A Splintered Mind

Simplifying Diagnosis If you suffer from neurological disabilities or ailments, chances are you've had a hard time getting diagnosed or isolating the trouble areas. The problem is that the neurological mind can be like a very complicated sequence of dominoes. Set one domino in motion and soon several branches come crashing down. It is hard to sort out which domino caused what when they're all jumbled together. The Problem: Things Can Get Complicated In my case, I received different diagnoses from multiple doctors over the years. I suspect your experience has been similar. Sometimes I wondered if they diagnosed me depending on their pet neurosis 1 , and other times I wondered if their diagnoses differed because I was emphasizing different problems 2 . For example, one doctor would ask me constantly if I had delusions of grandeur. Apparently he was convinced I was bipolar even though I wasn't. Maybe it was my Napoleon hat that prompted him... Other times, when my AD...

I've been fairly tired lately due to a raving bout of insomnia. Oh, sure, you've had sleepless nights. But I've taken to going out for walks to burn off excess energy at 3am in the morning. Several nights in a row. Last night's walk was interrupted by excessive wetness. A walk in the rain at 3am is tantamount to drinking from the septic tank of life and hoping to get lucky. It's like marking my weak immunity system with a giant bulls-eye. So I stayed home. At any rate, I'm sure the Carmen Rasmusen forum will appreciate my dissertation on the difference between webcasting and a podcasting. So when I say I'm having a raving bout of insomnia, unless you've walked the walk of the living dead you cannot even relate. That doesn't make me special, of course. There are others out there who I know can truly relate with me, but I've grown tired of posers blowing off my insomnia and the affect it has on my life because they stayed up 30 minutes past Let...

There are some things in life that never change - my bad luck for instance. I still manage to be the only person to step in spills with my socks. In fact, the other day I was standing in the kitchen minding my own business when suddenly my three year old came running in holding a cup of water, tripped over an imaginary bramble, and dumped her entire drink onto - yes - my socks. It was funny, as are other goofy things that have happened to me, but I want to focus on something else that doesn't change: the need to prune my life of projects. People with ADHD are famous for having a million irons in the fire but never remembering to light the fire in the first place. So part of the process of self-analysis is to figure out how to light that fire. I discovered long ago that a PDA was perfect for keeping track of all my various things to do on a daily basis, but for life goals and all around focus I needed to reevaluate how I spend my time every few months. Sometimes this is easy - l...

It's been a few entries since I covered my extraordinarily bad luck here. I thought maybe I was writing the subject into the ground, but then Monday happened. To be fair I should point out that Monday's aren't any worse for me than any other day. But I know that Monday is a bad day for others so you'll have to forgive me for my blatant ploy for instant sympathy. I had just brought my daughter to voice lessons when I thought I'd take a pit stop before entering her room. As I opened the door to the bathroom there must have been something behind the door I hadn't seen because the door bounced back and shoved me into the frame. I then bounced off the frame and back into the door which pushed back at me again. I was glad nobody else was in the waiting room to watch me fight to get inside the bathroom. Soon, my battle with the door was over. I grimaced at it and proceeded inside. The door was so old it had a cast iron knob and no lock. However, there was a hook wit...

Hoping to tap into the resource of umpteen thousands of cellphones, Australian researchers have prepared a new tool to gauge teenage depression. From the article: "The application -- which gathers information into how adolescents experience and respond to distress -- is expected to provide more comprehensive and accurate data than traditional research tools such as written questionnaires. It initially comprises a set of questionnaires that pop-up on the phone at random intervals three to four times during the day. The respondent enters a PIN or ID code and answer a list of questions on the phone through the text function." So in essence, this is an annoying pop-up questionnaire that will prove so irritating that teens all throughout Australia will have a new reason to hate their parents. Then again, my own teen has an unbounded passion for online questionnaires. Perhaps these guys are more on target than I give them credit for. Still, one has to wonder how effective th...