second time – Pertinent Observations

Depression and Stimulus

Ok so this post has nothing to do with macroeconomics, though it borrows its concepts from there. As the more perceptive of you might have figured out by now (ha, i love that line!) I was diagnosed with clinical depression about a year back. Actually that was the second time I had been diagnosed with that diagnosis, the first being a full six months earlier, when I had suddenly stopped medication after I had lost trust in that psychiatrist.

For over a year now, I have been on anti-depressants. It started with 37.5 mg per day of Venlafaxine (brand name Veniz), which got slowly bumped up until at 187.5 mg per day I started going crazy and having crazy mood swings and had to be scaled back to 150 mg. I was at that level for over six months when I realized that I had plateaued – that there was no real improvement in my mental situation thanks to continuous intake of the drug and perhaps I should consider getting off.

I proposed this idea to the psychiatrist when I met her last month and amazingly she agreed without any hesitation and quickly drew up a plan on how I need to get off the drug (you need to decrease dosage slowly else you’ll have withdrawal symptoms which are pretty bad). I found it a little disconcerting that she so readily agreed to take me off the drug, given that she had herself not given any indication of wanting to take me off the drug. I was disconcerted that I had been taking the drug for much longer than necessary, perhaps.

The doctor, however, paired the paring of my anti-depressant with doubling the dosage of the stimulant that I have been taking for my ADHD for the last six months. As it happened, though, I went through a major bout of NED that evening, and didn’t muster the enthu to go to the one pharmacy that legally sells Methylphenidate (the ADHD drug, supposed to have similar chemical composition as cocaine) in Bangalore. That I managed to function pretty well the following one week, including the three days spent at my client’s office, meant that I probably didn’t need teh ADHD drug also. So as I write this I’m off all mind-altering substances (apart from my several-times-a-day doses of caffeine and occasional ingestion of ethanol).

Recently I met a friend who told me that I had been too generous in my praise of psychiatric drugs in my blog, and that I hadn’t taken into consideration their various side effects and addictive symptoms. I’ve heard this from other people also – that I probably wasn’t doing the right thing by taking anti-depressants. So do I now regret taking them, given that I’ve chosen to go off them? Probably not.

This is where the analogy of economic depression and clinical depression comes in. In an economic depression, there is a halt in economic activity thanks to which there isn’t much circulation of money. When people start earning less, they start spending less, which further depresses their income and the whole economy goes into a tailspin. Going by Keynes’s theory, letting the economy slowly repair itself would take an extraordinarily long time (in the course of which we will all be dead, as the joke goes), so it is recommended that the government steps in and spends heavily in order to “stimulate” the economy and break the vicious circle it was getting itself into.

When you suffer from clinical depression, there is a shortage of flow of this chemical compound called Seretonin in your brain. Thanks to that, your mental energy is at a much lower level and you get tired and stressed out easily. Moreover, depression also leads to a significant drop in your confidence levels. You start believing that you are useless and not capable of anything. But then, your lowered mental energy levels mean that it is tough for you to be good at work, and do things that are likely to give your confidence a boost. And this in turn leads to further lowering of confidence and there is no way out for you to break out of this vicious circle.

A number of people believe that depression can be conquered with “willpower”, but this is applicable only if you’ve recognized it in its early stages. In most cases though, you realize it only when it’s deep into the vicious circle, and your “willpower”, much like “normal economics” during an economic depression, will take way too long to break you out of the vicious circle, and by then half your productive life will be gone.

Hence, to draw the Keynesian analogy, you need a stimulus. You need some sort of an artificial stimulus that breaks you out of your vicious cycle of low self-esteem and low performance. Sometimes, there can be a fortuitous life event which by matter of chance gives you a sudden sense of achievement and helps you break out of the cycle (for example, I was quite depressed (most likely clinically) through most of my life at IIT, but success in CAT proved to be a good stimulant in helping me break out of that cycle). But then, most of the time, life is structured such that there are few opportunities for such positive black swans, especially when you are older and especially when your mental energy levels are in general quite low.

Under these circumstances, I believe, there is no way out but chemical stimulants to help you get out of your depressive state. Clinical researchers and psychiatrists over the years have found the answer to be this molecule called “SSRI” which slows down the rate of seretonin uptake into the brain, with the result that there is greater flow of seretonin in your nervous system (continuing our economic analogy this is like the government cutting taxes as a form of stimulus). Greater seretonin in the system means greater mental energy, and sometimes the difference in energy levels is itself enough to push up your self-esteem levels, and the new energy levels means you have given yourself a chance to perform, and the cycle breaks.

Keynes said, as part of his theory, that it is important that a stimulus is short and targeted, and that in good times a government needs to be fiscally conservative so that, if not anything else, it has the necessary firepower to deliver a stimulus when necessary. Similarly, it is important that you don’t get yourself addicted on these anti-depressants and that you don’t become immune to them. Which is why psychiatrists typically wean you off your anti-depressants six months to a year after you started on it. By then, they expect, and in my case it did, that the stimulus would have been delivered.

Fractal life

Recently I finished reading Mandelbrot’s The (mis)Behaviour of Markets for the second time. Fantastic book. I think it is a must read for people who are interested in financial markets, and especially for those who work in capital markets. While it stays away from equations and “math”, and prefers to use pictures (or cartoons) to illustrate and show concepts (a method I definitely prefer to obscure math), it does raise a lot of very interesting fundaas.

So last week I was feeling stressed out. I realized that I had worked too hard on Wednesday and Thursday hence I got stressed out on Friday. A couple of months back, I took a couple of days of medical leave because I was stressed out. I reasoned that was because I’d pushed myself too hard the earlier two weeks. And thinking about all this today, I thought the incidence of stress has gone up over the last couple of months. This, I reasoned to pushing myself excessively for over a year now. And if I were to analyze my today’s work, I could probably say that I pushed myself too hard in the afternoon and hence got stressed out in the evening.

Same pattern, you see. At different scales.You get the drift, I guess. And stress is just an example I took. If I think about how my louvvu for my wife has evolved, again same pattern. There is a “global pattern”, and that same “global pattern” repeats itself over shorter intervals over the last two years. Irrespective of the quantum of time I look at, I see that same “global pattern” stretched or compressed to the appropriate time scale. In other words, love is also a fractal.

You can see fractals all around you. You can see self-similarity everywhere. And yet, even when you have small samples. you instinctively try to model it as a normal distribution. Without realizing that the “normal” distribution in life is the Power law.

Pashchimavaahini – Part Deux

I’ve twice written here about Pashchimavaahini – that part of the river Kaveri near Seringapatnam where it flows west. I had once written about it immediately following my first visit there. And I had written about it once again last year when I had disccussed the economics of the place. So over the weekeend I had to go there again, for the second time in two and a half years. In order to do the ritual that is associated with the place – which is to immerse ashes of the dead.

A few pertinent observations from the trip:

The place has lost the economics of the food. They probably didn’t want “casual travelers” to come and eat there, or maybe they overestimated their own monopoly power, but the lunch is priced at Rs 70 now. Quality has also dropped – sambar was watery and vada not fried properly. (I’d recommend you to read the death markets post I’ve linked to above before reading on).
To put this pricing in perspective, I must mention Kamat Upachar, a restaurant between Channapatna and Maddur. They have a breakfast buffet for the same price! And the buffet includes a choice of juices, bread, idli, vada and dosa, and you can eat as much as you want.
This time the shastri we engaged was peaceful. We included an “all-inclusive” price and told him we’ll give only small change as daana
I told the shastri to do the minimum possible rituals and told him that I’m doing these things becasue they “need to be done” and not due to some special religious intent. He agreed and kept his word, as he quickly took me through the most basic rituals.
When I was away and in the river taking bath, the shastri told one of my uncles that I’m the types that would’ve dunked ashes online if that were an option.
I had made it clear to my relatives that I find most of the post-death rituals extremely depressing and so I didn’t wnat to engage in anything beyond the most basic stuff. This meant that at the end of yesterday’s rituals I’d to discard my procedural “tools”. The “paatrams” were given as a gift to the shaastri. The sacred stone was thrown backward in the river. And when I was bathing after the rituals, I let the river wash away the highly starched procedural dhoti
Once that was done, I uttered a silent apology to the river for polluting it
Having been through all this once before, I knew what to expect and so was completely in control of the situation. This helped me manage my relatives better and have my way.
Having my way meant occupying the relatively comfortable front seat in the sumo while my senior citizen uncles struggled in the back due to lack of leg space. “This is even worse than an aircraft”, a former-HAL-employed granduncle told the driver
To help ease the situation for myself and distract myself, I live-tweeted the journey. And to further distract myself, I tried to tweet like Tharoor.
There was a fair bit of pollution involved in the ceremonies. A fair bit of plastic was used, and all got dunked into the river. Extremely sad stuff but I couldn’t really do anything.
I wonder why the urn of ashes is thrown backwards into the river. You stand on some rocks facing away and then chuck the thing backwards. I wonder what the significance of this is.
Looking at the general crowd there, I was wondering if death is a profitable business.

Why is Ten Sports sitting on so many rights?

I wanted to stay up last night. I wanted to stay up and watch the WI-Eng match till the very end. Waking up this morning and checking the scorecard, it seems like it was a really good match. And Fidel Edwards seems to have become a last-day-shutdown specialist. This is the second time this series he’s hung on. And he’d done so once before against India at ARG.

There was another reason I wanted to stay up last night. I wanted to watch Liverpool play Real Madrid. I woke up this morning and saw that it was an amazing game, too. Looking through the Guardian Football site (btw, Advani seems to be advertising heavily on that site; it’s a pity he never advertises here on my site) I noticed that Chelski-Juve was also a strong game, despite the result. Another reason I would’ve wanted to stay up last night. For the record, I slept at 12:10. Tea-time in the Test match, and before either of the football games had started.

Ten Sports seems to have bitten off more than it can chew. It seems to own the rights to telecast too many different things. I think I have raised this point once earlier, but it pzzles me as to what Ten Sports is trying to achieve by getting rights to telecast so many things, most of which are happening at the same time. For example, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been unable to watch the first hour of WI-Eng even if I’d wanted to, because it was overlapping with the last hour of SA-Aus, which was being telecast at the same time.

The reason I slept off early last night was because I didn’t have the option to watch what I wanted. All the three games that I’d’ve been reasonably interested in were supposed to be on Ten Sports (Zee Sports doesn’t count since Tata Sky doesn’t offer that), and I realized that I’d be forced to watch what the guys at the Taj Entertainment Network would want me to watch. Denied the option to choose what I wanted to watch, I went to bed.

It puzzles me that Ten Sports isn’t subletting its contracts. Devoid of anything decent to show, I suppose that ESPN or NEO would’ve only been too happy to acquire the rights to telecast last night’s Liv-Real game by paying a fee to Ten Sports. And it would’ve unlocked value at the hands of the remote-holder. Ten Sports need not let go of the rights to show all the games. All they need to do is to sell the “out of money options” – the rights to the game which they won’t be able to telecast anyway.

Now, the problem will be if accounting for all costs, no options are out of money. For example, you know you won’t be able to show Liv-Real. But you think that the loss of brand equity of your channel would exceed the money you’d gain by selling this option to another willing channel. The viewers are the only losers at this game, but I don’t know what can be done. After all, viewers are way too dispersed in order for them to take any kind of action.

Extending this question, what can a sports body do to prevent a bidder from acquiring rights to telecast and then mess up the telecast (or not telecast it at all) ? After all, the sports body is out there to make as much money as possible from the TV rights, and they need to ensure significant investment into broadcasting by the broadcasters, so the “i’ll give rights to only those channels that are in the interest of the people” model won’t work.

One option would be to sell the rights to two channels in each market. But given that broadcast is a natural monopoly, the sports body will not be able to make as much by selling to two bidders as it can by selling to one bidder. Is there any other solution that you can think of? If yes, unleash.