In the dumps

I'm not too good at keeping this blog updated, and to be honest, I've never been good at consistency in general. I started with the intention of writing regularly, but I guess other stuff just happens and I don't. But today I decided that I want to write and reflect on some things that have been going on in the past six months or so.

I have depression. I don't know what specific kind because I've never been evaluated or diagnosed. I don't know when it started, or what caused it exactly. I think I've always had this, and I think it runs in my family. However, the past couple years I've struggled with it more than I ever did before.

I don't know how to describe it. It's not just feeling down in the dumps like my blog title suggests. It's more than that. It impacts everything, and it doesn't just come and go like normal people's moods. It comes and it sets in and it stays. The things I like to do don't interest me anymore, not in the least, and although I can remember being interested I can't make myself feel it. Everything slows down... the way I think and even my physical movements. It feels as though I'm walking through water. You can probably imagine how much effort it takes to do normal, everyday things when I'm feeling this way.

The worst part of it is, I know what it is, that it's there, but simply knowing isn't enough to make it go away. There is no "cheering up." I've heard people say before, "what's there to be so sad about?" Well, my answer is, nothing. There is nothing to be sad about except for the way that I feel, and my inability to function like I know that I should be able to do.

A teacher of mine once told me about the importance of seeing depression like any other physical illness, and not like a personal flaw. Look at it like cancer or diabetes, he'd say, because it's an organic problem just like those diseases are. And I think most of the time I do see it that way, but I'm not sure other people do. I'll give you an example.

About 3 or 4 days into a big slump, when nothing lifts you up and all you feel is irritable and frustrated, people stop wanting to be around you. Or maybe you just perceive it that way? Either way, you try to pretend that you aren't miserable but you can only do so much of that. So you isolate yourself because you know how miserable you are to be around (you can't get away from yourself, after all) and you deal with it on your own, in silence. You try to think of things you can do to cheer up, but you don't want to do any of those things, and if you force yourself it winds up being a half-assed attempt, at best. So you just go back to bed and hope to sleep so you don't have to be conscious, or you try to find something to occupy your mind and take you away for a while. (That is, if you can concentrate.) It's really hard to treat something like this the same way that you would cancer, especially for the people that live around said depressed person.

The days mostly consist of getting through the day.

My last semesters in college have been pretty dreadful. My first few years I got straight A's and some B's. I had a 3.9 GPA and worked really hard for it. The last two semesters had a couple A's but also C's and I even failed a class. I didn't try too hard because I couldn't muster up the energy to care. The entire semester I knew it would happen, I knew what I "should" have been doing, but had no ambition to do any of it. It's like it sucked me in and there was nothing I could do to change it.

Like with any medical condition, I sought the help of a physician. I've known her for 13+ years, and when I sought her help I was given a six question quiz to screen for depression symptoms and was then told to choose between antidepressant A, B, C, D, or E. Well, how should I know? I end up choosing an SSRI because it helps with anxiety and depression, both of which I was experiencing. I knew a little bit about how they worked... the drug blocks the reuptake sites on the neuron where the serotonin is taken back in by the cell, which leaves more free serotonin to be available in the synapse. I figured I could use all the serotonin I can get. She gave me some pamphlets about depression and sent me on my way.

At the next checkup I say drug A isn't working 100%, she say's let's try B. Then C. I tried different things, I think the SSRI helped some but didn't work to relieve all the symptoms. She says to seek counseling, and I try, but counseling is expensive. I don't want to call up and ask for favors because I hate doing that, and that is the only way you find inexpensive/free counseling. (Unless you go to the counselors that give you printouts about depression.) I was referred to my CMH agency, and was denied because we had health insurance and made too much money (even though the insurance didn't cover mental health.) Also, because I was still able to function in school/work, my symptoms weren't "severe" enough to qualify.

Now, I am without health insurance, and I was off my meds for a while because my physician refused to refill my prescription without an office visit. I called her up again and she grudgingly refilled them, said rather tetchily that she wouldn't do it again without an appointment, that I needed counseling, and that she was "out of ideas for what to do for me."

I currently need to line up a new physician that isn't fed up with my problems, someone that can evaluate me and pinpoint exactly what my illness is and prescribe meds that can help with that, and find some sort of affordable counseling service that can help me with the cognitive side of depression. All without insurance. Yet, how do I do this when I can barely bring myself to get out of bed?

Increasingly, as I pull myself through day after day, I seem to lose hope that things will change. When, with each new day I wake up feeling miserable and irritable and sad, and I see the effect it has on the people around me, I feel like they are better off without me around. It's like people can only take so much of your despair before they start to wish you'd just knock it off already. Is that how it is with cancer and diabetes? Just knock off that cancer and get your shit together. (FYI- I'm not accusing anyone of treating me this way, it's just how I feel/perceive it, which admittedly may be skewed by the depression.)

Anyway, my intent in writing this today is not to upset anyone. Please don't worry. I will manage, as I always have done, and am not suicidal or anything. I'm just glum, and I don't know how to change that for myself. I feel stuck, and I don't know if that feeling is ever going to go away. I needed to say this because I hold it in all the time. I am tired of feeling this way.

A place, not a direction

Ever since I was young, my family has taken vacations to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Well, most of the time I went with my grandparents, who loved it up there and went just about every summer.

I remember a magnet that was on her fridge for many years about Michiganders-- #3 was "Up north is a place, not a direction." My grandma was born in Calumet, which is about as far north as you can go in Michigan (at least without a boat!) It used to be a very populated and busy area in the early part of last century because of the mining business. My grandma had a picture of her old house in Calumet buried in snow up to the eaves-- I can only imagine! I complain enough about the snow down here in the thumb.

Well this past fall my grandma Brunke died from pneumonia. She was a very special lady to my whole family and we all miss her very much. We will be having a memorial for her in Grand Marais- (a lovely little village on the coast of lake Superior, grandma's favorite agate-hunting destination. Well, one of them.) She never seemed happier than when she was on the beach of lake Superior hunting for agates.

My little family (mom, hub and the kids) will be going all the way up to Copper Harbor to camp at Lake Fanny Hooe. We will visit Calumet, where my great-grandmother (and other family members) are buried, and Hancock to check out an old copper mine. All the places we stay will have places to go fishing, which Jude is very excited about. On our way back we'll be going to whitefish point to see the shipwreck museum, and Tahquamenon Falls. Below is a one of my favorite pictures of my grandma at the falls:

I miss her. I love you grandma, and I will be thinking of you when we are visiting all your favorite places in the U.P.

A matter of perspective

As a student of psychology, and a generally curious person, I often wonder about people and why they think and do the things that they do. I put a great deal of thought into understanding the perspectives of others and their basis for beliefs. There are very specific examples that I have in mind, but before it will make much sense (or at least illustrate the complexity of the situation) I will need to add some background information.

We, as individuals, experience our own unique version of reality. Every living creature has their own take on the world, and depending on your species and circumstances, will see the world in very different ways. Take, for example, the honeybee. The world that they experience looks very different from the world that we do because their vision is in infrared, whereas our visual systems only detect visible light. Although a human and a honeybee share the same environment, and may look at the same flower, the experience is vastly different due to perspective. Below is a picture of a daisy in infrared, as a bee would see it.

 

Interestingly, bees can't see the color red because the wavelength of light is too low for their visual receptors to detect. It is not under dispute that the color red no longer exists, just because bees can't see it; rather, it is a matter of perception.

Another example is that of frogs. They are able to see objects in motion, but not objects that are still. Therefore, a frog cannot see a dead fly. Again, few would claim that the fly fails to exist just because it is not moving, but that is the reality for a frog. 

One of our advantages as human beings, I think, is our capacity for thinking about these things objectively, but how objectively can we really see the world? After all, we are only seeing it from our own small angle, using only the information we have encountered previously in our lives to understand the world as we see it. Seeing the world from a different angle is not intuitive, and may not even be entirely possible to do. What troubles me, however, is that so many people take their own version of reality as the one, solid reality-- and anything that does not conform to that standard is wrong, out of place. To me it is both troubling and completely understandable. 

There are so many complex human issues that arise because of this matter of perception, this inability to relate to a reality that does not conform to one's own version of it. Religion is the first thing that comes to my mind, although the list is probably endless. I am not a big fan of religion, not because of the belief itself (which I think is a perfectly fine thing to have) but that tendency, and in most cases obligation, to ostracize those beliefs which do not conform to its own standard of "reality." 

The truth is, reality is different for every species, and probably every individual member within a species. The only standard we have is based on what we have seen and experienced, and that is a very narrow band compared to what actually exists as a whole. So the next time you are certain that you are right, try to think about it from another point of view. I have, by no means, given credit to the immense complexity of this idea, but it's a start. Just try to see things from another point of view once in a while. I try to do so whenever possible, and it has really changed how I think about the world.

Off my soapbox for now!

Today kicks off baseball/softball season (at least in practices), and this year my husband is coaching a girl's softball team--10 year old girls, muahaha! This means a great deal of my day on Tuesdays and Saturdays will be spent at the city park. Although I will admit that I'm still baffled by humankind's fascination with chasing balls around (Or watching other people chase around balls on TV while paying them ridiculous amounts of money), I am glad that my kids are interested in doing something that involves physical body movement.

I guess I will read books to keep myself occupied. It's weird though-- I am usually the only person in the park reading. People DO still read, right?

I am very excited because on May 16, a few of us from lab will be going to the Lansing SfN (Society for Neuroscience) and it will be my first science conference ever. I don't really know what to expect but I think it will be really cool to have a bunch of brain-lovers packed together in one place, talking about their research.

Today I am trying to do a bit of yard work, and get things planted as early as possible. There's still a lot that needs to be done out there, but it's still pretty squishy in places. I wish it was just a little bit warmer, but in Michigan (and anywhere I suppose) you have to take what you get.

Rainy days of May

At the moment I'm in the crossroads of deciding where to go with my day. There's always so many things that I could be doing, so I really just have to prioritize all the time. Cleaning is a pretty important thing, I think I will do that. But first, I will write.

I can never complain of boredom, that's for sure.

This is an interesting thought really. My freshman English professor once said to me that the people who get the most done tend to be the people with the most things to do. (And, so it would follow, the people that consistently don't get work done probably don't do much work? Or maybe it's that they do too many things to do anything well, which is very possible... Confounds abounding! This is why science is hard.)

Anyway, I think that this whole idea of complicated and busy lives ties into something we learned in my physiological psych class last semester: the richness and complexity of the environment that one lives in has a major impact on learning and memory. Researchers have found, for instance, that rats raised in environments with stimuli from many modalities (ie, auditory, tactile, visual, social, etc) have much better performance on learning and memory tasks than rats raised in single housing isolation cages. The more senses used, the better.

A man by the name of Donald Hebb sort of pioneered this enriched environment movement (way back in 1949) and lots was learned about human development, and lots of other areas, as a result.  He also found that people kept in sensory deprivation had extreme symptoms after a short amount of time- the subjects would hallucinate and found that normal thought processes were difficult. Without input from the environment, a brain goes insane and cannot function normally.

I think it is interesting that despite the wealth of evidence supporting the idea that environmental enrichment is better for brain function and well being, that lab animals are still housed in individual cages. At the BRL we are studying the impact of the enriched environment (EE) on stem cell migration, versus standard treatment in standard housing. (Among other things!)

I have a feeling the EE isn't standard because it is more difficult for researchers to keep track of animals, keep cages clean, etc. But if that's the case, that wouldn't be good science, right? We don't keep people in individual plexiglass containers when they recover from stroke or brain injury, so why do so with the rat model? Simply for the convenience of the person doing research? (Yes, I'm sure confounds abound here too, but it is definitely something to consider.)

Ok, Sarah, get back to cleaning! Enough prattling on about lab ethics!

First Post

I have always enjoyed writing, but writing isn't something I do regularly. It's always been something I thought about doing, or that I wished I set aside more time to do. So enough of that-- here I am, and we'll see how regularly I can get myself here (and writing).

My name is Sarah and I am an undergrad at SVSU, majoring in psychology, minor(ing?) in biology. I work at the Brain Research Lab, where we are training and learning and preparing ourselves for the first research projects. There are many firsts happening in this place-- My first time doing hands-on scientific research and the first research that will be conducted in the lab. We have some new people that just joined us, and a lot of new equipment. Because everything, and everyone, (besides Dr. S who happens to always know what he is doing) is new, it should make for some interesting stories in the days ahead.

I will be working twice a week at the lab, and studying at home, as well as all my other stuff that occupies my time. (Gardening, cooking, knitting, house chores, kid stuff, animals, etc!)

The title of my blog comes from ee cummings
since feeling is first
life is not a paragraph, and death i think is no parenthesis

I am parenthetical in my writing a lot, and perhaps in my thoughts as well.I am fascinated by the way that thinking works, how the mind operates, and the different causes of behaviors. I love the field of psychology, I love science, and I am pretty excited about the road ahead into the mysterious and new world of academia. Grad school is in my near future...

Here goes nothin', eh?