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MS Mental Problems


I have MS.

I have been in denial about it, resisting the tendency to think and talk about my disease, because if I think and talk about it too much, I become boring to listen to.

People will think, sometimes rightly, that I am obsessed by my disease. But if they understand what is happening to me, that understanding will help them cope with this tendency I now have, to get stuck in a mental rut, to become seemingly obsessed. That tendency is also part of this disease. It is hard for people to understand. Understanding is a key to coping with this disease, both for sufferers and people living with sufferers, so please try.

Please understand, I am not obsessed by it right now. Right now I am trying to explain this disease to other people, so that they can avoid misinterpreting the traps and knots the MS sufferers’ brains lead them into, as somehow deliberate. Deliberation itself can be slower, or broken, because of this disease. But remember we are losing function, and none of that loss is deliberate, even though it sometimes can seem as if it is.

The easiest way to think about it is that I have brain damage which is general, random, and is becoming progressively worse. At the same time, as I become older, I am experiencing the same deterioration of function with age, as anyone does. That deterioration may or may not add to the other damage, also randomly.

That means a world of problems, which are different from the problems someone else has, from their MS. That is because my brain’s functions are located in different places, different mental pathways, a unique set of neurons, than those in someone else’s brain, whether or not they also have MS.

It’s sort of like being blind, and having furniture that can sometimes move itself to a different place in your room. It affects that conglomeration of functions and behaviours that people know of as my personality. But remember that this personality is located somewhere, (which may be different from where it lives in someone else’s brain).

Handedness

This business of “handedness” (right brain hemisphere versus left, right eye versus left, right arm, hand, leg, foot, etc.) is one of the hallmarks of this disease. Most of my brain’s problems are in the right hemisphere. Because for some reason nerves have a right/left crossover, that means my physical problems are mainly on the left side of my body. It also means any physical functions which are not bilaterally symmetrical, have problems on the left.

An example of that is my heart, which is on my left side. My lower colon is also largely on my left. So I have problems with those. Every part of my body is felt by, and controlled by, my brain. I think the handedness of my problems even extends to the two sides of my heart, so I would guess the two sides of my heart are controlled by different sides of my brain. It is only a guess.

But the functions of the brain are known to be “handed”, and the two brain hemispheres are usually used for entirely different sets of things. That is why I am still good at organization, for instance. If you read Dr. Oliver Sacks’ book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, you will know that right-brain problems are an entirely different, and more mysterious, set than left-brain ones.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks.

I have relatively few left brain problems. In the book, My Stroke of Insight, A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, we find some of the differences between the functions of the brain’s two sides. She had a left-brain stroke. My problems are mainly in my right brain, so they are the inverse, functions that she had to re-learn. You might say that if you put her left-stroke-damaged brain together with my right-MS-damaged brain, you might have a whole person.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Bolte_Taylor.

She has given a TED talk which you might find insightful: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_ta ... #t-1102369.

So I have relatively few problems with language, numbers, organization, and other left-brain functions.

The left side of your brain controls the muscles on the right side of your body, and it is responsible for language along with logical and mathematical thinking. Meanwhile, the right brain controls the muscles on the left side of your body, and it is associated with spatial reasoning and musical abilities. (https://www.reference.com/science/left- ... rQuestions)

That is interesting to me because I am a musician, and my MS damage is greater on the right side of my brain. Walking and music are both uphill battles for me, and language, logic, and math are not. I exercise regularly and play the piano by ear. Someone with MS damage on the left side of their brain has an entirely different set of problems with which I am completely unfamiliar. But some MS difficulties are common, because they exist on both sides of the brain.

The Right Side’s Connected To The Left Side

MS trouble may be mainly one-sided, but there are two-sided functions that are also damaged. The two hemispheres of the brain are connected by a bundle of 300 million nerve fibres. This bundle is called the Corpus Callosum. Unfortunately, this structure is typically atrophied, in MS. That means functions requiring left/right co-ordination are affected. Walking and piano playing are two of these. Playing catch is another.

Getting Slower

My functions which are affected by my MS include my speed of processing information. That is similar to my reaction time, in that any reaction to information I am processing also takes longer. It is not the same as, say, the time it takes me to react to a starting pistol, and start running. It is similar, in that my reaction to information does involve my time to process a sound, and start moving.

A sound I hear is not usually a starting gun. More usually, it will be language, a complicated sentence which must be at least superficially, or more thoroughly, understood, in some more or less deep part of my brain. That sentence may be a statement, or a question. If it is a question, I must not just take the speaker’s words in, but formulate an appropriate answer.

That formulation of an answer, or the beginning of a response, may take longer than it would for an undamaged brain. Even if the response is just an automatic one, like “uh-huh”, it will take longer than the other person might expect.

It will take even longer, if it involves a bit of thought, like “Yes, I am thirsty.” It will be longer still, if it involves a decision, like “Yes I’d like some ice cream.” It will be longer still, the more complex the statement or question is.

Even after a response has been formulated, speaking cannot begin until, like beginning to run after a starting shot, I have activated my tongue, vocal cords, and lungs to speak my response. That activation, with my MS damage, takes longer than it would for an undamaged brain.

Sometimes I may be distracted by something else I was trying to concentrate on, so I cannot muster the resources to respond quickly, and I know the other person has probably given up waiting by the time I am ready to respond. So it appears I have no answer, even when normal politeness requires it. That can be a problem which makes me seem “slow” or unresponsive.

The more tired I am, the more likely this problem will occur. That is par for the course, with MS. But only someone very familiar with MS may know that. The usual thought is that I am mentally “slow”.

The more MS damage I accumulate, the slower I seem, to an ordinary person.

ElliotB wrote:" I am trying to explain this disease to other people"

I don't know if it is possible without a common frame of reference. 'Normal' MS free people simply cannot fully comprehend what we are going through, especially mentally.

jimmylegs wrote:i'm running through definitions of terms over here, and wondering if you have found any kind of framework that examines a wide array of mental health issues, from physical injury through chemical imbalance etc.

could be interesting to see how your range of xp (and those of other patients), from physical thru cognitive thru emotional limitations, fit into such a system.

as of right now, i tend to think that most ppl when they use the phrase 'mental health' would understand it to refer to the range of issues addressed in the latest DSM, eg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5#Sec ... _and_codes

without digging in too deeply, i am not sure whether or how everything you're talking about above fits into that system.