Tag: anxiety

Fog of war

August 2019 was a crappy month. I’m just emerging from nasty fevers of the body and mind and haven’t fully recovered yet. I’ve become more cynical in the last few weeks – which I didn’t think was possible – and the level of baseline depression has increased; simply contemplating the monotony of daily life has started giving me anxiety attacks. But even under this pall of gloom, I have found some reasons to cheer:

  • I bought a new Kindle. I was running out of space to keep my books, and since a friend tipped me off to the existence of a service called Libgen, I have decided to move my entire library to this little device. So far, so good. I’m currently reading Kellanved’s Reach, the third book in Ian C. Esslemont’s riveting Path to Ascendancy trilogy. Before this, I read Trick Mirror, a new collection of essays about the sense of self in the Age of the Internet by Jia Tolentino. I found the essays well-written though not particularly enlightening, but others could easily disagree.
  • I discovered community stackscripts on Linode in an embarrassing moment considering I’ve been using Linode for a couple years now. Stackscripts make life so much easier; I don’t have to bank on Runcloud or Serverpilot to install WordPress on a VPS anymore. The script by OpenLiteSpeed also bundles a Let’s Encrypt certificate and launches WordPress with LiteSpeed. I simply have to route the domain through CloudFlare and install Heatshield on the server, which is cache, SSL, CDN, WAF, all under five minutes and for $5/mo.
  • Tool released its new album on August 30. I’ve been listening to it in bits and pieces – travesty, I know – but just this morning, I listened to the whole thing in one go. Thirteen years is a terribly long time between albums but it would seem Fear Inoculum was worth the wait. August 30 was also a good day to release the album; I was in terrible shape that day. I particularly enjoyed the track called ‘Descending’, which I thought was a little strange because a song of the same name by Lamb of God is one of my favourites and I’m wondering if this is simply an affinity to the word itself.
  • I utterly detested one of the few epiphanies I had last month (which precipitated the first wave of depression) because it caused me to stop blogging. But I started writing again late last week, about unexpected things collected under the page ‘Definitions’ (link in the menu and here). Nothing clears the fog in my head like writing has for nearly two decades now, so not being able to do it for whatever reason can become quickly maddening. The ability to produce words is where I locate the ultimate potency of my being.

To be a depressed person reading about research on depression

It’s a strangely unsettling experience to read about research on an affliction that one has, to understand how scientists are obtaining insights into it using a variety of techniques that allow them to look past the walls of the human and into their mind, so to speak, with the intention of developing new therapeutic techniques or improving old ones. This is principally because it suggests, to me, that we – humankind – don’t scientifically know about X in toto whereas I – the individual sufferer – claims to understand what it is like to live with X.

Of course, I concede that the experiment in question is an exercise in quantification and doesn’t seek (at least if its authors so intend) to displace my own experience of the condition. Nonetheless, the tension exists, especially when scientists claim to be able to model X with a set of equations.

Do they suggest I’m a set of equations, that they claim to understand how I have been living my life for eight years using a bunch of symbols on paper through which they think they could divine my entire being?

I have been learning, writing and reading about physics for the last decade and have been a science journalist and editor since 2012. Experiences in this time have allowed me a privileged view (mostly for the short span in which it could be assimilated) of what the scientific enterprise is, how it works, how scientific knowledge is organised, etc. As a result, I believe I am better placed to understand, for example, the particular mode of reductionism employed when scientists simulate a predetermined part of this or that condition in order to understand it better.

This isn’t a blanket empathy, however; it’s more an admission of open-mindedness, such as it is. While not speaking about a specific experiment, I have come to understand that such de facto reductive experiments are necessary – especially when the evolution of certain significant parameters can be carefully controlled – because the corresponding results are otherwise impossible to deduce through other means, at least with the same quality. In fact, in my view, this is less reductionism and invisibilisation and more ansatz and heuristics.

This is why I also see a flip side: the way scientists approach the problem, so to speak, has potential to redefine some aspects of my relationship with the affliction for the better. (It was a central part of my CBT programme.) To be clear, this isn’t about the prescriptive nature of what the scientists have been able to conclude through their studies and experiments but about the questions they chose to ask and the ways in which they decided to answer, and evaluate, them.

For example, on June 17, the journal Nature Human Behaviour published a paper that concluded, based on reinforcement learning techniques, that “anxious or depressed humans change their behaviour much faster after something bad happens”, to quote from an explanatory post written by one of the authors. They were able to do so because, “for each real person – those with mood and anxiety symptoms and those without – we [could] generate an artificial computerised agent that mimics their behaviour.”

Without commenting at all on the study’s robustness or the legitimacy of the paper, I’d say this sounds about right from personal experience: I display “mood and anxiety symptoms” and tend to play things very safe, which often means I’m very slow to have new experiences. Now, I have the opportunity to conduct a few experiments of my own to better ascertain that this is the case and then devise solutions, assisted by the study’s methods, that will help me eliminate this part of the problem. As the same note states, “Developing a deeper understanding of [how] symptoms emerge may eventually allow us to close [the] treatment gap” (with reference to the success rate of CBT ∪ medication, apparently about 66-75%).

Which brings me to the other thing about research on an affliction that one has: it exposes you. This may not seem like a significant problem but from the individual’s perspective, it can be. When a discovery that is specific to my condition is broadcast, I often feel, if only at first, that I am no longer in control of what people do and don’t know about me. Maybe “it’s textbook”, as they say, but I will never acknowledge that about myself even if it is, at whichever level, true, nor would I like others to believe that I am as predictable as a set of equations would have it – but at the same time I don’t want anyone to believe the method of interrogation employed in the study is illegitimate.

Thankfully, this feeling often dissipates quickly because the public narrative, at least among scientists, who are also likely to be discussing the findings for longer, is often depersonalised. However, there is that brief period of heightened apprehension – a sense of social nudity, as it were – and I have wondered if it tempts people into conforming with preset templates of public conduct vis-à-vis their affliction: either be completely open about it or completely closed off. I chose to be open about it; fortunately, I am also very comfortable with being this way.

Happy new year!

2017 was a blast. Lots of things happened. The world became a shittier place in many ways and better in a few. Mostly, Earth just went around the Sun once more, and from what we know, it’s going to be doing that for a while. But here’s to a roaring 2018 anyway!

As of January 2018, this blog is nine years old. Thanks for staying with me on this (often meandering) journey, even when its name changed a billion times in the middle of 2017. The interest many of you have been nice enough to express vocally is what has kept me going. I published 113 blog posts this year, up a 100% from 2016. I also had 70 articles published in The Wire. I’m quite happy with that total of 183.

I think I will continue writing more on my blog than for The Wire through the first half of 2018 because editing freelancers’ submissions will continue to take up most of my time.

This is a consequence of two things I tried to do differently last year: publish more reported stories and get more writers. So given the limited monthly budget, and the fact that opinions are cheaper than reports, the published story count (3901) was lower than that in 2016 – but the stories themselves were great, and we also got almost twice as many science writers to write them.

In 2018, I hope to expand the science journalism team at The Wire. We’ve also been planning a new-look section with a more diverse content offering. I’ll keep you all posted on how that goes. (If you wish to work with us, apply for a suitable position here.)

Personally, 2017 was full of ups and downs but since it ended mostly on the up, that’s how I’m going to remember the year. I did little to quell my anxieties and got back on antidepressants – but then I also moved to Chennai and started playing Dungeons & Dragons. Life’s good.

I’ll see you on the other side soon.

1. This excludes reports syndicated from publications The Wire has a content-sharing agreement with, republished content and agency copies.

Featured image credit: PublicDomainPictures/pixabay.