Saturday, September 26, 2009

A suicide song


Music has the ability to meddle with our mood. The evolution of music itself is to express the emotions, which the concrete verbal words fail to deliver. If, almost apt words of emotions join hand with perfect mood-reflecting music, they both travel deep into our brain and take control of the emotion programming softwares.

Such a dangerous thing happened in 1933, at Budapest, Hungary. Rezso Seress, a talented musician somewhat gloomy about his eloping success and his friend Laszlo Javor, who had recently broken up with his girl friend, teamed up to produce the saddest song of the century. Both their anguish merged and vibrated in each words and the vocal cords that sung the song trembled in despair and soon the sadness of the song become infectious and the suicides become an epidemic. They named the song 'gloomy Sunday'.

As malicious H1N1 becomes rampant in a damp climate, the depressive pre-world war climate accentuated the spread of the anguish of the song. Most suiciders dedicated with passion, the act of suicide to the song, in their last note. The stories regarding the people commiting suicide with clutching the musical notes of the song were spreading across the world and the song formed its own urban legend. According to legends, one man drunk in a bar in Budapest, requested the local band to play the 'gloomy Sunday'. Immediately after the end of the song, he ran out of the bar and shot himself. And another boy, who heard the song sung by a street beggar, after he finished the song, he gave all the money he had to him and shortly afterwards he flung himself into the river nearby.

when the famous Billy Holiday ( the lady in the photo above singing the 'gloomy Sunday') sung the English version of the song, the epidemic blew out of proportion to a pandemic. Soon it became one of the few famous notorious songs banned by BBC radio. And the legend says, in London a policeman became suspicious when the song was been played again and again in a nearby apartment. When he broke into the apartment, he found out a woman dead with overdose of sleeping pills and by the side of her an automatic phonograph was playing the song again and again, after this incident the BBC banned even the instrumental of that song which it had played.

Although he got great fame from his song 'gloomy Sunday', the life of Rezso Seress was followed by a string of sorrows. All other song composed by him afterwards, only got little attention. Then he became one of those unfortunates seized by the horror of the Holocaust. He lost his mother in the Holocaust. And the composer of the suicide song, committed suicide himself, in a 'gloomy Thursday' morning, in January 1968, by jumping out of the window of his apartment.


Saturday, September 19, 2009

psych,soul and the butterfly.

psychiatry is a word derived from the Greek phrase 'iatro tes psuches', which means 'healer of the soul'.

In Greek mythology 'psych' was the name of a beautiful girl, with a radiant soul, which made even the goddess of love Venus jealous. so the Venus send her son cupid (also called as Eros) with his love bow, instructing him to make her fall in love with a monster, but on the sight of her,cupid himself fell in love with her, truly madly deeply.

And the story deepens when Venus found out psych and cupid were in love, she started doing her best to separate the two, at last Zeus came to their love's rescue.

The 'psych' herself became the symbol of soul, with her exuberant animated beauty and the ordeal she had went through in finding her true love. 'psych' also represents the butterfly. Imagine a dead butterfly and the butterfly sitting on a flower with fluttering wings. The only difference between the two is the science eluding' spirit' or which is otherwise called as soul or its equivalent 'psych'.

Ultimately the 'psych' is nothing but which animates this mechanical biological body. when the animation exceeds, we call it as mania, when it slumps down we call it as depression, when it is irrational we call it as psychosis, when it dissociates from mechanical body we call it as dissociative disorders. So healing of the psych is the ultimate .

In this current paranoid world (especially the scientific world), the time tested, with 'instinct knows it is correct' type of phrase like , 'love heals psych' needs evidence.

I leave you with an open ended question... so open, so you will all open up I think!

Do love really heals psych?








Friday, September 11, 2009

Cats and Schizophrenia


Pet cats could cause schizophrenia in immuno-compramised adults, pregnant women and young children.

Cat lovers could conceive the above statement irrational. But anyway, the culprit is not the cat but the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. The cysts of these parasites love to linger in the litters of the cat. The cats which love to poo on the sand pits which children maintain for their play are the most dangerous ones. Toxoplasmosis targets cerebral neurons to produce a schizophrenia like picture with predominant positive symptoms.

























On talking about the cat lovers and schizophrenia, the great artist at the turn of twentieth century, Louis Wain comes to my mind. He had to support his mother and five sisters with the strokes of his brush, hence his art brush was always on an elegant rush. How he came to love cats was an interesting story. His wife fell ill of cancer, throughout her incurable pain, only her pet cat peter good-humored her.Wain also would dress peter up and put goggles on peter to make his wife laugh. After her death, he would have felt grateful towards the cat for taking some burden of her struggle with cancer. His 'human like Cat'-arts were very popular in late the 1880s and 1890s.

In the early 1900s he started developing schizophrenic illness and he was dumped by his sisters in a pauper asylum. With the help of popular writer H.G.Wells, he was committed into the Bethlehem royal hospital. Here he somewhat improved and resumed painting, as days progressed his paintings became more abstract. The popular speculation is that the deterioration of his illness had reflected in his increasingly abstract art. ( view the above pictures of Wain downwards... could you make out deterioration or increasing fineness?)

Whether Wain contracted the Gondii from one of his numerous cat friends... nobody knows! but latest researches say the odds ratio of schizophrenia associated with IgG antibody was approximately 5.0.




Now the question session: Could pet cats could be used as treatment for schizophrenia? what is AAT?

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

phantom music

I was writing my pharmacology exam... the question paper had started squeezing my temporal lobe... my memory circuits were frantic to download the eloping answers!

Everybody in the room seemed to be in the same state... and there prevailed an extraordinary silence in that room... as if everybody were in a transcendental meditation... then this thing happened... 

A music note was playing in my brain with a stunning clarity (the background music of the tamil song 'engenge engenge' from 'nerruku ner' movie)... it lasted only for few seconds, when i concentrated to hear it more clearly it vanished.

Still the clarity of the music note bedazzles me... is everybody having a hifi music recorder implanted in their brain?



Of late i am practising 'lucid dreaming'. At times in my dreams i could clearly notice a backdrop music playing in accordance to the mood of the scenes the dream machine creating.

I had seen a schizophrenic who had multiple phantom voices conversing to him... suddenly he would sing aloud... when enquired he said... one of the voices is of a lovely female... who sings to him in contrast to other mundane conversing (cursing) voices.. he would start singing to join in chorus with that girl...

I think he is a blessed schizophrenic. others who are blessed with this phantom music, technically called as Musical Ear Syndrome ( coined by Neil.G.Bauman ), are old people with hard of hearing.
Musical Ear Syndrome is almost an auditory equivalent of the visual Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in both insight is preserved.

It is feared that MES would be on the rise in future, in this i pod generation whose ear sockets are plugged with high octane music unplugged!

Musician Robert Schumann had developed this MES after slowly losing his hearing, he used to hear music of phantom Schubert, as he was taking dictation from Schubert's spirit.

Recent studies state that musical hallucination is much more common in sudden bilateral sensori-neural deafness. imagings shows increased activity in brodman's area 39 and frontal lobe middle gyrus.

you could share your views...

Iam going to leave you with one question after each post...

what is ringxiety?