Here is my self-made incubator. It was constructed at home from several cheap and available components – a nice big Styrofoam cooler, a light bulb, a light bulb socket, a temperature controller, and some tape. That’s all, very simple. The cooler I got from Canadian Tire for about $14, light bulb, socket, and tape also from Canadian Tire. The temperature controller I purchased on Amazon for $35. What does the incubator do? The light bulb goes inside the cooler, so does the sensor from the controller. You close the lid and choose the desired temperature. The controller keeps the light bulb on until the chosen temperature is reached, then it turns it off. If the temperature drops, the light bulb is turned back on.
How is any of this relevant to depression treatment? Well turns out that it is, and this incubator has been helping me a lot more than my previous trials of anti-depressants. I use the incubator to make fermented foods and research shows that eating probiotic foods can reduce chronic inflammation in the body and this in turn can reduce symptoms of depression. I have been making goat kefir, goat yougurt, sourdough, fermented fruits. I have also ordered a tempeh starter – spores of a specific mold, Rhizopus, that is used to ferment soy beans. I have also been buying natto (another type of fermented soy beans) in a Japanese store and eating it for breakfast.
It has been a bit more than a month since I started all this fermented food consumption and I think it has definitely improved my brain function in many ways. Correlation doesn’t mean causation, but I have noticed improvement in the way I think, the way I react to stressful events, my ability to sit down and spend time on meditation. I have rediscovered my interest in violin playing and my interest in the opposite sex. Last week I found my headphones because I wanted to listen to David Guetta in the subway on my way to work. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but if you’ve experienced severe depression and if you’ve seriously considered suicide, I think you would understand that this means progress. If you have experienced a state of mind in which your only desire was finding a way to end your life, then you know that going to a state where you have a desire for something else, anything else, is definitely an improvement.
I think therefore that constructing this incubator was the best decision this year so far. Last year the best decision that I made was pursuing immunosuppressant with intravenous steroids. I was treated with IV Solu-Medrol for five days in December and after that I saw my mind opening up. No, my depression did not vanish, but I started to have ideas, to be more proactive. Participating. I through of sharing my experience with autoimmune encephalitis, so I started a blog. I took the psychiatrist’s advice to do aerobic exercise in order to reduce brain inflammation. I researched further anti-inflammatory treatments and decided to build an incubator. I also became interested in helminthic therapy, so I learned how to use bitcoin and purchased some helminth larvae in order to infect myself. I don’t think this is all a coincidence, I think the steroids treatment did reduce inflammation that was there in my brain and some neural pathways opened up, more ideas started coming in. My tunnel vision became broader, the world became less black and white.
You can read my previous post about fermented foods and depression treatment here:
Bacteria, yeast, stinky tofu, desire?
My case of severe depression and improvement after immunotherapy is another piece of evidence supporting the idea that depression and suicidal thoughts are not always just caused by imbalance of serotonin, but inflammation can also play an important role.
Recently researchers at the University of Manchester conducted a study measuring level of inflammation in the brains of patients with clinical depression. “Dr. Talbot and colleagues measured the levels of translocator protein (TSPO) in the brains of people diagnosed with major depressive disorder. TSPO generally plays a role in the immune response system and cell death.
In the brain, elevated TSPO levels activate the microglia, which are immune cells specific to this organ. Microglial activation indicates brain inflammation, so this is what the scientists targeted.
People with depression who were experiencing suicidal thoughts were found to exhibit significantly higher levels of TSPO, associated with microglial activation and indicating inflammation of the brain.“
Depression: Is brain inflammation tied to suicidal thoughts?
I was suffering from treatment resistant depression, but now I believe that it is not resistant, the treatment was just incorrect. I was put on mirtazapine, bupropion, risperidone, sertraline, multiple combinations of antidepressants and antipsychotics were tried. Well none of those combinations worked, but today I am still alive. I cannot thank my psychiatrist who continued to treat me with the same medications just in different doses and mixes, but I am thankful to all the researchers, journalists, and bloggers, who have written on the topic of the link between inflammation, suicidality, and depression. I am very thankful for Susannah Cahalan for her book “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness” about her terrifying experience with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. I think, maybe not in the average psychiatrist’s office, but in general there has been progress in understanding the impact of our diet, lifestyle, and chronic inflammatory conditions, on mental health. Diet matters, exercising matters, so does our gut microbiome, blood glucose levels, inflammatory markers. All of this cannot be fixed by just taking Zoloft or Prozac and I believe that is why many people don’t get better on antidepressants. They are not treatment resistant, the right treatment is available, it just hasn’t been applied.
Notes of a Neuropsychiatry Amateur 