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Health Update
It’s been a rough couple of months as my doctors lowered the dose of my pain meds. I’ve been done with the withdrawal process for a few weeks now, but as you may expect my baseline pain is higher now. I’m trying to adjust to the higher pain levels, but it hasn’t been easy and…
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On Mental Illness and Mass Shootings
So many thoughts about guns and mental illness. 1) There is no correlation between mass shootings and mental illness. Let me repeat: there is NO CORRELATION between mass shooting and mental illness. Are there some mass shooters who are mentally ill? Certainly. And that is because the population of violent (and evil) people is huge…
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What I wish people understood about depression
Depression can be, and often is, a fatal disease. Depression is (IMHO) the AIDS of mental illnesses. Although Depression is not as frequently fatal as AIDS, it works using a similar mechanism: AIDS doesn’t kill you directly–it disables your immune system, and then some other disease kills you while your defenses are down. Similarly, Depression…
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Beware the Ide(ation)s of March
I’ve suffered off and on with Depression for decades now, and while I can’t really anticipate it, I do have a sense of its rhythms and patterns. I learned early on that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) played a factor–my Depression and its attendant Suicidal Ideation would loom larger in the darker months of the year.…
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Familiar Territory
Depression has pretty much swallowed me whole for the past month or so. I had been making lots of progress on the depression front through the past year, and even just two months ago I was in relatively good shape with my pain levels (relatively) low/stable and my depression concomitantly low to match. However, depression…
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Crossed Signals
My body is doing this weird thing where it interprets hunger as nausea. So when I go a while without eating, my stomach will start feeling bad and the feeling will keep growing the longer I don’t eat. But since the underlying issue is actually hunger, once I eat something I invaryingly feel fine. Of…
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Depression
[This post is part of my Medical Conditions Series.] Most people who suffer from chronic pain also struggle with depression. I am no exception. Intense, continuous, chronic pain is objectively horrible, and knowing that I don’t have any effective way to treat it frequently plunges me into despair. My depression is tightly linked to my…
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Medical Conditions Series
I have a whole host of medical issues–some are chronic and disabling, and others are episodic or merely disruptive. Over the next few blog posts, I’m going to give a brief description of each of my main conditions and how they affect me. Hopefully, these will help you to see what my disability looks like,…