Inner Science, Manufacturing Staff in your Inner Lab: HealthyPlace.com

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Kathryn's Corner

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Kathryn Cohan Inner Science

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the lab First I will describe my lab.

This "Kathryn's Life" lab was built in 1955 in Washington DC. It was moved to NYC about 6 weeks later and was located across from Central Park for about eight years. Then, it moved back to Washington and spent the next ten years moving between Africa and the US. The latter part of that period is when the "inner scientist" came to reside in the lab ... because the laboratory of my life at that time was starting to produce some experiences that just didn't fit in with anyone's idea of what my life should look like, including my own.

I made it back to the United States in time to graduate from an American High School. This was extremely important to the builders of the lab ... since entrance into college depended upon it. American High School was so completely different from any experience I had had before ... It was stressful in the extreme, isolated because of the lack of rootedness I brought to the experience of having peers, and I just plain didn't know "the rules" for being an American teenager. In my quiet moments ... and there were lots of those ... I heard music and saw things that weren't real.

things I used to worry about When you start manufacturing psychotic stuff in your lab, you feel compelled to keep it secret. Actually, it is more like you are on a secret mission ... you have an inner detective that ferrets out what is causing the psychotic stuff and sending reports (electrical outlets are involved) (bananas have a bad effect) ... and since the detective work is flawed, the scientist theorizes with flawed information (electrical outlets are sending the music, if I cover the outlets the music will stop) (bananas have a bad effect, my mother bought the bananas, my mother is trying to poison me).

Do you see how this happens?

So, the solution was -- at seventeen when things really unravelled -- to send me to an outside scientist for a second opinion. That opinion was that I had paranoid schizophrenia, and the doctor that rendered it might have been right, but no one liked the opinion. So another scientist was sought, this one with a different lens and a better opinion and so it was decided that the laboratory of my life had fallen victim to temporal lobe epilepsy.

Well, I was glad to hear it. My inner scientist was coming up with good conclusions, but they were conclusions that had a lot of fear with them ... the new, more experienced scientist outside of me said he could fix this ... and so far I hadn't been able to ... so I did what he said. I took drugs for temporal lobe epilepsy and was no longer preoccupied with voices and visions and decided , just to be on the safe side, to avoid school (in case that was somehow tied up in it) and to move to a new state (in case that was somehow tied up in it) and to set down roots (in case they were somehow tied up in it too).

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