Psychology Today: The Infection Connection Annotated
Today, scientists are increasingly coming to recognize that the bacteria and viruses that frequently invade our bodies and cause sore throats and other minor ailments may also unleash a host of major mental and emotional illnesses, including anorexia, schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.It's funny because just at the very moment I was reading those words, I heard David Brooks say on the Newshour that perhaps the Virginia Tech shooter may have had a virus that caused his mental illness. One of those very weird moments of synergy.
From an ME/CFIDS perspective, this article was interesting as there has certainly be a lot of speculation about the role of infectious agents in the etiology of the disease. Indeed, a lot of people who see improvement do so by taking antibiotics and/or antivirals. And mental illness is frequently comorbid with ME/CFIDS. Suicide is the leading cause of death for people with ME/CFIDS -- something I learned in a painful way last year when someone I knew with ME/CFIDS committed suicide -- and interestingly enough, it's the leading cause of death for those with HIV as well, a disease closely associated with ME/CFIDS.
This article also points out that Chlamydia Pneumonia is associated with Alzheimer's Disease. So, could that be why I keep forgetting everything lately? Or is that bout of strep I had when I was 15 the reason I seem to get more obsessive-compulsive as the years go by (seriously, A. teases me about getting all "Howard Hughes" on him)?
3 comments:
I wonder quite often about the connections between mind and body. With DID, I've discovered that different parts of me have very different experiences of the body--not only do they have differing levels of fibromyalgia, but different visual acuity, different allergies, different levels of strength or manual dexterity.
At the same time, I have a body that responds very symbolically to mental turmoil. Repeatedly (as in, five times that I can think of) I have had a badly sprained or broken foot right at a point when I was ambivalent about moving forward in my life; I stopped getting strep throat when I stopped having to "swallow" my anger; I got ear infections only when I was listening to people tell stories I wasn't able to hear.
And, I think that given how interconnected the brain and the body are, and how much there is that we don't know about our experience of the body, of COURSE I'd think that something affecting the body would also affect the mind.
I've got more things to say, but I think I'll leave it at that.
Yet another nail in the coffin of the mind-body split. Forget "connection," they're inseparable!
Wow -- those are some really amazing examples of the mind-body connection, JA! And you're right, Sylvia. There really is no separation between the psyche and the soma.
I think what I found really interesting about this story was that it went the opposite of the way we traditionally think -- the psyche disturbing the soma -- whereas here it was the soma, or rather, a pathogen disturbing the soma, that was going on to disturb the psyche as well. To me it was yet one more reminder of why mental health benefits parity is essential and the fact that we don't have it is immoral. As are so many other problems with the American health care system...
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