Keeping My Mind Healthy

By Paul VanRaden

September 2025

During 37 years of working at USDA, I must have been mostly healthy. When I retired in May, my unused sick leave totaled more than 1.5 years (3,122 hours). Luckily, I also needed to use little sick leave for staying at home with or taking family members to doctor visits until my wife was ill in April. On July 21 I summarized her medical bills and now review my own.

Why am I telling you this story? Because staying healthy is important. Understanding, treating, and preventing physical conditions can be easier to than mental conditions. Doctors cannot directly see any loose neurons in your brain and reconnect them. Medicines can treat symptoms but might not directly deal with real causes of mental illness.

My earliest memory of any mental health issue was being unable to sleep at age 20 with racing thoughts and so I walked a few blocks to the free campus health clinic in Urbana and stayed there overnite just to be safe. In 1983 when changing my religion I was asked to move out of the house where I lived near campus and had to find a new apartment. After a short-term relationship broke up in 1985 my major professor advised me to go to my parents’ home for a week to collect my thoughts. While working at USDA I was hospitalized for mania 4 times at ages 29, 31, 33, and 40 with stays of 4 to 12 days as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Paul’s hospital stays and costs.

Year / month	Days	Total cost $	My cost $	Where
1990 Jan	12	5,900	3,500	VA
1992 Jan	6	2,450	250	MD
1993 Oct	9	5,300	2,700	MD
2000 Nov	4	5,000	900	MD

After 3 hospital stays during the 4 years of 1990-93, I knew that having my own family might better keep me out of trouble. The 1992 stay was about the same time I ended a 5-year steady relationship. A few months after the 1993 stay I met Cheryl and her daughter Charlee. They and daughter Angel helped keep my mind entertained and sane most of the time since then. After returning from a short hospital stay in 2000, Cheryl told me not to ever go crazy again, so I stayed sane.

The hospital stay in 1993 was a year after my brother’s death but only a week after Holstein Association USA voted unanimously against my main research project. I was admitted to the hospital as insane, but the votes of all the elite farmers on that committee seemed insane to me. Holstein USA’s Genetic Advancement Committee hated the idea of using science and data from their farms to select cows with the genetic ability to live longer or to resist mastitis. Instead, they wanted just to look at the cows and imagine how long the cows might live or how healthy their udders might be. Fortunately, 6 years later, Holstein USA voted to use the productive life and somatic cell score traits that we at USDA computed but they previously had rejected.

That farmer committee in 1993 was more sane than 80% of U.S. farmers were in 2024. They voted against science, against truth, and for crime. They voted to return someone to power who created the most violent crime wave that Washington, DC ever saw. Voters knew that Trump 1) invited a mob to Washington, DC, 2) told them to keep him in power regardless of your vote or my vote against him, 3) refused to let anyone stop his mob’s criminal violence at the Capitol, 4) finally Vice President Mike Pence had to order the National Guard to stop Trump’s violent DC crime spree, and 5) later pardoned all 1,600 rioters who committed and were found guilty of violent crimes for him in DC. That night on January 6, 2021, Trump said he loved his criminal gang. Some people seem to lose their sanity frequently, but I will continue to think clearly.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) conducted a large genetic study of mental illness in the 1990s. I am from a large family with several members affected which was ideal for the study so we participated. The study did not find any obvious candidate genes for manic-depressive illness. More recent studies that used many more genetic markers and many more reported cases also found mostly small effects that hundreds of genes each have on such traits. My lab at USDA also found that most traits of cows are affected by many genes (but we had no data on manic-depressive or schizophrenic cows). Complex traits like mental illness are often harder to treat or to cure than some diseases that are affected by only 1 or few genes where researchers might find a simple fix for what is broken.

People with past cases or treatment of mental health might assume that they could never be elected to a political office. Even if you understand what the policies should be and how to solve difficult problems, many voters now prefer a constant stream of obvious lies from the mouth of a criminal who pretends he alone can fix it. Half of Congress, two thirds of Supreme Court Justices, and countless other cult members now nod their heads in total agreement with whatever he says, like bobble-head dolls. Trump’s government now has little respect from most of the world. We should find a cure for our country’s temporary insanity and help our fellow citizens regain the healthier thoughts they used to think.

Giving your brain a vacation or taking it to an expert can act like rebooting a computer or taking a car to the garage to get scheduled maintenance or emergency repairs. Thinking and computing may be similar, and efficient computing sometimes requires a reboot or down time to recover from software or hardware issues. Senator John Fetterman was open about his treatment. His words usually make more sense than the bobble-head Senators who repeat any lie from their leader.

Scheduled visits every 3 or 6 months are often required for maintaining prescriptions. Acute symptoms may require stronger medicines followed by longer-term medicines or therapy to make moods more stable. I took lithium for about 10 years, but it caused thyroid problems for me, and then Depakote (Divalproex sodium) for about 20 years. It is recommended for short-term treatment of mania. The instructions say to not stop taking it without consulting your doctor, and he always recommended it.

Gradually I stopped taking Depakote on my own during 2022-23 because for 22 years I had no mania. Also, medical side effects can be worse for seniors, which I now am. For 6 months of 2022 I took half the prescribed dose each day, then 1/4 dose for 6 months after that, then 1/8 dose for a year. The only changes I noticed were needing an hour or two less sleep per nite and thinking more clearly. Being on Depakote was a little like having the brakes on a bit. I have always had a very constant schedule of 8-9 hours in bed. Now I get about 6-7 hours of actual sleep each nite. About 30% of US adults get less than 7 hours of sleep.

Lack of sleep was a symptom when I had mania. Sometimes in research or in life too many options seem available to choose from. One way to clear your mind for sleep is to think of a blank blackboard and erase any image or thought that shows up, a trick my brother Mark suggested to me. It does not always lead to sleep but does help your mind at least switch to a new topic instead of thinking the same repetitive thoughts. A more advanced strategy I use recently is to think of relaxing your whole 3-dimensional brain and just keep any thoughts out of it. I have no advice on treating or curing depression because I rarely or never had that.

If good ideas happen in the middle of the nite, you might feel the urge to get up and write them down. Instead, I kept a small notebook and flashlight next to the bed. Or I skipped the flashlight and just scribbled words in the dark and kept the notebook open to that page. In retirement I have not used those strategies because most of my ideas come back the next morning. Previously, while trying to write poems, whenever a better combination of meaning, rhyming, and tempo arrived I put those in my notebook because that was safer and easier than trying to remember unusual phrases a few hours later. For decades I have set no wake-up alarm except if I sometimes had an early meeting, flight, etc.

Modern humans may now have their senses overloaded by constant inputs that can take over their brains. Past generations had fewer inputs and more time to think. A cuttlefish hypnotizes its prey using intense videos generated on its skin and then catches and eats it. Computers, AI, and smartphones can now generate addictive streams of information that you cannot stop staring at until your brain becomes captured by those who dazzle you. More people need to stop staring at the chaos and start thinking again.

While thinking about new theories 20 to 40 years ago I predicted that most of my ideas would not be accepted until I was at least 70 years old. That gave me a reason to stay healthy for more decades. Some good ideas catch on slowly. Nearly all people today accept the idea that we live on a round instead of a flat earth, but that idea started with just one lonely thinker. You may have read several of my ideas, but you might have accepted few of them. Your brain calculates that perhaps one of my ideas might catch on, but most of them must be wrong. One person cannot disprove so many of your beliefs on so many different topics. Your brain calculates that I must be crazy to believe so much crazy stuff.

New ideas on different topics are usually independent. If each of my ideas has < 10% chance of being correct, the probability that all 10 such ideas are correct is < 10^-10 or 1 in 10 billion, much less than the chance of winning this week’s big lottery. But many of my ideas on different topics are connected. The analogy of a jigsaw puzzle may be helpful.

Every day you see and hear things and try to make sense of the world. Your mind puts many picture pieces together to try to see the big picture, like a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Most of what you learned is true and helpful, but some information is false as if some pieces got mixed in from a wrong puzzle. Each wrong idea that you store blocks your progress from combining the true information to see the true picture. You and I must first remove and unlearn false ideas before connecting only the things that are true. I did that in 1983. Since then, I try to only store true ideas and valid data. You should check several sources to see if the information you store is true or false. Then, after you have many correct pieces in place, the last pieces of the puzzle are often easiest to snap into place to see the big picture.

The 1,000-piece picture that I want to see is of a potential Democracy World. Other people want you to see their beautiful picture of Dictator World. To make you see that, dictators often attack anyone who shows you a better, brighter future. They try to remove or restrict good ideas from your mind so you might accept the bad ideas they are trying to sell: hate for Haitians, Venezuelans and immigrants in general. Hate for big cities and Democrats. Hate for science, data, and honest debate. Love of money. If you want to read what I am trying to sell, see my Note to Self on How to Live. That report tells about my long-term strategy whereas my current report is more about daily living.

Your mental health is important also. Writing this personal report was more relaxing for me than watching TV or hearing about what our president did today. I watch a lot of news but want no poison in my mind. During his first term I blocked his words from entering my ears by pressing the mute button until it finally broke. This year I often cancel his words with my own by repeating the phrase “shutup shithead, shutup shithead” until his face disappears from my screen. Those words are rude, and I should not be saying that to a U.S. president. We pay him to preserve, protect, and defend our constitution, not to break laws and tell lies. If he said nothing, the world would be better, half of Americans would no longer feel that the other half are our enemy, and more people could calmly, sanely debate how to improve our lives. His actions are news, but his words harm my and your mental health. I keep my mind healthy by keeping his words out.

If I say anything false or break any law, please tell me. I always try to tell the truth, follow the law, apologize if I am wrong, correct any error, and treat others with respect, like I did for 37 years as a government employee. Each president, all federal employees, members of congress, and all courts are expected to do that. If they do, I will say nice words about them next week.

I should sleep well tonite, just as last nite. Sleep can help remove bad ideas, connect new ideas, and lead to clearer thinking tomorrow. Today I listened again to the 6 songs in my Rock and Roll library about Staying Sane. Listening to professional voices sing about their mental health has been helpful to me.

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