Disposing of a body is harder than one could imagine.
So……
It doesn’t look as if I will be able to donate my brain after my death.
And this kinda saddens me a bit.
I had always envisioned that my brain would serve some useful purpose.
After all I survived:
– sexual abuse
-mental abuse
-physical abuse
-neglect
I have lived with and coped with:
-CPTSD
-Major Depression
-Severe Anxiety
-The effects of military conversion therapy
The thought of death has never been very far.
Depression runs in my family.
And yet not once have I stuck a needle in my arm or snorted anything up my nose or toked on anything. The last time I had a drink was in July of 2011 and even then I was a very infrequent drinker.
I’ve had to deal with personality issues caused no doubt by the various traumas and abuses.
And yet I’ve somewhat navigated life and ended up with stable employment even if it is not at the level of employment that I could have risen to.
This rise is something that I’ve done on my own with absolutely no help from my father or my family. During all of the times I was unemployed in the early ’90s Richard was of no use. Even when I was on Skid Row in Vancouver and Toronto my father was of no assistance.
I did this all on my own.
You would think that research labs would want to know what it was inside my brain that allowed me to go from basically non-functional and requiring psychiatric institutionalization at age 10 to being the Chief Engineer of a hospital at 47.
Nope.
It’s like the field of depression research is oblivious to confirmation bias. By this I mean that researches are obviously looking for answers where they expect to find them, in the brains of depressed people who have not fared well in life. Or the researches go looking for the answers to drug addiction in the brains of those who were abused and who succumbed to drugs and other forms of self medication. They often use the brains of those who have never suffered from depression in their lives as a reference point. And that’s great if you’re only concerned about the two extremes, but it gives you absolutely no data about those in between the two extremes.
Where my body goes after my death? Don’t know really. So long as it isn’t cremated or buried, I’m cool with that.
Medical school would be nice.
But medical schools like UBC pose a problem in the sense that they only take “whole body” donations for their medical students to dissect. If my brain were to be removed immediately after my death, then UBC wouldn’t take my body.
Conversely, no brain research program would take my brain after it had been removed from my skull by medical students.
Now, of course this is all really silly when you think about it isn’t it?
After I’m dead they could launch by body into space and I wouldn’t have the foggiest clue, would I. What they do with my corpse and my brain after I’m dead and gone is really a matter of trust. But still…….
Beeshive 