The Adrenals Question

As one’s health improves, a good few aspects of the living experience reveal and come undone as if pulling a yarn to find you’ve also unraveled loose the needles stuck. The adrenal glands, or any other gland regulating the “internal secretions” aren’t as impersonal and foreign as we’d like to believe, and one ought to spend a little time trying to understand what they signify, how they shape perception and matter. I see the adrenal glands as a continuous and never-tiring reminder of our fallenness, driving aging and disease, borrowing time and forever owing, safeguarding all of our negative and “animal” characters, keeping focus solely on survival as if man is still in the middle of the savanna cortisol-eyeing all that surrounds him. Biologically speaking, the human organism is stuck in a tug of war between the pituitary/adrenal hormones, and thyroid/youth-associated hormones/androgens; the resulting physiology then influences character and personality formation.

“If your thyroid is working efficiently, your pituitary doesn’t have much to do and you’re not likely to get a pituitary tumor, your adrenals don’t have much to do, and your ovaries don’t get overstimulated. The other glands have an easy job when your thyroid is working right. If your thyroid gets interfered with, you have to rev up your adrenals and your pituitary becomes commander in chief and tells everyone what to do.“ - Ray

One may have already noticed the many similarities between thyroid therapy and the surgical removal of the adrenal glands (adrenalectomy) in the treatment of Cushing’s Syndrome. Cushing’s Syndrome is probably one of the (if not the) closest physical expression of hypothyroidism, and so in correcting the former one restores, at least temporarily, health.

Sometimes, before the adrenals are removed, the pituitary is irradiated which tends to bring momentary relief, as in the case below.

The question of “Are humans able to live healthily without their adrenal glands” has received little attention, if any. However, Selye did note in his experiments that as long as his adrenalectomized mice were supplemented with progesterone, they were free of symptoms. Thus, it seems that progesterone can to a good degree substitute for adrenaline, cortisol, and aldosterone.

There is an important point here that I would like to make that I do not think gets highlighted enough. When searching through various endocrinology textbooks in search of examples like the ones above, there are rarely any notes about the psychological and mental shifts accompanying these surgical procedures, as if the complete change in physiognomy and gaze does not at the slightest make one wonder IF A RADICAL SHIFT IN PERCEPTION HAS AT ALL TAKEN PLACE. For example, instead of surgically removing an entire gland, researchers have tried blocking the actions of the hormones produced by these glands. Lowering aldosterone (surprisingly little talked about hormone that drives demoralization (Sonino et al., 2006)) resolves agoraphobia, the fear of public and crowded places (Kijima et al., 2023), blocking adrenaline helps make friends and gets rid of stage fright and performance anxiety (Kymissis et al., 1990), and turning off cortisol (and lowering serotonin) with cyproheptadine corrects obsessive behaviors and inferiority complexes (Benady, 1970). I completely sympathize with those who reject reductionism, who dislike morphing aspects of the metaphysical with “chemicals in the brain“, but it is this unnecessary mystification that ends up causing a great deal of confusion resulting in a circular rather than forward development of knowledge and consciousness. I don’t think speaking about the endocrine constellation as a medium for what’s metaphysical is a roundabout way of affirming the mechanization of man that big pharmaceutical companies (and frankly most of “economy and industry”) have cultured for so long. It is man who senses God, and sense is a biological phenomenon. Where does heroic courage breed? The usual answer is something like “some external force that ‘takes hold’ and animates. Such nonanswers are everywhere, and all it takes to make them crumble are single examples where improving health spontaneously brings such qualities forward. Blake disliked this sort of gatekeeping from the general population by “esotericists” who like to cultivate an aura of mystery about themselves and their work (why his poems were written to be understood by everyday people). Only when this purge of fake mysticism about the world and our place in it is done away with can one redirect sight toward the actual unknowns.

It was Frye who, when analyzing Blake, said that the knowledge of our fallenness is revealed when one desires but lacks the power to act, who sees the limitations enforced upon himself - "the Blakean genius always suffering from claustrophobia," but I think one must take this a step further and say that it is only in the adrenal dominant state that one becomes acutely aware of one’s constraints in relation to one’s energetically demanding brain, invariably feeling “of this Earth” and trapped in flesh, and only when enough energy and heat have generated and pulsated upwards and outwards the head does one feel outside of these limits, where desire and action are one, where one gets a peek into the eternal and once again able to bear the Heavens in an attempt to reverse the Fall. Lowering cortisol comforts the skin, paradoxically lessening our awareness of being trapped in it. Because “the main features of aging can be produced directly by administering excessive amounts of cortisol” and the “inability to turn off cortisol production is characteristic of old age”, lowering it brings us closer to a state of youthfulness, and EVERY PERSONALITY TRAIT THAT HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH THIS DEMOGRAPHIC. And so it is only when the pituitary gives up its status as “commander in chief” to the thyroid that "what man can do" loses all its heaviness and merges with "what he would like to do". The adrenal stress hormones atrophy the brain, lowering our imaginative capacity, and because miracles reveal what the imagination can do, Christ-like isn’t an other.

References

Benady DR. Cyproheptadine hydrochloride (Periactin) and anorexia nervosa: a case report. Br J Psychiatry. 1970 Dec;117(541):681-2. doi: 10.1192/bjp.117.541.681.

Kijima R, Tesen H, Igata R, Okamoto N, Yoshimura R. Agoraphobia and panic attacks complicated by primary aldosteronism improved by treatment with eplerenone: a case report. BMC Psychiatry. 2023 Oct 27;23(1):787. doi: 10.1186/s12888-023-05275-w

Kymissis P, Martin E. Antistuttering medication? J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 1990 Sep;29(5):840. doi: 10.1097/00004583-199009000-00037

Sonino, N., Fallo, F., & Fava, G. A. (2006). Psychological Aspects of Primary Aldosteronism. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 75(5), 327–330. doi:10.1159/000093956