Posted by Spector on September 20, 2005, at 21:00:31
In reply to Re: Neurofeedback for severe depression?, posted by ravenstorm on September 17, 2005, at 12:10:24
Hi. I am still doing neurofeedback. I have not written again yet because they switched me to a new system relatively recently and I was waiting for it to work before I wrote. I just want to be able to write and tell you and any others that this worked for me, that something finally finally worked for me. I want that more than anything ever ever ever.
The new system is one they already had when I started with the people I am working with and they wanted to use it on me from the beginning, but felt they did not yet have enough experience with it. Now they do. When it works it is considerably more powerful and more efficient than the other systems, that is, it can work faster, sometimes much faster.
While it is still neurofeedback, it does not involve operant conditioning in any traditional sense. The big innovation with this system, which was developed by a psychologist in California who happens to also be very talented with technical things, is that it uses radio waves to stimulate the brain, to nudge the brain into resetting itself. The radio waves gently "offset," or throw off the brain waves which are (mysteriously) stuck in an unhealthy pattern. This causes the brain to momentarily reset itself into a healthier pattern. Then the brain takes the new information and hopefully processes it in a way that results in real and lasting healthy patterns and the evaporation of the unspeakable pain we are suffering.
This explanation is of course crude and simplistic as I am just a lay person, but I hope it is not too inaccurate. It is a kind of much more gentle, more controllable, more precise and particular ECT, but without the E or the C. AND, none of the dangers of long term or even permanent damage. The risk is a temporary one of over-stimulation which can be unpleasant or worse if you are in an already nearly unbearable state. That is why they start people, especially sensitive people, slowly. I so far have had no effects that I can feel -- no good stimulation, no over stimulation. They have started to go up on the intensity more quickly now.
How am I? How am I. How do I find words to answer that? It is unrelenting torture and terror that I can never adequately put into words. I try again and again because I have an overwhelming compulsion to try to describe pain to those who care and listen, but I fail always. That does not stop me from trying again. In fact, I believe I would literally die if I were not allowed to try to convey the unimaginable isolation of terror that consumes me and has consumed me for so so so long. I have no other way of bearing it.
And now the frantic panic of waiting and waiting for yet another treatment to work and living with the almost constant conviction that it is not going to work, has made my state even more debilitated. I won't go into gory details right now, but I have had to be taken care of like an infant, an inconsolable infant.
I beg for mercy almost constantly. Over and over often outloud howling in pain.
I am hard put to explain how I remain alive. I can only hope and hope and hope that relief is coming very soon, that God would not keep me alive through nearly three years of this only for me to have to die. But with a brain that is ill in the way that mine is, hope is . . . . hope is almost impossible to experience. And I cannot help but beg for death sometimes. Many many times.
You know much of this. I think you know it the way that only those who have lived it know it. I do not mean to assume that our experiences have been the same. Of course they have not. But I have the feeling that they have been close enough so that what I am writing is all too known to you.
Ravenstorm, I cannot tell you how badly I want to give you good news very soon. You are a stranger to me, but a day has not gone by that I have not thought of you. Often many times.
With love,
Nomi Spector
poster:Spector
thread:512397
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20050812/msgs/557483.html