Epilepsy, depression, and suicide

When people with a history of psychiatric illness were excluded from the analysis and researchers adjusted for other risk factors associated with suicide, epilepsy patients were still twice as likely to commit suicide as people without epilepsy.

Women with epilepsy and a history of psychiatric disease were 23 times more likely to commit suicide than women without either condition, compared with a tenfold increase in risk among men with epilepsy and psychiatric illness.

(via) (and thanks, Wired, for the image)

And then of course, there's this bit:

Depression is commonly experienced among persons with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Although evidence exists implicating dysfunction of distributed neural structure and circuitry among depressed persons without epilepsy, little is known regarding the neural correlates of depression in TLE

[...]

These findings indicate that both right and left amygdala volumes are associated with depression severity among persons with TLE. Future studies examining the potential role of extended neural regions may clarify the observed structural relationship between depressive symptoms and the amygdala.

And everyone's known for some time that vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) can aid both epilepsy and (unipolar) depression. So why aren't people following up on that correlation and researching drugs (or indeed surgical procedures) which can alleviate both through a common mechanism?

I can't help but read Richard K. Morgan or Iain Banks and wonder when we're going to finally get wetware. We know what to stimulate, we know roughly how much to stimulate, and we have a laundry list of stuff we'd like to address (depression, epilepsy, didactic memory, alzheimer's, parkinson's, the "babelfish" implant, and so on).

In the meantime, tens of thousands of people will continue to die needlessly from any of the above treatable diseases because nobody's got the balls to just start stuffing wires into craniums. Let me start the list here.

1. Alex Avriette
   

Breakin' the law

So I found myself the other day in my underwear in the hallway of my condo, locked outside. This is because the doors lock themselves, not because I'd been kicked out or anything. A concerned neighbor saw enough of my ass and decided to call Arlington Police. Naturally, people don't hang out in public places in their underwear, complaining about a broken ankle (actually a wicked sprain) and needing to be let back in to their home. APD arrived, broke into my home, and grabbed three bottles of drugs. Tegretol, Lithium carbonate, and [REDACTED]. One APD officer, one of those gorilla types with biceps bigger than their head, clutches the lithium in a deathgrip and shoves it in my face.

"You're going to prison for this, buddy!"

I ponder. I think to myself, why on earth would anyone want to take lithium recreationally? It makes you feel like shit. Unless, of course, your body needs it, in which case, you just feel "normal," not "high." Anyways, so I reply, "really?"

"Do you know how many kids abuse this stuff?"

"No, frankly, I'd be surprised. How many?"

"Lots."

Hmmmm. I mean, what a complete nitwit. The paramedics, duly summoned, informed my simian custodian that lithium was in fact not especially useful as a recreational drug, to which he grunted, and began looking for some other nuance to prosecute. I, ladies and gentlemen, am a criminal. A criminal so dastardly, I seek to maintain my mood at such a level that the rest of you don't find me so offensive.

I really have very little faith in humanity when things like this happen. Like, why do I bother working my ass off to be presentable to everyone else when I think faster, act quicker, and am generally more "me" without the fucking drugs. Why do I bother, if I'm just going to be told I'm a criminal for needing them to begin with?