Just a quick note for all those neurological and brain science researchers into meditation and manic depression.

I have a standing offer to volunteer for mri or pet imaging of my brain.

Why would you want to image my brain?

As a patient with untreated manic depression and schizophrenia my brain should be a wasteland. Studies apparently show that

Bipolar brains shrink

schizophrenic brains shrink

Bipolar brains have an unique chemical signature

Bipolars apparently have a genetic biomarker

schizophrenics apparently have a genetic biomarker

Family genetics

In 1991 my mother admitted to me during my second inpatient stay for suicide that she had suffered depression and suicidal ideation all her life.

In 1999, ten years after my dual diagnosis of manic depression and schizo affective my sister went inpatient on the opposite side of the country for a suicide attempt. She was diagnosed with Bipolar.

As we move through the year 2008 I look back on the fact that I have been depression, mania, self injury , voices and delusion free for over ten years.

How is this possible you might ask?

If you are familiar with my blog content and videos on youtube then you know how.

I secluded myself from other people with mental health issues and practiced meditation full time for years.

After the first year of that lifestyle I achieved a milestone marker of the first year without cyclical suicidal depression. Now over ten years have passed and I remain symptom free.

Some folks would not think breathing exercises and navel gazing could have that effect but that is because they are not up to date on the latest in meditation and brain imaging research.

1. Meditation is a way of tapping into a process of manipulating brain activity

2. Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better — and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

3. Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.

4. “Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School

5. New imaging technology makes it possible for scientists to document the brain activity of Buddhist monks. Dalai Lama visits MIT

6. In recent years, a group of neuroscientists are exploring the hypothesis that meditation can actually change the way the brain works.

7. scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison used new scanning techniques to examine brain activity in a group of Buddhists.Their tests revealed activity in the left prefrontal lobes of experienced Buddhist practitioners.This area is linked to positive emotions, self-control and temperament.Their tests showed this area of the Buddhists’ brains are constantly lit up and not just when they are meditating.

8. Medical effects of meditation.

So I make the following predictions. I must have these bipolar/schizoid biomarkers. I must have this unique bipolar brain signature. At 33 years old having had my first suicidal ideation nearly 25 years ago there must be some observable level of brain volume decrease.

Unless I have reversed that brain volume decrease. According to the meditation studies meditation builds the brain up increasing brain volume and density.

So we can make a few generalized conclusions.

Either meditation cured me of mental illness and there is no evidence in my brain whatsoever of the alleged brain destroying powers of bipolar and schizophrenia.

Or I still have these disorders and they are completely held in stasis by meditation.

Now either of those conclusions are medically and scientifically significant.

Meditation won’t put a dime in Big Pharma’s bank account but it is definitely important information to the ongoing study of psychology and perhaps psychiatry as well.

I make this offer. I am willing to submit to brain imaging while meditating and not meditating.

After 20 years of meditation experience I can make my brain light up the same way Tibetan and Buddhist Monks do I guarantee it.

I would also like to make a few other predictions or speculations about these brain images and biomarkers.

The first is this.

Biomarkers occur as a result of prolonged mental illness symptoms.

It is a correlation not a cause.

Biomarkers would eventually disappear if the symptoms went into remission long enough.

This is similar to the *chemical imbalance* theory.

Genetic chemical imbalances do not cause mental illness. The chemical imbalance is an effect of prolonged suffering of symptoms. Such chemical imbalances would restore themselves if the symptoms went into remission long enough.

Brain cell death and brain volume decreases associated with Bipolars and Schizoids are a result of the treatments for the illness, not the illness itself.

For Bipolars and Schizo that self medicate, the years of alcohol and drug abuse cause brain volume decreases.

For Bipolars and Schizoids that use polypharmacy the probable cause of this brain volume decrease is their meds more specifically neuroleptics.

That is not to say mental illness has no appreciable effect on brain volume.

There is the saying, if you don’t use it you lose it. Certainly if you fail to control or try to control your mental health symptoms then the natural brain functions that would instill stability become stunted and atrophy.

However in learning to manage mental illness symptoms without drugs I am guessing those areas of my brain are in reality much more developed than you might expect. Perhaps more developed than in those who never suffered from mental illness because it is an area of the brain I had to work at constantly to achieve stability and wellness.

My conclusions.

Biomarkers and chemical imbalances are the snapshot of ongoing mental illness. They are an effect of the illness, not a cause or a predictor. These imbalances and markers would disappear with remission of symptoms.

Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia do have a cure. Meditation is that cure. I think the MRI and PET scans will prove this unambiguously.

If you weigh the risk-reward ratio for taking five years out of your life in order to meditate until your emotional and cognitive controls are established. You compare that to a life spent with unmitigated mental health issues or a life spent on polypharmacy dependency than you will quickly realize that interrupting your career and lifestyle in order to cure your mental health problems permanently is more advantageous than a life spent keeping symptoms at bay with drugs while developing diabetes, obesity, tardives dyskinesia, nervous system ataxia, thyroid imbalances, kidney failure and psych med addiction.

Who is willing to take five years out of their life to meditate until they have inner peace?

Only the most eccentric, the most desperate and the most intelligent of people.

You have to have a certain level of foresight to see the benefits. Most people are too hung up trying to consume and move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to slow down and do what it takes to make lasting changes in themselves.

They would rather pop a pill and keep on surfing the web than sit down by a river or in the silence of their bedroom and sit quietly until they have mastered their mental landscape. It is too much work to heal yourself. That and all the bullshit pharmaganda would have people believe that it is not possible and they don’t have anything to take responsibility for. (except getting that scrip filled right away!)

Big Pharma takes advantage of that and profits. People tell themselves it is worth it as long as the pills keep their credit lines active and roof over their head.

Another predication I make is that the mental illness reversing powers of meditation work better the younger you are when you start. The more severe the symptoms, the sooner you need to check out of life and meditate.

People in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond will have decades of inertia to overcome if they have been suffering all that time. There is a sad irony to that. Young people generally don’t take that kind of time off. They are too busy being beautiful and trying to be successful. It was mostly older folks I met in meditation circles.

People in their teens, 20s and 30s that take this work seriously can make huge leaps in mental health sanitation if they take stick with it.

The longer you go without meditation the harder it will be do reverse your mental illness with it.

Not to say it is impossible, just much more difficult. I started serious meditation at the age of 21 a year after my last suicide attempt. That may have made a major difference in my recovery.

In the meantime, I would like to see future imaging studies of the brain to include whether or not the subjects being imaged have been on meds, what meds those are and how long they have been on them

I want to see controls in these studies such as scans of brains of people with bipolar and schizophrenia that are not on meds at all and compare them to scans of people on meds. I want clarifications and more details about these brain shrinkage studies.

So to further the cause of science and psychology I offer myself for brain imaging studies as a meditator who has cured themselves of manic depression and schizophrenia. I am also willing to take the bipolar and schizophrenic biomarker tests at anytime.

Remember, if I have the biomarkers, than my symptom remission is scientifically valuable information

If I do not have these biomarkers while my sister continues to receive treatment for bipolar and my mother continues to go without it than this too is scientifically significant.

Gene expression is an interesting thing. Stress, hormones, sickness and health all turn genes off or on. My guess is that gene expression for mental illness is not set in stone but is merely a snapshot of the current situation, not a reason or a predictor but an effect.

My contact information is on my Home page