Into the Void

Interdependence is the key word.
Enlightened interdependence.
Life in all its rich variety,
“take a little, leave a little”…
However: by the inexorable logistics of the vampiric process

THEY ALWAYS TAKE MORE THAN THEY NEED.
– William S. Burroughs
“Words of Advice for Young People”
From Hallucination Engine by Material.

This spoken-word piece by William S. Burroughs (backed up by the avant-garde group Material) totally sums up the top-down, free-market, TOXIC version of Capitalism that is practiced in the world of multinational corporations.

I worked for Tyco Electronics when Dennis Kozlowski was spending my pay raises on company-paid million-dollar birthday parties for his wife.

Here is what is happening:

Capitalism only works as long as there is growth. So what happens when there is no more? Well, first off your shareholders get seriously pissed off. It is against the law to piss off your shareholders, even if it means screwing over your employees and your customers.

• You can raise prices.
• You can reduce quality.
• You can lay off employees, or pay them less. Younger employees want less money and don’t use their medical benefits. Great idea!
• You can use advertising tricks to give you an edge over your competitors.
• You can take over or merge with your competitors. During the process, roll over some existing debt into the transaction.
• Play accounting games.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hang out with the vampires.

Of course the soul is energy. The body – the vessel we live in – runs on electrochemical reactions that have EM fields around them just like any other electrical conductor does. Halo, aura, nimbus.

“The Egyptians recognized many degrees of immortality. The Ren and the Sekem and the Khu are relatively immortal, but still subject to injury. The other souls who survive physical death are much more precariously situated. Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If humans and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy’s nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.”
– William S. Burroughs & Material, Soul Killer from the Seven Souls CD.

I’ve been thinking about parasites.

Not the “earworm” sort of thing where you hear a bit of a song and can’t get it out of your head for the rest of the day. Not even the everyday suck-on-your-intestines nasties. I’m thinking about the kind of parasites that get into your mind and control your thoughts and actions.

For the record, I know *of* these parasites but I’m looking up the names online as I go along. Damn it, Jim, I’m an engineer not a biologist.

The sensitive and the squeamish may want to stop reading this now.

Really.

Ok, now that we’ve shaken off the fleas…

There’s a parasite that infects rodents, Toxoplasm gondii. It makes them all hyper and weird and THAT makes them easier for cats to catch. Where it gets interesting is that the life cycle of this parasite requires that it pass through the stomach and intestinal tract of… wait for it… a cat! How convenient!

I have occasionally wondered whether the active phase of the infestation makes humans more attractive to cats. Something like 40% of the population has antibodies to T. gondii. Maybe “the rat race” isn’t so far off, eh?

The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey – whose sister is or was schizophrenic and is probably somewhat affected himself – is promoting the paranoid delusion that cat shit causes schizophrenia. Is it possible that when his sister got sick he blamed Fluffy? This, my friends, is a major researcher into bipolar disorder at the prestigious Stanley Foundation. We are SO f*cked.

Oh. In other countries with the same rate of antibodies to T. gondii in the population, there is less schizophrenia and the prognosis is better. Personally I think schizophrenia is a product of industrialization and I wish Dr. Torrey would quit wasting valuable time digging in the cat box.

There are many other parasites that affect the behavior of the host. Three
more follow:

Sacculina infects crabs. If by “infects” you mean “castrates and takes over the mind and body.” This is the stuff of nightmares. Succulina injects itself into a crack in the exoskeleton and quickly grows out through the entire nervous system. Crabs that are infected can’t breed, can’t regenerate limbs, and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but feeding and caring for the parasite. They even stroke and clean the monster, which in the female crab lives in the compartment where she usually holds her unhatched eggs.

Can you imagine having some THING living inside you, changing your brain so that the thing becomes the focus of your entire life? This is the stuff of nightmares.

The lancet fluke has a fairly complicated life cycle, but the interesting part is where it infects an ant. An infected ant acts like a regular ant by day, but at night she climbs up a blade of grass and waits at the top. The next stage of the parasite’s life cycle is to become a liver fluke in a cow. How better to be eaten by a cow than to have your host sit on the top of a blade of grass at dawn!

Another fluke infects fish – the young flukes migrate to the fish’s brain and crowd around it like pigs at a trough. Fish who are infected periodically stop what they’re doing and flail about at the surface of the water. Shorebirds find the flailing fish easy to catch, and yep, the birds are part of the life cycle too. The parasites boost the bird population by making more food available, but the fact that they kill their fish hosts puts limits on how much of the fish population can be infested. Again, a very convenient situation.

Hopefully you all are getting where I’m going with this – that parasites can make you do things you might not have done if it didn’t benefit the parasite. A parasite that flat out ate us alive would be found and eradicated like the screwfly was. Most of them are merely a nuisance.

Humans are, for the most part, repulsed by parasites. I’m sure there are some parasites somewhere that are status symbols, but I sure can’t think of
any. Usually we want to avoid parasites if we can, and expel or exterminate them when we can’t.

It would be more adaptive if the parasite made humans enjoy being infested. I’ve read sci-fi stories about this sort of thing, and I remember at least one Star Trek episode where the infested feel **enriched** by the parasite and are absolutely delighted to forcefully spread it to others.

If you believe the writer William S. Bourroughs, language itself is a virus. Certainly memes, often called “mind viruses,” have some quality that helps them spread. Does anyone remember Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus” from the “Home of the Brave” video?

Oh, he did a really nice book about the co-evolution of cats and people called “The Cat Inside” or something similar. I highly recommend it for the cat-infested.

Next section of this article will be on how *ideas* influence our thinking and behavior in the same way that parasites do.

Technorati: parasites medicine medical mind schizophrenia T+gondii cat+shit William+S+Burroughs memes

My take on the sixties:

I was born in 1957, 12 years after WWII The Big One ended. The Korean conflict came between the two events. As far as I can tell, I’m being labeled “Baby Boomer” only so that folks my age will fund the real boomers’ greedy retirement plans. Even as we speak, they are quietly moving their funds are from investments that have become UNSAFE due to their profit-taking. They don’t leave their money in the stock market as they get older. My group still does, and it will be disastrous. Stock Market “adjustments” are seen as inevitable, but when there is an adjustment it means that somebody is taking somebody else’s money. Who do you suppose it is? The poor? Not bloody likely. I used to think the stock market was a gamble. Now I realize that the game is fixed.

Many of these boomers were, as young adults, the hippies about which my friends speak so glowingly. The hippies headed for the hills when things got tough. Most of what you read about the culture of the ’60s was invented by students at Ivy League colleges who never knew the difficulties of living off handouts in the city. Free love was a farce – it wasn’t anything near free for the women – or girls – who got pregnant.

The Beatles brought a small vision of the world to public view, but they weren’t at the forefront. Not EVEN. They were Pop Icons at the tail end of the whole mess. The whole hippie thing had become a farce by the time the Beatles rolled out Sergeant Pepper’s.

So as a kid I heard many Great Ideas from my friends’ older, college-age siblings. Age of Aquarius, be-ins, freedom, evolution, revolution. But I watched the body counts in Viet Nam rise night after night on TV. I saw minorities fighting to be recognized not even as equals but as human beings. I saw the cops beating Blacks and college students and pretty much anyone they didn’t like the looks of to a pulp out in the streets. I lived in the aftermath of three assassinations. The Great Ideas vanished into thin air, leaving my generation with an intellectual wasteland.

The media doesn’t let that kind of information interfere with big business these days. There was even a ban on showing the rows of coffins from the Afghanistan and Iraq dead. I would watch that. Someone has to bear witness.

I suppose I should get more proactive. I’m too easy to silence, I’m mentally ill. I can be taken against my will into a hospital, drugged, zapped, whatever. Just say the word “anosognosia.” There are no political prisoners, no prisoners of conscience, only mental patients. My only recourse is to donate to the charities that are doing the real work. I don’t fool myself into thinking that throwing money at the problems will fix them. Money only generates more money – if the problems were solved, the charities would be out of business. I can only hope that they help a little bit.

Duck and cover, they told us as children. There was the constant threat of nuclear annihilation brought on by the hatred of my elders for folks just like us on the other side of the world. In the ’80s they told us to dig a hole in the backyard, lie down in it and cover yourself over if there’s a nuclear strike – dig your own goddam grave. “With enough shovels” was the slogan. This stupidity was successfully imitated in the aftermath of 9-11 Homeland Security told us to seal off a room with plastic and duct tape to protect ourselves from terrorists. I don’t think it will protect you, but it will definitely keep the smell down. Fear is a great strategy for controlling the populace.

I sat at work one night at 12 or 14 years old with a gun on the desk in front of me and the simple instructions: “If any <n -words> try to break in, shoot ‘em.” Camden was burning just a few blocks away. It was happening in cities across the country, the black people were looking for a better life. The owner left me to mind the store. The only <n -word> who showed up was a business associate that I’d known since I was a baby. He sat with me until the boss got back then ripped him a new asshole for leaving me there alone.

“Backlash, Backlash, Who do you think I am? You raise my taxes, freeze my wages, And send my son to Viet Nam. You gimme Second-class houses, And second-class schools, Do you think all colored people are just Second-class fools? Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you with the blues, yes I am.” – Langston Hughes, Nina Simone “Backlash Blues”

Backlash Blues didn’t get much airplay when it would have mattered. Now it’s used in a Lexus commercial to sell luxury automobiles. Langston Hughes would have seen the irony of it. A better life, indeed. I’m not sure whether a commercial with a good-looking African-American man grooving on the blues is supposed to be targeted for African-Americans. It motivated me to run out and get some Nina Simone CDs. I don’t want an SUV, thankyouverymuch.

So when I was a kid the air was bad, the rivers were full of poisons, raw sewage, and rotting fish. The Potomac river, backdrop to so many National Monuments, was so polluted that if you fell in the cops would take you off to the hospital. Rivers caught fire, the bald eagle was in danger of extinction. Our food was full of pesticides. The drug companies gave pregnant women Diethylstilbestrol (DES) and Thalidomide. Every species was manifesting serious anomalies from teratogens in the environment. EVERY species. Much later, William S. Burroughs drew attention to the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl with typical brutal honesty in an interview in 1986 in which he said, “Let me ask you one question, Doctor: You want your daughter born with two cunts?” He was referring to a condition known as “uterus didelphys.” Being born with two vaginas is also a side effect of maternal DES use.

The erstwhile hippies didn’t notice. If they did, they didn’t give a rat’s ass.

The Space Program, it turned out, wasn’t about our destiny among the stars. It was a non-war strategy for beating the Russians by outdoing them technologically. Reagan continued the strategy with space weapons programs in the ’80s. “Star Wars” was all about bankrupting “The Evil Empire” as he called the U.S.S.R..

Reagan also invented “trickle-down economics” which, as far as I can tell, involved giving all the money to the wealthy and the large corporations so that they can piss on the workers.

My generation lost hope long before Reagan came along. We smoked pot and listened to music. At the tail end of the boom, we were overcrowded everywhere we went and there were few jobs. On top of that, periodically there were gas crises with far-reaching economic effects, including stagflation. Stagflation is the situation I quoted above, where prices increase but salary doesn’t. More and more, we either lived at home until we were 30, in roachtraps in the city, or in group houses with four or more people. We were occasionally chased out of town with new zoning laws by the former hippies, but that’s another story for another day.

The American Dream has always been about taking care of the kids born right after WWII The Big One. It was used, along with religion, for keeping us quiet and obedient, at least until we figured out that it was all a big scam.

Suddenly the ’60s have become this Utopia. They are being totally rewritten. It’s very hip these days to pine for a Golden Age that never was, whether you pine for the ’60′s or for the post-war enthusiasm of our grandparents generation or for a mythical pre-industrial garden.

Maya, the world of illusion. Insanity is being able to see through the illusion. Insanity is rejecting the false values of your elders. So they tell us. It’s up to us to keep looking for the truth no matter how much they tell us to turn back to a glorious past that never was.

"A functioning police state needs no police."
– William S. Burroughs

"Shock Therapy" is that ugly dog collar and backpack combination that they use in some detention centers to control kids with behavior problems. Yes, read that to mean psychological problems. Don’t get me started on behaviorists. It is used as a behavior modification technique, often without the use of psych meds, to create an aversion to the undesirable behavior.

However, we are talking about ElectroConvulsive Therapy – ECT.

ECT is a pretty drastic measure. They put you under general anesthesia then give your head a big jolt electricity – so big that it would induce convulsions if they didn’t knock you out and paralyze you first. It is one of the last remaining vestiges of a truly brutal era in psychiatry.

There are less extreme modalities available these days. Transcranial Magnetic Therapy is one. See if you can find the IEEE Spectrum at your library. There was a really good article in the March 2006 IEEE Spectrum last month. High-tech devices have fewer side-effects and if used appropriately they are quite effective.

A well-meaning but completely ignorant individual recently tried to convince me that ECT works by activating the parts of the brain that aren’t working right when you’re depressed. If anything, ECT overloads and suppress areas that you *don’t* want to be active. Along with pretty much everything else between the electrodes.

But the fact of the matter is that the way they usually do ECT, they don’t target problem areas and they don’t target specific desirable pathways. They overload the entire brain and if you weren’t anesthetized and paralyzed you’d go into grand mal seizures. In the old days, people who had ECT often broke teeth and bones during the procedure. Many patients suffer permanent memory loss and severe cognitive deficits – not all, but many do. It remains to be seen whether the current (no pun intended) methods produce the kind of brain damage seen in in earlier days.

The point is, there are modern options that should be considered in many cases.

Before you go in for ECT, please ask yourself some questions. What non-medical options have you explored? You can’t settle down enough to do your usual stress-busting activities, you can’t still your mind enough to even begin meditating, you’re afraid to go outside and run around to let off steam? Biofeedback isn’t even working any more, maybe because you’re outside of the normal operating parameters of the equipment available to you?

There is a series on PBS called "Second Opinion." In the Depression episode, they made ECT sound like a miracle cure for depression. The reporting was unbelievably one-sided. They didn’t cover any of the magnetic therapies so anyone using PBS for their information doesn’t have the whole story. Furthermore, they trivialized the side-effects of ECT by saying, in effect, that it’s far preferable to have a permanent cognitive deficit than to be depressed. It was a fun show, but it was dumbed down way too much to be useful in making an informed decision.

I see that one of the sponsors provided the folks who did the show only limited access to information on MedLine. It appears that they prescreened the data made available – that is, they only provided articles that supported their agenda. Remember that PBS shows often have corporate sponsors who may want, say, to convince the public that an old-fashioned and therefore less expensive modality is better.

CLIC-on-Health provided Second Opinion wiith our pre-determined search access to MedlinePlus.

ECT is somewhat of a black art. The doctors have no idea how or why it works. From Wikipedia:

The exact mechanisms by which ECT exerts its effect are not known, but studies show that repeated applications have effects on several kinds of neurotransmitters in the central nervous system. ECT seems to sensitize two subtypes of serotonin receptor (5-HT receptor), thereby strengthening signaling. ECT also decreases the functioning of norepinephrine and dopamine inhibiting auto-receptors in the locus coeruleus and substantia nigra, respectively, causing more of each to be released.

The National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) also say that the doctors don’t know how or why ECT works. Furthermore, it isn’t totally clear which patients ECT is likely to help the most, nor is there any way of telling in advance if a particular patient is likely to have an adverse experience.

Much additional research is needed into the basic mechanisms by which ECT exerts its therapeutic effects. Studies are also needed to better identify subgroups for whom the treatment is particularly beneficial or toxic and to refine techniques to maximize efficacy and minimize side effects. A national survey should be conducted on the manner and extent of ECT use in the United States.

In fact, one conclusion of that article is that ECT is in use only because it’s been in use for so long.

ECT has been underinvestigated in the past. Among the most important immediate research tasks are:

• Better understanding of negative, positive, and indifferent responses should result in improved treatment practices.
• Identification of the biological mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effects of ECT and the memory deficits resulting from the treatment.

Better delineation of the long-term effects of ECT on the course of affective illnesses and cognitive functions, including clarification of the duration of ECT’s therapeutic effectiveness.

• Precise determination of the mode of electrode placement (unilateral versus bilateral) and the stimulus parameters (form and intensity) that maximize efficacy and minimize cognitive impairment.
• Identification of patient subgroups or types for whom ECT is particularly beneficial or toxic.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reiterates the statement that little is known about how ECT works on depression and that little is known about the after-effects of the treatment. In fact, they suggest that the therapeutic effects of ECT may be a result of the anesthesia or even of the nursing care and not to the actual electric shock at all.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is sometimes used to treat severe depressives who do not respond to drug treatment. A recent review and meta-analysis concluded that ECT is probably more effective than drug therapy, though the underlying mechanism is not known. The authors state that "any differences between ECT and drug therapy might not be attributable to the stimulus or shock alone, but could be due to other components of the ECT procedures (including anaesthetic and nursing care)" (100). Only one trial included in the meta-analysis provided data on cognitive functioning: patients treated with ECT had more word recognition errors after treatment compared to patients treated with simulated ECT. At six months this difference was no longer observable. The authors require more evidence for the efficacy of ECT in the subgroups of patients who are presently most likely to receive it: those with treatment-resistant depression and older patients.

Now for adverse effects:

In one recent study of almost 25,000 treatments, a complication rate of 1 per 1,300 to 1,400 treatments was found. These included laryngospasm, circulatory insufficiency, tooth damage, vertebral compression fractures, status epilepticus, peripheral nerve palsy, skin burns, and prolonged apnea.

During the few minutes following the stimulus, profound and potentially dangerous systemic changes occur. First, there may be transient hypotension from bradycardia caused by central vagal stimulation. This may be followed by sinus tachycardia and also sympathetic hyperactivity that leads to a rise in blood pressure, a response that may be more severe in patients with essential hypertension. Intracranial pressure increases during the seizure. Additionally, cardiac arrhythmias during this time are not uncommon (but usually subside without sequelae).

Also, the NIMH makes it very clear that ECT is only effective for a very limited group of illnesses.

The consideration of ECT is most appropriate in those conditions for which efficacy has been established: Delusional and severe endogenous depressions, acute mania, and certain schizophrenic syndromes. ECT should rarely be considered for other psychiatric conditions.

The law requires that a patient give informed consent. In order to give informed consent, the patient should be told about the risk of cognitive deficits and memory loss, particularly since there is a tendency to misrepresent ECT as a "quick fix" to get the patient back to work sooner. Some patients can never go back to work after ECT.

The NIMH is recommending that doctors get patient consent before each treatment in the series, not just for the series as a whole. That way the patient can assess the damage being done and refuse further treatments if necessary. The NIMH assumes that there is a statistically significant risk that a patient who is cognitively impaired by the procedure, even if the damage is only temporary, will not be capable of initiating a request to stop.

This recommendation sounds chillingly like the advice being given to prevent non-consensual sex. I won’t go so far as to call ECT "brain rape," but only because that particular phrase has already been used by the writer William S. Burroughs in "Meeting of International Conference of Technological Psychiatry" to describe a prefrontal lobotomy. (ed2k link to William S. Burroughs – “Call Me Burroughs” – requires winrar to unarchive.)

That being said, if your doctor insists upon you having ECT, you don’t have much of a choice, do you?

UPDATE 4/15/2007:
Sylvia Caras of People Who accepted this post for inclusion on her own site. Stop over to People Who and check out the tremendous amount of excellent mental health advocacy information she offers.