Chapter One - Neuroanatomy 101

This will be a very basic primer into neuroanatomy.

And it will give us some insight into what makes a brain - IE: "you" - tick. It will seem quite lengthy, for which I apologize, but there is a lot to get to. If we are to begin better understanding our complex selves - or even our simple selves - it is basic brain functions as understood by current neuroscience that we need to better understand and be aware of. It is my hope that this post will serve as a) a reference for us to refer back to as we go along, b) a reference for your future use and more importantly, c) an impetus and inspiration for further curiosity and reading on your part (if not, I will be doing my best to provide as comprehensive an understanding as possible in the easiest way for us layman to utilize).

So here we go, let's dive in.

First of all, you have in the neighbourhood of eighty-six billion of these:

That's a neuron and according to renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman, each one - all eighty-odd billion of 'em - is as complicated as a major city (there's an astonishing level of activity that happens in all of your cells, it's just that brain cells take that to a new level). Neurons "encode" stuff. The details of all your thoughts, memories and all your knowledge are encoded in various neurons (for example, there's a "Jennifer Aniston neuron". Honest! The discovery of this is detailed in neuroscientist Sebastian Sueng's book, The Connectome. Whether you have a "Jen neuron" (or any such specialized bit of encoded information) or not depends, of course, on whether you've seen her (or any such person) or not and whether certain brain circuits have "decided" if this person is important to you or not). They pass that encoded stuff along (to assemble bigger pictures or ideas or memories) to other neurons via these:



Those are axons (sending) and dendrites (receiving), AKA "the wiring". Axons are what make up white matter in the brain - see more below). While brain cells tend to be more (though not completely) permanent, the finer aspects of the wiring is not. Critical connections called dendrites and synapses grow and "prune back" all the time, creating new connections (and thus new memories, learned behaviour and the such) or trimming them back (if a certain memory function falls into disuse for example). As you can see by the number of dendrites, there are many, many connections between neurons (as many as ten thousand per neuron according to some counts!). Dendrites and these multiple, multiple connections are a big part of our mental puzzle. A more realistic depiction of what these connections look like appears like this:

That bright green blob in the centre of the image is a neuron. Yup, you've got close to ninety billion of those, each one with enough activity within it to be compared to a major city. Imagine the activity of billions of cities going on in your brain (though not exactly all at once).

Communication between neurons is sent along the axons in electrical pulses not unlike Morse code. Whether that "Morse code" is sent or not depends on something called action potential, a complicated bit of business which can be boiled down to whether a given neuron or set of neurons reaches a certain threshold of excitement that makes it pass on its message.

At the point of connection between an axon and a dendrite we have a synapse and at this point the electrical pulse triggers the release of a neurochemical which will pass the message from axon to dendrite and thus onto the next neuron. The details of this transfer, and the synapse itself, look something like this:

This happens to be for the system involving the neurotransmitter dopamine. You may notice opiate receptors as well, along with endorphins. There are receptors, "uptake pumps", there's a system - not shown - for whisking away excess neurotransmitter material and so on. This operates on a ridiculously delicate balance (we look at this in more detail in the post on the dopamine pathways and serotonin pathways ). There are something like one hundred known neurotransmitters, all of which perform inter-neuron communication in various regions of the brain and all of which are responsible for various functions that drive "you".


Look again at that tiny detail. Much of who you are and what you do, not to mention all your memories (some theories on long term memories posit that memories exist in our synapses), depends on that infinitesimally small chemical transaction. Now get this; it is estimated that your brain has somewhere over one hundred and fifty trillion synaptic connections at any one time all performing those little chemical transactions. And to put that number in perspective, in just a few cubic centimeters of cortical tissue you have more synaptic connections than there are stars in the Milky Way (David Eagleman's Incognito).


Neurotransmitters are the main focus of pharmacological psychiatry so we'll be revisiting what goes on here in more detail in future posts (see the above two posts on dopamine and serotonin).

The dopamine system and pathways happen to be one of the most studied and well understood and it is also widely implicated in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (and many addictive behaviours as it turns out). The dopamine pathway looks roughly (and I do mean roughly) like this:





As you can see, there are all kinds of key brain regions included in the loop. And what's this? Our "planning and judgement" centre is a destination? Yuppers. A lot of what you "think" is "good planning and judgement" may well be just your primitive brain reward system sending an emotion generated "good feeling" message to your "command centre". And this diagram just represents the dopamine pathway. Remember, there are over a hundred different neurotransmitters at work throughout your brain all governing - way below your conscious control - various functions going on in all those billions of cities in your brain.

Let's return to the "wiring". There's "local" and "long distance" wiring. Local wiring in the mammalian neocortex looks something like this (and this is a greatly simplified drawing). It works in layers and each layer performs a slightly different level of function (from Sebastian Seung's The Connectome).

Long distance wiring is longer axons that form "bundles" (the white matter mentioned above). This wiring connects the different brain regions. It is believed by some neuroscientists, such as Sebastian Seung (linked to above), that it is the unique wiring we each have between our brain regions - or "connectome" - that is responsible for much of "who we are". A basic "wiring harness" looks something like this:

The brain and its wiring is not, as once thought, "set" once full neurological adulthood is reached (about age 25). As mentioned, axons and dendrites grow and prune back depending on the demands, or lack of them, put on a region at any one time. This falls under the general heading of neuroplasticity, a term that describes the malleability and changeability of our finest (and we're talking very fine) and even major brain structures.


No two "wiring harnesses" or connectomes in people will be alike. They will form differently from birth and individual life experiences and environments will alter the course of their development throughout life. There is mounting evidence that differences in white matter connections - these "wiring bundles" - may play major roles in many psychiatric disorders.


I introduce and talk more about neuroplasticity in this post, but for now it's important to know that this plasticity can be good (the brain changing to adapt to a major change such as blindness) or bad (adapting to a harmful behaviour or practice (brought on usually through negative experiences or environmental conditions)). And that wiring? You have, in that small space between your ears, enough wiring to wrap around the world - twice.

Aside from "direct wiring", we also have various brain wave oscillations that appear to play important roles in producing or attaining certain states of consciousness, sleep activity, memory consolidation and more. These have very Greek names like Theta, Delta, Beta, Alpha and Gamma. We can think of brain wave oscillations as a sort of "wifi" in the brain that allows more instantaneous and widespread communication and cooperation between distant brain regions. Imagine it like being at a rave with strong pulsating electro-pop music pounding through the speakers and thousands of individual minds all tuning into that frequency and moving in unison. It's also been proposed that our highly (and unique among the animal world) pre-frontal cortex uses these "neural rhythms" like a "quarterback" to direct and coordinate activity in the brain.


Back to the wiring, it does not end in the brain of course. The wiring includes the central nervous system and connects every square centimeter of your body to your brain, something like this:

and this:

These are not only to send messages to muscles to move and to receive information in return or to receive and send pain signals (and we'll learn that this is a two way street) but are also part of a "full systems" monitoring program that is constantly testing what's going on in, as the latter diagram shows, your major organs. We'll be examining this in more detail as well when we learn more about the mind-body connection and how, for example, what goes on in your stomach may affect your mental health. For that matter, what goes on anywhere in your body is going to affect your brain in some way.

Aside from neurotransmitters, there are also hormones involved, such as the stress hormone cortisol. Its pathway looks something like this:

The stress response system is based on our primitive brain "fight or flight" response to perceived danger (and the term "perceived" is very pertinent here. How we perceive danger is one of the things that gets out of wack in our brains outside of our conscious control. Phobias fall under this category, among many others including anxiety disorders, depression and even schizophrenia). This system is essential to our survival but what's important to understand now is that this system evolved for fairly simple dangers like a saber-toothed tiger eyeing you for dinner. In our modern wacky world the concept of "danger" and our response to that is way, way more complicated and this system is often put under extreme duress and it is during situations of extreme duress that many mental health problems arise.

I cannot overstate the importance of the stress response system when considering both acute or chronic mental health disorders or situations. I introduce the stress response system in this post and that will eventually be a four or five part series as we try to understand this system's enormous effect on our behaviours and reactions along with our physical and mental health.

There are of course numerous hormones that greatly influence our behaviours and "who we are". Some are quite familiar to most of you - testosterone and estrogen for example - but we'll look at others as well and more importantly look at better understanding the roles these play in what we do and why we do them (or not do certain things).

And in among all those neurons and wiring are glia cells. Neuroscience only recently began discovering the enormous importance of these "support cells". Once thought only to be supporting cells in a literal sense (like scaffolding), it is now known that glia cells - microglia, astrocytes and oligodenrocytes - play absolutely essential roles in all aspects of neuronal communications. One critical role is in supporting the growth of the myelin sheath, a protective coating on axons (the breakdown of myelin is thought to play a role in MS). When we look at neuroplasticity, we'll learn more about the enormous role synaptic formation and pruning plays in memory and learning functions and glia cells are a vital fundamental part of this process. As well, they are involved in supplying nutrients and oxygen to neurons along with various "clean up" duties, whisking away toxic waste material that are produced in normal cellular function (like any cell, nutrients go in, waste comes out). Recent research suggests that among the reasons we need to sleep is that glia cells need the brain to be in a resting state for them to perform many of their functions (most critically, it appears, the essential house cleaning duties they perform). Glia cells look something like this:

Isn't this just the funnest stuff?! I love this stuff! Let's carry on.

Reptile brains, then higher brains followed by the mammalian brain, then the early hominid brains and finally the modern human brain evolved over millions of years. It is impossible to know precisely how these different regions evolved, of course, and I cannot report a lot of agreement in the evolutionary neuroscience community on this but what is clear today is the three distinct regions, all with different structuring and functions. We have the brain stem at the bottom, then the limbic region and - for our purpose here for understanding modern humans - the mammalian and humanoid outer cortex. Thus our basic brain outline looks like this:

That big (and ancient in evolutionary terms) blob at the back of the brain is the cerebellum. That's where body movements are coordinated, where your abilities of balance and body posture are held and equilibrium is controlled (and more recent research shows that it is involved in coordination of many higher cognitive mental activities, most notably, musical abilities). If you're not super graceful, blame this region, not yourself. The limbic system is where a number of major control centres reside, including, but not limited to, the aforementioned amygdala, the hypothalamus (the control centre for many autonomic functions), the hippocampus (involved in memory forming, organization and storing) and the basal ganglia (or basal nuclei; involved with a variety of functions, including voluntary motor control, procedural learning related to routine behaviours or "habits" such as bruxism, eye movements, cognitive and emotional functions).

Better understanding how these major regions control who you are and your outward behaviour and decision making processes is going to be a big focus of our exploration of mental health and behavioual issues.

Finally, we have the neocortex. If you have browsed articles on the brain you'll likely have come across mention of various "lobes". these are the four major regions and are outlined as thus:

Starting from the right, the back of the brain, we have the occipital lobe. That, incidentally, is actually where you "see". Our eyes merely collect light. That live action movie show that takes place when you open your eyes gets produced, edited (yes, whatever you may think, a lot of editing takes place of what your eyes take in) and assembled mostly in your occipital lobe and which then presents the final cut to "you".


Above and to the front of the occipital lobe there is the parietal lobe which is mostly concerned with processing sensory information. Mid brain, roughly around our ears, is the temporal lobe. This is where the processing of auditory information takes place (where you "hear") and is also very crucial in working with the hippocampus and amygdala in long term memory formation. As sight and sound must work very close together in producing that "live picture show" we live in every day, there is a great deal of cooperative work between the temporal and occipital lobes.

Those areas will all be very similar among all mammals. Moving to the very front of the brain we have the rather aptly named frontal lobe. This, folks, is where the rubber meets the road in better understanding human (and our) behaviours and "issues". For it is here where most of what we think of as "we" - our humanness - is housed, specifically in an area right at the front of this lobe called the prefrontal cortex (right above and behind our eyes).

The neocortex is where the responsibilities of our higher cognitive functions lie. This is a short list but all areas of thought and cognitive functions will have a key corresponding group of neurons that will be involved in that function. that looks roughly (and again, I do mean roughly) like this:

These represent just a small handful of examples and are only roughly located in this diagram as the areas are presently understood (neuroscience is making new discoveries all the time so none of the exact specifics of these locations are set in stone but the basics are well understood and agreed upon). How "good" you are at any particular activity will basically depend on a) how well developed a particular region is (say the Brodmann and Wernicke areas of language, for example (roughly "speech production" on the chart) or something more rudimentary like your cerebellum as we saw), b) how well the wiring is developed between your regions and c) how your particular neurochemical pathways perform.

That our brain regions and the connections between them (the "connectome" mentioned and illustrated above) are all different puts a whole new meaning on "smart" or "talented". "Smart" or "talented" is just a blessing of various regions being better proportioned and wired for a given task and you accidentally discovering the use of these regions (or more likely having them discovered for you). If you're a math "genius" and make a living from that, for example, you can climb down off your high horse and thank your lucky stars that you were gifted (and we'll see what "gifted" really means ... nothing to do with "you" I can assure you) with highly developed regions specific to math tasks (nature) and that they were discovered and developed (nurture, which strengthens the connections, or wiring, between these regions and the rest of your brain). Many people may be similarly gifted but tragically never discover these gifts. Others may not be so gifted but are cursed with high desire (or being driven by well meaning but ill-advised parents) and thus tragically beat their heads against the wall (and beat up on themselves) trying to do something they were simply not endowed to do. This is very important in understanding "who we are" and why are that way.


What almost anyone will know is that the brain is divided into two hemispheres:

Unfortunately, what most people have been taught or have learned about brain hemispheres and their respective functions is myth. While it is true that each hemisphere handles different tasks and controls different functions, it is only recently that it has been learned in modern neuroscientific research that the coordination between the hemispheres and specific "task sharing" is vastly more complex than previously understood. This alone is an enormous topic so all I can ask is for you to put aside probably the great majority of what you understand about brain hemispheres in the modern human brain.

All of this, the billions of neurons, the trillions of synapses, the dozens and dozens of specific brain regions, the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of wiring that tie it all together and the more than one hundred neurotransmitters, hormones and proteins that make it all communicate, harmonize to make up this - your brain:

The brain from any healthy adult will look like the one pictured above but here's something to consider, and is the essential foundation to what we will learn about brains - no two brains are alike. They are as unique as fingerprints. All those regions are connected slightly differently between us as well as some regions being better developed or activated and some not so much (which can be long term or short term), the wiring is slightly different between us and so on. This is, as I've pointed out, determined by genetics and environmental factors, with a strong emphasis on environmental factors. Even identical twins (of which I am one) who start out genetically identical will develop quite different brains (as a twin myself, and because twin studies are so fascinating, we'll try to get to twin studies at some point).


The brain collects "data" through the five senses - sight, sound, taste, touch and smell (and we now know that there is a critical and major "sixth" sense - our gut-brain connection) - runs this data through various brain regions and create the "reality" we perceive in our minds. Because our sensory organs and brains are all genetically different (with the exception of twins) plus are wired and developed slightly differently, we will all have different "versions" of "reality". This is why we find it hard to agree even when we're both looking at the exact same thing (like two people seeing a spider for example. One may look on with fascination and curiosity, the other will have a phobic melt down).

This is going to be a critical part of our examination of human behaviour and the brain. Obviously our differing views of realities - and we have very, very little conscious input into what these are (or exercise very little as we'll see) - is going to create very different views of the world and thus behaviour. "Reality" is one of the great philosophical questions of all time and, as it turns out, crucial to understanding the human brain and our inward and outward "selves" and, most importantly, how all our widely varying "selves" get along with other "selves". I have many ideas, thoughts and views that it is how our brains create the "reality" that we experience that are at the root of our mental health woes. And not only that, but it may be that there's nothing really wrong with our version of reality, per se, but that it doesn't fit in with standardized models of "reality" and it is this ostracizing that creates our mental anguish.

A huge thing to understand is that all these components we've looked at run a mind boggling number of subconscious "programs", or what many in the "brain biz" refer to as "zombie programs" and it's your particular collection of these programs (we all vary in these though some are quite standard) that run "you". No, "you" don't run "you", all these automated zombie programs - programs that run through all those neurons, wiring via electrical pulses, neurochemicals and hormones (to put it very basically) - run "you". Zombie programs are all your daily routines that you don't need to think about in addition to all kinds of other little programs that push you forward through life.

All those "conscious decisions" you make are almost certainly to be the result of various zombie programs spitting out, for example, the "decision" to buy a new car (which is just a glorified modern variation on ancient hunter-gatherer instincts) or take a new night class or pick a certain supermarket product over the others and so on. Then your dopamine reward centre gives you a "hit" of happy feeling dopamine to "reward" and "re-enforce" this behaviour. Then your brain creates a post hoc inner dialog to justify or rationalize this "decision".

Learning more about these subconscious systems is going to be a huge part of our undertaking in understanding why we are the way we are and what's going wrong.

Phew! Wasn't that fun?! And that was just the very basics. In future posts we'll look at most of these parts in more detail. We could think of all these parts as pieces of a puzzle that we are putting together. The completed puzzle is a biological computer of such dazzling complexity that human language is inadequate to completely describe it. For every second of every moment you are alive, your biological computer - your brain - will be performing an astounding number of functions, virtually all of which are outside of your conscious awareness, let alone control. In fact, as I've already alluded, we will see how astonishingly little control we have over who we are and what we do (though once we understand why that is it'll be far less astonishing and the only way we could possibly operate and get through life).


But perhaps more importantly, we'll learn more about just what kind of control we do have. And this is going to be where "the rubber meets the road" in this blog - learning better how to control your amazing and beautiful brain.

I promise that not all posts are going to be so science based and detailed. But in order for you to understand what's really going on in you and more importantly how to change it, being familiar with at least some of the basics of what's "under your hood" is very useful. So we're going to slog through more similar posts examining things in more detail. I will do my best to make it fun, though.

And I promise, there will be no tests so don't worry about memorizing all of that. :)

The Nine Hundred Foot Jesus and a Man on the Street

Nine Hundred Foot Jesus and

a Man on the Street

In 1977 I graduated high school. It was also a year in which I renounced religions of any kind and embraced science and began paying more attention to the claims made by con men and charlatans in the name of faith. As such it was during that year that a story caught my eye - a man announced publicly that he'd seen a vision of Jesus that stood, so he said, nine hundred feet tall. One would think this would be a rather frightening sight but not to this man. The nine hundred foot apparition – close in height to a hundred story building – had something to say, specifically to this man. It – I'm not quite certain we can say “He” in the usual usage of that capitalized pronoun - had a very special message for this man; to raise funds for and erect a special building.

That man was Oral Roberts and he told this story on his syndicated television program. His flock was so inspired and so eager to follow the plan as “instructed” to him by this gigantic apparition claiming to be “Jesus” that Roberts was indeed able to raise the considerable funds needed to erect the building of his (Jesus'?) vision (what would become, temporarily at least, the City of Faith Medical and Research Center (it closed 1989 eight years after its opening).

Many years later a man I'll call John had a similar vision, or at least he saw a vision of Jesus and just as with Roberts all those years earlier, this vision had a message and instructions for John, a message of peace for mankind and John was to deliver that message through the media. It (the vision) gave John specific instructions to follow which entailed him asking various media outlets to allow him radio time to deliver this message. John – just as Roberts was (or claimed to be) – was greatly moved by this and tried his most earnest level best to follow the instructions he was given. He was God's messenger – through Jesus – and as a devote believer he was determined to carry out those instructions. 

But this man was considered a "sick" schizophrenic. 

What's the difference between these two remarkably similar stories of religious visions?

If the comparison sounds facetious, it is not. And indeed I am not the only one who sees a comparison between symptoms we see in mental illnesses and behaviours we see in extreme religiosity such as having or claiming to have had the visions described above, renowned neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has made similar observations and drawn similar conclusions as outlined in this lecture at Stanford University. What makes one story “believable” and the other a “symptom” of schizophrenia has less to do with the visions themselves and everything to do with the differing circumstances of the two men.

John, you see, was a homeless man who pushed a bicycle around the streets of Vancouver and who earnestly tried to get people to listen to his story of Jesus talking to him and giving him instructions to spread the word of Jesus. I met John in my capacity as a volunteer at a charity organization that helped the homeless and those battling mental health issues near Vancouver's notorious Downtown East Side.

I make this comparison to illustrate how arbitrarily we apply “mental illness” symptoms such as visions and hearing voices. One man sees a vision and hears commands and he's revered. Another man experiences the exact same thing and he's shit upon by society, reviled and ignored.

The pain in John's voice, along with a genuine bewilderment, as he related his story and that no one would listen to him was palatable. There was visible anguish on his face. I could well imagine that pain of rejection he experienced every day as he sincerely pursued carrying out the instructions given him by his visions and commands.

So why are essentially the same experiences treated so differently? And they are the same experience as far as pure brain functioning goes (if indeed Roberts' claim was genuine and not a deliberate creation in order to fleece his flock of funds).

So why don't we change perspectives? Let's imagine each Roberts and John in a different light.

What if we put John in different circumstances? Let's clean him up, feed him and put some meat on his bones and a “wealthy” look on his face. Let's put him in a position of respect where people trust him and what he has to say. Let's then see his confidence and self-assurance grow. Let's envision him telling his story to a congregation. Do you still think he'd be regarded as “schizophrenic”? I'd wager a year's wages that he would not.

Now let's take Roberts (before he expired, of course), strip him of his fortune and TV ministry flock and put him on the street until he was haggard looking. Then have him tell his story of his nine hundred foot Jesus and its instructions and asking for money. I don't think I need to spell out how his story would be received then.

There is a broader story here with a long history, one that I will not be able to get to today but it is a theme I'll be either poking away at – or hammering at – as we go along in this blog and explore the definitions and perceptions of both mental illness and those “diagnosed” with such.

If you think the lines are sharp, you are badly mistaken. 

Taming the Polar Bears - the Final Chapters

Taming the Polar Bears

The Final Chapters

This is going to be blunt and is likely going to hurt. But so be it. 

Why am I closing down this blog and likely removing access to my writing? As always is the case, there are numerous reasons, the most important of which 99.5% of my readers will not be able to get no matter how much they “think” they “get it”.

Personal Boundaries

I may write very openly and honestly but I remain a very private person and I expect personal privacy. That boundary was being crossed too often.

I take a good deal of responsibility, however. At various times since I first started doing the work that would become the basis for Taming the Polar Bears in its current incarnation, I've very much wanted to get involved with helping others. I knew very early on that I had something very special and very powerful; more personal experience with living with a mental health disorder and more experience being within the mental health care system AND being deeply and widely read on not only psychiatric medications but everything to do with psychiatric conditions AND neuroscience. I also knew my writing was very powerful. I also knew I possess unusual levels of empathy and understanding for those who suffer (I had all my life, my family is just that way, but especially since going through everything I have over the past seven years).

So when people reached out to me for help, I found it not only very hard not to want to try help as best I could, I felt it was very much something I wanted to do.

So yes, I can blame myself for appearing to be accessible.

But this quickly spiraled out of control and at some point I could see that though I was very knowledgeable and uniquely understanding and empathetic, in no way was I qualified for helping people deal with their issues. And in various emails and blog posts, I thought I made it clear that I was not available on a personal basis.

I also thought I made it clear that absolutely NOBODY - that would be ZERO people - have access to me regarding my mental states or mental health status.

Yet my boundaries continued to be crossed, people felt they could email me or message me in ways they had absolutely no right to do.

“Have a Kit-Kat”

These are words that I will never forget. I probably wouldn't have forgotten them anyway, such is the way my memory storage system etches things into my mind, but I won't let myself forget.

This was the heading of an email I received in response to a private post I wrote on Taming the Polar Bears.

This from a regular reader of mine, one who's always proclaimed to “get it”.

I am, even as I attempt to write this three days later, at a loss to understand this or explain it. I can say a few things that I can only hope might be clear. One, is that an off the cuff dismissive hurtful line like this is so far away from the message I've tried to get across in Taming the Polar Bears, it pretty much demolishes any faith I had that my message was getting through. This is exactly the kind of bullshit I've put up with for years and is EXACTLY the kind of thing that greased my skid downwards towards suicidal hell. I would be devastated by hearing this from the most ignorant person in my life, let alone from a regular reader of my blog.

Then, further in the same email, I get “just chill out and enjoy Christmas with your family”.

This would be the “family” (ex-wife, daughter) that looks at me as a pathetic loser, that kicked me out when I had nowhere to go and wouldn't so much as give me $20 for gas. For fourteen years I worked my ass off and made great sacrifices to keep a roof over these two ungrateful wenches' heads and who “loved” me all that time but when I'm down and out and essentially homeless, they can't get me out of their lives fast enough.

And I'm airily “advised” to just “chill out and enjoy Christmas” with them.

But the defense of this ill fitted “advise” is that it was “well meaning”.

Let me give you all some background about “well meaning advise” and me.

In the seven years I've gone through this, I've never hid anything. I had dozens and dozens of friends who had “front row seats” to my long, sickening descent from successful, financially secure home owner into madness and then poverty. None of that was necessary and it was largely facilitated by people who had no fucking clue whatsoever what they were talking about bombarding me with “well meaning advice”.

I could fill a book with the “well meaning advice” given to me and occupy a condo building with the people who shoveled it to me. All of it completely useless and mostly harmful bullshit. Because NONE of it applied to a person of my unique situation.

And I'd explain and explain and explain and yet the fucking bullshit kept coming. And all the more my skids were greased and the further I descended into hell.

Meanwhile, I've seen twenty or more psychiatrists and dozens more mental health care workers of all kinds and NONE OF THEM could help either.

Meanwhile, I've attempted to make it abundantly clear that I have about the worst form of the worst psychiatric illness (I'd argue that in some ways my advanced form of bipolar is worse and harder to treat than schizophrenia) and that the likelihood of ANYONE going through ANYTHING similar is remotely, remotely slim.

Yet for reasons that I just utterly CANNOT fathom, people feel they're “qualified” to write me and give me “advise”.

This is not only with online “friends” but people in real life. There is no possible way on earth anyone could have any idea of what I'm going through let alone what to do, yet everyone seems to think they've “been there” and are thus “qualified” to say something.

This went on for years and greased the skids for my descent into suicidal hell.

Then at some point I just had to firmly say enough was enough (by this time I was finally beginning to get my mind back) and I established a ZERO tolerance policy for any “advice” or “input” into my condition from ANYONE.

I try to establish these boundaries yet people still feel entitled to cross them.

All because I “put myself out there” on my blog.

So this tells me two things:

People SAY they read my blog and get something from it but this crossing of boundaries tells me they don't. Getting told to “have a Kit-Kat” confirms that they don't.

That makes me feel, quite reasonably, that my writing has been a waste of time and my precious, precious energy. But more on this later.

Two, is that if people continue to cross the boundaries I try to establish and further tax my very, very limited energy resources – not to mention pound me down further with ignorant bullshit “advice” - then I simply cannot afford to “put myself out there” as I have.

You see, unlike the majority of you whose “suicidal thoughts” are just boo-hoo feeling sorry for yourself “I can't go on” bullshit, I – for reason that are VERY unique to my RARE form of bipolar – face real suicidal danger. If I slip down there, it's NOT because I'm feeling boo-hoo sorry for myself.

I don't know how many posts I've dedicated to this and people “claim” to “get it” and then I still get bullshit like “have a Kit-Kat”.

MEANWHILE, I have to put up with harassment bordering on stalking from someone who claims to “love” me. And this person too is full of ignorant assumptions and “well meaning” “support” and “input”. And none of this is welcome, none of this is needed, none of this is useful. Yet if I try to explain this and make it clear, I get all this passive aggressive guilt trip boo-hoo bullshit that puts me on the spot. And then I have to waste valuable and preciously little mental energy on dealing with all of THAT.

There are many reasons people do things like this and why they “think” it's “well meaning” but I'm going to have to get to that in another piece.

Meanwhile, I literally CANNOT afford to put myself out there anymore. I walk a tightrope everyday that very, very, VERY few people can know of, let alone fathom and comprehend. I do NOT need people pushing me off that tightrope.

As for deleting the contents of Taming the Polar Bears, I'll get to that in another piece as well.

I am well, well aware how much this hurts but as Wei Wu Wei said:

So yeah, truth hurts but it takes pain to make some people learn. Then again, seeing the amount of pain some people are willing to bear and never learn anything, I'm not so sure even this will help. But that's not my problem.

I have one criteria and one criteria only for my life now - I do WHATEVER it takes to stay alive. If that means hurting some people, so be it. But don't feel bad, I've cut many, many others out of my life for bullshit I won't tolerate, including, just two days ago, my own daughter (more later). 

 

Evolution and Suicide - Part Two

I ended off  the first part of this series "if evolution is essentially a drive to survive, a drive to reproduce, why would suicide genes have survived?". "Or, on the new understanding of DNA, why would it have developed?"

As I've stated, I didn't particularly feel in control of any of my suicidal drives. It for all the world felt like something else was in control. After coming out of the states of those various episodes, I'd think that it didn't make sense. The survival instinct is the most powerful in any species; why then would anyone be driven to self-destruct?

To answer those questions I suppose it's best to start with two obvious points. One is the super key evolutionary strategy of genetic diversity. It's not the only strategy, it's just a pretty good one. That's why humans dominate the earth. We are more genetically diverse (and this is most true in how our brains vary) than any other species on earth. We are more successful than our very closely related fellow primates because we are more genetically diverse. It's why we produce seven foot tall basketball players, tiny gymnasts, Mozarts, and Einsteins all out of the same basic species. This doesn't work by design (don't listen to the Creationists on this), it happens more or less by blind fluke; produce enough variations and enough of them will "work" to make the whole species better. The environment may well one day trump all this "success" (obliterate the human race in a massive asteroid strike for example) but that's neither here nor there at the present time. Right now we're "successful". And this process has worked by grinding out the weak. Or at least it did until we evolved the smarts to start overcoming many of these weaknesses with modern medicine and other meddling. 

Two is that "you" are not important. The survival of the species is. Yes, as much as the "everybody-is-"special"-and-gets-a-gold-star" liberals would like you to believe otherwise, you and your survival are actually extremely insignificant. It's the survival of the species that's important. The odd individual may prove significant (those that made those medical discoveries for example) or sometimes individuals band together to become significant (the Bolsheviks for example) but by and large most individuals are completely insignificant. Your disappearance won't make even the tiniest little difference to the survival of the species. (yes, I know, quite sobering, isn't it) But take heart, entire civilizations have disappeared or been wiped out and the homo sapiens species, in case you haven't noticed, has carried on quite fine. 

So if we accept that the species is more important than the individual then the idea of suicide genes starts to make more sense. I know this runs counter to every liberal's core thought process but we're not talking philosophy here, we're talking raw evolutionary forces. The latter has been around for four billion years, modern philosophy for about ... what? A couple hundred or so? Evolution could give a fig about our puny thought systems. 

In truth, I shouldn't disparage left wing philosophy so much. It's actually pretty important and itself has an evolutionary basis but that's for another time and place. It's just that it doesn't overcome all countering evolutionary forces (evolution is all about back and forth jousting between competing forces, after all). Or at least not yet. So I shouldn't imply that those so inclined shouldn't try. Trying is the whole point in making any given evolutionary strategy "work". 

"Stress" is not a modern invention. We've certainly created infinitely more sources for it, but it's hardly new. What we experience as stress originates in the stress response system, a very old piece of brain hardware indeed. It involves the limbic system and some deeper brain hardware. Not all animals experience stress to the degree that we - and our higher evolved animal cousins - do which is why we have developed such a wide variety of illnesses that arise from stress. 

The stress response system evolved for situations of danger or injury. Like a charging rhino for example or getting gored by that rhino. Those are acute, short term examples. But there are chronic examples. Like long term starvation. Chronic hunger will trigger the stress response system. This is, of course, to kick a person into action (fight or flee, or in other words, do something drastic (like wipe out the next tribe over and take their food) or go elsewhere in search of food). 

It's not useful - and we're talking strictly in terms of evolutionary design here - to have weak people around in situations like this. Which is of course why so many people don't survive these situations. Don't fight or flee properly? Out of the gene pool you go. Now I was dead wrong about lefty liberals before. I was wrong because somewhere along the line we - human, primates, elephants, dolphins/whales and a few other species - evolved "empathy centres" in our brains. 

Empathy centres mean we feel others' pain along with our own. It impels us to help those others when they don't fight or flee properly. This helps the tribe, you see (and hence the species at large). So despite what the right wing conservative or libertarian kooks believe, there is a massive evolutionary advantage to lefty liberalism. (sorry, just had to sneak all this in there). 

But life on earth is tough and always has been thus (and of course today's version of "tough" doesn't hold a candle to tough times from the past (thanks in no small part to all those strong empathy centre liberal types)). And there are only so many of the weak that can be dragged along in times of chronic stressful conditions. Somebody has to go or the whole tribe (and species at large) will be in danger. 

It's never really been "cool" in our evolutionary history to just up and cull out the weak. We may have let them die, but it's not cool to kill them if they don't just die out themselves. So what to do with those who are too weak and are a drag on the whole tribe? 

Evolution of course has an answer and that answer is the suicide gene. Certain people will be "pre-programmed" to self-cull if the going gets too rough. 

The going gets rough, this triggers the stress response system, the brain and body gets flooded with stress hormones and the presence of these hormones will activate certain genetic responses (this is extremely well known and established) and one of the possible responses is to self destruct. The weak must be culled from the herd and if no one else will do it, then it must be a self-activated act. 

Bing-bang-boom, there ya go. The answer for my quest for "why?"

And on a deep subconscious DNA level, the tribe approves. Because the tribe knows that this self-culling is necessary for the tribe to survive. Which is why no one really gives a shit if someone commits suicide - on a deep level we understand that it was meant to be and for good reason. 

And even those with strong empathy centres that want and try to help have limited reserves of empathy and energy when the situation is really difficult. 

The sixty-four thousand dollar question then becomes; to what degree should our modern day tribes - society and smaller family units - be willing to help those in danger of "self-culling"? 

And of greater importance, what should that "help" look like? 

The answers to that are not easy nor one dimensional but the exploration of which is more or less the raison d-etre of this blog. A more concise summary of what I think that help should look like is in the works but I always start with my Positive Difference Making Fundamentals.

Evolution and Suicide - Part One

[updated July, 2015 - BGE]

All my interest and research into mental health issues began with a single question - why? 

I wanted to know why I was driven to take my life. I've been through many episodes of high suicidal risk and none of them felt particularly under "my control". None of them particularly felt like a "decision" by "me". It for all the world felt like a deeper drive than that. 

So I simply wanted to know why that was. I simply wanted to know "why?". My search for the answer to that simple question took me through somewhere around a million and half words worth of science books and research papers. I explored every field of science there is that's related to human behaviour from genetics to evolutionary psychology to social sciences to the science of addiction to neurobiology and to neuroscience itself. As ALL behaviour originates in the brain, thus neuroscience provides the best answers to questions regarding human behaviour. So I spent considerable time and effort studying neuroscience. As genetics and environmental conditions shape the brain, I explored those two fields a lot too. 

While I became very, very interested in ALL aspects of mental health, my biggest interest was in the science of suicide. After all, that is by far the most serious consequence of a given mental health disorder.

The following series explores one possible explanation that I found. It's just a theory of course but I think it's a very good one. It's based on solid science and something most people don't get to study - what it's like to have this drive within oneself. 

This series is a rough draft for now. I hope to one day flesh it out more and include all the proper citations. 

The Evolutionary Basis for Suicide

Almost everyone will experience emotional pain in their lives. (1) Sociopaths and psychopaths are exceptions (definitions of these vary but the basic point is that they don't feel emotions and especially empathy and empathetic pain like most of us do).

Many people who commit suicide do in response to acute or chronic emotional pain. But if almost everyone experiences emotional pain, what makes the pain of suicide victims different? Is it that much worse?

I've spent a lot of time talking to people about emotional pain or hearing or reading their stories. I've talked to numerous street people and heard their stories. I heard many stories during group sessions in the hospital. There are a LOT of VERY painful stories out there. 

What makes one person's pain more severe than another's? This is virtually impossible to quantify. One person seems to be able to bear unfathomable amounts of pain and carry on. Another person gets diagnosed with PTSD after the death of a cat. 

And why are some people so driven by pain that they actually kill themselves? Or are driven to kill themselves? 

This is an extremely hard question to answer (and no, you don't have the answer). I have seen and come up with some good possibilities though.  

One of my lifelong interests is the study of evolution and how all that works. I accept that all life is shaped by evolutionary forces. This has been demonstrated on so many levels under so many conditions that it is really beyond doubt. All that is in doubt - and which is the never ending subject of debate among those in the field - is the precise mechanism for this or that present day feature (like homo sapiens' vaunted frontal lobes or a particular wing design on a certain species of bird and countless so on). The thinking among the leaders in evolutionary theory (evolution itself is not a theory but the processes of it are) is that nothing exists without an evolutionary basis. If it exists today, it exists for a reason. If it exists today, that means it survived the millions and millions of years of evolutionary grind (which is not to say evolution won't eventually grind out of existence many of today's "features" if conditions change). 

All things evolve to adapt and any given feature of any given species today will have evolved to either adapt to something or for purposes of genetic diversity (a very key and basic element of evolution often overlooked. A lot of what is passed on through genetics may not have a discernible purpose for current conditions but is there in case of differing conditions that may arise. In other words, some sort of change in environment conditions could trigger that gene into expression). 

So if one accepts this as true - and I do (and I've not seen any convincing arguments to the contrary) - then one has to look at suicide in this light. It must be here for a reason. In the world of evolution, all animal behaviours have a reason. Or had a reason at one point (and its present day redundancy hasn't been eliminated by adaptive evolutionary forces yet). 

Evolution grinds out the weak. That's what it does. Present day bleeding heart liberals can get themselves all in a tither about that but the relentless forces of evolution could care not a fig for such baseless sentiments. Evolutionary forces will grind on regardless of our pathetic little efforts to stop them. 

And so it is, I believe, with suicide. Those that commit suicide are the weak and the inner drive is one of evolution's neat little tricks to cull out the weak. 

I don't think one can understand genetics and deny there is a genetic component to something. Evolution works through genetics. Evolutionary "features" are passed on through genes. Not all genes will necessarily be "triggered" into action though. The basic ones that make up our physical features and most brain features will but a great deal need some sort of environmental trigger to activate them. People with a genetic predisposition towards heart disease, for example, won't necessarily get heart disease; there needs to be certain environmental factors (or the power of belief in their own mind might well do the trick). 

So if we accept that there is a gene for every conceivable and possible human condition (and we should), then there is a "suicide gene". It won't necessarily kick in but certain environmental factors will do just that. And those factors will involve stressful situations (things that trigger the stress response system). Each individual's response to stress will itself be genetically determined. Genes decide how much or little one responds to a potentially stress triggering situation. So put together a highly sensitive stress response system and a suicide gene and you've got the potential for a self inflicted death.

Further on genes and genetic expression; it has recently been discovered that DNA does NOT, as has been the belief all along, stay the same throughout its carrier's life. People's DNA can change through the course of their life. It's a pretty big discovery and it's completely thrown for a loop a lot of science based on the previous notion that DNA was "set for life" (including the science of DNA identification). Why does it change? For the simplest of evolutionary reasons, I'd wager - to adapt. (and if one understands and accepts the basics of evolutionary adaption, that DNA would "adapt on the fly" makes perfect sense). 

What this means in our case here is that if you didn't start out life with a suicide gene (or DNA), then you may well develop one as life's conditions kick you this way or that. It also might mean you develop more beneficial DNA but we're looking at suicide here and the downsides of this changing DNA. Or why such a gene might have an "upside". 

The reason I bring up this seemingly trivial bit of recent scientific discovery is that it's particularly relevant in my case. 

For those of you who are not aware, I have a genetically identical copy of myself. Identical twins are the only humans on earth that start out with identical DNA. This is because the fetuses of "identical twins"  are the result of a single fertilized egg splitting in two and two different life forms growing from that single split egg and thus having an absolutely identical string of DNA. This is in contrast to fraternal twins who develop from two separately fertilized eggs and thus quite different DNA. Each egg and each sperm carries slightly different DNA. Which is why every single solitary person on earth and in the history of earth is different. With the exception of identical twins. Which is why identical twins are so highly coveted by science for genetic and environmental research. 

I respond very severely to environmental stressors. I have been highly suicidal and driven to suicide. I experience bipolar far more severely. 

If my twin and I started out genetically identical (and this is beyond any dispute), why do we react so differently to life now? 

The answer is twofold.

One is that though we have identical genes, not all of them will be activated in either of us. That is up to environmental conditions. And since childhood, we have experienced different environmental conditions (this alone requires almost book length examination though I touched on this in my post on Genetic and Environmental Factors in Brain Development). These differences greatly accelerated following high school. The big difference is that I ventured out and explored the world and he stayed close to home and stable in one field of vocation. So our differing environmental experiences would be a factor.

Two is this recent discovery of DNA "changing on the fly". DNA expression happens on the cellular level. Stuff is going on at that level all the time. And now it appears that DNA itself is changing, all in response to environmental conditions. So as cells replace themselves, they may well do so with a somewhat different DNA code than the previous generation of themselves. As DNA and cells change over a lifetime, so "we" change. Simply put, my twin and I are likely not genetically identical anymore. Which means that not only will our environments be different, we'll respond to environmental conditions more and more differently. 

And on this model I appear to have "adapted" to eliminate myself (potentially ... the deed is obviously not done yet). 

This leads to the question of "if evolution is a drive to survive, why would a suicide gene have survived?". "Or, on the new understanding of DNA, why would it have developed?" Which are excellent questions.

Sources:

Much Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins

Many books and research papers on neuroscience

Numerous, numerous research papers on social psychology, neuropsychology and other related behavioural studies

Please proceed to Part Two.


Update:

I hadn't read this since originally writing and posting it a year and half ago. I was in a pretty dark place when I conceived of and composed this, having just recently being discharged from yet another hospitalization to remove myself from danger. Yet rereading it now, it still holds up strong and I have seen nothing in the interceding time since my original writing to change any of the foundations for my theory and in fact would say that I have only accumulated more evidence (and I may at some point flesh this out further).

I can say that I have moved considerably away from being tortured by this "self-cull" self-destruct drive. It's still there at some times, which I touched on in Random Thoughts on Bipolar and the Inevitable and its follow up companion piece but overall I continue to improve many aspects of my mental health and outlook towards life.