Hypericum and Tryptophan to counter Depression

Healing drawn by Penni Winter http://strangeringodzone.blogspot.co.nz/

Hi guys,

today I want to detail my experiences with Antidepressants. Since I am not a big fan or big pharma companies I chose to ask my doctor for Tryptophan first. And later for St. John’s wort. I have covered tryptophan here: https://rootlessintrospection.wordpress.com/2015/01/24/tryptophan-supplementation-to-medicate-depression/

Brief summary:

– tryptophan is taken 4 days a week for 3 weeks during the builtup phase
– after that 2 days a week should be trypto days
– 1.5g to 3g each trypto day
– take it as soon as you wake up
– if you take it after 2pm or if you want to maximise effect: wait 30 mins after intake, then be
physically active (take a walk, work out, vacuum, do laundry…)
– do not eat until 2 hours after you have taken tryptophan
– tryptophan develops its antidepressant effect very fast

Now for St Johns Wort: it is a plant with a nice looking flower originating in Europe but has since spread all the way to china. Scientists gave it the name of Hypericum perforatum to make sure you don’t know what they are talking about. No one knows exactly how this plant has antidepressive effects but it does. And many people are much better of for it.

Are you verbal? High functioning? The lovely labels….

Reading made me think about my own experiences with speech. I’m not entirely sure if I am unsual that way or if it’s the song of most adults who were not diagnosed early.

Let’s start with the basics: How Language is produced or not produced

Spoken Language has two prominent regions in the brain responsible for it: Wernicke and Broca. Wernicke creates a sentence in your head, it takes care of grammar, vocabulary and all the million other things necessary to make a proper statement. Brocas meanwhile is responsible of sending the right neurological signal to your language producing organs such as the larynx to actually turn your thought up sentence (courtesy of Wernickes) into a spoken sentence. In autistic non verbal people Brocas Region is not functioning properly. Meaning you might think of the best piece of literature or the most touching poem but it won’t ever leave your mouth. You essentially wear a very very effective muzzle, preventing you from opening your mouth.

Disabled not disordered: autism and the social model

this is precisely how i feel about autism. it is not a disease nor a disorder but it has disabling effects. if we manage to reduce those everyone will be better off 🙂

Autism through the Medium of Cats

I’ve often come across Autistic people who say, ‘I don’t see it as a disability.’

And then there are people who say they suffer from autism because they can’t get a job or they’ve been bullied.

In both cases I think the same thing: haven’t they heard of the social model? I don’t think enough people have.

The social model of disability is a way of thinking about disability in which disability results not from an individual’s neurological, physical or mental characteristics but from barriers created by society. The social model distinguishes between impairment, which is when someone has an unusually low ability to do something, and disability, which is when someone is prevented from full participation in society on the basis of an impairment. Society is built to accommodate the needs of the majority and not the needs of people with minority brains, bodies and minds. This is the…

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What is living with autism like?

Currently the one holy grail in autism research (aside from the cure search fund by Autism Unspeakable) is to find the root cause of autism. After spending some decades looking for what is broken and not having much luck the new bees knees for some research groups is now to consider autism not a monolith anymore but a spectrum caused by a variety of things. Frankly I do not know what causes autism any better than you do (unless you think its vaccines, then i know better :P). I want to discuss my thought about this issue, but first we need to be on the same level concerning what autism is. So I am trying to take you by your virtual hand and lead you to my world. You may try to walk within my shoes for a while but I have a feeling even putting on my shoes is already too much pain to bear for you if you are not autistic. One gets used to pain and one gets used to chaos. Autistic people who are able to communicate seem to have in common this skill to life an impossible life. To bear it all well enough to see the next day.

 

Here is why your Theory of Mind is broken!

Here we can see how Aspie Questionaires fail to take into account the different ways Aspies think. People who made up the quiz failed to apply Theory of Mind. Image Credit goes to Dinah the Aspie Dinosaur: https://www.facebook.com/DinahTheAspieDinosaur

My blog has one follower! I have not advertised is in any way yet. Hi Mx. follower! How do you do?

Anyhow I wanted to write about Theory of Mind today. Theory of Mind describes the skill to decipher what other people are thinking. Since that sounds awfully cerebral, lets go into you a Theory of Mind experiment for young children:

the child is shown two dolls/humanoid figures by the experimenter, in this makebelieve world of the dolls both are in the same room when one of the dolls hides an item somewhere, then one of the dolls leave the room while the other get hold of the hidden object and hides it somewhere else. Now the absent doll comes back. End of the fairy tale.
Now the child is asked where the returning doll will look for the hidden item. The child knows about the new hiding place. Very young children will always say the returning doll will look where the toy is hidden. Later children develop an understanding that while the child itself saw the process of rehiding the item the doll who left the room did not, hence it would still look for the item in the first hiding place. Thus the child starts to differentiate between what the child knows and what other people know and can predict behaviour depending on that difference of knowledge.

A look inside the crazed professors life

I have a confession to make. Many have outright disbelieved me. Some have immediately began to call me arrogant, full of myself and those closest to me have decided to either decide it means I do not need any guidance at all but instead should guide myself until it is not suitable for them anymore or have been deeply offended by it to the point of for some time blaming every complication in our relationship to this. So yeah I love being one of the smartest people I know. How smart exactly is an issue of debate in itself, some certified tests placed me barely in the brightest 2% category (which still means every 50th person I meet would be as clever or even more clever than I am) and some experts only dealing with gifted people think I am among the top 0.003%. So no big variation at all.

I decided to dig a bit into academic intelligence to understand all this. Partly because when I did I had plenty of free time at my hands, the internet was this new shiny library and because I had about as much self awareness as a teddy but unlike the toy named after an american president much heartache over it. So what did i find out?

How to find your Identity?

Full disclosure I have no idea how to answer this question. But I want to share what I learned in the ongoing process of finding mine.

The most important part for a long while for me is what differentiates me from others. ‘Fair enough’ most would think. A rather straight forward approach. But here the trouble already started. There are so many things separating me from the people around me that I (and the people around me) often feel as if I’m not a part of the tribe. In order to form an identity you need to surround yourself with people who are both different from you (the kind of different that is already achieved when you do not happen to live in a colony of clones) and sufficiently similar to you.

Often as a teenager I would complain how I felt different. The scarily uniform answer was always that all people are different. (Just keep contemplating for a moment how I got the same answer from everyone involved stress how much unsame they are…) That is true but not the kind of different I’m talking about. There are many ways to take different to a next level. You know whenever you are affected even in some small aspect like nutrition. You are always aware of how diabetes or your food allergy needs to be accommodated. More pervasively you always know how people likely treat people of your respective phenotype when you are living in a country where you stand out for your looks. You always feel it intensely when you are surrounded by people of a different faith than your own. And everyone being different certainly begins to feel like a joke in bad taste when you keep getting comments raging from astounded to offended on how the way you peel bananas is off. Apparently you need to adhere to a majority even for things as mundane as skinning agricultural products.