07/09/13 07:01 [Saturday]
I have thought on and off about making a diary entry (with the intention of uploading it to my blog) and asking myself (in the introspective way natural to me) why I am setting pen to paper (electronically) now, I note that yesterday I converted my Twitterings for August into a form suitable for publication and uploaded the result to my website colinbrough.co.uk.
For several months now I have been waking up early, on and off: in contradistinction to the way things were when I was on the higher dosage of Risperdal through 2011. I was on 37.5mg of Risperdal Consta injection every two weeks from the time I was in hospital early 2011, but from Thursday 03-Nov-11 it was 25mg every two weeks. The changes I have noticed since coming off the higher dosage - changes which I suspect professionals in the field might deny derived from the drug dosage but would attribute to something within my own nature - have occurred over a period of many months, that is (in fact) over getting on for two years. One of the changes, as I say, is in my sleeping pattern. On the 37.5mg dosage through the summer of 2011, I recall, I was sometimes awake in the night - suffering discomfort in my tummy as often as not - but (having in mind something along the lines that there was no point) I just lay there. This is an example of the effect of dopamine-blockers (which Risperdal is) of reducing the activity level in a manner parallel to the way in depression the activity level is reduced, sometimes to near zero. What I think to myself now in the night when I suffer discomfort in my tummy (or when I wake up for other reasons) is in complete opposition: what I feel now is that it is too boring to lie there so I should get up if there is anything at all I could find to do.
The point I am mainly making, though, is that in this recent period I have been sleeping fewer hours overall and seemingly not suffering any ill effect. In the earlier period I had come off the higher dosage I did wake up early and frequently got up early, but also I went to bed early and if I had not had enough hours of sleep would be tired in the daytime (and would catch up on sleep subsequent nights). I suppose it is still the case that if I get very little sleep I feel tired and catch up as I have just said, but it is also the case that I do not (usually) go to bed so early but still get up early, and get fewer hours of sleep on average while still feeling satisfactorily rested. I put this down to what in my terminology of a few years past I called ‘processing capacity’: that is on the lower dosage of Risperdal I have higher processing capacity and can take in and use more information through the waking hours without the need for such lengthy ‘post-processing’ during dreaming sleep.
I can see that being on the dosage of Risperdal I am on is a help to me, and it interests me to understand - if the lower the dosage of Risperdal the higher the processing capacity - what is wrong with a zero dosage (and I used to be convinced a zero dosage was best, certainly in my own case, and that any dopamine-blocking was negative and a horror). The answer is that with so much dopamine in my head as was in it on a zero dosage of dopamine-blocker, I did do a lot of processing while requiring relatively little sleep, but the fact is I was making mistakes in the processing without in the least suspecting they were mistakes (if I had suspected, then that itself would have elevated the ‘processing requirement’ which I suppose - striving to sort out my suspicions - would have required me to sleep more: indeed would have ensured I slept more, because it would automatically have made me tireder and I would either have slept at night or had to sleep in the daytime). To give a concrete example: when my computer went wrong, instead of understanding the real reason - or guessing and then checking until I found the real reason - I dismissed it with hardly any ‘processing’ as some organisation - ‘the Authorities’ - trying to steal and perhaps succeeding in stealing information from out of the computer, by introducing non-standard software that is some sort of spyware. Looked at from a more global, top-down perspective which I was not capable of in the years before 2011 because of the flood of data from the environment (and from my memories) taking up my processing resources in other ways, it is easy to see that no organisation with such influence and capabilities (able to interfere with the postal system, for one thing) would have any reason to want information from me.
I think I’ve explained that well enough (self-congratulatory preening here: I am lucky to have high natural levels of serotonin so I don’t castigate myself at every opportunity as some with my diagnosis do) and I don’t want to tax readers too much so I will close and defer until another time an exposition more focused on the events in my life the past few weeks.
Saturday 7 September 2013
Friday 6 September 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)