#as someone who has lived next to a medical college for eight years and interacted with studying professionals its like absurd its appalling

[bunabi]

venting a bit once again because I totally understand black folks' if I die I die stance to medical care now more than ever

you should not have to spend more time looking for a doctor you can trust willing to take your pain seriously than time getting actual treatment

very draining, dehumanizing, and just an overall wasteful use of limited time on earth

hope to see such changes happen in my generation

[highsviolets]

INTERVIEW NO. 1: RACHEL @djarinsbeskar

hello hello! i am so happy to announce that rachel — aka the immense talent that is @djarinsbeskar — has agreed to be my first interviewee for this new series! thank you to rach and to each one of you for all of your support. to read more about the project, click here, and to submit an author, click here.

| why rachel? |

Rachel captured my imagination from the first time we interacted as mutuals-in-law. She’s bursting with energy and vivaciousness, with a current of kindness just underneath everything she does. Her work is no exception. Oftentimes gritty, raw, and exposing (in … ahem…more ways than one), Rachel challenges her readers to dig deeper into both the story and themselves. Her smut brings a particular fire as it’s laced with need, desire, and mutual trust that leads us deeper into the characters’ identities and how physical affection can mimic other forms of intimacy. She’s a tour de force in this fandom and an absolute joy.

| known for |

Engaging with and encouraging other authors, cultivating inspo posts, attention to world building & character development

| my favorites |

Stitches

Boxer!Din

Full Masterlist • Ko-Fi

| q & a |

When did you start writing? What was that project, and what was it like? Has that feeling or process ever changed over time? Why?

I can’t remember a time I wasn’t writing. I was an avid reader, as I think most writers are—and I remember, after picking up Lord of the Rings—that I could live so many lives, experience so many things, all from the pages of a book. I could make sense of the world through words and ink and paper. And it offered me a level of peace and clarity I wanted to share with others. So, I started writing.

My first project I remember to this day, was a short story about a dog. I had been so heartbroken when I learned that dogs were colourblind. I must have been about seven or eight at the time, and I was fixated on this idea that dogs couldn’t see the vibrant hues that made the world beautiful. It was something I wanted to change—and with all the righteous anger of a child not getting their own way, I sulked over the fact that I couldn’t. Until I wrote it down.

“How do dogs see colour?”

And much like my writing today, I answered myself.

“Dogs don’t need to see colour. Dogs smell colour.”

And so, I wrote a story, about a puppy being brought on different walks by its owner. And with every new street it walked down—colour bloomed with scent. Colours more beautiful and vibrant than we could ever hope to see with our eyes. And it gave me solace and helped me work through an emotion that – granted was immature and inconsequential – had affected me. To this day, I still smile seeing dogs sniffing at everything they pass on their walks. Smelling colour. It gave me the key to my favourite thing in life. I don’t think my process has changed much since then. Much of what I write is based on a skeleton plan, but I leave room for characters to speak and feel as they need to. I like to know the starting point and destination of a chapter—but how they get there, that still falls to instinct. I think I’ve found a happy medium of strict planning and winging it that suits me now—and hopefully it will continue to improve over time!

When did you start posting your writing, and on what platform? What gave you the push to do that?

I mean, fanfiction has always been part of my life. I think anyone who was growing up in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s found their way to fanfiction.net at some time or other. The wild west compared to what we have now! My first post was for the Lord of the Rings fandom on fanfiction.net. It was an anthology of the story told through the eyes of the steeds. Bill the Pony, Shadowfax—it was all very innocent. That was probably in 2010 when I was fifteen. I had been wanting to share writing for a long time but was worried about how it would be received. I didn’t really have a gauge on my level or my creativity and – one of the many flaws of someone with crippling perfectionism – I only ever wanted to provide perfection. That was a major inhibitor when I was younger. By wanting it to be perfect, I never posted anything. Until that stupidly cute LOTR fic. It was freeing to write something that no one but me had any interest in, because if I was writing for myself then there was no one to disappoint, right? And that was all it took. I had some pauses over the years between college and life and such, but I’ve never lost that mindset when it comes to posting.

What your favorite work of yours that you have ever written? Why is it your favorite? What is more important to you when considering your own stories for your own enjoyment — characters? fandom? spice? emotional development? the work you’ve put into it? Is that different than what you enjoy reading most in other people’s fics?

I don’t think it’ll come as much of a surprise when I say Stitches. While not original, I mean—it follows the plot of the Mandalorian quite diligently, it is the piece of work I really hold very close to my heart. Din Djarin as a character is what got me back into writing after what must have been five years? He inspired something. His manner, his personality—he resonated with me as a person in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. And gave me back a creative outlet I had been missing.

It’s funny to say out loud—but I wanted to give him something? I spent so long thinking about his character that half my brain felt like it belonged to him—how he reacted and responded to things etc. and of course, like every dreamy Pisces—I wanted to give him love and happiness. So, Stitches came along. Personally, when writing—it’s a combination of characters, emotional development and spice (I can’t help myself) and when we can follow that development. With Stitches, it’s definitely the spice that is the conduit for development—but I adore showing how the physical can help people who struggle to communicate emotions too complex for words.

I don’t usually read for Din, as most people know—but I do enjoy reading the type of work that Stitches is. Human, damaged—but still with an undercurrent of hope that makes me think of children’s books.

You said, “much like writing today, I answered myself.” Could you talk about that in relation to Stitches?

So, I’m endlessly curious, it has to be said. Especially about why people are the way they are. Why people do A instead of B. Why X person’s immediate thought went to this place instead of that place. And I’m rarely satisfied with superficial explanations. One of the most exciting parts of writing and fanfiction especially, is making sense of that why. There can be countless explanations, some that are content with what is seen on the surface and some that go deep and some that go even deeper still.

Stitches is almost a – very long winded and much too long – answer to the questions I was so intrigued by about Din Djarin, about the Mandalorian and about the Star Wars universe as a whole. I often wondered what happened to people after the Rebellion, the normal people who fought—the people in the background. What did they do next? Did some of them suffer from PTSD? What was the galaxy like right after the Empire fell? That first season of the Mandalorian answered some of those questions, but I wanted to know more. So, I created a reader insert who was a combat medic—and through her, I let myself answer the questions of what happened next.

Regarding Din as a character, I wanted to know what a bounty hunter with a code of honour would do in certain situations—what made him tick, what made hm vulnerable. I wanted to explore the discovery of his identity. Din Djarin didn’t exist after he was taken from Aq Vetina. He became a cog in a very efficient machine of Mandalorians—and it was safe there. I wanted to see what – or who – might encourage him to step into his own. Grogu was that person in a familial sense, but what about romantically? What about individually? There’s so much to explore with this man! So many facets of personality and nuances of character that make him so gorgeous to write and think about.

Talk to me about the Din Djarin Athletic Universe. How does Din as all of these forms of athlete play off who you see him as in canon?

The Athletic Universe! How I adore my athletes. Despite being in a modern setting, I have kept the core of Din’s character in each of them (at least I hope I have!). I like to divide Din’s character into three phases when it comes to canon because he’s not as immovable as people seem to think he is. We discussed this before, how I see Din as a water element—adaptable, but strong enough that he can be as steadfast as rock. But I digress, the first phase is the character we see in the first episode. Basically, before Grogu. There’s an aggressive brutality to Din when we see him bounty hunting. He works on autopilot and isn’t swayed by sob stories or promises. He has the covert but is ultimately separate. Those soft feelings he comes to recognise when he has Grogu are dormant – not non-existent – but they haven’t been nurtured or encouraged. This is the point I extracted Boxer!Din’s personality and story from.

Cyclist!Din on the other hand—is already a father, a biological father to Grogu. And his personality, I took from that moment in the finale of Season two where I believe Din’s transformative arc of character solidified. He was always a father to Grogu, but I do believe that moment where he removes his helmet is the moment, he accepts that role fully in his heart and mind. And that is why I don’t believe for a second, that removing his helmet was him breaking his Creed. In fact, I believe it was the purest act he could do in devotion to his Creed—to his foundling, to his son. The Cyclist!AU is very much the character I see canon Din having should Grogu have stayed with him. This single dad who isn’t quite sure how he got to where he is now—but does anything and everything for his child without thought. It’s a natural instinct for him, and I like exploring those possibilities with Cyclist!Din.

You also said, “he has the covert but is ultimately separate.” What does it take for him — and you — to get to that point of being ‘not separate?’

I mentioned this above, but one of the biggest interests I have in Din as a character is his identity. He’s a Mandalorian, he’s a bounty hunter, he’s the child’s guardian but those are all what he is, not who. I think Din is separate while being part of the covert because he doesn’t know. I don’t think anyone can really be part of something if they don’t know who they are or, they struggle with their identity. It’s curious to me—how you can deceive even yourself to mimic the standard set for the many. In the boxer verse, he identifies himself in relation to his boxing—and every part of his outward personality exhibits those qualities. But when he’s given a softer touch—an outlet of affection, and comfort—we see the softer side of him surface. It’s very much the same with Stitches Din. Identity is like anything, emotions—relationships, bodies. It needs nurturing to thrive, an open door—a safe space. At least, that’s what goes through my mind when I think of him.

Who is your favorite character to read?

Frankie because there are so many ways his character can be interpreted and there are some stellar versions of him that I think of at least once a day. Javi because he reminds me of kintsugi-- golden recovery, broken pottery where the cracks are highlighted with gold. I also adore reading for Boba Fett, Paz Viszla and the clones!

Is there anything else you want your readers to know about you, your writing, or your creative process?

Hmm... only that I am quite literally a gremlin clown who is always here to chat Din, Star Wars, literature, book recs and anything else under the sun! I like to hear people's stories, their opinions etc. it helps me see things from alternative points of view and can truly help the writing process! Other than that, I think I can only thank readers for putting up with my ridiculously long chapters and rambling introspection. Thank you for indulging me always! ❤️

[l-l-kristofferson]

My Depression Struggles

***DISCLAIMER! IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR HELPFUL TIPS OR INSIGHT ABOUT DEPRESSION, PLEASE READ CAREFULLY. BUT IF YOU ARE EASILY DEPRESSED AND SENSITIVE TO THESE TOPICS, STOP READING NOW. THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!***

For those that know me personally, they know that I suffer from ADHD and bipolar disorder. Mostly because these are the only two conditions I talk about openly. I also suffer from anxiety disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), gender dysphoria, and depression. My other four disorders carry more stigma than the first two. I'm not as excited to talk about these topics in fear of judgment. That being said, I usually only talk about these things to a therapist or doctor. But with depression becoming more and more common, I feel that it should be talked about.

Here are some basic facts. In the US, about sixteen million (16,000,000) suffer from depression. That is estimated at almost seven percent of our population. It can be and is linked to a lot of disabilities in the world. It effects both men and women, at times effecting children from a young age. Those who are more likely to suffer from depression are girls and women. My mother, at one point in time, suffered from the condition. Worldwide, it effects three hundred and fifty million (350,000,000) people. It can stem from a lot of things such as loss and grief, personal or professional dilemmas, a preexisting medical condition, or all of the above. There are many other causes but everyone has a different experience.

What a lot of people don't know is that depression is just the general term for a lot of subgroups. There is major depression, premenstrual depressive disorder (PMDD), stress depressive disorder, manic depression, and post pardom depression. All have their separate causes and affect different people. Another thing that people don't get is that it can be linked to other conditions over the course of time. So here is my experience.

From a young age, I was always sad in some way. This probably started when my father separated from my mom when I was two years old. From then, he was in and out of my older bother's life as well as mine. Even now, I only interact with my father if I have to due to him leaving my mother and leaving us to struggle. Around seven or eight years old, I started to say to a lot of my adult "friends" at school that I would be better off dead. This caused concern and they brought my mother in about the issue, asking her if there were any changes at home. My mom explained what had happened years earlier and they suggested that I be put in therapy. From what I remember of those sessions with my therapist, Dr. Berman, she would always ask me how I was doing as I played with some toys. I would tell her about my day, about my brother and my mom, and about times I would see my dad. Every time I would go to a session, I would pick out a felt board with characters you can lay on top and make up a story. I would usually pick out a man and dress him in a knights costume, at times accompanied by a maiden or princess. After a while, she asked me why I would always do the same thing when I would visit her. I said that I didn't know. At the time, I had little idea of what it all meant because I didn't really think anything was wrong. I understood (in some sense) that my dad wasn't going to live with us ever again and that I wouldn't really get to see him. But looking at it now, I realize that all I was doing... was wishing someone would protect me like my father used to.

Eventually, I stopped going to therapy with Dr. Berman and "got over" what I was going through. I was okay until I was twelve. It started with the death of someone I was really close to... I lost her to suicide. It was the first girl I ever fell in love with and I never got to tell her how I felt. For months, I didn't know what to do. I would cry and cry and cry, not feeling any relief. This was my first glimpse into depression that I was aware of at the time. But soon, it turned into numbness and anger. Why did she leave me? She told me we'd be together forever. She abandoned me. This would coincide with my lesbian identity, something I was unaware of. When that got out in junior high, girls didn't want to come near me, which caused me to feel like an outcast. I was alienated by most of the girls, except a couple who remained friends with me (one I'd known since kindergarten and the one non English speaker who thought I was really nice). The boys thought I was awesome and welcomed me. For the next two years, I was able to make it through. I thought high school would be more accepting. I was so wrong.

When it got out that I was a lesbian nerd, I was constantly picked on by boys and girls. One time, someone said that a girl named Samantha thought I was cute and wanted to get to know me, maybe go on a date. Hearing this, I was so happy. It was awesome. A girl found me worth her time. I had seen her and thought she was pretty. Naturally, I wrote her a loving note and had her read it. Little did I know it was a joke and everyone was laughing at me. I went to the bathroom, cried, and had a fit. I even tossed my journal, bending the metal ring binding. As for the boys, they would toss me down stairs, throw me against walls, push me, physically assault me, hold me in dark closets, and trap me in the guy's room. Between struggling with my identity and being bullied until the age of sixteen, I was constantly depressed. I wouldn't sleep, I'd barely eat, and I wouldn't talk to anyone unless they spoke to me first. I was isolating myself to protect myself from rejection and ridicule. But that worked to my advantage. I kept my head in the books, excelled in class, and kept my GPA high. Friends came later like my best friend Odd, my friends Vachon, his brother Chris, my really good friend (and ex-girlfriend) Natalie, my shop friends Clyde and Erik, and other good friends (you know who you are guys). As I got to graduation, I won a scholarship for college, was in the top ten percent of my class, and surrounded by friends. I wanted to do better. For Jane...

From eighteen to now, it was alright. I kept my head in the books and tried to keep my GPA in the black. But from August to early November of this year, was my lowest point. I was fighting with my mental health facility to get my medication approved and in that fight, had no medication to fall back on. So I spiraled out of control. I couldn't sleep worth a damn, I had little motivation to do much of anything except watch YouTube and forget about it all, I wasn't eating any real food, I shut myself away from the rest of the world, I wouldn't shower for days (sometimes for almost a week), and my anxiety was awful. The only time I seemed to find joy was in the company of other people or on the phone with someone. I didn't feel alone then. But every day was a fight just to get out of bed. I thought of suicide and hurting myself a lot. I would take a lot of painkillers or drink half of a bottle of cough syrup to ease my pain and numb me from thinking. I was grateful for sleep... Because that was the only time I didn't feel any pain. I was mostly at peace. But after five weeks, I started having nightmares, one to three a night. I would be too scared to sleep and sought someone to talk to. Mind you, this was usually between two and four in the morning, when normal people are asleep. But that entire time, I was honest with three people, my best female friend, my therapist, and my regular doctor. Otherwise, no one knew that I was suffering. Not my friends at school, not my coworkers, not my classmates, not my family, not the customers I served. I didn't want them to know. I felt ashamed.

As of the fourteen of November, I have been getting better. It's easier to get out of bed, it's easier to talk to people about my pain, it's easier to eat, it's easier to do my work, it's easier to smile, and I can be more of myself. Some days can still be tough but I keep busy to stay out of those negative thoughts. The one thing I'm glad I did was not give up. I kept going. Through the pain, through the mental bouts and torment, through the anxiety and voices telling me to end it, I stood alive.

Some helpful tips I have are to 1) seek help, 2) be honest, 3) find a positive (and safe) way to deal with your struggles, 4) admit to yourself that you are in need, 5) remind yourself that it gets better, 6) drink tea (I do!), and 7) SMILE!

There are days that I get upset and want to get angry. But I try to keep calm and smile. It can be difficult at times because I'm under a lot of stress as I near the end of my academic career. I am currently doing two internships, a lot of schoolwork, participating in class, volunteering and helping friends, and holding a part time job. How am I alive? A lot of tea (HA HA!). I am grateful for my family, my friends, and those around me. They are one of few reasons I live.

I know it isn't easy for everyone and that there are those suffering much more than me. For those of you who are struggling, keep your head up and smile. If this is rock bottom, there is only one way to go from here: up. I hope that this post was helpful. If you ever need advice or need to talk, my Instagram is lame_dude_20 (my profile picture is of Roxas) and my Kik is Kingsebastianisdead (my profile is a picture of Ventus and the username is The Roxas Joker). I hope I can be the Merlin to your Arthur.

Thank you so much for listening. Write again soon.

[symmetrica]

Being Vulnerable About BPD: An Update

Almost 4 years ago, at the beginning of 2014, I wrote about the way that Borderline Personality Disorder affects me. Despite being a fairly open person by nature, it was difficult for me to post publicly about something so stigmatized and personal. I felt nerve-wracking anxiety due to opening up about my weaknesses, fear of being challenged or doubted as I have been in the past, annoyance at sympathetic responses, embarrassment and reticence when others brought up the topic in social situations, frustration and anger at the few people who dismissed my disorder or used the information to build a negative caricature of me. In other words, I had a completely normal reaction to opening up... for someone with a Borderline personality. But the emotion I felt strongest in the following months was relief. After two decades of being at the mercy of my emotions, without knowing how or why -- and one false diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder, which never explained my symptoms well -- I finally had an answer. Not only an answer, but an answer I’d shared with family, friends, ex-lovers, and acquaintances that I’d puzzled, frustrated, angered, or hurt over the years with my emotional instability. Or perhaps some of them had never noticed it, but now understood me a bit better. I embraced my new identity. But I faltered at every attempt to sit down and write about BPD again. Each time I reached a new plateau through therapy, my relationships, or finding an internal balance, I focused on the negativity I felt after the original post rather than the relief, and I declined to share updates -- except occasionally with those closest to me. Additionally, I didn’t want to exploit BPD for attention, and I felt like I’d communicated myself clearly. But last November, I discovered that someone close to me had continued to vastly misinterpret and misunderstand me despite my initial blogpost. I realized in a flash that this can’t be a one-time conversation. I need to continually talk about and write about BPD, for the benefit of those around me, for my own benefit, and even for the benefit of others with emotional disorders. Just like gay marriage and marijuana, the more we talk about it, the more we normalize it, minimize the stigmas, and help people who are suffering to live better lives. So I want to write more about BPD. I’m going to approach the subject with a much longer post than my initial one. If it’s too long for you, or if you want to read it in chunks over months, I understand -- the only thing I’d ask is that you not skim it and falsely believe that you understand me better. This has been a very, very difficult post. It’s taken me months not only to write it but to build up the bravery to post it publicly. Every section, every paragraph, every sentence is carefully considered and chosen. So if you’re going to read it, please read it slowly and thoroughly, and don’t skim. This is the most vulnerable and honest thing I’ve ever written, and it deserves your complete attention. The first section is a quick summary of BPD, a summary of other mental issues I deal with, and a correction from my first post. The second section is about the current research around BPD and the current scientific understanding of BPD, which I try to track regularly. The third section is about my experience with therapy, the way that I experience the symptoms of BPD, and where I am now.

1. A Summary

I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in 2013. BPD is “characterized by unstable relationships with other people, unstable sense of self, and unstable emotions." Symptoms include intense reactions that seem disproportionate or overreactive to others, frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, extreme black-and-white thinking about others, impulsivity, identity disturbance, negative self-image often accompanied by self-harm, and dissociation during times of stress (I will talk at length about how I experience symptoms in the third section). BPD does not respond to medication, although certain symptoms can be treated individually, and the primary form of treatment is Dialectical Behavior Therapy. At a high level, DBT primarily involves increasing self-awareness and mindfulness in an accepting and non-self-judgmental way, and then applying those internal processes to interpersonal relationships. BPD has a very high incidence rate of comorbidities -- the presence of additional disorders that may be related in some way to the first disorder. The primary one I deal with is probably obvious to anyone who has spent an hour around me -- I’ve been diagnosed with a “severe case” of ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. This is one of the most common comorbidities of BPD, and it affects my life on a daily basis, just like BPD. In fact, I will unequivocally state that ADHD inhibits me more than BPD, especially in my professional life. I’ll talk about it more in another post sometime, but this post will focus on BPD. I’ve also dealt with intermittent depression since I was a teenager, which I now believe is mostly caused by BPD. And ever since college, I’ve dealt with high anxiety, both generalized anxiety and social anxiety. As well as being a symptom of BPD, I believe this is the result of a traumatic event in college that shattered my social worldview, which I may or may not discuss on this blog in the future. Fortunately, both my depression and my anxiety are under control, more or less, these days. I treat the former with yoga, exercise, mindfulness, marijuana, and more. I treat the latter with those same processes, plus an herbal supplement called Ashwagandha, which I highly recommend to anyone dealing with extreme anxiety. Feel free to message me or run your own Google searches if you’re curious about it. Finally, to wrap up this first section, I wanted to make a note on the term EUPD, or Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder. I wrote about the ongoing debate between that term and “BPD” in my original post, and stressed that EUPD is the more accurate terminology. However, for various reasons, I’ve settled on using the term “BPD” to describe my condition. Personally, I don’t feel that the word “Borderline” stigmatizes me, especially considering the modern understanding of BPD... which leads me to my next section.

2. Understanding BPD

Over the last few years, it’s not the word “Borderline” that has concerned me. It’s the phrase “Personality Disorder.” This phrase, along with the two others typically used to summarize BPD -- “mental illness” and “long-term pattern of abnormal behavior” -- all seem to spawn inaccurate interpretations of what BPD actually is. “Personality Disorder” and “abnormal behavior” both imply that BPD is primarily based in the way a person functions in regard to interpersonal relationships, which of course suggests that those with BPD can overcome their nature by changing the way they handle interactions and relationships, and thereby “get better.” “Mental illness,” meanwhile, adds the implication that BPD is a sickness that can be cured, as well as the stigma that BPD is primarily psychological in nature. But seeing BPD as a disorder of personality, behavior, or psychology is exactly what studies, brain imaging, and my personal experiences increasingly contradict: BPD is not a mental disorder; it is a physical brain disorder, also called a neurobiological disorder.

I briefly touched on this in my original post with a few sentences about the physiology of BPD: “Because of a smaller hippocampus, smaller yet more active amygdala, and heightened cortisol production, people with EUPD feel emotions more strongly and for longer periods of time than a normal person.” (Unfortunately, this part seemed to be widely ignored or misunderstood by most people who read my post, when it was probably the most important sentence for understanding BPD.) Because those primary physiological differences can occur in people without BPD as well, they’ve never been considered the “cause” of BPD by the medical community. The prevailing view has long been that BPD is caused by a mish-mash of environmental, physical, and genetic factors. While technically correct, that in itself is a severely limited understanding of BPD. And the general population, of course, has only been exposed to terms like “personality disorder” and “mental illness,” so the stigma of BPD as a psychological disorder has remained prevalent. But every year, we understand BPD better. A few months ago, I found a wonderful article from MDedge attempting to summarize the current scientific and psychological understanding of BPD. I think the introduction explains it perfectly:

The prevailing view ... is that borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a “psychological” condition. BPD often is conceptualized as a behav­ioral consequence of childhood trauma ... You might not be aware that a large body of research over the past decade provides strong evidence that BPD is a neuro­biological illness—a finding that would drastically alter how the disorder should be conceptualized and managed. Foremost, BPD must be regarded as a serious, disabling brain disorder, not simply an aberration of personality ... No wonder that 42 published stud­ies report that, compared with healthy controls, people who have BPD display extensive cortical and subcortical abnor­malities in brain structure and function. 

The article goes on to cite 28 physical and chemical differences in the brains of those with BPD detected with MRI, fMRI, MRS, and DTI. Twenty-eight. Let that sink in for a minute. My brain is as different from yours on a physical level as your blood is different from a person with sickle-cell anaemia, or as different as your heart is from someone with angina. My brain may even be as different from yours as yours is from someone with Down Syndrome. And the primary differences are in the parts of my brain that allow me to regulate emotion, impulsivity, compulsivity, response to stress, and interpretation of others’ actions or emotions. Researchers using MRI at Mount Sinai Medical Center found that:

... when people with BPD attempted to control and reduce their reactions to disturbing emotional scenes, the areas of the brain that are active in healthy people under the same conditions remained inactive in the BPD patients. This research shows that BPD patients are not able to use those parts of the brain that healthy people use to help regulate their emotions.

As far as the causes go, rather than the mish-mash of factors I referred to earlier, with the primary cause being attributed to childhood trauma by most psychiatrists, researchers are increasingly using gene-environment (G.E.) models to understand the causes of BPD. These models suggest that the “ex­pression of plasticity genes is modified by childhood experiences and environ­ment, such as physical or sexual abuse.” In other words, certain people genetically inherit the propensity for it, and a chronically stressful environment or extreme trauma can activate and enhance these biological factors through the phenomenon of gene plasticity, resulting in BPD. So what’s the TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)? Rather than a psychological behavioral disorder that occurs because of a self-protective reaction to trauma, BPD is more accurately seen as a neurobiological disorder comprising physical and chemical brain differences that occurs when someone with a genetic predisposition is exposed to a chronically stressful environment or extreme traumatic event that triggers changes in the brain, usually at an early age. These changes produce more intense emotions and an inability to regulate emotion on a neural level, which is the root cause of most of the symptoms of BPD. So when therapy, treatments, and remission are discussed in relation to BPD, the goal is not to eventually feel emotions normally. I will always experience emotions in harsher ways than most people, I will always have difficulty regulating them, and many of the symptoms of BPD will never cease. Rather, the goal is to mitigate the negative effects of those emotions on myself and people close to me. The goal is to learn to be aware of those emotions, that disregulation, all of those symptoms, to regard them with patience and acceptance, to experience them rather than having a secondary reaction to them, and to discuss them with others instead of showing them to others.

3. My experience

This part has been difficult to write. I finished the first two sections of this post by the beginning of July, and it’s taken me months to do what is usually easiest for me -- to talk about myself. A lot of my procrastination has been because I simply didn’t know what to say. There’s far too much, and words are such clumsy things, even when one is trained to use them well. But I’m finally sitting down and getting it out, whatever way I can.

Therapy

After my self-diagnosis of BPD, it seemed natural to seek out a psychotherapist, both for validation of my diagnosis and for long-term help. Fortunately, my intuition served me well, and the first and only therapist I contacted was a perfect match for me. Our rapport grew steadily over the three years that I saw her, and she helped me sort through my life, my feelings, and my understanding of myself. We engaged in DBT to a degree, though my case was different from normal BPD treatment because of my high levels of self-awareness, self-knowledge, and willingness to change myself, which my therapist said were unprecedented in her experience with personality disorders. We primarily focused on two things: Coming to terms with the guilt and shame I felt over many parts of my life, and translating my inner experience to the outer world in a healthier manner.

While therapy helped me in many ways, I reached a point last autumn where I felt that I needed to continue walking the road by myself, at least for awhile. It had become more of a way to vent about troubles each week than a way to move forward holistically. Additionally, Edie and I wanted to focus on each other and the way BPD affects our relationship, which is something we can do better by ourselves. The decision was the right one, and while the last year has been very difficult at times, I’ve built the confidence that Edie and I can handle whatever comes our way. She is my rock, and I am her river.

My Symptoms

This is the specific section that’s taken months to write, but it’s probably the most important section. I’m nervous. Very nervous. But let’s dive right in.

There are two ways to outline the symptoms of BPD. A few years ago, the DSM, the primary psychological diagnostic manual, revised its diagnostic criteria for BPD when moving from the DSM-IV to the DSM-V. Instead of a simple list of 9 symptoms, from which a person needed to display 6 for diagnosis (I displayed 8), the criteria are now 2 significant personality impairments and 3 pathological traits, all of which have subheadings and definitions. The new list contains all 9 original symptoms, but reorganized, with more specific definitions and one or two additions.

First, here’s the DSM-IV list:

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. 2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. 3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self image or sense of self. 4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., excessive spending, substances of abuse, sex, reckless driving, binge eating). 5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior 6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g. intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days). 7. Chronic feelings of emptiness. 8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g. frequent displays of temper tantrums, constant anger and reoccurring fights). 9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

And here’s the DSM-V list in italics, with my symptoms, my definitions, and my comments on my experiences in regular font:

1. Impairments in self functioning:

a. Identity: Markedly impoverished, poorly developed, or unstable self-image, often associated with excessive self-criticism; chronic feelings of emptiness; dissociative states under stress.

Hoo boy. Right into the good stuff. Yes, this is a big part of my life experience. Most people who know me would probably say that I have a strong identity, one that I’m not afraid to push at people. I believe that comes from a combination of strong willpower and my supportive, validating, individualist upbringing. But deeper inside, my identity is often prey to instability. Somewhere in the background, for my entire life, I’ve felt as if I don’t have a real personality, that it’s constructed based on everyone’s expectations of me and based on imitating others. And I’ve seen this “identity slippage” in action over and over: my likes and dislikes, my desires, my interests, even my general demeanor can be influenced by a character I read in a book, or something I saw in a movie, or spending time with a person that I admire -- for example, I always adapted to whatever clique I spent time around, taking on their mannerisms and interests. Reading about Holden Caulfield made me act cynical for days, while watching Inside Out made me want to hug the entire world. If I read a particularly good travelogue, I envy the writer, sometimes to the extent of feeling an existential sense of loss or anger that I haven’t experienced that particular place. Without a stable sense of self, my self-image fluctuates too, usually between very positive and very negative views of myself, often accompanied by that excessive self-criticism I discussed at length in my original post. Perhaps the most pernicious part of that paragraph, however, is “dissociative states under stress.” Everyone’s felt so stressed about an upcoming exam or annual review or party that they freeze up, not getting anything done and falling back into a simple repetitive task that allows the brain to try to come to terms with those strong emotions. Taken to an extreme, this coping mechanism is dissociation. You may not know the term, or you may understand it through imprecise portrayals in media, where dissociation is usually an extreme catatonic state (like in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or American Beauty). But dissociation is a continuum, from mild detachment from surroundings to a complete physical and emotional separation from the world. Mine presents fairly mildly, though I’ve had episodes of more intense dissociation during extreme stress. When my thoughts start to loop because I can’t find a satisfactory solution to a problem, or because I feel trapped into something that I want to avoid (or vice versa), or for another reason, I will often sit on the computer, clicking back and forth between the same few webpages without actually seeing anything. For hours. Sometimes I look at the clock and realize 2 hours have passed by... when I thought it’d been 2 minutes. It usually happens in private, but I experience mild dissociation at least once a month around Edie, and there have been a few scary times where I completely stopped responding to her or the outside world. During one argument years ago, I went nearly catatonic for half an hour, and there were other similar incidents when I was younger -- some of which I probably don’t even realize happened. It was also a major reason that I cut as a teen -- to stop myself from dissociating from my life. Fortunately, my identity is much more solid these days, for a variety of reasons. While I still experience “identity slippage,” abusive self-criticism, and mild dissociation, these symptoms have all eased with increasing self-awareness and self-love, external validation and support, and my efforts to be true to myself. Edie’s been great at alerting me to signs that I’m dissociating, and I’m starting to recognize it even when I’m by myself. It’s still difficult to control my dissociation even when I’m aware of it, but it’s getting better all the time.

1. Impairments in self functioning: 

b) Self-direction: Instability in goals, aspirations, values, or career plans.

Well, seeing as I’ve received a great deal of criticism during my life for this symptom, I don’t think it’s a mystery to others, so I won’t spend much time on this one. Despite entertaining career paths as diverse as a baseball player, writer, Jedi, and lawyer, I’ve never had many professional goals. My career -- and money as a whole -- mean very little to me (although I do like to work hard... as long as the goal isn’t financial and my work is varied, flexible, and interesting to me). I settled on my LEGO business as a combination of an excuse to spend time on a hobby that I particularly enjoy, one of the only “jobs” that’s compatible with severe ADHD, and a way to appease the capitalists in my life. But still, I constantly challenge and doubt my chosen path as an entrepreneur.

Likewise, my personal goals and aspirations shift continuously... although the two core ones are everpresent: having children and raising them well, and steadily finding more peace in life. But those close to me have seen my flings, where I’m briefly interested in coin tricks or audio engineering or paintball or a thousand other things, then drop them within weeks and never look back. (Contrary to popular misunderstanding, this has nothing to do with ADHD and is solely a symptom of BPD.) However, I don’t believe this symptom is a fault or a vice. When I attempted to resist the instability and find a “normal” career path and stable goals for myself in the few years after college, it led to deep depression and was very harmful to my mental health. So I’m happy to have unstable goals and career plans, and I reject the idea that I’m irresponsible by accepting this instability and refusing to fight it.

2. Impairments in interpersonal functioning.

a) Empathy: Compromised ability to recognize the feelings and needs of others, associated with interpersonal hypersensitivity (i.e. prone to feeling slighted or insulted), and perceptions of others selectively biased toward negative attributes or vulnerabilities.

And for the first time, here’s a symptom -- or at least half of one -- that I don’t experience to a great extent. I can have problems with empathy in the moment, usually because I’m too far into my own head to pay attention to the feelings of those around me. Also, it seems to be difficult for me to read others’ physiognomy in real-time, as I can only do it reliably in my short-term or long-term memory. But given time to reflect, I’m generally an empathetic person. Likewise, while my initial reactions are often cynical, upon reflection I believe strongly that everyone is simply doing their best with what they’re given.

I do experience issues with interpersonal hypersensitivity, but with an interesting dynamic: Because of having such a strong analytic-deductive-intuitive mind, I tend to be correct in my deductions more often than not -- more often than most people I’ve met, in fact. So while “hypersensitive” might imply inaccurate impressions of others, that’s not the case for me: I may be very sensitive to others, but my intuition is often spot-on, whether in factual or emotional situations. It’s difficult to give a brief concrete example, since most require extensive context, but sometimes my intuition is based on a single word -- last year, someone used the word “tantrum” to refer to a relatively mild emotional reaction that I controlled quickly and for which I promptly apologized. I focused on that single word for months, correctly interpreting it as evidence of a negative interpretation of my character as a whole, which manifested itself months later. I do this every day, both in interpersonal situations and in factual situations, such as the most recent example -- based on different traffic patterns, I figured out that someone had stolen a few of the signs for our LEGO garage sale last Saturday within an hour of the theft. I’m the God of Educated Guesses.

Lastly, I do tend to see others’ vices and vulnerabilities more easily than their virtues or strengths, and that process assists splitting, one of the most destructive symptoms of BPD, which I will discuss in the next section.

2. Impairments in interpersonal functioning. 

 b) Intimacy: Intense, unstable, and conflicted close relationships, marked by mistrust, neediness, and anxious preoccupation with real or imagined abandonment; close relationships often viewed in extremes of idealization and devaluation and alternating between over-involvement and withdrawal.

This is another of the symptoms that has affected my life the most. As an introduction and qualification, there’s some interesting interplay between this symptom of BPD and my upbringing. I was raised in a loving, emotionally open family, and my mom taught a class on how to have healthy relationships as part of my homeschooling curriculum. We read and discussed books on interpersonal relationships and the psychology of love, and applied them not just to future romantic relationships but also to familial relationships and friendships. This gave me many of the tools I needed to balance out this symptom of BPD.

Yet many of my relationships, romantic and otherwise, have been intense and unstable. I’ve had lifelong trust issues, especially with men and romantic partners. Many of my decisions and actions are influenced by an overwhelming fear of abandonment or rejection, probably the core symptom of BPD, which, to my displeasure, has been minimized in the DSM-V. And, unfortunately, viewing others in bipolar extremes of idealization and devaluation, also called splitting, is a primary symptom of BPD for me.

So let’s take this one part at a time. First, “intense” intimate relationships. Nothing has ever mattered to me as much as my intimate relationships, particularly romantic ones -- not work, not school, not hobbies, not friends, not even family. I put an incredible amount of energy, mostly mental and spiritual, into my relationships, and have always expected that in return. And because BPD constantly magnifies my emotional reactions, my relationships are fairly emotionally intense as well. But though I’ve experienced instability because of this in the past, my relationship with Edie is and has always been stable. I credit this to the communication, honesty, conflict management, and many other healthy relationship strategies that my mom taught me. I would, however, describe many of my past platonic friendships as unstable, as I find it difficult to employ the same healthy approaches as I do in my romantic relationships, partially because I have little desire to invest myself into non-familial platonic friendships. But that’s a conversation for another time.

“Conflicted close relationships”? I’m not entirely sure what the DSM means by this sentence, but I’ll interpret it as feeling internally conflicted about my friendships and relationships, often due to splitting, which happens to me constantly. I’ll discuss that further in the section about splitting below.

As far as trust goes, I find it very difficult to trust people, including those close to me. The only things that positively affect my trust are time and repetition, as I tend to pay attention to others’ actions rather than their words. Even with Edie, the most trustworthy person I’ve met, it took me 4 years to trust that she wouldn’t suddenly abandon or reject me every time she was upset with me. The less I trust someone, the less I act like myself around them and the more I put on a charade. It makes me profoundly uncomfortable to act like that for very long, which is why I don’t enjoy parties with strangers, long periods in public, or spending time with mere acquaintances. So my introversion partly comes from my trust issues. And at the core, many of the symptoms of BPD arise from these problems with trusting others.

“Anxious preoccupation with real or imagined abandonment,” or, as the DSM-IV put it, “frantic efforts” to avoid that abandonment, is the primary result of these trust issues. It was at the top of the symptoms list for BPD in the DSM-IV, and through my discussions with my therapist and others with BPD, I’ve come to believe that the preoccupation with and frantic efforts to avoid abandonment and rejection -- and the trust issues that spawn it -- are the root cause of many of the other symptoms of BPD. For example, this precipitates or strongly influences separation insecurity, impulsivity in interpersonal relationships, hostility, and sudden emotional changes. For many with BPD, the ultimate fear is being rejected by people they trust, which would validate the core anxiety that they’re unlovable. I could spend an entire blogpost on the ways this fear affects my life, but this one’s already long enough, so I’ll leave it high-level for now.

Lastly, the big one: Splitting. The Wikipedia definition is: “the failure in a person's thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism used by many people.” For example, I meet someone. With the titillation and excitement of swiftly getting to know someone new and interesting, I become enamored of them, seeing their positive qualities strongly and dismissing any obvious negative qualities as unimportant. Then they do something that hurts my feelings. I analyze the reasons, deduce one or two of their faults, and then -- particularly if the person continues to hurt my feelings or is not self-aware enough to see their own faults -- I start to view those faults as the major parts of their personality, and interpret nearly every negative occurrence as a result of those faults. It becomes difficult for me to even be near the person. But then we have a heart-to-heart and they show self-awareness and a desire to improve, and perhaps do something that impresses me, and I switch back to seeing them as respectable and even wonderful. If we don’t have a heart-to-heart, or the person doesn’t apologize or shows no desire to improve themselves, I tend to force them out of my life, mostly for self-protection, since I can no longer trust them. This cycle occurs constantly with everyone in my life, including my family, my friends, and my wife (although the better I know her and trust her, the less splitting affects our relationship).

And, worst of all, I split with myself. I talked about this to an extent in my first post about BPD, about how I’ve talked down to myself and seen myself as an asshole for a lot of my life. On a near-daily basis, I go from seeing myself as an amazing person, one of the most interesting and intelligent and talented people I’ve known, to seeing myself as a piece of shit that is boring, stupid, whiny, and prone to failure. Usually this occurs in response to a small failure or a small success -- the big stuff doesn’t faze me as much. It causes regular depression and anxiety, and led to an abusive relationship with myself (the way I talk to myself and treat myself internally) for much of my life. It was only through therapy that I was finally able to address internal splitting, and I’m still working hard every day on understanding and controlling how I split with others.

3. Negative affectivity, characterized by:

a) Emotional lability: Unstable emotional experiences and frequent mood changes; emotions that are easily aroused, intense, and/or out of proportion to events and circumstances.

This is the most common and easily-recognizable symptom of BPD, and it’s also a symptom of other disorders. Anyone who’s spent significant time around me knows that I struggle to control my emotions and that I often react out of proportion to the circumstances. But I spent most of the original post discussing it, and my brother mentioned that he’d like to better understand my thought process during an emotional reaction. So instead of trying to describe those intense emotions from a high level, I’ll zoom in and detail one specific example. But first, one point:

Mood changes can occur any time for any reason. Even at 30 years old, I’m still not entirely sure how other people experience mood changes, but for me they’re sudden. They often change in reaction to a single stimulus -- one look, one sentence, one action, one mistake, one failure. Perhaps my deep analysis might give you the idea that I understand what’s happening in the moment, but I generally don’t -- it’s subconscious, even when my mood shift seems loud and obvious to everyone in the room. Sure, in retrospect, I can analyze it and understand it, and sometimes I’m aware in the moment. But as I described in Understanding BPD (section 2), I simply cannot access the parts of my brain that would allow a normal person to regulate the emotion, to self-soothe, to affect it in any way whatsoever. My emotional filter is missing, the filter that allows most people to separate feeling something from reacting to it. The feeling has to come out of me, into the outside world, before I can understand it or deal with it.

That being said, there’s a good example I can use to describe what an emotional reaction is like for me. One of the things I’m most sensitive about, which often arouses strong emotions in me, is... food. Yeah, food and eating. I have a rocky relationship with nearly everything about food, and even moreso since I discovered that my lifelong digestive issues were due to a wheat allergy.

Storytime: In 2016, I visited my family in Maryland and we went car-camping in the Shenandoah National Park. When we arrived, I was already stressed about 3 hours of driving, my back pain, the potential for sleeping poorly that night due to the hard ground and the nearby toddlers, and a few other things... which all made me more susceptible to an emotional reaction. We set up camp, and I began to play my brother Spence at chess. I beat him in the first game, and took his queen for a solid lead in the second game... but then, a few moves later, I slightly removed my hand from a piece after moving it, noticed danger, and tried to take back the move. Spence reluctantly consented. Even though the bent rules benefited me, it ruined the game for me -- it was no longer sporting, because one debatable event might change the outcome (incidentally, this sentence is the exact reason I’ve come to dislike American Football for its constant and debatable penalties that have an undue influence on the outcome of the game). I’m also particularly sensitive to my family giving in to unreasonable or unfair demands on my part, as I’ve carried lifelong shame for how often my emotions pushed them to give me my way when I was younger. So in my head, I was panicking, judging and condemning myself as an immature cheater and projecting the fear that Spence felt the same way -- when I’d obviously prefer that my brothers respect me. Partly because the strong emotions hurt my strategy, and partly as a conscious effort to make amends for cheating and bring the competition back into parity, I made a foolish mistake and lost my own queen. But instead of helping me, that only made every outcome of the game unacceptable to me. If I won, I’d feel guilty over taking back the move. If I lost, I’d feel upset that I’d sabotaged myself. Neither was a “fair” outcome. The only solution, my brain told me, was to stop playing. In the past, this feeling has led to me rage-quitting, flipping gameboards over, throwing baseballs into the woods, etc. While these are not acceptable ways to behave, I’ve often been misunderstood as a “poor loser,” when in reality I’ve usually been reacting to a perceived imbalance in the equity of the competition, which causes me to feel that no result is satisfactory or fair. This time, fortunately, I didn’t rage-quit. But while we were playing chess, others had been starting to prepare dinner.

As I mentioned, I have a rocky relationship with food: I hate the act of swallowing, I dislike spending time on eating, and the idea of eating as a whole kind of grosses me out. I’ve also had lifelong IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), compounded by the wheat allergy, which has resulted in regular problems with nausea, cramps, and bloating. When my stomach is acting up, the idea of eating makes me nauseated, even foods I normally love, sometimes literally every edible item I can imagine -- but I’m sensitive to low blood sugar, so I need to eat very soon after becoming hungry, regardless of my nausea. As you can imagine, needing to eat yet not feeling physically able to eat is very upsetting, and when I get upset my stomach cramps us and makes me even more nauseated. This has been compounded by discovering my wheat allergy, since that eliminated about 75% of the normal culinary options that other people offer me. Now I’m restricted to certain foods, most of which are difficult when I’m nauseated. And unfortunately, many of the people in my life have handled my gluten intolerance poorly, treating me unequally because of something I can’t control. Hosts have refused to provide “expensive substitutes” for wheat items (read: $8 instead of $4, or $5 instead of $2). My allergy has been neglected, even when we reminded hosts 24 hours ahead of time. I’ve been forced to scrounge for snack food instead of having a hot meal at dinner, because it’s oddly difficult for some people to make one single hot meal without wheat in it (no wonder the country’s so fat). And worst of all, I’ve been guilt-tripped for mentioning my dissatisfaction with or inability to eat the food that was provided. All of this has combined to make me sensitive about food.

So just as my emotions concerning the chess game were escalating, I became aware that I had misunderstood the victuals for the evening. Without going too far into the details, there weren’t as many options as I’d thought there’d be, and the wheat substitute was the exact brand I’d said I disliked and asked them not to buy. As my attention shifted from the chess game to the dinner, my blood sugar was low and I felt grumpy and nauseated. I became anxious at the thought of there not being enough palatable food for me, and that made me feel upset and annoyed. But I was aware that I hadn’t gone to the grocery store, or made sure to bring food I wanted, so I also felt guilty for not helping procure my own food, which made me ashamed of my annoyance. In combination with the chess game, I suddenly felt that I was on the verge of losing my temper, so I walked away as quickly as I could out of fear of shaming myself. On the way out of the campsite, I kicked a log and said “FUCK!” fairly loudly -- but it wasn’t a “tantrum.” It was a cry for help, a way to let everyone know I was feeling very emotional and that I needed time and help and love to calm down. I often lash out physically at inanimate objects when I’m angry, and this is usually the reason -- it’s me asking for generosity, love, and kindness in a fairly fucked-up way because I’m panicking and afraid that I’ll be rejected for panicking.

I took a short walk and tried to get my thoughts in order. But once I’ve had an emotional reaction, it becomes difficult to think in a straight line. My thoughts bounce around in my head, with every thought generating a reactionary emotion. Usually I feel overwhelmingly that I want this to stop, to cease feeling strongly. This need for my emotions to stop is very painful; it’s more difficult to tolerate than any scrape, cut, or bruise I’ve ever received. I would put the pain on the same level with the worst back pain or migraines I’ve ever had. And it happens to me on a regular basis. It happened as I walked, and after 10 or 15 minutes I still hadn’t calmed down. So I walked back to the cars, within view of the camp, feeling intense shame that prevented me from going back to apologize. Edie walked over almost immediately, and we began to sort through why I’d reacted and what my feelings were. After a few minutes, my mom came over too, and I was able to explain myself to her as well. Even after another 15 minutes, it was still difficult to walk back and apologize for my actions, but I did.

This is what life with an emotional disorder is like. I could easily spend four more paragraphs on each one of hundreds of example from my life, recent events as well as memories burned into my mind from decades ago. I hope that the detailed explanation of a single event helps people to understand my internal processes that generate the external actions that they see.

3. Negative affectivity, characterized by: 

 b) Anxiousness: Intense feelings of nervousness, tenseness, or panic, often in reaction to interpersonal stresses; worry about the negative effects of past unpleasant experiences and future negative possibilities; feeling fearful, apprehensive, or threatened by uncertainty; fears of falling apart or losing control.

This is basically just GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder). It’s a big part of BPD, and seems to influence many of the other symptoms. But I preferred the DSM-IV criteria, where anxiety was not listed as a distinct symptom. Instead, like depression, it seems to be a common comorbidity of BPD that isn’t present in every case. I don’t mind talking about how I deal with anxiety, but the definition and my examples of my anxieties from the last section are sufficient for now.

3. Negative affectivity, characterized by: 

 c) Separation insecurity: Fears of rejection by – and/or separation from – significant others, associated with fears of excessive dependency and complete loss of autonomy.

I pretty much covered this one when discussing rejection and abandonment a few paragraphs back. The only important thing to note is that the fear of abandonment is juxtaposed strongly, at all times, with a fear of showing that fear of abandonment. I’m constantly afraid that my fears will drive people away from me, or that acting on my fears means I’m not a respectably autonomous person. That creates a negative feedback loop where I simultaneously feel that I must share my fears and must not share my fears. I had to deal with this symptom strongly during the summer this year. Polyamory isn’t always easy.

3. Negative affectivity, characterized by: 

 d) Depressivity: Frequent feelings of being down, miserable, and/or hopeless; difficulty recovering from such moods; pessimism about the future; pervasive shame; feeling of inferior self-worth; thoughts of suicide and suicidal behavior.

Mmm, yes, depression. You’re familiar with it. I’m very familiar with it. There’s probably not much that I need to explain about it, especially since, like anxiety, it seems to be more of a comorbidity of BPD that interacts with it, rather than a core symptom. However, in the context of BPD, the keyword here is “shame.” Pervasive feelings of shame -- about everything -- is one of the hallmarks of BPD, and I experience constant intense shame. It’s part of the reason I have such trouble with eye contact. It’s generally the reason I become quiet or leave social gatherings. It’s why I apologize freely and often. It’s why I avoid discussing my strong feelings before I become upset. It’s frequently the reason that I lose my temper -- because I’m already feeling ashamed for my desires or needs, and that shame is compounded by another person’s facial expressions, tone, words, or actions that seem to judge and condemn me. After I’ve lost my temper, shame about losing it often drives me to loudly leave the situation, or to attempt to turn the blame towards someone or something else. Shame is also the primary reason I’ve procrastinated on writing and posting this blog. It’s probably the most difficult symptom of BPD to confront and control. But fortunately, I am not suicidal. Sometimes the thought of not existing, of nothingness, seems more desirable than constant physical and emotional pain... but I’ve never truly considered taking my life, and I’ve never come close to attempting it. I decided a long time ago that life is worth the pain.

4. Disinhibition, characterized by:

a) Impulsivity: Acting on the spur of the moment in response to immediate stimuli; acting on a momentary basis without a plan or consideration of outcomes; difficulty establishing or following plans; a sense of urgency and self-harming behavior under emotional distress.

When most people hear the word “impulsive,” they seem to think of someone randomly deciding to go fishing in the middle of the night, or something like that. I don’t have that problem. In fact, I like to plan ahead. Even in the past, when I agreed to do impulsive things, they were nearly always suggested by someone else. However, acting or speaking in response to immediate stimuli is a big part of my life, and it seems to be enhanced by ADHD (the core of ADHD is that focus slips between whatever “seems most important” moment-to-moment). But unlike other BPD symptoms, I’m not sure I can really describe why this happens, or the mental process involved. The very nature of impulsivity is that there is no mental process -- decisions are made based on intuition, desire, or perceived need, usually on an instinctual level.

My impulsivity isn’t as problematic as it could be due to my INTJ tendency to overanalyze things and delay making impulsive decisions in many circumstances. In fact, my limited impulsivity can be very useful, such as when I reacted immediately to leave and jog 3 miles on the Vegas Strip in order to grab forgotten tickets and ensure that my group could all see a Cirque du Soleil show on time. The most problematic area for me is verbal impulsivity, as my reactionary responses at times of strong emotion can be poorly considered, hurtful, or misrepresentative of my true feelings. But overall, I become less impulsive as I age.

4. Disinhibition, characterized by: 

 b) Risk taking: Engagement in dangerous, risky, and potentially self-damaging activities, unnecessarily and without regard to consequences; lack of concern for one’s limitations and denial of the reality of personal danger.

This is a symptom that I’ve never particularly struggled with. I haven’t always been completely safe, especially concerning drugs, unprotected sex, and driving recklessly, but I’ve never shown a pattern of risky or self-destructive behavior. And I’m very, very aware of the reality of mortality, especially as an adult.

5. Antagonism, characterized by:

a) Hostility: Persistent or frequent angry feelings; anger or irritability in response to minor slights and insults.

Similar to anxiety and depression, I believe hostility doesn’t usually occur in a vacuum and is generally the result of one of the core symptoms of BPD. Shame, fear of rejection or abandonment, anxiety, splitting, and especially emotional lability lead to hostility, both through methods that I’ve already mentioned as well as others. I can’t speak for everyone with BPD, but for me, antagonism is almost always a result of trying and failing to manage my internal thoughts and feelings, not a direct response to the external actions of others. It’s generally self-protective in nature.

Day-to-Day Life

So where am I now? What’s my life like, living with BPD?

Internally, I spend a lot of time trying to differentiate between what I term “reactive emotions” and “true emotions.” Reactive emotions happen all the time, every day, about anything you can imagine -- Edie once asked me to tell her each time I had a strong feeling, and most of our dialogue that Sunday was my explanations of any I noticed and our discussions of them. In other words, if I tried to recognize, validate, and process every emotion I feel, I would literally do nothing else with my life. And that would be pointless, since many of those emotions would have faded or disappeared by the time I finished processing them. So by necessity, I must suppress, control, and dismiss many of my emotions. But I try to recognize when I’m feeling something based in reality, based in a long-term response that will not fade when the electrical signals in my brain change. These are what I call “true emotions.” And the primary process that allows me to differentiate between them is rationality.

I’ve long struggled to mediate between the two sides of myself, what I think of as the principal duality of my existence: Emotion vs. logic. I have both in copious amounts. Over the past decade, I’ve come to understand the emotional side of myself much more thoroughly, but the logical side -- which is generally socially acceptable and much easier to deal with -- hasn’t seemed as important to comprehend. Lately, though, I’ve started exploring the Myers-Briggs structure for understanding personality -- not simply taking the quiz, but rather reading about and understanding the intricacies of the method, and then discussing them in the context of my self with some of my closest friends. I am very clearly an INTJ, the Mastermind/Architect personality. I could delve deeply into a tangent about this aspect of my personality, but I’ll leave that for a later post. For now, suffice it to say that this duality has defined me since I was young.

Also internally, another of my principal processes is what I term “reframing.” It is the long-term process of better understanding myself, the people around me, the events that happen, and humanity as a whole through discovering or deducing new information about a subject, and then adding that information to everything I already know and generating a different -- sometimes only slightly different -- way of understanding the subject. I’m constantly deconstructing and reconstructing my opinions on everything, from the reasons for a minor disagreement with Edie to the way I pursue my Lego business to the reasons Trump won. And by constantly, I truly mean constantly. I’m doing it today while I write. I do it while working, relaxing, playing music, having sex... yeah, even then. I’ve probably done it to some extent during every interaction you’ve ever had with me. This is the primary instigator of change in my life, and the primary lens through which I understand my internal world as well as the external world.

But these logical processes falter when the chemicals in my brain change. And boy, do they love to do that. I spent a lot of time in my original post describing various stimuli that affect me disproportionately compared to “normal people,” and a lot of subsequent discussions focused on the disproportionate emotions caused by those stimuli. But it’s not really the extreme emotions themselves that cause my behavioral issues; as I discussed in the second section of this post, my issues are caused more by my brain’s inability to regulate those emotions, to process them, to affect them at all. The logic disappears. The analysis disappears. The precedents disappear. I feel like I’ve been completely swallowed by an emotional whale, and all I can do is try to get out. So I lash out and try to escape in any way I can, and sometimes I hurt other people -- or myself -- in the process.

Externally, I try to live symbiotically with BPD. I have more understanding and control now than ever before. My emotions have long been informed negatively by my pain levels, which are generally quite high. And that’s an understatement. But supplements, medication, yoga, marijuana, and working out have all helped me get my pain mostly under control, despite my struggles with doing yoga and working out regularly -- another side effect of ADHD. My supplements, including Vitamin D and Ashwagandha, have had a positive effect on my day-to-day baseline mood. Edie and I have found strategies and approaches that minimize the negative effect of my emotions on her, and help me be more positive. I’ve adopted a free-form approach to my workday that helps me stay busy and prevents extended downtime from depressive cycles. I treat acute emotional attacks with various drugs/medications, playing guitar, or taking time alone to calm down. I avoid forcing myself into situations where I know I will likely overload, and am much more lenient with myself and forgiving of myself than I used to be. Overall, I show myself love much better and have a healthier relationship with myself -- and with others by proxy.

Conclusion

I’m not sure when I will write about BPD again, but I’m glad to have expressed myself so well. Before I stop typing, I want to acknowledge that, although my life is more difficult because of BPD, I’m very lucky -- not only only to be raised in the family I was, but also to be privileged to be a white male living in the 21st century in a modernized country. Dealing with this could have been much harder if any of those weren’t true.

I’m always open to conversations about BPD, so please approach me if there’s anything you’d like to talk about, whether that’s over chat, text, phone, or in person. Let’s all keep making the world a better place by being more vulnerable, more open, and more honest about ourselves with everyone around us.

-Jordy

[paullassiterca]

Vitamin D Deficiency Can Lead to Increased Allergies

Food allergy, a serious and potentially life-threatening medical condition, affects a growing number of Americans. According to Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE), 1 in 13 children now has a food allergy and every three minutes a food reaction sends someone to the emergency room.1

Food allergies are also estimated to affect nearly 4 percent of adults, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).2 While they are most common in babies and children, food allergies can develop at any age. Adults may even develop an allergy to foods they’ve previously eaten for years with no problem.

More than 170 foods have been reported to cause allergic reactions, but the eight major food allergens include milk, eggs, peanuts and tree nuts, wheat, soy and fish.3 However, as evidenced by the British teenager who recently died after eating sesame,4 this seed is also an emerging concern. The number of hospitalizations for food allergies have tripled from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s.5

Nearly 40 percent of children with food allergies have experienced a severe reaction, such as anaphylaxis. Typical food allergy symptoms may begin with hives, rash, nausea, vomiting or diarrhea. This may be followed by coughing and wheezing. In severe cases, anaphylaxis can occur, which is when your throat swells and you may not be able to breathe.

The rising prevalence of food allergies has been particularly noticeable in the West, where there is also rising numbers suffering vitamin D deficiency.6 Nearly 7 percent of children in the U.K. and 9 percent of those in Australia suffer from food allergies.7

Is It a Food Allergy or Intolerance?

Sensitivities and food reactions are often mistaken for allergies. A true food allergy is mediated by the immune system and triggered by an antibody reaction to a protein in a specific food or drink. While most develop during childhood, the most common allergies known to develop in adults are allergies to shellfish, tree nuts and peanuts.8

Food sensitivity, also called food intolerance, is an unpleasant — usually gastrointestinal — reaction to something you’ve swallowed, but is not mediated by your immune system.9 For instance, a true allergy to milk is different from lactose intolerance, which triggers gastrointestinal symptoms from an inability to digest proteins in the milk.10

Type 1 food allergies involve immunoglobulin-e (IgE), an antibody in the blood and mast cells found in all body tissues. Food allergies mediated by IgE are triggered after you’ve eaten a food for the first time, after which cells produce IgE for the part of the food triggering the allergic reaction, called an allergen.

IgE is released and attaches to the surface of mast cells. This process sets the stage for the next time you’ve eaten a food with the specific allergen. The protein interacts with IgE and triggers mast cells to release histamine. Since some food allergens are not broken down by heat or stomach acid, they cross immediately into your bloodstream and may cause reactions throughout your body.11

IgE reactions may start with itchiness in your mouth, followed by symptoms of vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain. If the allergen reaches your blood, it can trigger a drop in blood pressure; in your skin you may experience hives or eczema; and in the lungs it may trigger wheezing. Each of these reactions can take a few minutes or a couple of hours to develop and signal an immediate food allergy.

A second type of food allergy, Type 3, also called delayed food allergy, is mediated by immunoglobulin-g (IgG). These reactions occur hours and possibly even days following your exposure to the allergen. Individuals who suffer from Type 3 food allergies are often allergic to more than two types of food, and larger amounts of food over multiple meals are needed to provoke this reaction.12

You may experience some of the same types of symptoms, making it difficult to distinguish between an IgE and an IgG response. Foods triggering an IgG response are often favorite foods eaten in larger amounts. IgG responses do not typically show up on a skin test.

Rising Prevalence of Allergies Corresponds to Increasing Vitamin D Deficiency

Food allergies associated with IgE affects 3 percent of the population, with severe effects on daily life. Manifestations of the allergy are not only gastrointestinal, but also affect other organ systems and may lead to an anaphylactic response.13

While vitamin D also has known effects on lung and immune system development, as well as support of the immune system after birth,14 including asthma and allergic responses, it is also significant in the regulation of IgE.

The increase in allergies and sensitivities to foods is likely related to environmental factors and Western lifestyles. Developing nations have lower rates of allergic responses, and individuals with allergies are likely to live in urban rather than rural areas.

Although there is no single explanation for the rise in prevalence, one significant factor is the overwhelming vitamin D deficiency suffered by those who live in urban areas.15

The link between vitamin D deficiency, which has almost doubled in just over a decade in the U.S.,16 and poor regulation of IgE responses, may be a significant factor. Both of these play a role in the development, severity and course of allergic diseases, and help explain, at least in part, why so many adults are now developing food allergies.

Australia has the highest rate of confirmed food allergies, with one study finding 9 percent of 1-year-olds suffering from egg allergy.17 Australia initiated one of their most successful health campaigns to increase use of sun screen in 1981 with the slogan “Slip! Slop! Slap!”18

At the time, the campaign was aimed at lowering melanoma rates, which the government believed was the result of spending too much time in the sun.

Today, nearly 25 percent of Australia’s population is deficient in vitamin D. Despite these numbers, Choosing Wisely Australia, an initiative of NPS MedicineWise,19 does not recommend having routine testing for vitamin D unless you’re specifically at risk, including those who:20

Have a health condition affecting vitamin D absorption from their diet

Cover their body completely when outside

Are a baby of a vitamin D deficient mother

Spend the majority of their day indoors

Take medications affecting vitamin D

Avoid the sun completely

Have naturally dark skin

Suffer obesity

Considering the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency, I strongly recommend getting your vitamin D level tested regardless of whether you fit into a high-risk category or not, and to make sure you’re actually within the ideal range of 60 to 80 ng/mL, and if below 60 ng/mL, take proactive steps to optimize your level. The fact of the matter is, most people are at high risk for vitamin D deficiency these days.

Early Exposure to Allergens May Reduce Allergy Risk

In addition to vitamin D deficiency, a theory of dual allergen exposure may also explain the rise in pediatric food allergies. This was the basis for the LEAP study from King’s College London, in which they evaluated how early exposure to peanuts may affect the development of a peanut allergy.21

The prevalence of peanut allergy in children has doubled in the past 10 years in countries where parents are advised to avoid exposure to peanuts during pregnancy, lactation and infancy.

The researchers randomly assigned 640 infants, 4 to 11 months old, with a history of severe eczema, egg allergy or both, to either eat or avoid peanuts until they were 60 months old. The children were assigned to groups based on preexisting sensitivity to peanut extract, determined by a skin-prick test.

Of the 98 participants treated who initially had a positive peanut allergy test, 35 percent of those who avoided peanuts had a peanut allergy at 60 months, compared to just 10 percent of those who consumed peanuts. Dr. Gideon Lack, lead investigator for the study, commented:22

“For decades allergists have been recommending that young infants avoid consuming allergenic foods such as peanut to prevent food allergies. Our findings suggest that this advice was incorrect and may have contributed to the rise in the peanut and other food allergies.”

These results have been validated in subsequent studies, finding late introduction of fish and eggs is associated with an increased risk of allergy development.23 A metadata analysis from the Imperial College London, which evaluated 146 studies with over 200,000 children, also concluded that feeding egg between the ages of 4 and 6 months may reduce the child’s risk of developing an egg allergy.24

Other Health Benefits of Vitamin D Optimization

Vitamin D deficiency has become so widespread it’s been called a pandemic by a Harvard Medical School researcher.25 The short list of health benefits attributed to vitamin D optimization include improving your immune system, strengthening muscles, bones and teeth and improving your cardiovascular health.

Over the past decades, thousands of studies have evaluated the benefits of vitamin D and have linked low levels to a host of chronic health conditions. In fact, this site was one of the leaders to help catalyze interest in vitamin D over 15 years ago.

Unfortunately, some studies claim supplementation at amounts over 4,000 IUs/day may lead to health problems. Research by GrassrootsHealth negates such concerns, showing toxicity is not an issue until you hit 30,000 IUs a day.26

What’s more, the recommended vitamin D level and dosage established by the National Academy of Medicine is actually the result of a mathematical error that has never been corrected. You can read more about this in my previous article, “Are Americans Really Getting Too Much Vitamin D? A Critical Look at Recent Media Warnings.”

There is a long list of studies confirming the correlation between vitamin D status and cancer risk. Maintaining sufficient levels of vitamin D also helps to lower all-cause mortality and risk of Type 2 diabetes.

During pregnancy, optimal levels of vitamin D help to reduce the percentage of preterm birth, and subsequently higher risks of ADHD, asthma, autism and vision problems associated with early birth. Low levels of vitamin D are also associated with depression, metabolic syndrome,27 cardiovascular disease28 and lung disease.29

Maintain Healthy Levels to Help Prevent Disease

My recommendation is to get your vitamin D level tested twice a year, when your level is likely to be at its lowest (midwinter) and highest (midsummer). This is particularly important if you’re pregnant, planning a pregnancy or if you have cancer.

Research30 suggests it may require 9,600 IUs of vitamin D per day to get a majority (97.5 percent) of the population to reach 40 ng/mL, but individual requirements can vary widely. If you’ve been taking a certain amount of vitamin D3 for a number of months and retesting reveals you’re still not within the recommended range, then you know you need to increase your dosage.

Over time, with continued testing, you’ll find your individual sweet spot based on your usual safe sun exposure and have a good idea of how much supplementation you need to maintain a year-round level of 60 to 80 ng/mL, which research suggests is the ideal range for optimal health and disease prevention.

GrassrootsHealth offers vitamin D testing through its D*Action study, and has an online vitamin D calculator you can use to estimate your vitamin D3 dosage once you know your current serum level.

The Synergism Between Vitamin D3, Magnesium, Calcium and Vitamin K2

Pamela Lutsey, public health researcher at the University of Minnesota, points out excessive vitamin D may cause over absorption of calcium, which in turn may result in calcium deposits in your heart and kidneys. Indeed, it is important to maintain not only the proper balance of vitamin D and calcium, but also magnesium and vitamin K2.

Lack of balance between these four nutrients is why calcium supplements have become associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke, and why some experience symptoms of “vitamin D toxicity.” I use quotation marks here, because the problem is not so much excess vitamin D as it is a lack of vitamin K2.

Part of the explanation for these adverse side effects is that vitamin K2 is what keeps calcium in its appropriate place. If you’re K2 deficient, added calcium can cause more problems than it solves, by accumulating in the wrong places. Similarly, taking megadoses of vitamin D supplements without sufficient amounts of K2 can lead to inappropriate calcification, which is what Lutsey is suggesting.

While the optimal ratios between vitamin D and vitamin K2 have yet to be established, Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue (whom I’ve interviewed on this topic) suggests for every 1,000 IUs of vitamin D you take, you may benefit from about 100 micrograms (mcg) of K2, and perhaps as much as 150 to 200 mcg.

Maintaining an appropriate calcium-to-magnesium ratio is also important, as magnesium helps keep calcium in your cells so they can function better. Historically, mankind ate a diet with a calcium-magnesium ratio of 1-to-1,31 but Americans tend to have a higher calcium-to-magnesium ratio in their diet, averaging about 3.5-to-1.

Magnesium and vitamin K2 also complement each other, as magnesium helps lower blood pressure, which is an important component of heart disease. So, anytime you’re taking magnesium, calcium or vitamin D3, remember to take all the others into consideration as well, as they all work synergistically with each other.

from Articles http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/12/26/vitamin-d-deficiency-can-lead-to-increased-allergies.aspx source https://niapurenaturecom.tumblr.com/post/181420869551

[jerrytackettca]

Vitamin D Deficiency Can Lead to Increased Allergies

Food allergy, a serious and potentially life-threatening medical condition, affects a growing number of Americans. According to Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE), 1 in 13 children now has a food allergy and every three minutes a food reaction sends someone to the emergency room.1

Food allergies are also estimated to affect nearly 4 percent of adults, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).2 While they are most common in babies and children, food allergies can develop at any age. Adults may even develop an allergy to foods they've previously eaten for years with no problem.

More than 170 foods have been reported to cause allergic reactions, but the eight major food allergens include milk, eggs, peanuts and tree nuts, wheat, soy and fish.3 However, as evidenced by the British teenager who recently died after eating sesame,4 this seed is also an emerging concern. The number of hospitalizations for food allergies have tripled from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s.5

Nearly 40 percent of children with food allergies have experienced a severe reaction, such as anaphylaxis. Typical food allergy symptoms may begin with hives, rash, nausea, vomiting or diarrhea. This may be followed by coughing and wheezing. In severe cases, anaphylaxis can occur, which is when your throat swells and you may not be able to breathe.

The rising prevalence of food allergies has been particularly noticeable in the West, where there is also rising numbers suffering vitamin D deficiency.6 Nearly 7 percent of children in the U.K. and 9 percent of those in Australia suffer from food allergies.7

Is It a Food Allergy or Intolerance?

Sensitivities and food reactions are often mistaken for allergies. A true food allergy is mediated by the immune system and triggered by an antibody reaction to a protein in a specific food or drink. While most develop during childhood, the most common allergies known to develop in adults are allergies to shellfish, tree nuts and peanuts.8

Food sensitivity, also called food intolerance, is an unpleasant — usually gastrointestinal — reaction to something you've swallowed, but is not mediated by your immune system.9 For instance, a true allergy to milk is different from lactose intolerance, which triggers gastrointestinal symptoms from an inability to digest proteins in the milk.10

Type 1 food allergies involve immunoglobulin-e (IgE), an antibody in the blood and mast cells found in all body tissues. Food allergies mediated by IgE are triggered after you've eaten a food for the first time, after which cells produce IgE for the part of the food triggering the allergic reaction, called an allergen.

IgE is released and attaches to the surface of mast cells. This process sets the stage for the next time you’ve eaten a food with the specific allergen. The protein interacts with IgE and triggers mast cells to release histamine. Since some food allergens are not broken down by heat or stomach acid, they cross immediately into your bloodstream and may cause reactions throughout your body.11

IgE reactions may start with itchiness in your mouth, followed by symptoms of vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain. If the allergen reaches your blood, it can trigger a drop in blood pressure; in your skin you may experience hives or eczema; and in the lungs it may trigger wheezing. Each of these reactions can take a few minutes or a couple of hours to develop and signal an immediate food allergy.

A second type of food allergy, Type 3, also called delayed food allergy, is mediated by immunoglobulin-g (IgG). These reactions occur hours and possibly even days following your exposure to the allergen. Individuals who suffer from Type 3 food allergies are often allergic to more than two types of food, and larger amounts of food over multiple meals are needed to provoke this reaction.12

You may experience some of the same types of symptoms, making it difficult to distinguish between an IgE and an IgG response. Foods triggering an IgG response are often favorite foods eaten in larger amounts. IgG responses do not typically show up on a skin test.

Rising Prevalence of Allergies Corresponds to Increasing Vitamin D Deficiency

Food allergies associated with IgE affects 3 percent of the population, with severe effects on daily life. Manifestations of the allergy are not only gastrointestinal, but also affect other organ systems and may lead to an anaphylactic response.13

While vitamin D also has known effects on lung and immune system development, as well as support of the immune system after birth,14 including asthma and allergic responses, it is also significant in the regulation of IgE.

The increase in allergies and sensitivities to foods is likely related to environmental factors and Western lifestyles. Developing nations have lower rates of allergic responses, and individuals with allergies are likely to live in urban rather than rural areas.

Although there is no single explanation for the rise in prevalence, one significant factor is the overwhelming vitamin D deficiency suffered by those who live in urban areas.15

The link between vitamin D deficiency, which has almost doubled in just over a decade in the U.S.,16 and poor regulation of IgE responses, may be a significant factor. Both of these play a role in the development, severity and course of allergic diseases, and help explain, at least in part, why so many adults are now developing food allergies.

Australia has the highest rate of confirmed food allergies, with one study finding 9 percent of 1-year-olds suffering from egg allergy.17 Australia initiated one of their most successful health campaigns to increase use of sun screen in 1981 with the slogan “Slip! Slop! Slap!”18

At the time, the campaign was aimed at lowering melanoma rates, which the government believed was the result of spending too much time in the sun.

Today, nearly 25 percent of Australia's population is deficient in vitamin D. Despite these numbers, Choosing Wisely Australia, an initiative of NPS MedicineWise,19 does not recommend having routine testing for vitamin D unless you're specifically at risk, including those who:20

Have a health condition affecting vitamin D absorption from their diet

Cover their body completely when outside

Are a baby of a vitamin D deficient mother

Spend the majority of their day indoors

Take medications affecting vitamin D

Avoid the sun completely

Have naturally dark skin

Suffer obesity

Considering the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency, I strongly recommend getting your vitamin D level tested regardless of whether you fit into a high-risk category or not, and to make sure you’re actually within the ideal range of 60 to 80 ng/mL, and if below 60 ng/mL, take proactive steps to optimize your level. The fact of the matter is, most people are at high risk for vitamin D deficiency these days.

Early Exposure to Allergens May Reduce Allergy Risk

In addition to vitamin D deficiency, a theory of dual allergen exposure may also explain the rise in pediatric food allergies. This was the basis for the LEAP study from King's College London, in which they evaluated how early exposure to peanuts may affect the development of a peanut allergy.21

The prevalence of peanut allergy in children has doubled in the past 10 years in countries where parents are advised to avoid exposure to peanuts during pregnancy, lactation and infancy.

The researchers randomly assigned 640 infants, 4 to 11 months old, with a history of severe eczema, egg allergy or both, to either eat or avoid peanuts until they were 60 months old. The children were assigned to groups based on preexisting sensitivity to peanut extract, determined by a skin-prick test.

Of the 98 participants treated who initially had a positive peanut allergy test, 35 percent of those who avoided peanuts had a peanut allergy at 60 months, compared to just 10 percent of those who consumed peanuts. Dr. Gideon Lack, lead investigator for the study, commented:22

“For decades allergists have been recommending that young infants avoid consuming allergenic foods such as peanut to prevent food allergies. Our findings suggest that this advice was incorrect and may have contributed to the rise in the peanut and other food allergies.”

These results have been validated in subsequent studies, finding late introduction of fish and eggs is associated with an increased risk of allergy development.23 A metadata analysis from the Imperial College London, which evaluated 146 studies with over 200,000 children, also concluded that feeding egg between the ages of 4 and 6 months may reduce the child’s risk of developing an egg allergy.24

Other Health Benefits of Vitamin D Optimization

Vitamin D deficiency has become so widespread it's been called a pandemic by a Harvard Medical School researcher.25 The short list of health benefits attributed to vitamin D optimization include improving your immune system, strengthening muscles, bones and teeth and improving your cardiovascular health.

Over the past decades, thousands of studies have evaluated the benefits of vitamin D and have linked low levels to a host of chronic health conditions. In fact, this site was one of the leaders to help catalyze interest in vitamin D over 15 years ago.

Unfortunately, some studies claim supplementation at amounts over 4,000 IUs/day may lead to health problems. Research by GrassrootsHealth negates such concerns, showing toxicity is not an issue until you hit 30,000 IUs a day.26

What’s more, the recommended vitamin D level and dosage established by the National Academy of Medicine is actually the result of a mathematical error that has never been corrected. You can read more about this in my previous article, “Are Americans Really Getting Too Much Vitamin D? A Critical Look at Recent Media Warnings.”

There is a long list of studies confirming the correlation between vitamin D status and cancer risk. Maintaining sufficient levels of vitamin D also helps to lower all-cause mortality and risk of Type 2 diabetes.

During pregnancy, optimal levels of vitamin D help to reduce the percentage of preterm birth, and subsequently higher risks of ADHD, asthma, autism and vision problems associated with early birth. Low levels of vitamin D are also associated with depression, metabolic syndrome,27 cardiovascular disease28 and lung disease.29

Maintain Healthy Levels to Help Prevent Disease

My recommendation is to get your vitamin D level tested twice a year, when your level is likely to be at its lowest (midwinter) and highest (midsummer). This is particularly important if you're pregnant, planning a pregnancy or if you have cancer.

Research30 suggests it may require 9,600 IUs of vitamin D per day to get a majority (97.5 percent) of the population to reach 40 ng/mL, but individual requirements can vary widely. If you've been taking a certain amount of vitamin D3 for a number of months and retesting reveals you're still not within the recommended range, then you know you need to increase your dosage.

Over time, with continued testing, you'll find your individual sweet spot based on your usual safe sun exposure and have a good idea of how much supplementation you need to maintain a year-round level of 60 to 80 ng/mL, which research suggests is the ideal range for optimal health and disease prevention.

GrassrootsHealth offers vitamin D testing through its D*Action study, and has an online vitamin D calculator you can use to estimate your vitamin D3 dosage once you know your current serum level.

The Synergism Between Vitamin D3, Magnesium, Calcium and Vitamin K2

Pamela Lutsey, public health researcher at the University of Minnesota, points out excessive vitamin D may cause over absorption of calcium, which in turn may result in calcium deposits in your heart and kidneys. Indeed, it is important to maintain not only the proper balance of vitamin D and calcium, but also magnesium and vitamin K2.

Lack of balance between these four nutrients is why calcium supplements have become associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke, and why some experience symptoms of "vitamin D toxicity." I use quotation marks here, because the problem is not so much excess vitamin D as it is a lack of vitamin K2.

Part of the explanation for these adverse side effects is that vitamin K2 is what keeps calcium in its appropriate place. If you're K2 deficient, added calcium can cause more problems than it solves, by accumulating in the wrong places. Similarly, taking megadoses of vitamin D supplements without sufficient amounts of K2 can lead to inappropriate calcification, which is what Lutsey is suggesting.

While the optimal ratios between vitamin D and vitamin K2 have yet to be established, Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue (whom I've interviewed on this topic) suggests for every 1,000 IUs of vitamin D you take, you may benefit from about 100 micrograms (mcg) of K2, and perhaps as much as 150 to 200 mcg.

Maintaining an appropriate calcium-to-magnesium ratio is also important, as magnesium helps keep calcium in your cells so they can function better. Historically, mankind ate a diet with a calcium-magnesium ratio of 1-to-1,31 but Americans tend to have a higher calcium-to-magnesium ratio in their diet, averaging about 3.5-to-1.

Magnesium and vitamin K2 also complement each other, as magnesium helps lower blood pressure, which is an important component of heart disease. So, anytime you're taking magnesium, calcium or vitamin D3, remember to take all the others into consideration as well, as they all work synergistically with each other.

from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/12/26/vitamin-d-deficiency-can-lead-to-increased-allergies.aspx

source http://niapurenaturecom.weebly.com/blog/vitamin-d-deficiency-can-lead-to-increased-allergies

[investmart007]

WALLINGFORD, Conn | Program combats ageism by having students live with seniors

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/Pke05u

WALLINGFORD, Conn | Program combats ageism by having students live with seniors

WALLINGFORD, Conn— Victoria Kozar, like many students, met one of her best friends while in college.

The now 23-year-old, who attended Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, says she and Beth lived in the same building and spent hours talking about everything from boyfriends to baking.

Her other friends are usually surprised when they find out that Beth Eichelman is 91 years old.

“I don’t refer to her as like, my elderly friend Beth,” she said. “She’s not like another grandma. She’s just one of the girls.”

Kozar, of New Milford, was among the first students to participate in Quinnipiac’s Students-In-Residence Program, which had her live during her senior year in 2016-17, at Masonicare at Ashlar Village, a retirement community in Wallingford.

Intergenerational learning isn’t new. There are dozens of programs across the nation that have opened assisted living facilities on campus or given senior citizens access to college classrooms. But only a few, such as Quinnipiac, actually have the generations live together.

The idea of the program is to tear down generational stereotypes, combat ageism and introduce students to possibility of careers working with the elderly.

On Friday, Ashlar Village welcomed Cathleen Dacey, a law student.

Dacey has her own apartment there and will provide at least eight hours of service each week in exchange for housing.

“I’m really interested in elder law and I find that the best way to help those people is to be with them to listen to them,” said Dacey, 23. “So I’m hopeful that this year, I’ll learn about their lives, but also how to help them.”

Kozar, who is applying to medical schools, said the program helped steer her toward a career in geriatrics. She helped run a jewelry making club and baking class at the center. Residents would ask her for help with computer tablets and technology.

“It’s nice to have someone come in who’s young, who is vibrant, who smiles, who talks to us,” said 85-year-old resident Clarisse Miessau,

who wore a Quinnipiac University T-shirt Friday to welcome Dacey.

“That’s what they have done for us.”

Kozar said she and the other students get just as much, if not more, from the program through living history lessons. Several of the women at the center, she said, had distinguished careers — in science and medicine — breaking down barriers that she is now able to walk through. All of them, she said, are happy to share their stories and expertise.

“This place was more full of life than many of my college classrooms,” she said. “My other friends wanted to spend more time there than anywhere else.”

The experience inspired her to start an organization, “Old Friends and New,” which brought other Quinnipiac students to the center.

John Morgan, a university spokesman, said is becoming clear throughout the higher education community that the elderly are an untapped resource. He said the next step may be to have a Masonciare resident live in a university dorm.

In Ohio, students from the Cleveland Institute of Music, have been living at the Judson Manor retirement home since 2010.

Kristina Kuprevicius, the center’s director of marketing, said the arrangement provides a built-in audience for the students and welcome interaction with the younger generation for the seniors.

“Between the two generations, there is a lot of comradery that starts to build, because as one resident told me, ‘We don’t have baggage with each other,'” she said. “Students can ask residents about certain issues and how they should react to their parents, and the seniors are kept up to date by the students.”

Kozar said the students have learned that the elderly aren’t necessarily frail and the older residents have learned that Millennials aren’t necessarily self-absorbed, she said.

J.P. Venoit, the chief executive of Masonicare, said when they became involved in the Quinnipiac program, he assumed the students would come in, do their required work with the elderly and spend the rest of the time in their rooms studying.

“That hasn’t been the case,” he said. “They aren’t going through the motions. The have become fully engaged. That has been the interesting part. It’s turned out to be something much better, much more than we thought it would be.”

By PAT EATON-ROBB , Associated Press

[apsbicepstraining]

From dream to nightmare: when your sperm donor has secrets

Having a newborn by sperm donation is an intensely personal and emotional process. So what happens when you discover that interested donors has a genetic health agitation?

Sperm donor 9623 searched good on paper. An IQ of 160. A bachelors-at-arms degree in neuroscience, a masters in artificial intelligence, en route to a PhD in neuroscience engineering. A joy for crystallography, algorithm and fitness. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had obtained the perfect parent for their baby.

Seven times after their son was carry, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a egocentric personality disorder and a criminal record. He had spent eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation.

The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donors refer, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple. A Google search did the residual. His stepfather had vouched in court that Aggeless psychotic chapters embarked aged 19, well before he started donating in Georgia. Aggeless sperm led to the birth of at least 36 children worldwide.

It was like a dream shifted nightmare in an instant, said Collins. The couple, alongside at least three other lineages, have filed suits against the Georgia-based seman bank, Xytex Corporation, which too afforded sperm to British pairs. Xytex disavows wrongdoing.

Such examples are not unique. Like Collins, Hanson and their son, numerous lineages and individuals are now coming to terms with vital information that their donors withheld.

The forks of such discoveries can be gargantuan. The most important entity to me is[ my son] potentially facing a extremely debilitating life-style, Collins says. I felt like I was hoaxed by Xytex and I flunked my son for having opted Xytex. In hindsight, a hitchhiker on the side of the road would have been a far more responsible alternative for designing a child.

Lineages have filed litigations against the Georgia-based seman bank, Xytex Corporation. Picture: David Goldman/ AP

What level of probability do Aggeless genes consult? The structure of mental health diseases is complex. The genetic ingredient of schizophrenia, shows Professor Cathryn Lewis, prof of genetic epidemiology and statistics at Kings College London, is not a single gene, but is compounded across many genes. There are likely to be thousands of inherited variants that verify peril of schizophrenia. Each change somewhat increases or declines our jeopardy, but none of them alone will enable us to predict whether someone is likely to develop schizophrenia.

Even arousing brand-new findings in the C4 gene expect careful interpretation. Its a single piece in a large genetic jigsaw riddle, Lewis says. Testing one gene tells us anything about private individuals risk of developing schizophrenia.

Mental health conditions too manifest a mix of interacting environment and social causes. Not to mention that many people with schizophrenia respond to treatment and live full, productive lives.

Donor anonymity was abolished in the UK in 2005. Donor-conceived offspring are now legally entitled, at the age of 18, to information on their donors identity. Nonetheless, this was not retrospectively exerted: those imagined before April 2005( thats 21,000 people born between 1991 and 2004 alone) cannot identify their donor unless interested donors steps forward willingly. Some are never even told they were donor-conceived in the first place.

Tyler Blackwell discovered as a boy in Maryland that he has 35 half-siblings. His second astonish: using the same condition that his donor leader, John( not his real mention) has not been able to uncovered. Johns sister received the Blackwells through a family genealogy website. It transpired that John, who had not replied to their mail, had an aortic aneurysm, which had ruptured at the age of 43. He had existed. At least three other family members were similarly altered. Tyler appreciated a cardiologist as a precaution, was diagnosed with an aneurysm and underwent surgery. Without an operation on an aneurysm of this kind, the mortality from severance is up to 97%. When sever arises, patients often die within six hours. There is no one who knew about it, said his mother of the sperm bank committed. If I could foretell the future, I would have picked a different donor.

Financial motivations could underlie some instances of deception. Nonetheless, the UKs Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority ( HFEA ) defines the limit for sperm donors at 35 per clinic visit and egg donors at 750 per hertz of subscription, plus expenses. These limits, it territory, is also intended to reward altruism and depres compulsion. Rules vary internationally. One California cryobank repays your time and expenditures with compensation of up to $1,500/ month with periodic motivations such as movie tickets or talent credentials for additional meter and exertion expended by participants.

Danish sperms donor 7042 unwittingly passed on neurofibromatosis to at least 11 of his children, after his sperm was used in clinics across the US, Canada, Belgium, Greece, Spain, Thailand and the UK. Neurofibromatosis is associated with mentality and nerve cancers, bone deformities, visual impairment, high blood pressure and discover difficulties. Offspring have a 50% threat of acquiring it. Denmark has since mandated that donor sperm can be used in a maximum of 12 inseminations. In the UK , no more than 10 houses can be created using egg or sperm from a single donor. Donated eggs are not risk-free, but sperm donors typically have more offspring who can pass on inherited preconditions to the next generation.

There is no such thing as reproduction without gamble. Here i am, however, an ethical responsibility towards the child to be imagined and their hopeful parents. If a donor develops a genetic circumstance times after donation, “were not receiving” structure at present that executes disclosure.

Donors now must measure negative for HIV, hepatitis B and C, and syphilis, with farther screening be a primary consideration in ethnicity such as cystic fibrosis in those of Caucasian ancestry and sickle-cell sicknes in African and Afro-Caribbean populations. Guidelines state that potential donors should be assessed for ailments with a genetic component cleave palate, spina bifida, congenital nature malformations, psychosis and others but that decisions on eligibility should be individualised.

These screening regulations do not always apply to the unknown number of UK citizens who travel abroad to find donors, utilization unlicensed clinics or buy home-insemination paraphernaliums online. Although psychological evaluation is required by most international authorities, this will not bar donors who have not yet developed evidences of a serious mental health issues disorder. For them, the diagnostic implement is time.

Genetic screening is more cheap and comprehensive than ever before. So, should we turn away from the donors account and towards the laboratory? Allan Pacey, professor of andrology at the University of Sheffield, is distrustful. I fantasize the perfect genome probably doesnt prevail, so its truly a question of where the line should be drawn. Only about 4% of all those who come forward to be sperm donors are admitted. If we were to impose a whole new change of exclusion criteria based on theoretical threats, it is possible there wont be any sperm donors at all.

Frozen sperm stored in a sperm bank. Image: monkeybusinessimages/ Getty Images/ iStockphoto

With improved screening, donors might be diagnosed with genetic ailments that would have remained undiscovered for ever, or are untreatable. Perhaps there is an controversy for not knowing.

Kevin, who were working in photography in London, is not just a donor-conceived person but a donor himself. He believes that prospective mothers should know as much as possible about the donors medical history. But there is a level where you have to draw the line, and say were no longer causing designer babies here, he adds.

He understands the distress of Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins, yet concern about speaking too much into particular case. Its a shame if parties tell it overshadow the industry and take it to be some sort of wide-reaching fraud. It is one floor. Every daytime there are lots of children being born to couples who have fertility problems and thats much more important to remember.

Eleven offspring have been born from his gifts. Why did he donate? I wouldnt be here if someone hadnt donated. Soul did that and thats why I am here.

Jess Cresswell discovered aged 28 that she was donor-conceived. Seven years later, she still does not know who her biological father is, but appears her parents established her best available life we are able to. Since some of her own family medical record is missing, how does she feel about donor screening?

I think they should be screened but I also considered that, just because they have some kind of hereditary condition, they shouldnt necessarily be excluded. Its the parents discretion; some people would rather have a child knowing theres a risk of picking something up than not, if that was their alone option.

It is now easier than ever for donor-conceived parties to find their genetic house. The US Donor Sibling Registry has helped connect more than 10,900 parties with their half-siblings and/ or their donors. Nearly 70% of those who sign up match with a biological relative, and virtually 80% of these working groups pair instant. The UK has a Donor Sibling Link site.

Direct-to-consumer genetic tests have revolutionised this room. In 2005, a 15 -year-old moved a saliva sample to an online service, had his genetic code uploaded, use a tracking website and met his biological father 10 weeks later. Kevin met a half-sister through a donor-sibling registry and two half-siblings through parentage places. He later unwittingly discovered some of his donors items. Two hours on, Google divulged his donors epithet. The two have since stayed in contact.

One last occasion: Aggeles received mental health therapy and picked up a degree in cognitive discipline two decades after he firstly registered at university. He is now working on a masters in artificial intelligence.

The post From dream to nightmare: when your sperm donor has secrets appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[oceanicplanets]

It took me a long time to realize that included me. When I was younger, I could go hungry at a restaurant because I was scared to give the cashier my order, and then a few hours later, I would be on stage at my weekly drama class, strutting my stuff with my performing arts pals. My hand would often be the first to shoot up in the classroom, but I once burst into tears when I had to read an essay of mine aloud. I baffled my parents and my friends—the drama kids couldn’t figure out why I turned into a wallflower offstage, and everyone else in my life didn’t know what to make of me when I wasn’tacting shy.To put it simply, I was TERRIFIED of negative attention. I’d rather freeze up and not do anything at all than say the wrong thing and be criticized for it. At the same time, I was hungry for praise, and I structured my life around getting a lot of it. I was good in school, so I spoke up in class and took every extracurricular that I had room for. Teachers loved me and I won academic awards left and right. Drama allowed me to express myself without having to come up with my own words, and as long as I worked really hard to please the director, I couldn’t go wrong—at least not until I left school. My community-theater dreams were shattered by three failed auditions, and afterwards I stuck to classes and clubs, where I was always guaranteed parts.This anxiety didn’t end in the classroom. I’m a naturally shy person, and I used to want all my interactions to go perfectly, so I practically wrote them out in advance, always terrified that the other person would go off-script and force me to think on my feet. If I was ordering food, for example, I’d expect the waitress to ask what I wanted, I’d tell her, then she would leave. If she unexpectedly asked me what toppings or sides I wanted with my burger, I was rattled and took WAY too long to decide. Or, worse, she might be chatty and ask a completely unrelated question about my day, and now my whole narrative was off and I wouldn’t know how to answer. Do I just say “good” or do I give a full rundown, and then how do I segue back to my order, and oh no, I’m taking too long to answer and I look like an idiot, WHY DOES THIS HAVE TO HAPPEN TO ME? Basically, even the prospect of feeling awkward counted as negative attention, which made me more awkward, because now I was this creepy quiet girl who would turn into stone when asked to do ordinary things like order a hamburger.I can’t tell you how many times my parents cajoled me into doing something I didn’t want to do, like cash a check at the bank, and then I’d make a tiny little mistake, like writing down my routing number instead of my account number, and I’d stutter a little bit but pretend to laugh it off even though I was dying inside, because I’d made a stupid mistake and now that teller was thinking that I was a dumb teenager who didn’t know how banking works. I’d get outside and yell at my parents “DID YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENED? You made me do this and it all went wrong and don’t you feel terrible?” And they’d just shake their heads wondering where they went wrong raising me.In those cases, my social anxiety was extreme and noticeable, but I think the more damaging stress I dealt with is something that many, many people experience: I was working so hard to be perfect that I took any sort of reprimand or critique or social misstep as a judgment on my character.As you can imagine, school was a minefield. When I was six or seven, I once got caught climbing a tree on the playground, and I’ll never forget how sick I felt after my teacher yelled at me to get down. It was like I’d done something very, very wrong and it could never be rectified. I couldn’t understand why all my friends, who’d also gotten scolded, were able to happily play somewhere else—it took me all day to get over it.In high school, I wanted to get good marks on all my assignments, because being an honors student earned me the praise I desired, but also because when I didn’t live up to my high standards, I’d be crushed. Math was my weak point, and the few Cs that made it onto my report cards stood out as black marks that would forever paint me as a failure. Even constructive criticism could shake me up, like the note I once got on a creative writing assignment to come up with a “punchier ending.” The teacher loved the piece, but the ending was mediocre and now that I was aware of it, I felt terrible for turning in that piece of crap.That same sick feeling I got as a kid after climbing that tree was triggered any time I did something wrong, like accidently hurt someone’s feelings or make a mistake at work. A gentle reprimand—“you did this incorrectly, please fix it, and don’t do it again”—sounded to me like someone screaming at me. I once forgot to return a book I’d borrowed from school before summer break, and I’m not exaggerating at all when I say it took me about EIGHT YEARS to be able to hear the name Nancy Drew without feeling shame. I was certain that the teacher who lost it harbored a grudge against me, so I hid the book in my room and spent the next decade or so fighting random spikes of anxiety whenever I thought about it.After high school, criticism becomes even more common, while praise is harder to come by. College professors don’t get excited just because you understand the coursework, and your manager at the big box store you’re working at on weekends probably won’t even notice you unless you screw up. It was a big change, and it forced me to make an important adjustment: I had to start looking to myself for encouragement. Was this essay/poster/poem something I could be proud of? Did I do the best I could? Did I have fun doing it? I started doing photography as a hobby, just so I could look at all my pretty pictures, and spent ridiculous amounts of time on projects that had no purpose except for the fun of creating them, like the time I started making wall art out of old sticky notes. And this was surprisingly easy—it turned out that pride in yourself for hard work feels just as good as praise from another person.Learning to deal with criticism, on the other hand, was much harder. My constant fear of failure was starting to interfere with my schoolwork, because I’d procrastinate to stave off the possibility of not excelling, and then I’d turn in less-than-stellar work anyway, because I didn’t give myself enough time to complete it. So my freshman year of college, I made the big decision to see a school counselor. And, man, I wish I’d done it a lot earlier.One of the very first things my counselor did was ship me off to a doctor for anti-anxiety medication. Once I was on the right cocktail of pills, I felt like a new person. Suddenly, talking was a little less scary, and the shame of failure was much more fleeting. (Not everyone who has anxiety needs drugs to cope, but if you feel it’s interfering with everyday life, I do recommend at least talking to your doctor.) I also started therapy, and my counselor really helped change my outlook on the world. In some cases, I just needed practice. She’d give me assignments to do things I found terrifying, like asking for a job application at a local fast-food restaurant, and I slowly gained more confidence in my ability to handle these kinds of interactions. Most of my fears of rejection were in my head—no one ever told me, “Wow, you really effed up that conversation!”I also talked about other things that were bothering me, and I got some clarity. Everyday schoolwork just wasn’t important enough for me to feel so stressed about it, and furthermore, it was OK to fail. I took this message in, and when I started to crash and burn in college biology, I didn’t force myself to stick it out. I accepted that biology and I were just never going to get along, and I dropped the course. Just a year before, I would have berated myself for weeks this for doing this, but now I only felt relief.A year or two after I graduated high school, I had a conversation with my old algebra teacher. I said something about being bad at math, and he told me that I was never bad at math—my other classes just came so easily to me that I didn’t know what it was like to struggle to learn something. He pointed out that many of my classmates celebrated when they got a C. My perspective had been so skewed that I assumed I had really embarrassed myself by not being the best, and that others thought less of me as a result.I realize now no one is thinking as hard about me as I am. That teacher on the playground was just worried that I’d fall, and she probably forgot about the incident five minutes later, while I’m still thinking about it 15 years later. My creative writing teacher just wanted to help me improve my story. Waitresses and bank tellers have dealt with literally thousands of small mistakes and awkward moments over the years.Earlier today, I made a rather large mistake at my day job, resulting in my having to send a correction email to several thousand people. It was really, really embarrassing. But instead of retreating in panic and begging my boss not to fire me, I calmly apologized and then wrote a self-deprecating Facebook post so that EVERYONE had an opportunity to laugh at me. It felt a lot better than mentally beating myself up.On the flip side, with the understanding that my failures were not permanent came the knowledge that most of my accomplishments have been similarly fleeting. My academic awards have done absolutely nothing for me apart from a few moments of pride and fodder for scholarship applications. Most of the compliments I got from my drama teacher are just fuzzy memories today.I’m not saying that any of this was worthless. Being a good student served me well, but not because my teachers loved me—rather because it gave me skills and opportunities to move on in life. It’s important to work hard and nurture ambition, but for the right reasons—not to escape criticism, but because it makes you happy. It’s better to learn from your mistakes than not to make them at all. ♦

[apsbicepstraining]

From dream to nightmare: when your sperm donor has secrets

Having a newborn by sperm donation is an intensely personal and emotional process. So what happens when you discover that interested donors has a genetic health agitation?

Sperm donor 9623 searched good on paper. An IQ of 160. A bachelors-at-arms degree in neuroscience, a masters in artificial intelligence, en route to a PhD in neuroscience engineering. A joy for crystallography, algorithm and fitness. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had obtained the perfect parent for their baby.

Seven times after their son was carry, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a egocentric personality disorder and a criminal record. He had spent eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation.

The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donors refer, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple. A Google search did the residual. His stepfather had vouched in court that Aggeless psychotic chapters embarked aged 19, well before he started donating in Georgia. Aggeless sperm led to the birth of at least 36 children worldwide.

It was like a dream shifted nightmare in an instant, said Collins. The couple, alongside at least three other lineages, have filed suits against the Georgia-based seman bank, Xytex Corporation, which too afforded sperm to British pairs. Xytex disavows wrongdoing.

Such examples are not unique. Like Collins, Hanson and their son, numerous lineages and individuals are now coming to terms with vital information that their donors withheld.

The forks of such discoveries can be gargantuan. The most important entity to me is[ my son] potentially facing a extremely debilitating life-style, Collins says. I felt like I was hoaxed by Xytex and I flunked my son for having opted Xytex. In hindsight, a hitchhiker on the side of the road would have been a far more responsible alternative for designing a child.

Lineages have filed litigations against the Georgia-based seman bank, Xytex Corporation. Picture: David Goldman/ AP

What level of probability do Aggeless genes consult? The structure of mental health diseases is complex. The genetic ingredient of schizophrenia, shows Professor Cathryn Lewis, prof of genetic epidemiology and statistics at Kings College London, is not a single gene, but is compounded across many genes. There are likely to be thousands of inherited variants that verify peril of schizophrenia. Each change somewhat increases or declines our jeopardy, but none of them alone will enable us to predict whether someone is likely to develop schizophrenia.

Even arousing brand-new findings in the C4 gene expect careful interpretation. Its a single piece in a large genetic jigsaw riddle, Lewis says. Testing one gene tells us anything about private individuals risk of developing schizophrenia.

Mental health conditions too manifest a mix of interacting environment and social causes. Not to mention that many people with schizophrenia respond to treatment and live full, productive lives.

Donor anonymity was abolished in the UK in 2005. Donor-conceived offspring are now legally entitled, at the age of 18, to information on their donors identity. Nonetheless, this was not retrospectively exerted: those imagined before April 2005( thats 21,000 people born between 1991 and 2004 alone) cannot identify their donor unless interested donors steps forward willingly. Some are never even told they were donor-conceived in the first place.

Tyler Blackwell discovered as a boy in Maryland that he has 35 half-siblings. His second astonish: using the same condition that his donor leader, John( not his real mention) has not been able to uncovered. Johns sister received the Blackwells through a family genealogy website. It transpired that John, who had not replied to their mail, had an aortic aneurysm, which had ruptured at the age of 43. He had existed. At least three other family members were similarly altered. Tyler appreciated a cardiologist as a precaution, was diagnosed with an aneurysm and underwent surgery. Without an operation on an aneurysm of this kind, the mortality from severance is up to 97%. When sever arises, patients often die within six hours. There is no one who knew about it, said his mother of the sperm bank committed. If I could foretell the future, I would have picked a different donor.

Financial motivations could underlie some instances of deception. Nonetheless, the UKs Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority ( HFEA ) defines the limit for sperm donors at 35 per clinic visit and egg donors at 750 per hertz of subscription, plus expenses. These limits, it territory, is also intended to reward altruism and depres compulsion. Rules vary internationally. One California cryobank repays your time and expenditures with compensation of up to $1,500/ month with periodic motivations such as movie tickets or talent credentials for additional meter and exertion expended by participants.

Danish sperms donor 7042 unwittingly passed on neurofibromatosis to at least 11 of his children, after his sperm was used in clinics across the US, Canada, Belgium, Greece, Spain, Thailand and the UK. Neurofibromatosis is associated with mentality and nerve cancers, bone deformities, visual impairment, high blood pressure and discover difficulties. Offspring have a 50% threat of acquiring it. Denmark has since mandated that donor sperm can be used in a maximum of 12 inseminations. In the UK , no more than 10 houses can be created using egg or sperm from a single donor. Donated eggs are not risk-free, but sperm donors typically have more offspring who can pass on inherited preconditions to the next generation.

There is no such thing as reproduction without gamble. Here i am, however, an ethical responsibility towards the child to be imagined and their hopeful parents. If a donor develops a genetic circumstance times after donation, “were not receiving” structure at present that executes disclosure.

Donors now must measure negative for HIV, hepatitis B and C, and syphilis, with farther screening be a primary consideration in ethnicity such as cystic fibrosis in those of Caucasian ancestry and sickle-cell sicknes in African and Afro-Caribbean populations. Guidelines state that potential donors should be assessed for ailments with a genetic component cleave palate, spina bifida, congenital nature malformations, psychosis and others but that decisions on eligibility should be individualised.

These screening regulations do not always apply to the unknown number of UK citizens who travel abroad to find donors, utilization unlicensed clinics or buy home-insemination paraphernaliums online. Although psychological evaluation is required by most international authorities, this will not bar donors who have not yet developed evidences of a serious mental health issues disorder. For them, the diagnostic implement is time.

Genetic screening is more cheap and comprehensive than ever before. So, should we turn away from the donors account and towards the laboratory? Allan Pacey, professor of andrology at the University of Sheffield, is distrustful. I fantasize the perfect genome probably doesnt prevail, so its truly a question of where the line should be drawn. Only about 4% of all those who come forward to be sperm donors are admitted. If we were to impose a whole new change of exclusion criteria based on theoretical threats, it is possible there wont be any sperm donors at all.

Frozen sperm stored in a sperm bank. Image: monkeybusinessimages/ Getty Images/ iStockphoto

With improved screening, donors might be diagnosed with genetic ailments that would have remained undiscovered for ever, or are untreatable. Perhaps there is an controversy for not knowing.

Kevin, who were working in photography in London, is not just a donor-conceived person but a donor himself. He believes that prospective mothers should know as much as possible about the donors medical history. But there is a level where you have to draw the line, and say were no longer causing designer babies here, he adds.

He understands the distress of Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins, yet concern about speaking too much into particular case. Its a shame if parties tell it overshadow the industry and take it to be some sort of wide-reaching fraud. It is one floor. Every daytime there are lots of children being born to couples who have fertility problems and thats much more important to remember.

Eleven offspring have been born from his gifts. Why did he donate? I wouldnt be here if someone hadnt donated. Soul did that and thats why I am here.

Jess Cresswell discovered aged 28 that she was donor-conceived. Seven years later, she still does not know who her biological father is, but appears her parents established her best available life we are able to. Since some of her own family medical record is missing, how does she feel about donor screening?

I think they should be screened but I also considered that, just because they have some kind of hereditary condition, they shouldnt necessarily be excluded. Its the parents discretion; some people would rather have a child knowing theres a risk of picking something up than not, if that was their alone option.

It is now easier than ever for donor-conceived parties to find their genetic house. The US Donor Sibling Registry has helped connect more than 10,900 parties with their half-siblings and/ or their donors. Nearly 70% of those who sign up match with a biological relative, and virtually 80% of these working groups pair instant. The UK has a Donor Sibling Link site.

Direct-to-consumer genetic tests have revolutionised this room. In 2005, a 15 -year-old moved a saliva sample to an online service, had his genetic code uploaded, use a tracking website and met his biological father 10 weeks later. Kevin met a half-sister through a donor-sibling registry and two half-siblings through parentage places. He later unwittingly discovered some of his donors items. Two hours on, Google divulged his donors epithet. The two have since stayed in contact.

One last occasion: Aggeles received mental health therapy and picked up a degree in cognitive discipline two decades after he firstly registered at university. He is now working on a masters in artificial intelligence.

The post From dream to nightmare: when your sperm donor has secrets appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2jbB4t9 via IFTTT

[apsbicepstraining]

From dream to nightmare: when your sperm donor has secrets

Having a newborn by sperm donation is an intensely personal and emotional process. So what happens when you discover that interested donors has a genetic health agitation?

Sperm donor 9623 searched good on paper. An IQ of 160. A bachelors-at-arms degree in neuroscience, a masters in artificial intelligence, en route to a PhD in neuroscience engineering. A joy for crystallography, algorithm and fitness. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had obtained the perfect parent for their baby.

Seven times after their son was carry, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a egocentric personality disorder and a criminal record. He had spent eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation.

The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donors refer, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple. A Google search did the residual. His stepfather had vouched in court that Aggeless psychotic chapters embarked aged 19, well before he started donating in Georgia. Aggeless sperm led to the birth of at least 36 children worldwide.

It was like a dream shifted nightmare in an instant, said Collins. The couple, alongside at least three other lineages, have filed suits against the Georgia-based seman bank, Xytex Corporation, which too afforded sperm to British pairs. Xytex disavows wrongdoing.

Such examples are not unique. Like Collins, Hanson and their son, numerous lineages and individuals are now coming to terms with vital information that their donors withheld.

The forks of such discoveries can be gargantuan. The most important entity to me is[ my son] potentially facing a extremely debilitating life-style, Collins says. I felt like I was hoaxed by Xytex and I flunked my son for having opted Xytex. In hindsight, a hitchhiker on the side of the road would have been a far more responsible alternative for designing a child.

Lineages have filed litigations against the Georgia-based seman bank, Xytex Corporation. Picture: David Goldman/ AP

What level of probability do Aggeless genes consult? The structure of mental health diseases is complex. The genetic ingredient of schizophrenia, shows Professor Cathryn Lewis, prof of genetic epidemiology and statistics at Kings College London, is not a single gene, but is compounded across many genes. There are likely to be thousands of inherited variants that verify peril of schizophrenia. Each change somewhat increases or declines our jeopardy, but none of them alone will enable us to predict whether someone is likely to develop schizophrenia.

Even arousing brand-new findings in the C4 gene expect careful interpretation. Its a single piece in a large genetic jigsaw riddle, Lewis says. Testing one gene tells us anything about private individuals risk of developing schizophrenia.

Mental health conditions too manifest a mix of interacting environment and social causes. Not to mention that many people with schizophrenia respond to treatment and live full, productive lives.

Donor anonymity was abolished in the UK in 2005. Donor-conceived offspring are now legally entitled, at the age of 18, to information on their donors identity. Nonetheless, this was not retrospectively exerted: those imagined before April 2005( thats 21,000 people born between 1991 and 2004 alone) cannot identify their donor unless interested donors steps forward willingly. Some are never even told they were donor-conceived in the first place.

Tyler Blackwell discovered as a boy in Maryland that he has 35 half-siblings. His second astonish: using the same condition that his donor leader, John( not his real mention) has not been able to uncovered. Johns sister received the Blackwells through a family genealogy website. It transpired that John, who had not replied to their mail, had an aortic aneurysm, which had ruptured at the age of 43. He had existed. At least three other family members were similarly altered. Tyler appreciated a cardiologist as a precaution, was diagnosed with an aneurysm and underwent surgery. Without an operation on an aneurysm of this kind, the mortality from severance is up to 97%. When sever arises, patients often die within six hours. There is no one who knew about it, said his mother of the sperm bank committed. If I could foretell the future, I would have picked a different donor.

Financial motivations could underlie some instances of deception. Nonetheless, the UKs Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority ( HFEA ) defines the limit for sperm donors at 35 per clinic visit and egg donors at 750 per hertz of subscription, plus expenses. These limits, it territory, is also intended to reward altruism and depres compulsion. Rules vary internationally. One California cryobank repays your time and expenditures with compensation of up to $1,500/ month with periodic motivations such as movie tickets or talent credentials for additional meter and exertion expended by participants.

Danish sperms donor 7042 unwittingly passed on neurofibromatosis to at least 11 of his children, after his sperm was used in clinics across the US, Canada, Belgium, Greece, Spain, Thailand and the UK. Neurofibromatosis is associated with mentality and nerve cancers, bone deformities, visual impairment, high blood pressure and discover difficulties. Offspring have a 50% threat of acquiring it. Denmark has since mandated that donor sperm can be used in a maximum of 12 inseminations. In the UK , no more than 10 houses can be created using egg or sperm from a single donor. Donated eggs are not risk-free, but sperm donors typically have more offspring who can pass on inherited preconditions to the next generation.

There is no such thing as reproduction without gamble. Here i am, however, an ethical responsibility towards the child to be imagined and their hopeful parents. If a donor develops a genetic circumstance times after donation, “were not receiving” structure at present that executes disclosure.

Donors now must measure negative for HIV, hepatitis B and C, and syphilis, with farther screening be a primary consideration in ethnicity such as cystic fibrosis in those of Caucasian ancestry and sickle-cell sicknes in African and Afro-Caribbean populations. Guidelines state that potential donors should be assessed for ailments with a genetic component cleave palate, spina bifida, congenital nature malformations, psychosis and others but that decisions on eligibility should be individualised.

These screening regulations do not always apply to the unknown number of UK citizens who travel abroad to find donors, utilization unlicensed clinics or buy home-insemination paraphernaliums online. Although psychological evaluation is required by most international authorities, this will not bar donors who have not yet developed evidences of a serious mental health issues disorder. For them, the diagnostic implement is time.

Genetic screening is more cheap and comprehensive than ever before. So, should we turn away from the donors account and towards the laboratory? Allan Pacey, professor of andrology at the University of Sheffield, is distrustful. I fantasize the perfect genome probably doesnt prevail, so its truly a question of where the line should be drawn. Only about 4% of all those who come forward to be sperm donors are admitted. If we were to impose a whole new change of exclusion criteria based on theoretical threats, it is possible there wont be any sperm donors at all.

Frozen sperm stored in a sperm bank. Image: monkeybusinessimages/ Getty Images/ iStockphoto

With improved screening, donors might be diagnosed with genetic ailments that would have remained undiscovered for ever, or are untreatable. Perhaps there is an controversy for not knowing.

Kevin, who were working in photography in London, is not just a donor-conceived person but a donor himself. He believes that prospective mothers should know as much as possible about the donors medical history. But there is a level where you have to draw the line, and say were no longer causing designer babies here, he adds.

He understands the distress of Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins, yet concern about speaking too much into particular case. Its a shame if parties tell it overshadow the industry and take it to be some sort of wide-reaching fraud. It is one floor. Every daytime there are lots of children being born to couples who have fertility problems and thats much more important to remember.

Eleven offspring have been born from his gifts. Why did he donate? I wouldnt be here if someone hadnt donated. Soul did that and thats why I am here.

Jess Cresswell discovered aged 28 that she was donor-conceived. Seven years later, she still does not know who her biological father is, but appears her parents established her best available life we are able to. Since some of her own family medical record is missing, how does she feel about donor screening?

I think they should be screened but I also considered that, just because they have some kind of hereditary condition, they shouldnt necessarily be excluded. Its the parents discretion; some people would rather have a child knowing theres a risk of picking something up than not, if that was their alone option.

It is now easier than ever for donor-conceived parties to find their genetic house. The US Donor Sibling Registry has helped connect more than 10,900 parties with their half-siblings and/ or their donors. Nearly 70% of those who sign up match with a biological relative, and virtually 80% of these working groups pair instant. The UK has a Donor Sibling Link site.

Direct-to-consumer genetic tests have revolutionised this room. In 2005, a 15 -year-old moved a saliva sample to an online service, had his genetic code uploaded, use a tracking website and met his biological father 10 weeks later. Kevin met a half-sister through a donor-sibling registry and two half-siblings through parentage places. He later unwittingly discovered some of his donors items. Two hours on, Google divulged his donors epithet. The two have since stayed in contact.

One last occasion: Aggeles received mental health therapy and picked up a degree in cognitive discipline two decades after he firstly registered at university. He is now working on a masters in artificial intelligence.

The post From dream to nightmare: when your sperm donor has secrets appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[apsbicepstraining]

From dream to nightmare: when your seman donor has secrets

Having a baby by sperm donation is an intensely personal and psychological process. So what happens when you discover that interested donors has a genetic health ill?

Sperm donor 9623 looked good on paper. An IQ of 160. A bachelors degree in neuroscience, a masters in artificial intelligence, en route to a PhD in neuroscience engineering. A passion for crystallography, algorithms and fitness. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had observed the perfect father for their baby.

Seven times after their son was born, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a egocentric personality disorder and a criminal record. He had wasted eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation.

The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donors appoint, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple. A Google search did the remain. His stepfather had vouched in tribunal that Aggeless psychopathic chapters began age-old 19, well before he started donating in Georgia. Aggeless sperm led to the birth of at least 36 children worldwide.

It was like a dream changed nightmare in an point, said Collins. The couple, alongside at least three other categories, have registered lawsuits against the Georgia-based sperm bank, Xytex Corporation, which too gave sperm to British duets. Xytex disclaims wrongdoing.

Such specimen are not unique. Like Collins, Hanson and their son, numerous categories and individuals are now to access to words with vital information that their donors withheld.

The forks of such breakthroughs can be immense. The most important entity to me is[ my son] potentially facing a very debilitating life-style, Collins says. I felt like I was defrauded by Xytex and I flunked my son for having selected Xytex. In hindsight, a hitchhiker on the side of the road would have been a far more responsible option for imagining a child.

Families have registered lawsuits against the Georgia-based seman bank, Xytex Corporation. Photograph: David Goldman/ AP

What level of danger do Aggeless genes award? The building of mental health illness is complex. The genetic ingredient of schizophrenia, explains Professor Cathryn Lewis, prof of genetic epidemiology and statistics at Kings College London, is not a single gene, but is combined across many genes. There are likely to be thousands of acquired discrepancies that hold threat of schizophrenia. Each change slightly increases or decreases our danger, but nothing of them alone will enable us to predict whether someone is likely to develop schizophrenia.

Even stimulating brand-new findings in the C4 gene ask careful version. Its a single piece in a large genetic jigsaw riddle, Lewis says. Measuring one gene tells us anything about private individuals risk of developing schizophrenia.

Mental health conditions also show a mixture of interacting environment and social causes. Not to mention that many parties with schizophrenia respond to treatment and live full, productive lives.

Donor anonymity was abolished in the UK in 2005. Donor-conceived offspring are now legally entitled, at the age of 18, to information on their donors identity. However, this was not retrospectively exerted: those thoughts before April 2005( thats 21,000 people born between 1991 and 2004 alone) cannot identify their donor unless interested donors gradations forward voluntarily. Some are never even told they were donor-conceived in the first place.

Tyler Blackwell discovered as a teen in Maryland that he has 35 half-siblings. His second amaze: having the same condition that his donor parent, John( not his real refer) has not been able to divulged. Johns sister discovered the Blackwells through a family pedigree place. It transpired that John, who had not replied to their communication, had an aortic aneurysm, which had severed at persons under the age of 43. He had endured. At least three other family members were similarly altered. Tyler accompanied a cardiologist as a precaution, was diagnosed with an aneurysm and underwent surgery. Without an operation on an aneurysm of this type, the mortality rate from severance is up to 97%. When sever appears, patients typically die within six hours. There is no one who knew about it, said his mother of the sperm bank committed. If I could foretell the future, I would have picked a different donor.

Financial incentives could underlie some instances of deception. However, the UKs Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority ( HFEA ) specifies the limit for sperm donors at 35 per clinic visit and egg donors at 750 per repetition of donation, plus expenses. These restrictions, it territory, aim to reward altruism and prevent coercion. Rules vary internationally. One California cryobank recoups your time and expenditures with compensation of up to $1,500/ month with regular motivations such as movie tickets or endow certificates for additional era and try expended by participants.

Danish semen donor 7042 unwittingly passed on neurofibromatosis to at least 11 of “their childrens”, after his seman was used in clinics across the US, Canada, Belgium, Greece, Spain, Thailand and the UK. Neurofibromatosis is consistent with brain and nerve tumors, bone deformities, visual disorder, blood pressure and read rigors. Offspring have a 50% gamble of acquiring it. Denmark has since mandated that donor sperm can be used in a maximum of 12 inseminations. In the UK , no more than 10 categories can be created using egg or seman from a single donor. Donated eggs are not risk-free, but sperm donors frequently have more offspring who are in a position pass on acquired plights to the next generation.

There is no such situation as reproduction without peril. Here i am, however, an ethical responsibility towards the child to be seen and their hopeful mothers. If a donor develops a genetic precondition years after donation, “were not receiving” arrangement at present that enforces disclosure.

Donors now must experiment negative for HIV, hepatitis B and C, and syphilis, with farther screening be a primary consideration in ethnicity such as cystic fibrosis in those of Caucasian swoop and sickle-cell sicknes in African and Afro-Caribbean populations. Guidelines state that potential donors should be assessed for positions with a genetic constituent cleft palate, spina bifida, congenital mettle malformations, psychosis and others but that decisions on eligibility should be individualised.

These screening regulations do not ever apply to the unknown number of UK citizens who travel abroad to find donors, implement unlicensed clinics or buy home-insemination kits online. Although mental evaluation is required by most international authorities, this will not table donors who have not yet developed indications of a serious mental health issues disease. For them, the diagnostic implement is time.

Genetic screening is more affordable and thorough than ever before. So, should be used turn away from the donors account and towards the laboratory? Allan Pacey, prof of andrology at the University of Sheffield, is leery. I thoughts the perfect genome probably doesnt prevail, so its actually a question of where the line should be drawn. Merely about 4% of all those who come forward to be seman donors are abode. If we were to impose a whole new prepare of exclusion criteria based on theoretical hazards, it is possible there wont be any sperm donors at all.

Frozen sperm stored in a sperm bank. Picture: monkeybusinessimages/ Getty Images/ iStockphoto

With intensified screening, donors might be diagnosed with genetic positions that would have remained undiscovered for ever, or are untreatable. Perhaps there is an statement for not knowing.

Kevin, who works in photography in London, is not only a donor-conceived being but a donor himself. He is therefore of the opinion that prospective parents should know as much as possible about interested donors medical record. But there is a stage where you have to draw the line, and say were no longer forming decorator children here, he adds.

He understands the distress of Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins, hitherto worries about speaking too much into particular case. Its a disgrace if beings make it overshadow the industry and take it to be some sort of wide-reaching corruption. It is one narration. Every era there are lots of children being born to duets who have fertility both problems and thats much more important to remember.

Eleven offspring have been born from his gifts. Why did he donate? I wouldnt be here if someone hadnt donated. Someone did that and thats why I am here.

Jess Cresswell detected aged 28 that she was donor-conceived. Seven years later, she still does not know who her biological father is, but find her mothers imparted her the best life they could. Since some of her own family medical record is missing, how does she feel about donor screening?

I think they should be screened but I also think that, just because they have some sort of hereditary condition, they shouldnt inevitably be excluded. Its the parents discretion; some people would rather have a child knowing theres a risk of picking something up than not, if that was their only option.

It is now easier than ever for donor-conceived parties to find their genetic pedigree. The US Donor Sibling Registry has helped connect more than 10,900 people with their half-siblings and/ or their donors. Nearly 70% of those who sign up match with a biological relative, and nearly 80% of this group competitor instantaneously. The UK has a Donor Sibling Link website.

Direct-to-consumer genetic tests have revolutionised this opening. In 2005, a 15 -year-old mailed a saliva sample to an on-line service, had his genetic code uploaded, applied a tracking website and met his biological father 10 days later. Kevin spotted a half-sister through a donor-sibling registry and two half-siblings through parentage places. He afterward unwittingly discovered some of his donors items. Two hours on, Google disclosed his donors appoint. The two have since stayed in contact.

One last concept: Aggeles received mental health medicine and picked up a degree in cognitive discipline two decades after he first registered at university. He is now working on a masters in artificial intelligence.

The post From dream to nightmare: when your seman donor has secrets appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2yYLA9n via IFTTT

[apsbicepstraining]

From dream to nightmare: when your seman donor has secrets

Having a baby by sperm donation is an intensely personal and psychological process. So what happens when you discover that interested donors has a genetic health ill?

Sperm donor 9623 looked good on paper. An IQ of 160. A bachelors degree in neuroscience, a masters in artificial intelligence, en route to a PhD in neuroscience engineering. A passion for crystallography, algorithms and fitness. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had observed the perfect father for their baby.

Seven times after their son was born, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a egocentric personality disorder and a criminal record. He had wasted eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation.

The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donors appoint, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple. A Google search did the remain. His stepfather had vouched in tribunal that Aggeless psychopathic chapters began age-old 19, well before he started donating in Georgia. Aggeless sperm led to the birth of at least 36 children worldwide.

It was like a dream changed nightmare in an point, said Collins. The couple, alongside at least three other categories, have registered lawsuits against the Georgia-based sperm bank, Xytex Corporation, which too gave sperm to British duets. Xytex disclaims wrongdoing.

Such specimen are not unique. Like Collins, Hanson and their son, numerous categories and individuals are now to access to words with vital information that their donors withheld.

The forks of such breakthroughs can be immense. The most important entity to me is[ my son] potentially facing a very debilitating life-style, Collins says. I felt like I was defrauded by Xytex and I flunked my son for having selected Xytex. In hindsight, a hitchhiker on the side of the road would have been a far more responsible option for imagining a child.

Families have registered lawsuits against the Georgia-based seman bank, Xytex Corporation. Photograph: David Goldman/ AP

What level of danger do Aggeless genes award? The building of mental health illness is complex. The genetic ingredient of schizophrenia, explains Professor Cathryn Lewis, prof of genetic epidemiology and statistics at Kings College London, is not a single gene, but is combined across many genes. There are likely to be thousands of acquired discrepancies that hold threat of schizophrenia. Each change slightly increases or decreases our danger, but nothing of them alone will enable us to predict whether someone is likely to develop schizophrenia.

Even stimulating brand-new findings in the C4 gene ask careful version. Its a single piece in a large genetic jigsaw riddle, Lewis says. Measuring one gene tells us anything about private individuals risk of developing schizophrenia.

Mental health conditions also show a mixture of interacting environment and social causes. Not to mention that many parties with schizophrenia respond to treatment and live full, productive lives.

Donor anonymity was abolished in the UK in 2005. Donor-conceived offspring are now legally entitled, at the age of 18, to information on their donors identity. However, this was not retrospectively exerted: those thoughts before April 2005( thats 21,000 people born between 1991 and 2004 alone) cannot identify their donor unless interested donors gradations forward voluntarily. Some are never even told they were donor-conceived in the first place.

Tyler Blackwell discovered as a teen in Maryland that he has 35 half-siblings. His second amaze: having the same condition that his donor parent, John( not his real refer) has not been able to divulged. Johns sister discovered the Blackwells through a family pedigree place. It transpired that John, who had not replied to their communication, had an aortic aneurysm, which had severed at persons under the age of 43. He had endured. At least three other family members were similarly altered. Tyler accompanied a cardiologist as a precaution, was diagnosed with an aneurysm and underwent surgery. Without an operation on an aneurysm of this type, the mortality rate from severance is up to 97%. When sever appears, patients typically die within six hours. There is no one who knew about it, said his mother of the sperm bank committed. If I could foretell the future, I would have picked a different donor.

Financial incentives could underlie some instances of deception. However, the UKs Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority ( HFEA ) specifies the limit for sperm donors at 35 per clinic visit and egg donors at 750 per repetition of donation, plus expenses. These restrictions, it territory, aim to reward altruism and prevent coercion. Rules vary internationally. One California cryobank recoups your time and expenditures with compensation of up to $1,500/ month with regular motivations such as movie tickets or endow certificates for additional era and try expended by participants.

Danish semen donor 7042 unwittingly passed on neurofibromatosis to at least 11 of “their childrens”, after his seman was used in clinics across the US, Canada, Belgium, Greece, Spain, Thailand and the UK. Neurofibromatosis is consistent with brain and nerve tumors, bone deformities, visual disorder, blood pressure and read rigors. Offspring have a 50% gamble of acquiring it. Denmark has since mandated that donor sperm can be used in a maximum of 12 inseminations. In the UK , no more than 10 categories can be created using egg or seman from a single donor. Donated eggs are not risk-free, but sperm donors frequently have more offspring who are in a position pass on acquired plights to the next generation.

There is no such situation as reproduction without peril. Here i am, however, an ethical responsibility towards the child to be seen and their hopeful mothers. If a donor develops a genetic precondition years after donation, “were not receiving” arrangement at present that enforces disclosure.

Donors now must experiment negative for HIV, hepatitis B and C, and syphilis, with farther screening be a primary consideration in ethnicity such as cystic fibrosis in those of Caucasian swoop and sickle-cell sicknes in African and Afro-Caribbean populations. Guidelines state that potential donors should be assessed for positions with a genetic constituent cleft palate, spina bifida, congenital mettle malformations, psychosis and others but that decisions on eligibility should be individualised.

These screening regulations do not ever apply to the unknown number of UK citizens who travel abroad to find donors, implement unlicensed clinics or buy home-insemination kits online. Although mental evaluation is required by most international authorities, this will not table donors who have not yet developed indications of a serious mental health issues disease. For them, the diagnostic implement is time.

Genetic screening is more affordable and thorough than ever before. So, should be used turn away from the donors account and towards the laboratory? Allan Pacey, prof of andrology at the University of Sheffield, is leery. I thoughts the perfect genome probably doesnt prevail, so its actually a question of where the line should be drawn. Merely about 4% of all those who come forward to be seman donors are abode. If we were to impose a whole new prepare of exclusion criteria based on theoretical hazards, it is possible there wont be any sperm donors at all.

Frozen sperm stored in a sperm bank. Picture: monkeybusinessimages/ Getty Images/ iStockphoto

With intensified screening, donors might be diagnosed with genetic positions that would have remained undiscovered for ever, or are untreatable. Perhaps there is an statement for not knowing.

Kevin, who works in photography in London, is not only a donor-conceived being but a donor himself. He is therefore of the opinion that prospective parents should know as much as possible about interested donors medical record. But there is a stage where you have to draw the line, and say were no longer forming decorator children here, he adds.

He understands the distress of Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins, hitherto worries about speaking too much into particular case. Its a disgrace if beings make it overshadow the industry and take it to be some sort of wide-reaching corruption. It is one narration. Every era there are lots of children being born to duets who have fertility both problems and thats much more important to remember.

Eleven offspring have been born from his gifts. Why did he donate? I wouldnt be here if someone hadnt donated. Someone did that and thats why I am here.

Jess Cresswell detected aged 28 that she was donor-conceived. Seven years later, she still does not know who her biological father is, but find her mothers imparted her the best life they could. Since some of her own family medical record is missing, how does she feel about donor screening?

I think they should be screened but I also think that, just because they have some sort of hereditary condition, they shouldnt inevitably be excluded. Its the parents discretion; some people would rather have a child knowing theres a risk of picking something up than not, if that was their only option.

It is now easier than ever for donor-conceived parties to find their genetic pedigree. The US Donor Sibling Registry has helped connect more than 10,900 people with their half-siblings and/ or their donors. Nearly 70% of those who sign up match with a biological relative, and nearly 80% of this group competitor instantaneously. The UK has a Donor Sibling Link website.

Direct-to-consumer genetic tests have revolutionised this opening. In 2005, a 15 -year-old mailed a saliva sample to an on-line service, had his genetic code uploaded, applied a tracking website and met his biological father 10 days later. Kevin spotted a half-sister through a donor-sibling registry and two half-siblings through parentage places. He afterward unwittingly discovered some of his donors items. Two hours on, Google disclosed his donors appoint. The two have since stayed in contact.

One last concept: Aggeles received mental health medicine and picked up a degree in cognitive discipline two decades after he first registered at university. He is now working on a masters in artificial intelligence.

The post From dream to nightmare: when your seman donor has secrets appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2yYLA9n via IFTTT

[apsbicepstraining]

From dream to nightmare: when your seman donor has secrets

Having a baby by sperm donation is an intensely personal and psychological process. So what happens when you discover that interested donors has a genetic health ill?

Sperm donor 9623 looked good on paper. An IQ of 160. A bachelors degree in neuroscience, a masters in artificial intelligence, en route to a PhD in neuroscience engineering. A passion for crystallography, algorithms and fitness. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had observed the perfect father for their baby.

Seven times after their son was born, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a egocentric personality disorder and a criminal record. He had wasted eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation.

The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donors appoint, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple. A Google search did the remain. His stepfather had vouched in tribunal that Aggeless psychopathic chapters began age-old 19, well before he started donating in Georgia. Aggeless sperm led to the birth of at least 36 children worldwide.

It was like a dream changed nightmare in an point, said Collins. The couple, alongside at least three other categories, have registered lawsuits against the Georgia-based sperm bank, Xytex Corporation, which too gave sperm to British duets. Xytex disclaims wrongdoing.

Such specimen are not unique. Like Collins, Hanson and their son, numerous categories and individuals are now to access to words with vital information that their donors withheld.

The forks of such breakthroughs can be immense. The most important entity to me is[ my son] potentially facing a very debilitating life-style, Collins says. I felt like I was defrauded by Xytex and I flunked my son for having selected Xytex. In hindsight, a hitchhiker on the side of the road would have been a far more responsible option for imagining a child.

Families have registered lawsuits against the Georgia-based seman bank, Xytex Corporation. Photograph: David Goldman/ AP

What level of danger do Aggeless genes award? The building of mental health illness is complex. The genetic ingredient of schizophrenia, explains Professor Cathryn Lewis, prof of genetic epidemiology and statistics at Kings College London, is not a single gene, but is combined across many genes. There are likely to be thousands of acquired discrepancies that hold threat of schizophrenia. Each change slightly increases or decreases our danger, but nothing of them alone will enable us to predict whether someone is likely to develop schizophrenia.

Even stimulating brand-new findings in the C4 gene ask careful version. Its a single piece in a large genetic jigsaw riddle, Lewis says. Measuring one gene tells us anything about private individuals risk of developing schizophrenia.

Mental health conditions also show a mixture of interacting environment and social causes. Not to mention that many parties with schizophrenia respond to treatment and live full, productive lives.

Donor anonymity was abolished in the UK in 2005. Donor-conceived offspring are now legally entitled, at the age of 18, to information on their donors identity. However, this was not retrospectively exerted: those thoughts before April 2005( thats 21,000 people born between 1991 and 2004 alone) cannot identify their donor unless interested donors gradations forward voluntarily. Some are never even told they were donor-conceived in the first place.

Tyler Blackwell discovered as a teen in Maryland that he has 35 half-siblings. His second amaze: having the same condition that his donor parent, John( not his real refer) has not been able to divulged. Johns sister discovered the Blackwells through a family pedigree place. It transpired that John, who had not replied to their communication, had an aortic aneurysm, which had severed at persons under the age of 43. He had endured. At least three other family members were similarly altered. Tyler accompanied a cardiologist as a precaution, was diagnosed with an aneurysm and underwent surgery. Without an operation on an aneurysm of this type, the mortality rate from severance is up to 97%. When sever appears, patients typically die within six hours. There is no one who knew about it, said his mother of the sperm bank committed. If I could foretell the future, I would have picked a different donor.

Financial incentives could underlie some instances of deception. However, the UKs Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority ( HFEA ) specifies the limit for sperm donors at 35 per clinic visit and egg donors at 750 per repetition of donation, plus expenses. These restrictions, it territory, aim to reward altruism and prevent coercion. Rules vary internationally. One California cryobank recoups your time and expenditures with compensation of up to $1,500/ month with regular motivations such as movie tickets or endow certificates for additional era and try expended by participants.

Danish semen donor 7042 unwittingly passed on neurofibromatosis to at least 11 of “their childrens”, after his seman was used in clinics across the US, Canada, Belgium, Greece, Spain, Thailand and the UK. Neurofibromatosis is consistent with brain and nerve tumors, bone deformities, visual disorder, blood pressure and read rigors. Offspring have a 50% gamble of acquiring it. Denmark has since mandated that donor sperm can be used in a maximum of 12 inseminations. In the UK , no more than 10 categories can be created using egg or seman from a single donor. Donated eggs are not risk-free, but sperm donors frequently have more offspring who are in a position pass on acquired plights to the next generation.

There is no such situation as reproduction without peril. Here i am, however, an ethical responsibility towards the child to be seen and their hopeful mothers. If a donor develops a genetic precondition years after donation, “were not receiving” arrangement at present that enforces disclosure.

Donors now must experiment negative for HIV, hepatitis B and C, and syphilis, with farther screening be a primary consideration in ethnicity such as cystic fibrosis in those of Caucasian swoop and sickle-cell sicknes in African and Afro-Caribbean populations. Guidelines state that potential donors should be assessed for positions with a genetic constituent cleft palate, spina bifida, congenital mettle malformations, psychosis and others but that decisions on eligibility should be individualised.

These screening regulations do not ever apply to the unknown number of UK citizens who travel abroad to find donors, implement unlicensed clinics or buy home-insemination kits online. Although mental evaluation is required by most international authorities, this will not table donors who have not yet developed indications of a serious mental health issues disease. For them, the diagnostic implement is time.

Genetic screening is more affordable and thorough than ever before. So, should be used turn away from the donors account and towards the laboratory? Allan Pacey, prof of andrology at the University of Sheffield, is leery. I thoughts the perfect genome probably doesnt prevail, so its actually a question of where the line should be drawn. Merely about 4% of all those who come forward to be seman donors are abode. If we were to impose a whole new prepare of exclusion criteria based on theoretical hazards, it is possible there wont be any sperm donors at all.

Frozen sperm stored in a sperm bank. Picture: monkeybusinessimages/ Getty Images/ iStockphoto

With intensified screening, donors might be diagnosed with genetic positions that would have remained undiscovered for ever, or are untreatable. Perhaps there is an statement for not knowing.

Kevin, who works in photography in London, is not only a donor-conceived being but a donor himself. He is therefore of the opinion that prospective parents should know as much as possible about interested donors medical record. But there is a stage where you have to draw the line, and say were no longer forming decorator children here, he adds.

He understands the distress of Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins, hitherto worries about speaking too much into particular case. Its a disgrace if beings make it overshadow the industry and take it to be some sort of wide-reaching corruption. It is one narration. Every era there are lots of children being born to duets who have fertility both problems and thats much more important to remember.

Eleven offspring have been born from his gifts. Why did he donate? I wouldnt be here if someone hadnt donated. Someone did that and thats why I am here.

Jess Cresswell detected aged 28 that she was donor-conceived. Seven years later, she still does not know who her biological father is, but find her mothers imparted her the best life they could. Since some of her own family medical record is missing, how does she feel about donor screening?

I think they should be screened but I also think that, just because they have some sort of hereditary condition, they shouldnt inevitably be excluded. Its the parents discretion; some people would rather have a child knowing theres a risk of picking something up than not, if that was their only option.

It is now easier than ever for donor-conceived parties to find their genetic pedigree. The US Donor Sibling Registry has helped connect more than 10,900 people with their half-siblings and/ or their donors. Nearly 70% of those who sign up match with a biological relative, and nearly 80% of this group competitor instantaneously. The UK has a Donor Sibling Link website.

Direct-to-consumer genetic tests have revolutionised this opening. In 2005, a 15 -year-old mailed a saliva sample to an on-line service, had his genetic code uploaded, applied a tracking website and met his biological father 10 days later. Kevin spotted a half-sister through a donor-sibling registry and two half-siblings through parentage places. He afterward unwittingly discovered some of his donors items. Two hours on, Google disclosed his donors appoint. The two have since stayed in contact.

One last concept: Aggeles received mental health medicine and picked up a degree in cognitive discipline two decades after he first registered at university. He is now working on a masters in artificial intelligence.

The post From dream to nightmare: when your seman donor has secrets appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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