#brain stuck on doctor who

[tenrose]

I think we don't talk enough about the Ninth Doctor's theme. Like what force on Earth possessed Murray Gold to make the saddest, most haunting theme song for the reboot of the oldest sci-fi TV show?

[aenslem]

I guess you better go and get your armor. Get your armor... We could pretend that we are friends tonight.

[the-worms-in-your-bones]

Doctor who related things I think about constantly

- ‘but if nobody watches dr who will kill himself’

- ‘why do you think in times new roman’

- untempered schism -> hole of rassilon

[letsnotdiealone]

Not gonna lie whatever was happening in that finale was overshadowed in my brain by MURRAY GOLD IS SO BACK HE IS SO BACK EVERYONE DID YALL HEAR THAT MURRAY GOLD

[khruschevshoe]

The cognitive dissonance in the Timeless Children when Jodie Whittaker is acting her ass off, winning all of the hypothetical awards, embodying every cell of the Doctor's body, and the dialogue about the Time Lords (have made universe-spanning careers out of secrecy, keeping things from other species, lying about their real goals, forcing the Doctor out so he can't tell people the truth, literally planning to burn the universe to ascend to a higher plane) is literally "Why would they lie?"

Like, bro. Dude. Doctor. My pal. Friendo. Regardless of the Timeless Child twist, That is literally all the Time Lords have ever done.

[ninemelodies]

such a sucker for characters with memory loss but who end up still being influenced by the memories they've lost

like

donna holding baby rose for the first time and thinking "it's good to be a mother again." and she has to stop and figure out where that came from because she's never been a mother before. all the baby stuff, changing diapers, feeding, how to comfort them, hold them, etc being so easy for donna in a way that isn't typical of first time mothers

rose coming out to her mother as trans and wanting to change her name and donna suggesting "rose" without a second thought and when rose asks why that name, donna can't say. "guess i used to know someone with that name?" is all she can come up with and she thinks she did know a girl named rose, but she can't remember and it's really not all that important because rose is trying out her new name in the mirror and deciding that it's perfect

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

the music in this scene is soooo evil im gonna throw up

[iceeericeee]

I’ve started watching Dr. Who and I’m starting to really really like it. I’m already on S1 E7 (the one with the 9th doctor and Rose).

[lvebug]

hello all! good morning, i've been missing you! i hope everyone enjoys this lovely day. my goal for today is to reply to a bunch of starters i have so that i can start tracking em :P

[quietwingsinthesky]

🌹:O

:3c

Lucifer doesn't care how the labcoats say it works; he knows there's no such thing as a clean break from a drift the minute the plug is pulled. Instead, Michael goes from a second consciousness beside his own to being dragged out of Lucifer the further Lucifer gets from him, both of them gripping tight to the connection until it slips, until it snaps, with a violent recoil that knocks Lucifer's brain out of alignment and reminds his legs that they don't work. His next step falls too fast, too heavily, and refuses to take his weight. It's only Michael, now only a voice outside of Lucifer's head yelling his name, catching him from behind that allows Lucifer to collapse to the floor with his dignity intact.

[multishipper-baby]

The idea of the swap AUs is back in my brain but this time with Mandarin because I think it would be really interesting to put him in other roles and see how he functions in them. And if he's less of a dick there.

[milo-is-rambling]

Me vs confusing gender thoughts vs mental illness

[radiates-confusion]

To any Visual Snow buddies, especially those that have days where your eyes just kinda hurt, and sometimes the bright sunny clouds fucking hurt too, don't push yourself to go for a walk or anything.

The sunny paths fucked with my eyes and periphera vision, and I had to spend the last few hours feeling sick and week as shit and now my right eye is in and out of fucking hurting too. 👍

Anyway, simply put, don't try to push yourself when it's too sunny out. If you have ways of mitigating the damage a bad day of this shit can do to you, don't avoid using it because you're 'not bad enough' because a shitty day mixed with ignoring that issue can land you worse off than you'd think.

Love y'all, stay safe out there ❤️

[xmen-blue]

the whole jack harkness is the face of boe concept can be so personal to me. because with an immortal character like him with so much trauma (and having a counterpart in the doctor who is only maybe sometimes immortal) dying can be viewed as a good thing even if you don’t want it to be.

i have a lot of fun ideas about whether or not jack does actually age slowly into the face of boe throughout his immortality, or if dying does literally reset him and becoming the face takes an eternity of not dying. ideas about whether it then just takes so long for him to resurrect that for a while he is believably dead.

and i mean i think that’s my favourite theory? i know rtd confirmed he’s the face during watchalongs, and actors have agreed, but actors say stuff about ships being canon when they never are all the time, so pinch of salt ig? unless rtd does something onscreen about the face we’ll really never know imo. which i both hate and love.

[glorioustidalwavedefendor]

Story from the Washington Post here, non-paywall version here.

Washington Post stop blocking linksharing and shit challenge.

"The young woman was catatonic, stuck at the nurses’ station — unmoving, unblinking and unknowing of where or who she was.

Her name was April Burrell.

Before she became a patient, April had been an outgoing, straight-A student majoring in accounting at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. But after a traumatic event when she was 21, April suddenly developed psychosis and became lost in a constant state of visual and auditory hallucinations. The former high school valedictorian could no longer communicate, bathe or take care of herself.

April was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia, an often devastating mental illness that affects approximately 1 percent of the global population and can drastically impair how patients behave and perceive reality.

“She was the first person I ever saw as a patient,” said Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, who was still a medical student in 2000 when he first encountered April. “She is, to this day, the sickest patient I’ve ever seen.” ...

It would be nearly two decades before their paths crossed again. But in 2018, another chance encounter led to several medical discoveries...

Markx and his colleagues discovered that although April’s illness was clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, she also had lupus, an underlying and treatable autoimmune condition that was attacking her brain.

After months of targeted treatments [for lupus] — and more than two decades trapped in her mind — April woke up.

The awakening of April — and the successful treatment of other people with similar conditions — now stand to transform care for some of psychiatry’s sickest patients, many of whom are languishing in mental institutions.

Researchers working with the New York state mental health-care system have identified about 200 patients with autoimmune diseases, some institutionalized for years, who may be helped by the discovery.

And scientists around the world, including Germany and Britain, are conducting similar research, finding that underlying autoimmune and inflammatory processes may be more common in patients with a variety of psychiatric syndromes than previously believed.

Although the current research probably will help only a small subset of patients, the impact of the work is already beginning to reshape the practice of psychiatry and the way many cases of mental illness are diagnosed and treated.

“These are the forgotten souls,” said Markx. “We’re not just improving the lives of these people, but we’re bringing them back from a place that I didn’t think they could come back from.” ...

Waking up after two decades

The medical team set to work counteracting April’s rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus...

The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately...

A joyful reunion

“I’ve always wanted my sister to get back to who she was,” Guy Burrell said.

In 2020, April was deemed mentally competent to discharge herself from the psychiatric hospital where she had lived for nearly two decades, and she moved to a rehabilitation center...

Because of visiting restrictions related to covid, the family’s face-to-face reunion with April was delayed until last year. April’s brother, sister-in-law and their kids were finally able to visit her at a rehabilitation center, and the occasion was tearful and joyous.

“When she came in there, you would’ve thought she was a brand-new person,” Guy Burrell said. “She knew all of us, remembered different stuff from back when she was a child.” ...

The family felt as if they’d witnessed a miracle.

“She was hugging me, she was holding my hand,” Guy Burrell said. “You might as well have thrown a parade because we were so happy, because we hadn’t seen her like that in, like, forever.”

“It was like she came home,” Markx said. “We never thought that was possible.”

...After April’s unexpected recovery, the medical team put out an alert to the hospital system to identify any patients with antibody markers for autoimmune disease. A few months later, Anca Askanase, a rheumatologist and director of the Columbia Lupus Center,who had been on April’s treatment team, approached Markx. “I think we found our girl,” she said.

Bringing back Devine

When Devine Cruz was 9, she began to hear voices. At first, the voices fought with one another. But as she grew older, the voices would talk about her, [and over the years, things got worse].

For more than a decade, the young woman moved in and out of hospitals for treatment. Her symptoms included visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as delusions that prevented her from living a normal life.

Devine was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which can result in symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She also was diagnosed with intellectual disability.

She was on a laundry list of drugs — two antipsychotic medications, lithium, clonazepam, Ativan and benztropine — that came with a litany of side effects but didn’t resolve all her symptoms...

She also had lupus, which she had been diagnosed with when she was about 14, although doctors had never made a connection between the disease and her mental health...

Last August, the medical team prescribed monthly immunosuppressive infusions of corticosteroids and chemotherapy drugs, a regime similar to what April had been given a few years prior. By October, there were already dramatic signs of improvement.

“She was like ‘Yeah, I gotta go,’” Markx said. “‘Like, I’ve been missing out.’”

After several treatments, Devine began developing awareness that the voices in her head were different from real voices, a sign that she was reconnecting with reality. She finished her sixth and final round of infusions in January.

In March, she was well enough to meet with a reporter. “I feel like I’m already better,” Devine said during a conversation in Markx’s office at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she was treated. “I feel myself being a person that I was supposed to be my whole entire life.” ...

Her recovery is remarkable for several reasons, her doctors said. The voices and visions have stopped. And she no longer meets the diagnostic criteria for either schizoaffective disorder or intellectual disability, Markx said...

Today, Devine lives with her mother and is leading a more active and engaged life. She helps her mother cook, goes to the grocery store and navigates public transportation to keep her appointments. She is even babysitting her siblings’ young children — listening to music, taking them to the park or watching “Frozen 2” — responsibilities her family never would have entrusted her with before her recovery.

Expanding the search for more patients

While it is likely that only a subset of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic disorders have an underlying autoimmune condition, Markx and other doctors believe there are probably many more patients whose psychiatric conditions are caused or exacerbated by autoimmune issues...

The cases of April and Devine also helped inspire the development of the SNF Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health at Columbia, which was named for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which awarded it a $75 million grant in April. The goal of the center is to develop new treatments based on specific genetic and autoimmune causes of psychiatric illness, said Joseph Gogos, co-director of the SNF Center.

Markx said he has begun care and treatment on about 40 patients since the SNF Center opened. The SNF Center is working with the New York State Office of Mental Health, which oversees one of the largest public mental health systems in America, to conduct whole genome sequencing and autoimmunity screening on inpatients at long-term facilities.

For “the most disabled, the sickest of the sick, even if we can help just a small fraction of them, by doing these detailed analyses, that’s worth something,” said Thomas Smith, chief medical officer for the New York State Office of Mental Health. “You’re helping save someone’s life, get them out of the hospital, have them live in the community, go home.”

Discussions are underway to extend the search to the 20,000 outpatients in the New York state system as well. Serious psychiatric disorders, like schizophrenia, are more likely to be undertreated in underprivileged groups. And autoimmune disorders like lupus disproportionately affect women and people of color with more severity.

Changing psychiatric care

How many people ultimately will be helped by the research remains a subject of debate in the scientific community. But the research has spurred excitement about the potential to better understand what is going on in the brain during serious mental illness...

Emerging research has implicated inflammation and immunological dysfunction as potential players in a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, depression and autism.

“It opens new treatment possibilities to patients that used to be treated very differently,” said Ludger Tebartz van Elst, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Medical Clinic Freiburg in Germany.

In one study, published last year in Molecular Psychiatry, Tebartz van Elst and his colleagues identified 91 psychiatric patients with suspected autoimmune diseases, and reported that immunotherapies benefited the majority of them.

Belinda Lennox, head of the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford, is enrolling patients in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of immunotherapy for autoimmune psychosis patients.

As a result of the research, screenings for immunological markers in psychotic patients are already routine in Germany, where psychiatrists regularly collect samples from cerebrospinal fluid.

Markx is also doing similar screening with his patients. He believes highly sensitive and inexpensive blood tests to detect different antibodies should become part of the standard screening protocol for psychosis.

Also on the horizon: more targeted immunotherapy rather than current “sledgehammer approaches” that suppress the immune system on a broad level, said George Yancopoulos, the co-founder and president of the pharmaceutical company Regeneron.

“I think we’re at the dawn of a new era. This is just the beginning,” said Yancopoulos."

-via The Washington Post, June 1, 2023