amygdala treatment

[rossala]

14 April 2016


dear Friends,

Let introduced myself. I am Ross and I wrote from Italy. Nice to meet you!


I thought before to write you about my experience and after some days I decided to share it with you all.

I suffer of sever Agoraphobia + Bipolar Disorder since 2008. Since 2012 I cannot exit home independently. I tried 10+ therapies with 0% results (drugs, psycho, holistic, everything..).

The disease was always getting worse, so, I decided, with my family, to go on and try a new experimental surgery.

One month ago I went to Asia and I treated my right Amygdala with Gamma Knife.

They told me 6-to-18 months will be needed to destroy it (necrotization), so actually is too soon to talk about results.



I will keep you updated. If you have question, please, do it.

With my best regards,

Ross

[MyNameIsTerry]

Good luck with the neurosurgery. Have you managed to avoid any difficult side effects from this?

Gamma Knife has been in the UK since the 1980's. Other more invasive neurosurgery was around before. There are studies around for various mental health disorders but they will be on the most refractory of cases, I would imagine.

[rossala]

Italy, 12 May 2016



Hi Terry and friends.

It’s Month 2.

I have good news to share.

- My immune system is better now. I passed about 1 months with some little mouth inflammations, a bit high white globes and headache, as expected after GK. Since 1 week I have no more headache and mouth inflammations, white globes now are ok. It seems (and I hope) the inflammatory period is finished.

- On the other side I confirm my senses empowerment but I am starting also to feel less general anxiety and stress. I’m starting watching things with a bit more objectivity. I don’t know about agoraphobia because I didn’t try to make extra car travels or change safe external zones for now, this will be the last improvement I expect because it’s the most hard part, so.. I am talking about anxiety and stress in the normal house/family/city living. I feel a bit less stressed but also more positive and trusty in the future.

- About identity I am doing some changes and in last 2 weeks I made beautiful thoughts that maybe are clearing my minds in-depth. I am writing a big diary describing everything and these are some most significant sentences I wrote and I share with you.

“I observe that my anxiety/stress/dissociative disorder is made of three main internal conditions: 1) coming of unexpected bad thoughts (suffering); 2) control and suppression of bad thoughts (tiring); 3) the absence of bad thoughts (enjoying). Awareness on those moments can be important to solve the problem. [..]


(this is what I wrote on a group of self-help) - I love to be here, surrounded by kind people. I sit now. Watching myself inside is like watching a landscape. On the side of the river I breathe and wait, until serenity and freedom will return to flow in front of me.[..]


(this is what I wrote about my past problems) - I’d like to forgive everyone that hurt me. And to ask forgiveness to everyone who suffered for my fault. Tonight I understood one thing: chronic illness leads to stress, stress leads to irritability, irritability can lead to hate without knowing it. I hated too much these years.. I invented an aphorism, just to keep it always in mind - “If you hate a person you are on the way of hating everyone.” - This could be a restarting point for a healing path. ♥ [..]


I think serenity is the best, enduring happiness come from there. There’s a difference between happiness and pleasure: pleasure it's short, rare, powerful, it can consume you, happiness is long, frequent, and beautiful, it charges you to live your life in wellness. [..]


(last sentence I wrote yesterday to the self-help group, a quote from Gibran) - For brave and visionary: “ The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. ” (the prophet, Gibran) - for me this means that the deep hole created along these years is only the cradle in which my awareness and my serenity will reborn. I wish it to all of us.”




As expected, my mind is changing and I hope returning the one when I was 27 (before the illness), in those times I was a quite calm and normal social person. Quite optimistic.

I continued also studying the amygdala and I see that from literature it’s considered the epicentre of all stress-anxiety-dissociative disorders like emotional/behavioural disorders.

In sum, just to simplify, Amygdala is a sort of prehistoric brain that has a collaboration with cognitive brain in normal people.. but when this little zone become abnormally “hyperactive” it takes ruling the brain due to it’s pivotal zone and multi-connection with brain above and autonomic organs below. Goleman (1996) called this process “hijacking” of the cognitive brain by the limbic system, and in particular amygdala. In those disorders the equilibrium between "reactive" and "cognitive" neurons changes in favour of reactive neurons, with well known consequences.

Amygdala is what we have in common with fishes and lizards. It’s inheritance of violent and mortal jungle living of our ancestors. This is the reason that when amygdala take predominance of our brain we regress and go back to rude feelings and behaviours. These days, I started calling my amygdala: the Munga-Munga. :)

Well..
I hope everything will continue this way, and to give you other good news next month.

Ross

PS. Oh, forgetting: in June I’ll have first MRI after GK treatment (every 3 months for 1st year), so I will see technically how my right 1.8cm3 amygdala necrotization is going..