BEDO + Michael Jackson Chamber

Summary of current life feelings:

The Struggle Boat
Image: A group of white people with a dark-skinned tour guide (lol—didn't even notice this until I did the image description) in one of those blow-up-looking water rafts with a bunch of plastic oars, braving some vicious-looking rapids that they shouldn't have even attempted to cross in the first place and looking generally like n00bs.

The plan is to use my blog to ameliorate the afloat-ness. It is COLLEGE APP TIME. Is this blog an asset or a detriment to me for college apps? What if I delete the videos where I talk about White people?

So I'm going to BEDO, which is my version of VEDA. I was going to VEDA and then I lost my "motivaish," in the words of a great Blake math teacher. So BEDO is Blog Every Day in October. Because, you know, October also starts with a vowel.

Naturally, I am already two days behind.

***

THAT BEING SAID, I was wallowing a yester-fortnight and just watching infinite TED talks. And I found one on depression.

Embedding this was hard work and you should praise me for it - the youtube search engine through blogger SUCKS.

A summary of my takeaway from this video would approximately amount to:

1. Something is wrong with the way we treat depression currently.
2. Anti-depressants are great, sometimes, but other times they just uselessly (or harmfully) flood the brain with serotonin or norepinephrine or dopamine and it's a bad, expensive thing. Especially when a placebo works almost as well.

Full disclosure: I've experienced my fair share of negative psychiatric medication side effects.

3. There's this clinical trial in Arizona (where I can't go because I might be mistaken for Latina and racially profiled #4thamendmentfail) where they're putting patients, off their meds, with major depressive disorder, in 145ºF hyperthermia chambers for a series of 2 hour sessions. AND IT'S WORKING. It's working better than the antidepressant and the placebo.

I am having a (hypomanic) hunch about this. I think this is a breakthrough, guys. Especially as Minnesotan, we have heightened rates of depression and suicide, and just from my life experience, this makes so much sense. I know that pathos isn't logos, but the fact that the temperature linkage to depression is even stronger than PROZAC's linkage to depression is huge.

I am convinced that three years from now, there will be a new class of temperature-regulating drugs, and all the naysayers will look back on this TED talk as a piece of history.

So spread the word.