Schizoaffective

 Strange insights can come up when you meditate, and I meditate a fair amount: 50 minutes twice a day. Over the last four or five months, a series of insights has revealed to me that I, and probably all people, hold deep, subconscious beliefs that our conscious self would never agree with. For instance, I was recently sitting when I heard some people talking in the parking lot outside my apartment windows. These people talk out there a lot. It hit me quite suddenly that "this is my life, to sit in this apartment overhearing the same people talking in the parking lot." It washed over me that this here, now existence is all I have. Even if I moved from this apartment, my life would not be substantively different. I would just overhear different people outside my apartment. The insight continued. I realized in this flash that I harbored a fundamental belief/feeling/hope that was quite delusional. I believed that somehow, somewhere, my problems would be solved and I would live in...

It occurred to me that I may have appeared to contradict myself in the course of the last several postings on this blog. On August 13, in a post entitled "Skin," I explained how the skin does not have to be viewed as the boundary between the self and the rest of the world. In fact, skin is one of the ways we reach out into the world, connecting with it, being in relationship with it. I went on to say that consciousness is not inside us, especially not in the neural workings of the brain, but all over the place, both inside and outside. The things of the world we are conscious of, such as birds and piles of sand, are also conscious, though not to the extent a human being is. After arguing for this perspective, I proceeded to write several posts that detailed my recent experiences with antipsychotics. I related how getting off risperidone caused withdrawal symptoms that included anxiety. Anxiety is a mood that, like all moods, affects consciousness by causing us to focus on som...

by Jay Paul I have posted here for the last several weeks about my recent struggles with medication. I am happy to say that, for now, things are resolved. I am on a low dose of olanzapine that does not play havoc with my blood and does not make me feel woozy. Unfortunately, I am having some minor problems with weight gain and sleepiness. I hope they get better as time goes on. But for now, my serious problems are behind me. Now on to this week's essay. _________________________________________________ In his essay “Moral Luck” Thomas Nagel notes that we blame a drunk driver for recklessly driving up onto a curb and hurting a pedestrian much more so than we blame her if she just went up on the curb and nobody was there. This is a case of moral luck. If nobody was there, the drunk driver’s moral, and legal, standing results from her being lucky that the sidewalk was empty.   Nagel’s point seems irrefutable. Much of our moral standing in our own and in other people’s eyes results...

by Jay Paul Last week on this blog, I gave a rundown of what has been ailing me for the past five weeks—namely, wooziness. We still don't know what was causing it. A celiacs test came up negative. But in the course of investigating it, we found that my prolactin levels were twice as high as they should be. Prolactin is the hormone that in women causes them to lactate when pregnant. Risperidone, which I was on a low dose of, can cause prolactin build up because of its effect on the pituitary gland. So I am now off risperidone and on a low dose of olanzapine. Olanzapine causes you to gain weight more so than other antipsychotics. I have had problems with that for the last 25 years. I have recently been losing weight. So far, I am two days into the olanzapine, and I have lost some weight. My strategy is to eat set amounts only at mealtimes and not eat according to hunger. This is not easy. We'll see if I succeed. Two things concern me: olanzapine can raise prolactin as well, altho...

by Jay Paul On July 28 I was hiking with a friend in a nature center. While going up a hill I felt a strange wooziness for a few seconds. I attributed it to some weird reaction to the meds I take for schizoaffective, and thought little of it. It happened a few days later when I was hiking by myself in a state park. That evening, I knew something was amiss when I felt woozy and like I was going to fall off my chair while meditating. I have felt woozy off and on ever since. At first it was bad. It hit me the worst when I was out walking. In early August, I cut the length of my walks down considerably. What was happening to me? The only change I could identify was going from a 2 mg Risperidone cut in half to a 1 mg Risperidone. I figured I was having some withdrawal from an inactive ingredient in the 2 mg tablet. I figured I would get over it in a few weeks. A few weeks came and went. I still had it, but it was less acute. I called my psychiatrist, and he thought it might be dehydration. ...

by Jay Paul In many ways, I consider myself lucky when it comes to side effects. The antipsychotics I am on cause some people to have diabetes or tardive dyskinesia. I have neither. But this does not mean I haven’t had my share of bizarre side effects. After a great June and July this year, when I felt better than I have in decades in terms of mood, something creeped back in in August. It may be side effects. I may be cycling. It’s not clear.             Bizarre side effects are nothing new for me. They started around 2000 when I was diagnosed with central apnea—a rare condition where the brain, not airway obstruction, shuts down breathing while asleep. I was put on a fancy and expensive CPAP machine called a bilevel. In 2013 I was taken off Depakote because of side effects. It was causing a build-up of ammonia in my blood. At my next sleep study, in 2016, it was found that I had mild obstructive apnea and no central apnea. The...

by Jay Paul Perhaps the most common assumption about skin is that it seals off what is “me” from the rest of the world. For instance, I am sitting in this room right now with a bicycle to my right, a computer in front of me, and a bed behind me. My skin provides the barrier between these other objects and what is “me.”             Upon reflection, problems arise with this naive view. The biggest one is that we usually associate our consciousness with our self, but our consciousness rarely concerns itself with what is inside our skin. Except when we are in pain or discomfort, our consciousness focuses on what is about us in the world. Right now, the keys on this keyboard, which are outside me but touching my fingers, are part of my conscious awareness while, say, my heart is not. It’s true that I need the heart to be conscious, but I am rarely conscious of it unless something goes wrong with it.      ...