Category: Thoughts (Page 2 of 2)

During the editing and proofing process of the Physics World article I wrote, a few misconceptions slipped in. Which is understandable. Before I became mentally ill, I believed many of the misconceptions I have listed below. As I slowly got sicker and sicker, I realised just how wrong most of the common perceptions of mental health conditions are.

A poor understanding of the brain in society leads to films, T.V. shows, articles and other forms of media misrepresenting what mental illness actually is like. Ironically, this misrepresentation can come from the mentally ill themselves. It can be immensely difficult to describe what it is like to have a mental illness because the very nature of the illness affects the organ that we use to describe what it’s like.

Our society is therefore filled with misconceptions galore. Which makes having a mental health condition or illness all that much harder to deal with. Something I hope to rectify very slightly here.

I want to emphasise that the article is based on my experience. The following will likely differ from person to person. Which brings me on to my first misconception.

As I will likely parrot in most of the things I write, physicists think ‘bottom up’. That is, to find some fundamental equation that underlies the whole of whatever it is describing, even if it itself does not give a very accurate portrayal of reality. Think of those classical problems in school physics lessons of a 2D ball being launched by some force at a specific angle. I’m sure some of you have nightmares after the mere mention of SUVAT equations (apologies).

But these Newtonian equations describe the fundamental physics of classical objects travelling along a trajectory really well. To then accurately describe the forces (wind resistance, spin, friction etc.) acting on a 3D real-life ball flying through the air, terms and perturbations are added to the fundamental equations. Importantly, however, terms are never taken away.

There are many guides out there on how to cite sources in your writing (e.g. scribbr, citethisforme and OCR) but relatively few on how to actually find these sources. I write about how this underutilised skill could be taught and how it could help society sort through the chaos that is internet literature.   

Finally. After years of waiting, I would be heading to university to study physics. I was going to consume knowledge and understanding (pretty poorly at first) from realms of physics most fear ¹. Subjects like quantum mechanics, astrophysics, magnetism, thermodynamics and special relativity. My only previous encounter of these topics was from watching Brian Cox waffle on T.V. while staring into the middle distance and ‘reading’² books deemed a bit too much for the school curriculum³.

I was just about to attend my first conference as a 1^st year PhD student. Finally, after years of waiting, I would get to see the hum of activity of a scientific conference. I was excited to be a part of the deep conversations about each other’s work, the exchanging of ideas, maybe even possible future collaborations. But most of all, I was looking forward to the talks. The life’s work of eminent scientists on a stage, the platform for scientists to show the fruits of their gruelling labour. I was expecting passion, engagement, life. I was expecting to get everything science had meant to me since I was a wee nipper.

I got fear. I got dull, monotone dregs of character. There were a couple of sparks amidst the darkness, but they remained unnoticed to most – without even a nugatory raise of an eyebrow.

I imagine the honey bee’s world is dictated by two emotions: desire and avoidance. When a honey bee sees a flower off in the distance, it has a strong desire to fly towards it, to rid it of its nectar. A small reward circuit lights up in its little mind whenever it comes across a flower. Similarly, whenever a honey bee sees a predator, like a bear, spider or bird an avoidance circuit lights up (or in dire situations an attack circuit).

To a honey bee, it is like their world is in greyscale, with only the flowers in green and predators in red standing proudly out against the background. A honey bee does not care about the bright blue sky, or a trickling waterfall, or a lush field of grass. Neither does it care about the mundane, like roads, bricks or trees. To a honey bee, it is as if these things don’t exist. While it sees them, knows they are there, it pays these phenomena absolutely no attention. The honey bee’s world is almost entirely determined by the green flowers and red predators.

I had just left an rTMS session a little frustrated. The nurses ask how I have been to report back to the doctor, and I always find it difficult to describe. Not because there is some doubt as to what I am feeling (even if I do not understand why I am feeling it) nor because I do not have the language to describe it. I have realised after years of living with mental illness that my words become misinterpreted. I have felt consistently that every doctor and psychiatrist I have had so far has thought I am at least 3x better than I actually am. I think those who have never lived with a severe mental illness don’t realise that for the entirety of their lives they have this background feeling of ‘you are safe enough right now’ running through their heads – sometimes even through deep feelings of grief, sadness, anger and worry. This background ‘okayness’ may only go away for a moment, a day, a month at most (but usually remains in some form even if it doesn’t feel like it). But to the healthy-minded it always comes back. There is eventual relief. This does not happen with the mentally ill.

I was trying to describe to the nurse how a little bit of this ‘okayness’ had started to come back after I started lithium treatment. I said “the days are easier, time goes by faster than it did before”. After some more discussion, the nurse says “so time used to drag and now it is not?”. Time being a drag is like boredom. What I was experiencing was most definitely not boredom. But no matter how hard I thought (thinking is very hard nowadays) I couldn’t think of a way to explain what I was feeling in a way that the nurses could understand. How do you tell someone that under specific circumstances, the feeling they have in the back of their minds they don’t even realise is there, can go away?