little bit extra going on in my head when there isn't supposed to be and it doesn't intrude into my life. What I experience from it is mild -- I've read that others actually see the letters and numbers they read in the colors they associate them with and sometimes it interferes with peoples' lives. My issues only made my teachers and parents look at me funny because as a child I described the world to them exactly in how I perceived it. Its not that distorted of a world -- there appear to be just a couple more ways for me to describe it.

I guess my "strong" crossing is audio/visual, and it isn't so bad. I don't notice it in daily life except for when I see flashing lights. The yellow lights on traffic signals that flash at intersections at night? They have a dull, low, fading tone as they come and go. Strobes have a higher frequency and often chirp or "bip" depending on their color. Watching a field of antenna towers all blinking out of synch can be kinda weird, sometimes. Music operates the other way and has textures and features to it that can sometimes be felt.

A lot of what is reported parallels accounts of acid trips. Some people "taste" music, which leaves me to wonder: does rap music taste as bad as it sounds?

0 1 2 3 (should be yellow, but it isn't an option in the menu!) 4 5 6 7 8 9 (lighter yellow than 3)

Undertoad · 03-01-2004, 08:50 PM

We ARE all fucked in the head. My personal demon is anxiety, which I have said elsewhere on the board, is controlled really well with a sub-therapeutic dose of the SSRIs.

I forget if I mentioned it, but my ex's psychiatrist swears up and down that almost all the psych docs are on SSRIs. These drugs aren't supposed to do anything for people who are "normal"... but for some time now they've been "tweaking" with responses of thse drugs. So tweaky now that, say, if you want to get your head fix and gain weight, they have a combo that will do that for you... just as they do to get your head fix and LOSE weight.

They're really figuring out the brain now and we should all make an effort to stay alive to see what they come up with... could be pretty damn cool.

Kitsune · 03-01-2004, 09:16 PM

I forget if I mentioned it, but my ex's psychiatrist swears up and down that almost all the psych docs are on SSRIs. These drugs aren't supposed to do anything for people who are "normal"... but for some time now they've been "tweaking" with responses of thse drugs.

Very interesting!

I strongly considered pills for my anxiety, but switching insurance providers in the middle of all of this (I was forced to due to change of jobs) landed me with a big fat rider on my insurance agreement that essentially excludes them from covering me for anything depresion/neurological disease/nervous system disorder-related. Its such a wide statement that I could probably break a toe and they could come up with a reason to not pay for it.

The phone interview for the new insurance contract started at the top of my head and went all the way to my feet and they asked me about everything inbetween. When I told them I visited a cardiologist and was diagnosed as physically healthy, they were pleased. I passed my stress test, ultrasound, etc, and so they have no problem insuring me for heart problems. But I was forced to explain why I ended up at the cardiologist in the first place. Damn.

I ended up taking some samples of a Beta Blocker, which proved enough to get my heart calm. When the heart would calm down, I would calm down, and the vicious cycle would slow down.

lumberjim · 03-01-2004, 10:20 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Kitsune

I associate numbers and letters with specific colors (2 is blue, 3 is yellow, 4 is green, 5 is a deep red, etc)

dude. 6 is yellow.

it has always been yellow. Do you flip words, too? In my head, as i was typing "6 is yellow"...i kept trying to say "yellow is six".

I always thought that it was a mapping thing. Like information erosion. If you make a mental mistep like retrieving the information for "6" when you meant to get "yellow", the chemo-electrical current or whatever it is that carries the infomation, carves a groove or leaves a trail. This trail serves as a sort of "lubricant" for the next time you send for the information regarding "6", making it more likely that you make the same mistake again. This is a self perpetuating mistake that results in an association between those two things, "6 & yellow"

The more you hear "6" and "yellow" said together, the stronger the association, and one day you commonly juxstapose those two words.

so. Clear your mind.

no, you, the one reading this. clear your head.

now, what color is 6?

I had to erase " what color is yellow"

Also, somehow, when I go t say "red", I always want to say "yellow", too. What the fuck? i just realized I'm nuts.

What's with yellow? It never really bothers me, i just have to stop, and go, " no goddamnit, I ment to say "red". I flip the words "rebate" and "warranty" occaisionally at work, too.

Sun_Sparkz · 03-01-2004, 10:26 PM

i sympathise with this, i grew up with a dad who stutters. its terrible to watch... my heart bleeds. he is very smart and he knows what he means to say in his head, but he just cant get it out there.

Scary thing is he says it didnt start till his mid 20's and i am nearing 21 and i find myself occasionaly struggling with some words. .. . uh oh!

03-01-2004, 12:27 PM	#2
jaguar whig Join Date: Apr 2001 Posts: 5,075	Can I join in the fun or do we have to take tickets before we can let it all out? __________________ Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. - Twain

03-01-2004, 07:57 PM	#9
Shattered Soul Shuttered and locked Join Date: Feb 2004 Posts: 97	Synethsia....you know, that sounds like it would be interesting. I can see how it would cause problems, but damn, it would be cool, too. __________________ I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad...the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had....

03-01-2004, 08:06 PM	#10
wolf lobber of scimitars Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Phila Burbs Posts: 20,774	Kitsune, I have to commend you for your ability to adapt ... finding a balance between your experience of the world and an interpretation of it that allows you to remain functional is nothing short of amazing. How it works is far less important than the fact that it does. One of the things that I do appreciate about my job is that once the day is over, and I'm out of the building ... it's done. Paperwork does not follow me home, neither (hopefully) do patients. I do occasionally take "on call" as well ... luckily not as anxiety provoking as what you've had to do, essentially I just give a thumbs up or thumbs down to commitment petitions filed by families when a commitment officer is not available in the building. I do occasionally end up with consults regarding royally screwed up cases, but more often than not it's just like handling them in the building, with someone else following my instructions — I don't have to go in or get my hands dirty. __________________ wolf eht htiw og "Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception." --G. Edward Griffin The Creature from Jekyll Island High Priestess of the Church of the Whale Penis

03-01-2004, 10:26 PM	#15
Sun_Sparkz Has Body Temperature Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: I come from a land downunder Posts: 1,105	i sympathise with this, i grew up with a dad who stutters. its terrible to watch... my heart bleeds. he is very smart and he knows what he means to say in his head, but he just cant get it out there. Scary thing is he says it didnt start till his mid 20's and i am nearing 21 and i find myself occasionaly struggling with some words. .. . uh oh! __________________ We'll never be as young as we are right now

03-01-2004, 11:57 AM	#1
Kitsune still eats dirt Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Tampa, FL Posts: 3,031	You're All Fucked in the Head! ...but who isn't? I know I've got my issues, some of them serious. I've seen immense spillings of depression and life stories on this board and the 'net in general and, in all, I think it is a bit of a good thing. It always feels good to get stuff off your chest. So, here's to mental issues! What are the issues in my head? I went through some depression mixed with anxiety, but I was able to get through it. It was not fun times and, for awhile, I was quite sure I needed to see someone about it, as an unusual fear of death became a little too overwhelming at times. While I never went to see a shrink concerning my days in the dumps, I did see a cardiologist about my heart pounding all the time and the occasional skipped beat. He kicked me out, told me to not come back, and to find something that made me happy and take my mind off of work. I elected to not go the way of drugs and I think it was a wise decision -- too many people, I know, are on various doctor issued drugs for their problems and I've seen a lot of people changed for the worse because of it. Many of them lost their creativity and interest in having fun when they started taking pills for ADD/depression/etc. They were very much changed people, almost as much as someone who had become addicted to illegal drugs. Insurance companies, by the way, are real assholes when it comes to dealing with all of the above issues. My other issue is one that made my childhood days really difficult -- I had a hard time explaining to teachers and other students various things concerning math, numbers, and music. The problem was bad enough that I was nearly held because because of my inability to concentrate and comprehend. It wasn't until years later that I began reading about synethsia, a disease in which the pathways in the brain cause senses to be confused or crossed, that I found parallels and an explanation for what I was experiencing that no one else seemed to understand. I associate numbers and letters with specific colors (2 is blue, 3 is yellow, 4 is green, 5 is a deep red, etc) and if numbers or letters are presented in colors other than what I know it becomes very distracting, almost unpleasant. Flashing lights have sounds depending on the color, the rate at which they blink, how fast they fade on or off, etc and, inversely, music has shapes and almost tangible features when I listen to it or remember it. When in the 2nd grade, my class was asked to close our eyes and listen to a ballet piece played on a tape player and then describe what we saw. The usual answer was that students "saw people dancing", while I got disturbed looks from the teacher when I described a landscape with twists and turns, mountains, spirialing staircases, and the texture and color of the grass on the hills. "Cool! You have LSD trips all the time!" "Not quite." So, you think you got problems? I think everyone does! Last edited by Kitsune; 03-01-2004 at 12:01 PM.

03-01-2004, 01:10 PM	#3
Kitsune still eats dirt Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Tampa, FL Posts: 3,031	Can I join in the fun or do we have to take tickets before we can let it all out? Tickets? Unimportant. Just spew.

03-01-2004, 01:11 PM	#4
staceyv Lecturer Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Ohio Posts: 927	it's always good to know you're not alone..here's to mental issues, kitsune...so, what do you do for a living and have your unique senses had an impact on it?

03-01-2004, 01:22 PM	#5
Kitsune still eats dirt Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Tampa, FL Posts: 3,031	what do you do for a living and have your unique senses had an impact on it? What I do for a living is the primary cause of issue #1 -- the anxiety. Carrying a pager around and having it go off at all hours of the day and night was bad, while the calls and problems that the pages led to were horrible. There were nights sleep didn't happen because I was getting paged so often to log in and handle technical problems. Very shortly after taking the job, I began admiring people that worked jobs that ended after a certain hour of the day. So while you might not enjoy waiting tables, your work is over with once you are off shift. Mine didn't stop and it soon became some kind of rule or bad luck that the moment I tried going to sleep would be cause for the pager to go off. "PLEASE JOIN BRIDGE. CLUSTER DOWN. EMERGENCY", it would usually read, which was enough to get my heart going, knowing that some director or VP had also been woken from their sleep and paged to the call because of the severity of the issue. After awhile, sleep wasn't possible, so I didn't. I was unable to relax. It was then that I developed something that used to be called "soldier's heart" because palpitations, skipped beats, and feeling your heart beat all the time were usually seen in people that had been in combat situations and were stressed out because of it. The synethsia was only an issue when I was really young. After awhile I learned to simply keep my mouth shut about it.

03-01-2004, 01:30 PM	#6
staceyv Lecturer Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Ohio Posts: 927	that would drive me insane...are you still working there? and if so, what has helped you to overcome the anxiety?

03-01-2004, 01:47 PM	#7
Kitsune still eats dirt Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Tampa, FL Posts: 3,031	that would drive me insane...are you still working there? and if so, what has helped you to overcome the anxiety? First, I stopped taking the job so seriously. I realized that if a server was down or something wasn't operating correctly that people were not dieing and the world was not ending, despite the way in which some of the directors would hype up the problem on the call. Another change I made was to find something to do during the times I wasn't on pager duty, at work, or when I wasn't on a problem call. Once I found something to do that allowed for quiet time, I stopped becoming so freaked out when the pager did go off. Photography and sketching became very enjoyable ways to pass the "dead time", even during the strangest hours of the morning. Campus police came to know me and would check up on me as I roamed around with my tripod. The first stop was for suspicious activity, after they found out what I was doing with a camera at 2:30am, they would just wave or drop by to see what images I had collected over the night. Some of them even gave suggestions for good subjects and ideas. The third thing was to not grab the phone the moment the pager went off. Pager beeping again? No rush -- finish some more of the sketch or shoot, then join the problem call when an opportunity came along. Lastly, and the most important item, was that I learned to laugh at problems at work, even when they were my screw-ups. To this day, anything that seriously blows up or becomes a huge issue I treat as a funny story to tell others in the future. What if the problem was one I caused and got in trouble for? That makes for an even better story. I quickly found that if you treated a problem as you would if you were looking back on it, the problem became insignificant. And that is the way they should all be.

03-01-2004, 08:44 PM	#11
Kitsune still eats dirt Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Tampa, FL Posts: 3,031	finding a balance between your experience of the world and an interpretation of it that allows you to remain functional is nothing short of amazing. How it works is far less important than the fact that it does. I really didn't have to adapt to anything, there's just a little bit extra going on in my head when there isn't supposed to be and it doesn't intrude into my life. What I experience from it is mild -- I've read that others actually see the letters and numbers they read in the colors they associate them with and sometimes it interferes with peoples' lives. My issues only made my teachers and parents look at me funny because as a child I described the world to them exactly in how I perceived it. Its not that distorted of a world -- there appear to be just a couple more ways for me to describe it. I guess my "strong" crossing is audio/visual, and it isn't so bad. I don't notice it in daily life except for when I see flashing lights. The yellow lights on traffic signals that flash at intersections at night? They have a dull, low, fading tone as they come and go. Strobes have a higher frequency and often chirp or "bip" depending on their color. Watching a field of antenna towers all blinking out of synch can be kinda weird, sometimes. Music operates the other way and has textures and features to it that can sometimes be felt. A lot of what is reported parallels accounts of acid trips. Some people "taste" music, which leaves me to wonder: does rap music taste as bad as it sounds? 0 1 2 3 (should be yellow, but it isn't an option in the menu!) 4 5 6 7 8 9 (lighter yellow than 3)

03-01-2004, 08:50 PM	#12
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	We ARE all fucked in the head. My personal demon is anxiety, which I have said elsewhere on the board, is controlled really well with a sub-therapeutic dose of the SSRIs. I forget if I mentioned it, but my ex's psychiatrist swears up and down that almost all the psych docs are on SSRIs. These drugs aren't supposed to do anything for people who are "normal"... but for some time now they've been "tweaking" with responses of thse drugs. So tweaky now that, say, if you want to get your head fix and gain weight, they have a combo that will do that for you... just as they do to get your head fix and LOSE weight. They're really figuring out the brain now and we should all make an effort to stay alive to see what they come up with... could be pretty damn cool.

03-01-2004, 09:16 PM	#13
Kitsune still eats dirt Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Tampa, FL Posts: 3,031	I forget if I mentioned it, but my ex's psychiatrist swears up and down that almost all the psych docs are on SSRIs. These drugs aren't supposed to do anything for people who are "normal"... but for some time now they've been "tweaking" with responses of thse drugs. Very interesting! I strongly considered pills for my anxiety, but switching insurance providers in the middle of all of this (I was forced to due to change of jobs) landed me with a big fat rider on my insurance agreement that essentially excludes them from covering me for anything depresion/neurological disease/nervous system disorder-related. Its such a wide statement that I could probably break a toe and they could come up with a reason to not pay for it. The phone interview for the new insurance contract started at the top of my head and went all the way to my feet and they asked me about everything inbetween. When I told them I visited a cardiologist and was diagnosed as physically healthy, they were pleased. I passed my stress test, ultrasound, etc, and so they have no problem insuring me for heart problems. But I was forced to explain why I ended up at the cardiologist in the first place. Damn. I ended up taking some samples of a Beta Blocker, which proved enough to get my heart calm. When the heart would calm down, I would calm down, and the vicious cycle would slow down.

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