Seth's Blog

While Forest [Laboratories] applied to the FDA for pediatric use of Celexa [the anti-depressant] and was eventually denied, the company admitted it had marketed the drug to doctors by hiring speakers to tout its benefits for young patients. Forest also admitted it had suppressed the negative results of research in Europe that found Celexa was no more effective in treating depressed children and adolescents than a sugar pill. Fourteen young patients in that study attempted suicide or contemplated suicide, compared with five in the placebo group, court records show.

From this article. Is Forest Laboratories worse than other big drug companies? Probably not. What’s horrible is how this sort of thing — suppression of negative results — keeps happening. It suggests that the evaluation of drugs should be taken entirely out of the hands of drug companies.

• trouble at the American Meteorological Society
• the power of mood-sharing by Alexandra Carmichael
• crash diet reverses Type 2 diabetes in a week
• archeology of fermentation
• American capitalism with Chinese characteristics: James Stewart’s first column for the New York Times. Stewart is one of my favorite writers.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

After trying the Shangri-La Diet, Jazi yechezkel zilber found that other aspects of my research (“stuff of seth”) were relevant to his life:

Years ago, I was part of a community where people would be up early praying etc. For an hour and then eat together. I noticed that going there in the morning was good for me, but was puzzled by the effect. I hypothesized it was the social effect per se.

At some point, I stopped this (what the hell do I have with religion and prayer?) and noticed that I got depressed. I remember that the depression came with a delay. It was funny to see it, as I could not make sense of it. But this I remember well. The depressive effect was not the same day as not going to the prayers but tomorrow (or later?).

I was not having early awakening then. Afterwards, I started having periodically early awakening, I cannot remember the frequency, but it was there and annoying. Now when going to the community, I had two hours between awakening and eating. Whereas at home I would eat immediately after waking. Another thing that puzzled me was how I came to wake up naturally *before* my scheduled wake-up time. I used to wake up much later. With food anticipation it makes perfect sense. I woke up two hours before conditioned feeding.

The Amish have extremely low rates of depression — and eat communal breakfasts. The story about early awakening reminds me of a student who told me when you told us this in class I didn’t believe it but lately I started waking up too early and was puzzled until I realized I had changed my breakfast.

In the mid-1990s I discovered that seeing faces in the morning raised my mood the next day. If I saw faces Monday morning, I felt better on Tuesday — not Monday. This discovery and many other facts suggest that we have an internal oscillator that controls our mood — in particular, how happy we are, how eager we are to do things, and how irritable we are. For this oscillator to work properly, we must see faces in the morning and avoid faces and fluorescent light at night.

In rich countries, almost everyone gets nothing resembling the optimum input. One of the problems this may create is bipolar disorder. A week ago I posted how a friend of mine used my faces/mood discovery to control his bipolar disorder. After that post, a man I’ll call Rex wrote to me thanking me — that post had inspired him to try to control his own bipolar disorder that way. Before knowing anything about whether he would be successful, I decided it would be good to follow and record what happens. Either way — successful or not — it should be revealing.

I am going to post his story in several parts. The first few parts are background.

My first full-blown bipolar episode was at 29 years of age.  (I am now 37.) (more…)

In yesterday’s post, a friend of mine with bipolar disorder told how he used my faces/mood discovery. It allowed him “to enjoy life and relate to others in ways that I never could my entire life,” he wrote. Partly because it allows him to stop taking the usual meds prescribed for bipolar disorder, which have awful side effects.

What do I think about this?

(more…)

In 1995, I discovered that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood the next day. If I saw faces Monday morning I felt better on Tuesday — but not Monday. The delay was astonishing; so was the size of the effect. The faces not only made me cheerful, they also made me eager to do things (the opposite of procrastination) and serene. This is the opposite of depression. Depressed people feel unhappy, don’t want to do anything, and are irritable. Eventually I found that the mood improvement was part of a larger effect: morning faces produced an oscillation in mood (below neutral then above neutral) that began about 6 pm on the day I saw the faces and lasted about a day. As strange as this may sound, there was plenty of supporting data — the connection between depression and insomnia, for example.

After I had observed the effect on myself hundreds of time, I urged a friend with bipolar disorder to try it. Recently he wrote me about how it has helped him.

Here is the very short story of my experience with this treatment.

I have used your treatment since 1997. As an indication of its effectiveness, from 1999 to 2003 I was completely off of medications, and now I’ve been off again since August of last year. (more…)

Todd Becker pointed me to this post which is negative about the notion that cold showers raise mood (“empty science”) but you can ignore the negativity and go to the comment that gives a long list of studies that support the idea. Todd has blogged about his use of cold showers.

Todd calls this hormesis. About the mood-raising aspect of cold showers, I’m not so sure. There is a broad correlation between being sleepy and being in a bad mood.  So anything that wakes us up is likely to improve our mood. But if cold showers improve one’s response to stress of all sorts — which is less clear — it does seem like hormesis in other contexts. When I think of hormesis I think of two sorts: intra-cellular (e.g., x-ray-like radiation breaks stuff, activating repair systems — radiation hormesis) and extra-cellular (microbes in fermented food activate the immune system). But there are other examples of similar stuff: exercise breaks muscle fibers (which is why you shouldn’t exercise the same muscles two days in a row) and longer-term increases them; bones when broken grow back stronger. If we need a certain amount of thermal or other stress to properly respond to stress that would be another example.

I’m sure we need to ingest plenty of bacteria for our digestion and immune systems to work properly. What about the brain? When I started eating lots of fermented foods, I didn’t notice any brain-related changes, such as changes in mood or sleep. Suggesting that fermented foods have little effect on the brain. But a new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests I reexamine the question. The researchers followed 160,000 high-school students in Taiwan for eleven years.

The incidence rate of suicide mortality in participants with current asthma at [the start of the study] was more than twice that of those without asthma (11.0 compared with 4.3 per 100,000 person-years), but there was no significant difference in the incidence of natural deaths.

Linking immune-system dysfunction (asthma) with brain dysfunction (suicide). I believe fermented foods will substantially reduce asthma. This finding makes it more plausible they’d also improve brain function.

Here I describe my discovery that seeing faces on TV in the morning improved my mood the next day. The details of the effect suggested that the ideal stimulus is what you’d see during a conversation. For a long time I used the C-Span show Booknotes as the main source of the faces. I watched it on a 25-inch TV. More recently I used my own face in a mirror. It was readily available and perfectly life-size. I listened to a podcast or book at the same time.

A few months ago, Caleb Cooper commented saying that he’d found that looking at two faces every morning seemed to work better than looking at one face. He found that Bloggingheads.tv expanded to full screen on a 24-inch monitor (measured diagonally) produced close-to-life-size faces, which is what he wanted.

This interested me for several reasons: 1. It might make the effect stronger. 2. Bloggingheads.tv has a big selection, offering control over size.  3. I disliked looking at my face for long times. 4. It seems more naturalistic than looking at my own face.

I’ve been trying this with a 22-inch monitor (which I already had). Perhaps 24-inch would be better. The effect does seem stronger, as Caleb said.

I asked Caleb several questions about his experience.

How did you get started doing this?

I think it started when I read your posts about standing and sleeping.  This led me to read your paper on self experimentation and sleep.  Like you, I often suffered from early awakenings where I would wake up around 2-3 hours early, still feeling tired but having a hard time going back to sleep.

Based on what I learned from you and other sources, I tried out the following; got a pair of blue blocker clip-ons for my glasses which I put on about two hours before bed; ordered an Apollo goLite blue light emitter that I use for about an hour in the morning, I would sometimes take 1/3 mg of melatonin nine hours after waking up, and 3mg half hour before bed, and I started standing on a high difficulty Thera-Band balance pad on one leg while looking into a mirror for 30 minutes in the morning.

What made you think it was worth a try?

Well, why not:)  Most self experimentation can be easily done for practically no cost, while the potential upside is significant.  There’s also satisfying curiosity, expanding self knowledge, gaining mastery over your mind and body…  You had a plausible theory, had collected suggestive data, and I’d already found the appetite suppression effect of the Shagnri-La was very real, so you had a track record of introducing ideas worth paying attention to.

What happened at first?

It felt to me like my sleep modestly improved, sleeping through the night longer and having the energy to get up and go much sooner after waking.  This was awhile ago though, I didn’t keep any data, and I was adding and dropping different things, so my experience doesn’t have a high enough confidence interval for drawing any general inferences.

When did you make those changes?

I’d guess around sixteen months ago.

After you made those changes (“got a pair of BlueBlocker glasses…”) did your mood change?

It improved in as much as waking up feeling rested makes you feel a lot better than trying to get up while still tired.

Tell me something about yourself (job, age, etc.).

I got into medicine through Clinical Massage Therapy.  Being a high school dropout I wanted something I could get into quickly, then sink or swim on my own.  Massage is one of the few fields the university-accreditation complex hasn’t sunk its tentacles deeply into (a mixed blessing; for an autodidact it lets you quickly start a great career, but the field really needs a bifurcated certification track to separate medical massage from relaxational spa massage). I live in the Pacific Northwest, near the site where they developed the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.  Despite all the lingering nuclear waste, it’s a nice, mid sized metro area. I’m in my mid twenties.

• “ant tribes” near Beijing
• What exactly is umami?
• Is omega-3 an antidepressant?  “Initial analyses failed to clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of Omega-3 for all patients taking part in the study. Other analyses, however, revealed that Omega-3 improved depression symptoms in patients diagnosed with depression unaccompanied by an anxiety disorder.” Are they fooling themselves? Maybe not. My research suggests that morning faces can reduce only depression but also anxiety disorders. So if you have depression without an anxiety disorder it may indeed have a different cause.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.