Risperdal and interest in life, or motivation

27/09/12 16:42 [Thursday]
I have to say this present dosage of Risperdal I am on is a great success. I am not completely deactivated so that I didn't find anything of interest in life, as I was on the higher dosage last year; nor am I so rushed in what I am doing that I cannot have leisure to think about it in advance, as I was when on no medication at all. Part of the interest I have in life now is introspecting - as I am doing here - that is observing myself doing stuff and commenting on it. If this introspection gets out of hand it adds to the 'processing' load so that I have no resources - I am too rushed - to do anything other than introspecting: but I don't think it gets to quite that stage now I am helped by this medication.
So I will cut the introspecting on introspection and say that what I have in mind to do - what I am planning - is based on another thing I find interesting in my present life which is to say saving money. This interest - which amounts to a need - is founded in the fact that I am surviving at present entirely on benefits. Another aspect of this source of interest derives from my way of thinking in mathematical terms, so that for example one vague intention I have is to graph my spending over recent years on gas and electric: then I can see how the spending has varied over the years and how it varies over the seasons. I have for around eighteen months now - starting at the time I was looking forward to being discharged from hospital in the Spring of 2011 - been taking my meter readings frequently and recording my usage in a form which is of more use to me than kWh, that is in 'meter units'.
However my primary interest is in recording on the internet somewhere I can conveniently access the data using my mobile phone how much I have paid for groceries in supermarkets. This would give me an idea - while actually in the supermarket for new spending, and without needing to carry a big notebook - whether things I might buy are cheap or dear. I have for a number of months been recording the prices I have paid, but as I say without carrying the information with me it is not available (except in my imperfect memory) when I am in the supermarket anew. Also I ask myself if other people - people obsessive in the style I am - might be interested in this information which, therefore, I wish to upload in a publicly available version. Furthermore if possible I'd like to be able to search through the text - my list of items and prices - to see how much I paid for selected items and do this using my mobile phone. (The alternative to that would be to upload also an index to all the items in my list.) At present the solution might be to use Facebook Notes, or alternatively to add easily accessed pages to my own website colinbrough.co.uk.
Other information it would be useful for me to be able to access using my mobile phone consists of train and bus timetables specially tailored to my requirements (in other words not going through the nationalrail.co.uk or similar app which in any case doesn't cover buses).
The last thing in my mind this evening is the fact - which I have discovered some days after the event - that Morrisons charged me £2.29 for Rightguard deodorant when the shelf-edge said something like £1.14 (which I presume was supposed to represent half-price). The Morrisons receipt - unlike Asda and Tesco which I am familiar with - does not have a website address for me to put in my comments. So I shall have to try to find an email address for Morrisons from their website.
27/09/12 17:38
A specific example of this Risperdal doing me good: in planning to go to Asda this evening I have explicitly considered whether it will be open in the evening. I don't feel I need to actually go to the website and check, but because I have reason to believe the Asda I am on about shuts earlier on a Saturday (and it has limited hours on a Sunday) if it were the weekend I would check. It is because my head is not running-on with other truly less significant questions that I am able to realise the question whether Asda will be open and make a clear decision on the need to check.

Oxford Dictionaries

This sort of thing interests me: the mathematics of language. You can take this poll at http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com (I show the response statistics at a recent date).

Cost of treatment

17/09/12 11:51 [Monday]

I have had thoughts consequent on revising my website and as an aside to it altering ‘no charge’ in my description of the cost to me of treatment over the years to ‘mostly free of charge’. What I mean by the alteration is that in the past when I needed tablets to counter the side-effects of the injections which were the primary means of medicating me I (or in truth my father) had to pay prescription charges. The way I regarded it when I was more angry than I am now (when I was not on the present lightweight régime of Risperdal) was as getting money out of me (or out of my family) through threats. That is, if I did not accept the primary medication I was locked up, and if I accepted the primary medication I could not do without the anti-side-effect medication (and suffered a lot even with it).

I must criticise the NHS psychiatrist who played such a large part in spoiling my life over decades: Anthony Dew Armond. My thinking now, with the success in my case of this treatment with Risperdal I am now getting, is that extraordinary lengths should be gone to to gain the patient’s acceptance of the treatment plan. Armond had a completely different view from this and enforced drug treatment on me by keeping me liable to be detained over a period of years (that is on a Section but having long periods of leave at home), ignoring my protestations about side-effects totally. The conclusion I drew from the experience I had with medication was that I must be super-sensitive and unable to tolerate any dosage however low of dopamine-blocking drugs. This has been proved wrong by the success of my present treatment, and it is thanks to the doctor I had at the time of my detention in 2010 and 2011 and for a few years before - Dr Matthew Kurian - who followed the policy of attending to what I said about the initially higher dosage of Risperdal I was on and reducing it, in other words as I say the policy of doing everything reasonably possible to gain the patient’s acceptance.

Dopamine-blocking drugs have powerful effects on the patient’s mind, indeed in his overall life, as do psychotic illnesses these drugs tackle. A doctor who sees the patient every few weeks or every few months will not be able to see for himself the sometimes devastating effect of the medication, and the only thing to do is trust what the patient says certainly once he has recovered from what may be plain delusions. The far-reaching effects of dopamine-blocking - especially since these drugs affect some people in ways which show more obviously than in some other people - are not fully understood and certainly not fully reported, and the only individuals who know the ins and outs of the effects on them are the patients taking the medication (and they may not realise all the effects which are in truth caused by the medication rather than by the illness or anything else).

So my summary is: once the patent is no longer out-of-touch with reality care must be taken not to ride rough-shod over his possibly weak-egoed objections to aspects of his treatment. Every effort should be made to gain his willing acceptance of the treatment prescribed.

Activation

09/09/12 07:48 [Sunday]

Since I was a teenager I have been very introspective, questioning myself on the reasons I do things or make the choices I do. I’m sure this introspection derives from my brain wiring. But anyway through introspection I have come up with theories about what I call activation, which has to do with the level of activity in the brain/mind being like stimulation but more to do with mental processing than anything physical. What I am wanting to mention first is the failings in generally available theories of personality from not taking activation (or simply rate of activity) into account. Theories of personality which form the basis (for example) of questionnaires which match people for ‘dating’ purposes are based on measuring topics people are interested in rather than their level of activity in interacting with the environment, with other people or with themselves within their own mind, and in this they fall down.

When I was not on dopamine-blocking medication my rate of interaction with the environment and with myself was very high (leaving, actually, little resources for interacting with people except briefly and superficially). On the higher dosage of Risperdal I was on last year my rate of activity was very low: I sat about unable to decide to do anything and this I found unpleasant and it manifested (paradoxically) as anxiety. If I was required to interact (with people or with the environment in the form of things which needed doing in my home) I could not come to any firm conclusions what I ought to do, and to a large degree took no action.

My natural condition is to be more tied up in things within my own mind, and to stop the overactivity along these lines which led me into difficulty around 2008-2010 (not so much withdrawing into my own mind but deriving things from my own way of understanding which led me headlong into sending a lot of correspondence and making as it were a lot of noise and in the process into wasting a lot of money; also misunderstanding the basis of my own condition of mind - introspectively observed - this misunderstanding being really what led to my hospitalisation): to stop this overactivity I now accept that some dopamine-blocking through medication is essential. The thing is it is necessary to strike a balance, so that I am not completely deactivated. As I say, I cannot get away from the fact that what is in my own mind is a large factor in my considerations and my behaviour, and a result of this is that I don’t have a lot to say to other people. Still, with the very low dosage of Risperdal I am currently on - and hope to remain on, and no higher a dosage - I can think of things including things which get said to other people (and things which find their way, at a much lower rate than in the years 2008-2010, onto my blog) so really although the effect of the medication is not ideal - cutting down my mental activity without increasing my interaction with other people to normal levels - still I think it is the optimum that can be achieved.

What originated this diary entry was my reflecting that in the years when I was not on medication life was full of interest and variety, but when I was on the higher dosage of medication life was flat and empty. The way the activity went in 2008-2010 had to do with my being disorganised in most things I did. I did a lot because of the basic overactivation I have stressed - sleeping very little at night: which itself made me disorganised in that I fell asleep at unhelpful times in the day - and observed introspectively that things went wrong (for example in my use of computers). I did not however accept responsibility and understand the reason things went wrong was the racing of my mind: instead I blamed some external force which through hypnotism or through mind-altering drugs being got into me interfered. The upshot was that more activity was generated, and more disorganised activity, as I tried to fight back and counter these hypothetical intrusions from outside myself. As I say, life was full of interest and variety as I dashed hither and thither in what genuinely was confusion but which I thought at the time was a reasonably founded game-plan of opposition.