Lithium

Lithium nearly killed me. This is a lomo photograph taken while driving over the Granville Street Bridge on a typical Vancouver night. It represents the internal feeling I had being on psychiatric drugs.

Anhedonia

This is a still from my grad film Anhedonia. I was still a good consumer then, but I was trying to show how deep depression goes so it got pretty dark. I started sampling more in this film and using audio landscapes instead of just me talking. I also layered the video. My sweet friend Margaret Flood plays the beautiful yet distant girlfriend who shows up and ignores me (just after this frame). She’s a great sport, but every time the cameras roll she gets shy. She and I met in first year and passed notes through art history. She and I laughed at Goya. No really, he did some funny commercial art.

True Love

I was asked to create something for Blackflash’s Love On The Prairies postcard series. My sweet cousin Christopher died on the job just before I made this. I scanned in flower petals, put a filter on it, and drew this angelic creature which seemed to represent either him or my feelings for him. He’s holding a ball of pure light because that’s how I saw him the eve of his burial, just a transcendent ball of loving light. I miss him, we all do.

Christopher Ian Cuthand
February 18 1986 – June 2 2006

Inspirations

It’s funny, I could talk about where I am now but I doubt anyone would believe me. Anyway, these were some of my inspirations when I was eighteen and nineteen.

Bjork – Hunter

David Bowie (feat. Trent Reznor) I’m Afraid of Americans

Garbage – When I Grow Up

Public Image Ltd – Rise

Nowhere by Greg Araki
I watched this movie over and over, James Duvall plays an earnest video artist trying to survive the shallowness of LA. This is the Valley Girl scene. James Duvall is a sweet guy BTW.

Basquiat painting downtown circa 1981
This is when I started thinking more seriously about street art. Later on I also discovered Banksy and have been a fan since.

Jenny Holzer
“Abuse of power comes as no surprise”
A televised text. I was really interested in Jenny Holzer’s use of text as art.

Barbara Kruger
“You are not yourself”

The Smiths – How Soon Is Now
The funny thing about this song is it’s the opening for Charmed, which I watched over and over when I had nothing but a t.v. in Montreal. The dialogue always goes something like “I thought we vanquished the demon.” “No, we forgot our special book, and I don’t think your boyfriend is mortal, I think he’s a dark lord.” “Well do we have to vanquish him too?” “I don’t know I’ll go ask Piper.” Seriously!

The Heads – No Talking Just Head

Peggy Lee – Is That all there is?

Cindy Sherman
This is a fan’s tribute video to her.

Sarah Mclachlan – Sweet Surrender

Gran Fury

Barbara Kruger’s work today:

Stanislav Grof on Spiritual Emergency

DR: In some cultures, what you are calling a “spiritual emergency” is a recognized part of growth and individuation. In our culture, at least its symptoms are frequently considered pathological. How does our culture move in a more inclusive direction?

The basic idea is that there exist spontaneous non-ordinary states that would in the west be seen and treated as psychosis, treated mostly by suppressive medication. But if we use the observations from the study of non-ordinary states, and also from other spiritual traditions, they should really be treated as crises of transformation, or crises of spiritual opening. Something that should really be supported rather than suppressed. If properly understood and properly supported, they are actually conducive to healing and transformation.

From spiritualcompetency.com:

Pranic movements or kriyas
Prana is the Hindu word for vital energy. As intense energy moves through the body and clears out physiological blocks, some people experience intense involuntary, jerking movements of the body, including shaking, vibrations, spasm and contraction.

Yogic Phenomena
Some people find themselves performing yogic postures or hand mudra gestures which they have never learned or could not do in a normal state of consciousness. Unusual breathing patterns may appear with either very rapid or slow, shallow breathing.

Physiological Symptoms
Kundalini awakening often generates unusual physiological activity which can present as heart, spinal, gastrointestinal, or neurological problems. Internal sensations of burning, hypersensitivity to sensory input, hyperactivity or lethargy, great variations in sexual desire, and even spontaneous orgasm have been reported.

Psychological Upheaval
Emotions can swing from feelings of anxiety, guilt, and depression (with bouts of uncontrollable weeping) to compassion, love, and joy.

Extrasensory Experiences
Some people experience visions of lights, symbols, spiritual entities. Auditory sensations may include hearing voices, music, inner sounds or mantras. There may also be disruption of the proprioceptive system, with loss of a sense of self as a body, or an out of the body experience.

Psychic Phenomena
A person may experience precognition, telepathy, psychokinesis, awareness of auras and healing abilities.

Mystical States of Consciousness
A person may shift into altered states of consciousness where they directly perceive the unity underlying the world of separation and experience a deep peace and serenity. (see Karin Hannigan, PhD for additional description)

The sudden onset of these experiences led many in Greenwell’s study to become confused and disoriented. Kundalini awakening is probably the most common type of spiritual emergency. The Spiritual Emergence Network Newsletter reported that 24% of their hotline calls concerned kundalini awakening experiences.
___________

Some practitioners, such as John Perry, MD, have argued that medication only inhibits a person’s ability to concentrate on the inner work and it mutes the psychic energy needed to sustain the effort to move the process forward. When medication is used to simply repress the inner process, it becomes frozen in an unfinished state. Suppression can impede the potential for a complete working through to a point of resolution.

Grof believes using psychiatric medication in Kundalini Awakenings can result in death for the now pathologized person. Some people recommend it. Either way informed consent is necessary in the treatment of anyone.

For more information on spiritual awakenings see the Spiritual Emergence Network.

1997 – 2007 The Art Practice of Thirza Cuthand

2007 marks the end of a ten year span of Thirza Cuthand’s practice using confessional interventions, both public and anonymous, to reflect the psyche of the world. In 1997 during her first year at Emily Carr she created a site specific installation in downtown Vancouver to address the general tone of isolation, fear, and loss of hope. Using selections from diaries she has written since 1984, she wrote parts onto tags which were glue gunned onto eggs she had cracked, cleaned, dried, and glued back together. These eggs and their accompanying diary selection were placed within the downtown core. Within 24 hours every egg had departed without a trace.

Her confessional practice continued after her positive disintegration moved into a kundalini awakening in 1998. During that time she continued using personal stories in her video practice, which garnered her international attention. Her short video works have screened in festivals across North America, Asia, Europe, South America, and Australia. She has attended the prestigious Oberhausen International Short Film Festival twice and won an honourable mention for “Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I’ Statement.” She has also screened work at Mix Brasil in Sao Paolo, Transmediale in Berlin, Bienniale de Image et Mouvement in Geneva, Frameline in San Francisco, and various other festivals world wide. Due to government restrictions on travel grants she was often unable to attend her international screenings.

She also began to post anonymously on various diary sites such as Open Diary, Bloop Diary, and Livejournal since 1998 when she finally got internet access. These anonymous confessions briefly stopped in 2002, when she returned to Saskatchewan and began following Riel’s journey to Montreal. She lost contact with the online community until 2003, after she had endured extreme abuse in the hands of the Quebec psychiatric care system. She began writing publically under her own name in her confessional, personal, and ultimately political blog Fit of Pique. Between 2003 and 2007 she went from a psychiatric consumer to a psychiatric survivor and ultimately achieved Secondary Integration after withdrawing from her medication.

During her journey she reclaimed her identity as a Gifted woman, and spoke openly of Positive Disintegration, spiritual searches, abuse, colonization, and the experience of growing up with multiple, sometimes contradictory identities.

The last short film of her very public Positive Disintegration process takes on fascism in contemporary psychiatric care. “Madness In Four Actions” marks a departure from her earlier work. She used collage to tell a story no one would listen to in her own voice. It debuted at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon in the middle of January 2007.

Now 29 years old, Thirza is outlining plans for a Gnostic Soteria house in Saskatchewan for future Louis Riel’s. She is also continuing to write feature screenplays and hopes to some day get funding for her 35mm projects. She is also learning her Cree language and plans to take guitar lessons. She considers herself a modern poet and is a 5th generation survivor of the Northwest Rebellion. Her mother, Ruth Cuthand, is descended from the Cree uprising. Her father, Edward Poitras, is a descendent of the Red River Metis. Both have made enormous contributions not just to the Aboriginal art world but also to the international art world in general. She hopes her work has served in some ways to heal both families. She was raised within the Aboriginal art community and has acquired the affectionate appellation of Art Brat. In 2005 she went back and completed her BFA in Film and Video at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver BC. She does not claim copyright over the egg intervention and encourage’s it’s use in areas of the world where suffering occurs.

Her next project is a feature documentary charting her bloodlines through DNA, oral storytelling, historical research, and travel to various parts of the world where her ancestors can be found, including Ireland, Scotland, France, Blackfoot territory, Cree territory, Saulteaux territory, and the migration route which led us here.

She believes the military maneuvers of colonialist enterprise have changed little over the millenia, and can now be seen in the current Iraq conflict.

Mary

This is Tori Amos’ video for Mary, a song of her 1992 debut album Little Earthquakes. Which was one of those albums I listened to all the time.

Eggshell Thoughts

I feel like I just unblocked something significant. I don’t know what to do about it now, because it makes four years of my life a totally different me. I know right about now I’d be getting scared someone will involuntarily commit me again just because they don’t know or don’t remember how I really am. I mean, I’ve been voluminously blogging for a decade really, but it was mostly anonymous, so most people in my life never knew how much I blogged. I remember how it started too, because it had a purpose in the beginning that I forgot.

In first year at Emily Carr we had to do a site specific installation as part of our creative process class. We were randomly assigned neighborhoods and I got Downtown – Granville. I noticed it had so many fascinating little places and yet the people walked around in kind of a daze, like they had amnesia. And it felt like a really cold environment, people didn’t know how to connect to each other. They didn’t trust each other.

So I wrote out parts of my diaries onto tags, and I spent an afternoon breaking, washing, drying, and regluing eggs together. I took all my broken eggs that were hot glued back together attached to some of my most intense thoughts from my young life. And I just left them various places around Granville. It was kind of an experiment, I wanted to reflect how people felt so alone, with a little anonymous thought that also felt alone. And I noticed within hours people had taken every egg out of that place, because you couldn’t leave an object like that on the streets.

So I was really interested in this idea of public diaries. And I mean diaries, like personal thoughts. In third year of my film program I made a devastating 16mm film of collections of writings from my time in an abusive relationship, and I was shocked at how well it worked. Every time I played it people spent four minutes crying their eyes out, and that kind of terrified me. I still have this film incidentally, I never got finishing money for it and I kind of didn’t want to, because I felt guilty for making people cry so hard. But I’m thinking maybe I should release it.

At the time I was making the film I also started writing in various anonymous diary websites. It was funny because people were really instant in how they responded. And it made me feel better too because I realized all kinds of people were having eggshell thoughts. And people did argue a lot, because people do that, but there were also these beautiful transcendent moments when some particularly poignant voice spoke out about their lives in the most honest way. And I think it started sparking empathy in people, even though they squabbled a lot and tattled on various web masters and so on.

I don’t quite know why I decided to do a public blog, except that the war was starting and I thought it was time to stand proudly next to my little eggshell thoughts. So I did, and it was scary at first, and then just whatever because no one seemed to visit anyway, but I hoped that once in a while someone else with a little eggshell thought would hang around.

And they have, and I’ve met them in various ways, even if it’s just knowing someone in Prince Albert likes to visit. And I think my eggshell thoughts don’t need to be glued together anymore, I think they’re finally whole.

So yeah, that’s the end of ten years of my career, and I still have more of my career left. I’m 29 in a month. I’m not sure what I’ll do now, except that I was hoping someone would give me money to make a feature. But I’m not quite ready yet, I have some rewriting to do.

Eggshell Project, Vancouver BC, 1997, Granville St by Capitol Theatre

“God. This pain just intensifies. I don’t know where it ends and I begin anymore. Maybe I am just pain now. Maybe there’s no human left, only wounded animal, a wail, a sliver of bone and burnt flesh.”

Biological Healing

I briefly toyed with the idea of suing the Quebec Government for mind control in the psych system, but then I checked out their health laws and found out they wrote a new one since my hospitalization where if they get sued or taken to court they can open up someone’s ENTIRE medical record to public scrutiny, and give someone’s medical record to employers, and give it to people in the event of the patient becoming incapacitated mentally, it’s really creepy and it got written in under a more neutral case. And I know weird shit is written in mine, so I’m not terribly interested in giving them that power. On the other hand, I’m perfectly happy to continue describing my experience in the Montreal psych ward through this blog.

One thing which does kind of bum me out is that sometimes I worry no one has been paying any attention to this blog, but I think that’s just some weird program I have. I tried to get as many people to pay attention to me when I was disintegrating because I knew I needed people to carefully watch what happened to me. But sometimes I’m worried people just kind of wandered off in disgust along the way, and a lot of people did. I remember afterwards my dad was just like “Thirza! You have to pick your friends better!” And it was so cute because it was like the understatement of the year. At this point I’m pretty cognizant of people who might try to influence me back towards that kind of programming, but I think I’m starting to regain mastery over myself. I don’t want to state that completely though, because I don’t know if I’ll have flashbacks from heavy neuroleptics.

I’m healing my brain as well as I can though. I’m taking Natrum Sulphuricum for head injury as prescribed by my homeopath, along with 3 capsules of Omega 3 6 9, iron, vitamins, and kelp just because it’s recommended for people in awakenings. And some other stuff, but those are the ones directly related to my brain. In fact, the entire depression thing could be explained just by my low iron levels, because my iron was REALLY low. And my Gramma had to take iron pills her whole life too. I’m interested in this idea of biomagnetism, because the theory is that you can replace damaged brain tissue with magnetite crystals. And that’s not doing creepy brain surgery, it’s just figuring out a way to consciously spark the natural formation of those crystals, how that’s done I’m not sure. But it does make Buddha’s Diamond Mind thing sound like he was talking about more than a metaphor. So for now I’m looking at Buddha again and his concept of cultivating a diamond mind. Magnetite has some funny characteristics in crystal work, but I’m not really doing it to get that, just to repair what’s been taken. But I’m aware it might have other implications.

I am going to keep making movies though, and I think I’m more interested in doing “fictional” work to talk about history and issues. The funny thing is the entire time I was in the hospital I kept telling them “I’m making a movie” and what I meant is that I was observing so that I could write a screenplay about it later. I think it just seemed like a bizarre rambling though, which is good. I mean, they genuinely thought that me being a filmmaker was a delusion, until my friends said it was true. And the first psychiatrist was convinced I spoke French, for who knows what reason. I didn’t. And there are various mistakes altogether, including the fact that Montreal psych ward survivors recognize each other and talk about it because it is so overt.

But fucking hell, it’s been so frustrating trying to tell people around me that I was ritually abused in the psych ward, because of programming. I don’t know what would happen to me if I hadn’t studied mind control long before I ended up there. And when I say I studied mind control, fuck, I spent two years off and on reading all about it. I’m trying to figure out how to intelligently disarm the programming in the people around me who keep trying to keep me involved with psychiatry. Telling my mom about the hate-your-mother programming changed something in her, but I don’t know if she knows about how the other programs work. I can’t really tell people “Hey! Pay attention to this!” because then it looks like I’m “manic.” So I’m just hoping people eventually start listening to me, but it’s going to take a while. I only did my healing turn around this weekend. And I know people might try to intimidate me through the threat of psychiatric force again, so that will be interesting. But I do have reams of evidence to confront them with, or the appropriate questions to get them to reveal their thinking around it, which is probably the better tactic.

It frustrates me though that I bothered to spend time around R.A. survivors, because they did put their shit on me and that sucks. I think I’m developing boundaries though, especially since every time I make friends with an R.A. survivor I set them off at some point and I know it. I don’t want to hurt them, but clearly there is something about me that hurts them, and I don’t want to change myself just so they feel at ease. It’s time to let some of those people go. And I have, the seriously programmed people are for the most part out of my life. And it’s getting easier, to trust that even though R.A. survivors seem to be everywhere, there are people who never went through it. I think sometimes if you attract that kind of energy, it seems like EVERYONE is an R.A. survivor, it just blocks out reality through a generalized feeling. Mostly though, if someone starts putting their issues on me I’m not going to take it on anymore, it confuses me.

I also wonder, why is it so many people don’t remember stuff they say? I have this bizarrely good memory (when not drugged) and I can somehow quote people verbatim once in a while. But even if someone says something really mean, they don’t remember it. I guess it’s selective memory. But it used to fuck me over all the time.

Anyway, even if the drugs did make me feel better (which they didn’t) I was going to die from them one way or another. I just couldn’t handle those neurotoxins in my system anymore.

New Tactic

Based on what I know, I predict that Bush will be deposed this year. BUT, I know how they’re going to do it, because they’re so damned predictable. He’ll be diagnosed with a heavy duty mental illness, and the agenda of fascist psychiatry (a distinct sect of psychiatry) will be advanced on peoples world wide. Don’t be like Bush, he was mentally ill, take this pill and you won’t have to worry about turning into a war lord. It will be a type of health act, working under the guise of keeping people from becoming evil, but because of the nature of the pills it will really eliminate high cognitivity.

Bush is not normal, but I think his brand of weirdness corresponds to psychopathy more than things like “schizophrenia” or “bipolar disorder.” And realistically there is no known therapy for psychopaths, drugs or otherwise. They just fit in really well on level one societies (according to Dabrowski’s Positive Disintegration model).

On the other hand, if a society was willing to go to a higher level, then psychopaths wouldn’t fit in anymore. They would be exposed because they wouldn’t really know how to work on say, a Level five society. Lacking empathy, they would become really obvious. And from the case studies of psychopaths, empathy is competely out of reach for unknown reasons. I think we have to distinguish between R.A. survivors and psychopaths, because an R.A. survivor had their empathy used against them, and that is very different than having no empathy whatsoever. One can heal and the other can’t.

But it’s not up to us to try and hunt down psychopaths, because a lot of people would get hurt since they blend in really well. No, it’s up to us to simply recognize them, which takes a while to learn. And after recognizing them, you can just know who not to follow anymore. It’s very non-violent, and simple. But again, there are a lot of pitfalls because like I said, they do fit in with a primary integrated society really well, and also psychosis/spiritual emergence/positive disintegration/kundalini awakening, which can be positive developmental features, gets mistaken for psychopathy. It’s a tricky route, but not entirely impossible.