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So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

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Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#161

Post by j4yav »

derangedHorse wrote: post #143
vegardx wrote: post #124

This reads out exactly how a manic or hypomanic person would experience things and rationalize past events and feelings. The idea that it has to be something complex and in a sense grandiose compared to "just being burned out" is often a very telling sign. Perhaps it's Twitter forcing the format a little, but I could see myself thinking like this during a hypomanic episode. I'm diagnosed with bipolar disorder (type 2…

I think that would just be a misdiagnosis. Seizures don’t typically accompany manic episodes and not being able to come up with words that are used in everyday situations is also an oddity.

May be more common than you think (or perhaps you are a doctor with more recent info than I have, in which case I would love to read about it.)

https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Epilepsy_a...

> Psychiatric symptoms may also resemble epilepsy, and in that case they are sometimes called psychogenic seizures or nonepileptic seizures. Conversion disorder (formerly called hysterical conversion disorder) can produce symptoms that look uncannily like generalized seizures but actually occur in connection with a need for attention or relief from stress that the patient is not aware of.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#162

Post by tedajax »

mjgs wrote: post #158
tluyben2 wrote: post #72

Same exact symptoms (the bass guitar string he heard is a thing that gave me ptsd like symptoms/crippling anxiety for a long time after) I had from a TIA when I was overworked. He waited getting a scan so they could've missed it later; my office was next to the hospital: nothing showed on the CT one hour after but on the RMI a couple of hours after they found a tiny lesion in one of the regions involved in forming sp…

What the f is there in the head that can make a sound like a bass guitar string?

Could be auditory processing of random synaptic firings.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#163

Post by wittyreference »

Does anyone remember that Reddit post where a guy thought his landlord was sneaking into his apartment and leaving him notes? He insisted the handwriting was completely different. Then a poster suggested he get tested for CO poisoning, which it was, and the “different handwriting” was actually a part of his delusion.

“Burning out all of the glucose and dopamine in your brain” isn’t a thing. “Functional Neurological Disorder” is another name for Conversion Disorder - a condition of apparently neurological symptoms inconsistent with neurological anatomy or mechanisms, triggered (most often) by significant stressors, often suffering a longer duration in patients who strongly believe “this is definitely a physical disease!”

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#164

Post by dTal »

mjgs wrote: post #158
tluyben2 wrote: post #72

Same exact symptoms (the bass guitar string he heard is a thing that gave me ptsd like symptoms/crippling anxiety for a long time after) I had from a TIA when I was overworked. He waited getting a scan so they could've missed it later; my office was next to the hospital: nothing showed on the CT one hour after but on the RMI a couple of hours after they found a tiny lesion in one of the regions involved in forming sp…

What the f is there in the head that can make a sound like a bass guitar string?

Your brain. All sound perception ultimately comes from there.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#165

Post by hprotagonist »

mjgs wrote: post #158
tluyben2 wrote: post #72

Same exact symptoms (the bass guitar string he heard is a thing that gave me ptsd like symptoms/crippling anxiety for a long time after) I had from a TIA when I was overworked. He waited getting a scan so they could've missed it later; my office was next to the hospital: nothing showed on the CT one hour after but on the RMI a couple of hours after they found a tiny lesion in one of the regions involved in forming sp…

What the f is there in the head that can make a sound like a bass guitar string?

sounds in the world and percepts of sounds to you are at best loosely related.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#166

Post by wittyreference »

vegardx wrote: post #124

This reads out exactly how a manic or hypomanic person would experience things and rationalize past events and feelings. The idea that it has to be something complex and in a sense grandiose compared to "just being burned out" is often a very telling sign. Perhaps it's Twitter forcing the format a little, but I could see myself thinking like this during a hypomanic episode. I'm diagnosed with bipolar disorder (type 2…

> T his reads out exactly how a manic or hypomanic person would experience things and rationalize past events and feelings. The idea that it has to be something complex and in a sense grandiose compared to "just being burned out" is often a very telling sign.

Bingo. FND is another name for “conversion disorder.”

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#167

Post by p_l »

Jakobeha wrote: post #45

I don't necessarily doubt the author, but how do you chronically deprive your brain of glucose? Afaik you would get glucose back whenever you ate anything. Unless you were doing keto, but then your body and brain run on ketones. And if you did somehow deprive your brain of fuel, you would get symptoms in a much shorter span. Maybe undereating, but he doesn't list weight loss, and if you're rapidly losing weight and s…

The trick is that your burn rate of glucose might exceed supply rate. Especially if stress conditions or dietary situation results in misbehaving supply, too.

Not to mention getting warning signs and pushing through, which I'll be honest I'm guilty of doing as well (though I never got that far, and mostly it was sleep deprivation)

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#168

Post by sneak »

wittyreference wrote: post #163

Does anyone remember that Reddit post where a guy thought his landlord was sneaking into his apartment and leaving him notes? He insisted the handwriting was completely different. Then a poster suggested he get tested for CO poisoning, which it was, and the “different handwriting” was actually a part of his delusion. “Burning out all of the glucose and dopamine in your brain” isn’t a thing. “Functional Neurological D…

> “Burning out all of the glucose and dopamine in your brain” isn’t a thing.

This sort of narrative-based grandstanding is something the author is previously known for.

His "lol oops I hacked too much" doesn't hold up to scrutiny, otherwise this would be an extremely common thing in overworked knowledge workers. It's not.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#169

Post by wittyreference »

vegardx wrote: post #151
derangedHorse wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that would just be a misdiagnosis. Seizures don’t typically accompany manic episodes and not being able to come up with words that are used in everyday situations is also an oddity.

Seizures during a manic or hypomanic episode is very common, it's often what lands undiagnosed people in hospital to begin with. Lamotrigine and Lithium was primarily used to treat epilepsy, now they're also used to treat mood disorders like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia as well. The problem is often that there are compounding issues. There's nothing that stops you from having TIA at the same time. People often…

Do you have any sort of citation for this? I’m not trying to be snarky, I’d really like to read more.

My understanding of the med lit is that bipolar and epilepsy aren’t particularly associated, and pure BD in particular is a rarity - when epileptic patients were assessed for BD symptoms, they were mostly only found in the confusional states pre- and post-seizure, which isn’t BD at all.

At least in my hospital, the most common way we get BD patients hospitalized is either during a severe depressive episode, or when their mania results in violence or law-breaking. We do sometimes have patients land on our floor whose first presentation was seizure, but that’s after they’re assessed by neuro and found that it was pseudoseizure (factitious seizure).

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#170

Post by aero142 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #140
fho wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that "bass guitar string" thing common? I had it twice, both times in a hot and cramped train and shrugged it up to "heat stroke".

Not sure, but I had 'lighter versions' of that sound before getting a migraine after this(never had migraines before the tia): those episodes immediately caused extreme anxiety, as in: it is happening again, while I knew it was not because I had no speech issues or foggy brain, just an aura floating in front of my eyes. This is a long time ago and the way of getting rid of all of this was getting rid of and learning…

I would love to hear how you changed how stressed you feel.
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