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Can Blocking Blue Light Help Bipolar Disorder As Well as Sleep Issues? (sciencealert.com)
A new experiment suggests sleeping with amber-tinted glasses can reduce the manic symptoms of bipolar disorder within three days. Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes a report from Science Alert:
The benefits of amber-tinted glasses are that they block blue light -- a major component of sunlight and the light beamed at us from our computer and phone screens. In the mornings, it's this blue light that helps reset our body clock each day. But a growing body of evidence is linking too much blue-light exposure in the evenings to problems including insomnia, obesity, depression, and other mental illnesses.
I wonder how many Slashdot readers are already trying to improve their sleep patterns by avoiding exposure to blue light?
I wonder how many Slashdot readers are already trying to improve their sleep patterns by avoiding exposure to blue light?
I'm a little dubious, on general principles. Plus my optometrist just suggested this new "blue-blocker" option for my glasses, it stops blue-laser light dead, a very impressive demonstration, but it paradoxically doesn't remove any blue from what you're looking at. Must be a very fine-tuned filter that just blocks one wavelength of blue. He talked on and on about the effects of blue light on sleep. Quite a hard-sell. And they want $140 for that option. Sounds like blue snake-oil to me.
I have a pair of blue light blocking computer glasses that I use. Ever since I started using them, my sleep cycle has returned to normal.
The LED traffic light issue is a funny one though, the lights are efficient enough that they don't put out enough heat, and can get covered by snow.
So now they need to put heaters in to melt the snow. :)
Hypomania is kind-of-sort-of awesome. Not really, but it feels that way, like cocaine or a small dose of meth might.
Full mania involves a facial rictus like the Joker, being unable to stop grinning, giggling at everything. You drive fast, you make bad decisions, you don't care. Everything is awesome, all things are awesome. The inside of your skull burns, and it's awesome; you can feel your neurons screaming, and you want to shoot yourself in the head with a shotgun to make it stop, because it's so awesome, too much awesome, it burns so much and it's awesome like a vicious nuclear fire inside your skull.
Even a hypomanic episode can completely cancel any urge to sleep. You wake up the next day still feeling awesome, but also tired; your eyes burn, your head hurts, your body creaks and cracks around you, and you drag yourself, nauseated and battered by sleep deprivation, out of bed because you just can't stay still. It's bad but it's cool because you feel kind of great and kind of shitty at the same time. You might spend days or even several months without more than a few hours sleep each night; you start feeling high all the time, like you're smoking opium constantly, but the sedation is just extreme sleep deprivation. You can't think straight and can't get anything done, and you feel useless, but also pretty awesome, actually.
Unless you're stable against suicide, mania is a good time to kill yourself, since it's both terrible and uninhibited: it's a shitty way to go through life, and you feel a lot more confident about going on and offing yourself. Most bipolar suicides occur during a manic episode.
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Apologies if what follows comes across as a rant. Thus is an extremely sore topic for me.
As someone with bipolar diagnosis (and an autistic spectrum disorder diagnised over a decade after the bipolar diagnosis), I can say from my experience that two different people with the same diagnostic label can have markedly different problems. What works is heavily dependent on what exactly is happing in the patient's life and mind, and upon what intellectual, social, family and other resources they have at their disposal.
The idea that you can treat all instances of a bipolar patient as sufficiently similar that a clinical trial of a treatment will yield useful, meaningful and reliable information as to what will help an arbitrary new patient with the same diagnosis is something for which I have yet to come across empirical support for (consider how different software can cause the same hardware to behave markedly differently, the futility of trying to fix serious software errors with simple hardware patches, and the foolishness of taking 1000 windows PCs which regularly blue screen, and conducting a double blind randomised controlled trial on treatments for PCs with 'compulsive blue screen disorder'). I am sorry to say, that to me psychiatric research is thus brain damaged in its basic methodologies.
The idea that chemical imbalances are a cause rather than a symptom is something yet to be justified, as is the idea that bipolar disorders can be understood at a biochemical level and remedied with chemicals with any degree of reliability. Then things like whether the person has a (possibly undiagnosed) autistic spectrum disorder or not are ignored (I have recently received an ASC diagnosis), and if not ignored, old trials are not revisited in the event that new diagnostic information has come to light regarding participants of old trials which would have affectee the trial and possibly the outcome. By comparison, if a physicist discovers a component in his exoerimental apparatus has a bias, he or she will not ignore the matter if it could significantly affect the conclusions of the experiment. The psychpharmalogical juggernaut just rolls on, turning mental health into a game of drug sales, cattle management, and explaining away all alternatives: behaviour reminiscent of hard sell marketing, not proper scientific inquiry.
As for blue light, at times when extremely sensitive, blue light can, due to extreme sensitivity, be confused with daylight, with consequences for how your brain tries to sync to daylight. In times of extreme sensitivity (which can be diagnosed as manic episodes, as can episodes of manic behaviour driven differently), it is like the gain on yout brain inputs is turned up too high, is saturated, distorting, and your brain then attempts to make sense of the distorted sensory input on the implicit assumption that it is free of distortion. That, at least, has been my experience in the past (once in hospital they used bright blue-tinted flashlights to see if we were in bed, for example, resulting in my being awoken so strongly when about to go to sleep that there was no possibility of sleep for a number of hours, and jobbing nursing staff often want their jobs to be as easy for themselves as possible, and care little if that has negative ramifications for the patients).
In addition, check out 'Deprived of our Humanity' by Lars Martensson (what he writes accords much with my experience), madinamerica, Joanna Moncrieff's books (myth of chemical cure, straight talking intro), Richard Bentall's books, Lucy Johnstone's books (straight talking intro), details of successful outcomes (beyond what is achieved with typical pharmacologically centred approaches) using alternative approaches (see e.g. Daniel Mackler's open dialog documentary, on youtube now).
Feynman had a wonderful couple of quotes in his Cargo Cult Science talk:
"But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselvesâ"of having utter scientific integrityâ"is, Iâ(TM)m sorry to say, something that we
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