Some Things That Made Me Laugh Inappropriately
You know you’ve taken too many psych medications when…
On the premier episode of American Horror Story (so far the only scene of which I haven’t been able to watch with the lights off is the intro made up of all those creepy as hell baby pictures) there is a scene in which a psychiatrist named Ben is counseling a teenage boy named Tate who has, with much grandiosity, described a recurring fantasy about murdering some of his fellow students. (The “noble war,” he calls it, to free the people he likes from this “filthy goddamn helpless world” and “take them somewhere clean and kind.”) The doctor asks Tate if he’s been taking his medications; and then calls his bluff by asking him if he’s had any light sensitivity. When Tate says something to the effect of not too much, Ben says that “light sensitivity isn’t a side effect of Lexapro.”
Lexapro? Are you freaking kidding me?!
I’m in no position to say what Tate’s diagnosis may be, but even I know a psychiatrist may as well prescribe aspirin to a homicidal patient as an antidepressant. Gimme a break! FX fact checkers… fail.
Later that week I was trawling the Internet to confirm a rumor that George Lucas had yet again… ugh… “enhanced” the latest Star Wars boxed set, this time by adding a track of Darth Vader screaming while Emperor Palpatine electrocutes Luke Skywalker. (FAIL!) And my long meandering browsing journey led me to this story which, perhaps due to a little schadenfreude brought on by my current struggles, caught my attention: a recent neurological study suggests that optimism may be the result of a lack of frontal lobe activity in the brain. (So eat that!)
In an experiment conducted by Dr. Tali Sharot and Dr. Ray Dolan of University College London and Christoph Korn of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, volunteers were presented with 80 negative life events (like being the victim of a crime or diagnosed with a major illness) and asked to estimate how likely they were to experience them while an MRI monitored their brain activity. They were then given the actual probability of each event and asked to make a second estimate.
Participants who had overestimated the likelihood of negative events in their future (i.e. pessimists) were likely to reduce their second estimates accordingly; however, participants who had underestimated at first (optimists, according to personality tests) were unlikely to increase them. While this was happening, the more pessimistic volunteers showed, as expected, increased activity in their prefrontal cortex while the more optimistic showed significantly less activity, as though their brains were literally incapable of processing the new data. (If so, it may be that those of us with depression aren’t so much more dysfunctional than those on the opposite end of the spectrum!)
