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.