The BRAIN!

A few things about the brain.  First of all, Brain Awareness Week is coming up!  March 15-21st!  The Dana Foundation (private philanthropic organization that supports brain research through grants and educates the public) claims to have the official site for Brain Awareness Week (BAW). There will be two events in Chicago:

1. Chicago Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting at Depaul on 3.25.2010

2. Staying Sharp: Screening and Discussion at Lincolnwood Place in Lincolnwood, IL.

Interesting that this week’s New Yorker had a story about the fallacies of depression or maybe just the fallacies of medicating depression, especially since the DSM is potentially changing. The article is called “Head Case: can psychiatry be a science?” by Louis Menand.

What is depression?  What makes it different than the blues or melancholy?  or bereavement?  or mourning?  grief?  When does it become something that needs medication, or something that just needs to be lived through and talked about?  There is a complex and intertwined history of this disorder and pharmaceuticals in the States, especially when anxiety enters the picture (i.e., the introduction of the tranquilizer drug Miltown into the American population).

In reading this article, i wonder about my own situation.  My rheumatologist just prescribed me Xanax, a powerful medication used to treat anxiety.  I feel anxious all the time - heart palpitations, out-of-body sorts of panic feelings, irritability, you name it - but is what i have truly anxiety?  And, more importantly, does it require pharmaceutical treatment?  it took me over a week to pick the scrip up from the pharmacy.  now, it sits in my room, but do i take it?

is this anxiety purely a result of my disease, like hyperthyroidism i’m thinking?  or is it a result from my new body-state that i am getting to know, getting to call my own, my new identity?  this surely can cause feelings of depression and anxiety.  or, is the disease attacking my brain and central nervous system.  this is rare, but possible.  is the fogginess due to anxiety not related to the disease, just to the stresses of life, or is it due to something more physiological?

my own prescription of generic Valium - now, I guess, it must be Xanax