Been reading a fascinating and quite disturbing article about the deadly new street drug nicknamed “bath salts”.

So yes, brain science. I am intrigued by this drug because its horrible effects are so strikingly like a genuine, normally occurring psychopathology. It is like snorting psychosis, and I cannot help but wonder if by understanding this drug better, we might end up understanding psychotic pathologies better.

Plus, the article has a lot of interesting information about how different drugs work that I did not know before. (That is the problem with getting one’s information by grazing rather than pursuing knowledge more systematically. )

For instance, I did not know that what an amphetamine does is that it stimulates your brain cells to release their supply of dopamine, whereas a drug like cocaine raises your dopamine levels by keeping your brain cells from re-absorbing the dopamine after it has been released via what is know as “re-uptake”.

And suddenly, I know what re-uptake is, and hence, have a clue to what the Paxil, which is an SSRI, or Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor, is doing for me. It is keeping my brain cells from sucking the serotonin back into themselves quite so fast, and so it’s raising my brain’s serotonin levels in a safe and controlled way, instead of just dumping a bunch of serotonin into my system and causing a lot more problems than it solves.

So now I know more about what is happening in my brain. Keen gear.

“Bath salts” are not keen gear at all. In fact, I am not sure why anyone would take them, given what I have learned from the article so far. The title of the article is The Drug That Never Dies, and that refers to the fact that people who have taken this drug continue to be agitated, paranoid, flushed, and hallucinating for as much as two weeks after initial dose.

There is no high in the world that is worth going through the hell of violent insanity, with the real danger of you being a threat to yourself and others and sometimes in truly horrifying ways. It seems to me to be about the worst experience you could have. Totally not worth it.

So I can only assume that as information about the drug spreads, demand will dwindle rapidly. I mean, sure, there are a lot of dumb people out there who are perfectly willing to ingest all kinds of dangerous chemicals in order to get high, but even pretty stupid people will be reluctant to do a drug that will give them the worst trip possible for weeks at a time.

Even the really young ones, who often have trouble believing bad things can happen to them.

The drug actually works like taking cocaine and meth at the same time. It both stimulates the release of dopamine and blocks re-uptake, which as the article says, is like turning the faucets on full in the sink while plugging the drain. No wonder its effects are so dramatic and horrible.

And the worst part is that something about the nastiest of the ingredients in “bath salts”, a chemical called MDPV (short for methylenedioxypyrovalerone), is that it binds to the parts of the brains cells it effects, which is why its effects can lasts so long.

I feel bad for this drug’s hapless victims. I can only speculate as to what kind of long term psychological effects it has on people. Spending days or even weeks in Hell cannot be healthy for a person’s psyche. These people have gone someplace that none of us ever want to go, and have seen things none of us ever want to see.

And quite possibly, have done things they will then have to live with once they recover from the drug’s effects. I am not sure what sort of counseling you can give these people. Especially since there is a very good chance that they have permanent brain damage. Talk about a mistake you live with for the rest of your life. What a total nightmare.

So like I said before, hopefully word about this shit’s bad effects will spread amongst the recreational drugs crowd and that will curb its use. There will always be people willing to try anything, and there is nothing you can do about that. But the drug world operates like any other branch of capitalism, and drugs compete with one another for the drug user’s dollar. So as long as there are safer highs (from like, literally every other drug out there… this shit makes meth look like decaf), that will limit the damage that “bath salts” can do. Hopefully.

Not that I am exactly fully conversant in drug lore or part of that culture at all. I mean, I am on a lot of drugs, but they are all boring prescription drugs for legitimate medical purposes. None of them could be considered “recreational”. And because I am on all these drugs, and am frankly not that strongly assembled upstairs in the first place, I am kind of reluctant to mess things up any further anyhow.

Plus, I am positive I have just the kind of weak, sensitive, and escapist mindset that would make me a prone candidate for addiction. Hell, I almost got addicted to gambling, and that is not even a drug. I am just glad I figured out that I liked gambling too much before it was too late.

So for me, the world of recreational drugs is basically marked Don’t Go There. I have enough problems keeping my marbles in without sending some recreational chemical in there to mess things up. Sure, it is always possible that a good acid trip might be just what my psyche needs to clean out the crap and deal with a whole lot of unresolved emotions all at once.

But it might also leave me way crazier than before, and that is the last thing in the world I need.

So I will stick with he drugs that make me saner.

They might not be as much fun, but they are a way better idea.

Thought I would share what is on my mind right now (that is what a blog is for, right?) and for a change, it is not stuff that is directly about myself. Like I have said before, I grow tired of navel gazing and trying to predict the future by pawing through my own entrails, and so I have decided the best therapy for now is to get the heck over myself and wander the broader pastures of thought for inspiration instead of trying to get fresh water from that muddy old well inside me.

Right now, I am ruminating on this article about the importance of self-compassion over self-esteem.

I got the link off Facebook, from of all people the Dalai Lama, and I am deeply interested in the subject because I have felt, intuitively, that there was something deeply wrong with our well-intentioned focus on self-esteem in mental health that has been ongoing for forty years or more.

It is not hard to see how it happened. You talk to people with mental health issues, you get a lot of people who do not like themselves very much. It is a very common symptom of society’s ills, and so the immediate response was to treat the symptom directly. Someone has poor self-esteem, give them praise and support. It is as simple as bandaging a wound.

But it was naively shallow, because it was attempting far before we had any deep understand of where self-esteem comes from. As often happens in medicine, treating the symptom does not cure the illness. So simply telling people how great they are does not help. This is mental illness, after all, and the kind of distorted thinking that leads a perfectly normal, competent person to think they are the scum of the Earth is not going to disappear just because you gave the person a pat on the back and reasoned with them.

This brings us to the article, which examines the growing scientific evidence that the self-esteem model is outdated and ineffectual compared to treatment based around self-compassion.

Self-compassion is a simple idea. It simply means being kind and compassionate and forgiving towards oneself. This is something I have been stressing to others for quite some time, and so it is highly gratifying to see that science has come along and proved me right on this.

For a long time, I have been asking my fellow depressives to imagine how they would treat another person who was in the exact same situations as them, with all the same problems, circumstances, weaknesses, strengths, and so on. Invariably, the answer is that they would treat that person with far more kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and support than they have ever given themselves. Somehow, the rules for them are different than the rules for everybody else. For them, the standards are impossibly harsh and brutal and impossible to achieve, thus stacking the deck against themselves and keeping them in a constant state of seemingly justified self-loathing and contempt.

Others, they can view in a more compassionate and balanced way.

In fact, you can get some very interesting and useful results by asking people to take all the horrible things they say and think about themselves, and imagine themselves saying them to someone else. Or even to imagine someone saying all those awful things TO them, and what they would think of that person for saying it. What a horrible person, right? So why is it fine to do to yourself what you would condemn in another?

This internal double-standard is a big part of the cognitive roots of depression, I think, and while merely confronting it might not yield immediate therapeutic results, I think it can begin the process of deep self-examination that yields deep and lasting benefit further down the road.

Back to self-esteem versus self-compassion. I do not quite buy the article’s trite and simplistic dismissal of self-esteem. To wit :

And of course you must be perfectly awesome in order to keep believing that you are—so you live in quiet terror of making mistakes, and feel devastated when you do. Your only defense is to refocus your attention on all the things you do well, mentally stroking your own ego until it has forgotten this horrible episode of unawesomeness and moved on to something more satisfying.

This strikes me as a uniquely American straw man argument. Sure, if you put it like that, it seems absurdly self-defeating. But nobody is putting it like that.

Regardless of that, I think the author, psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, makes some good points about self-compassion. The trick, to me, is to recognize that while positive self-esteem is the goal, approaching it as an issue of self-compassion might well prove to be a superior method.

The question remains the same, however : can this be taught? Can you move someone towards self-compassion directly, or is it, like self-esteem, something which can only come from the long and laborious route of traditional therapy, digging up past traumas and trying to resolve the emotions involved and thus relieve the patient’s mind (and soul?) of the strain of carrying them around.

Psychology is always looking for something faster than that, and who can blame them? But I am increasingly convinced that said quest is quixotic, and that the real solution is that tired old slowpoke workhorse of traditional therapy. If you can unpack the emotional baggage, then other things like self-compassion and self-esteem will recover as a result.

And if you try to skip the therapy and go straight for the self-esteem or self-compassion, you are, as I said earlier, treating the symptom and not the disease, and you will be left scratching your head as to why the person is still sick with pneumonia when you have given them the best cough suppressant around.

When you think about it, this doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for success, does it?

It sucks, but it looks like old fashioned therapy is the only way.

Well, until someone invent a catharsis pill, anyhow.