Greater Than Lesser Than

This is so weird. I keep cycling through two different feelings, and it’s not me being crazy, it’s just me trying to sort my head out. On one hand, I’m happy that I have a life which is really good, that in fact all of the things about me people thought were creepy and fucked up turns out to be healthy and normal and even better than normal because it means I have a larger potential than the majority. On the other hand, I’m realizing just HOW MUCH was taken from me by psychiatry, and that is really upsetting. Sometimes my body still has memories of violence that come into it, I have odd fear that shows up about being violated again. I’m realizing that the four hours of four point restraints was actually a sexual assault, and that’s scary. (Thought stream: I am a sadomasochist, I have some extreme submissive activities I enjoy and bondage was one of them, the restraints were non-consensual and punitive, I had wanted to use the phone which is why I was restrained, and in fact it did feel like rape, worse even. It was more force than the rape I had experienced beforehand.) I’m realizing that I have a lot of healing to do, and a lot of trauma in my body.

One really nice thing that happened this weekend is someone touched me in a loving way, for the first time since the hospital. I don’t know how to explain to you what it feels like to own a hated body for so many years and suddenly be touched in a gentle caring way (although I am a sadomasochist, so “gentle” is relative). It totally blew my mind. And I hadn’t even realized I could feel like that again, or ever. I’m really amazed, the experience brought my body back to life in a way I hadn’t expected. I had hoped that would happen, but feeling it is very different than just imagining it. Suddenly I don’t have a body that can feel only pain, and that’s really intense. Still, it makes me sad because I didn’t realize I had been carrying so much of my pain and so much of other’s hate in my flesh. I want to scream, or something. And I’m trying to hide the sad parts of me from people, because I don’t want them to hurt me again.

I don’t know how to trust people, except for a tiny few. And I’m also realizing that by being myself again, I will be confusing and odd to many, who might judge me for it. I don’t want to walk around with pamphletes on what geniuses are like, but at the same time I’m terrified I’ll end up having a friend or friends with a savior complex and this whole painful thing will happen to me again, and I’m not sure I could survive a second round of it. I feel vulnerable and defiant and sad and angry and just really fucking confused.

Mostly I’m sad that people must have hated me so much to do something so awful to me, and it makes me wonder why they hate me? Am I really so awful? That’s really hard. I talked to a friend who asked if I was going to see a counsellor for it and I was just like “Fuck no!” I don’t trust the mental health profession at all. And in a way that is sad, because it’s driven me away from certain resources. But in another way, I would rather be alive. I may see a counsellor at some point, but only if they know something about psychiatric survivors and gifted people.

I’ve decided I have to take my recovery into my own hands. I’m looking at thoughts that are in my head, trying to figure out what bad things I tell myself and learning how to deprogram and reprogram myself. That sounds kind of bad, but I’m doing it to myself, I’m not in a forced deprogramming situation. I’m going to be studying the Logical Fallacies and Neurolinguistic Programming and see if I can fix my head without drugs or someone’s outside opinion. I’m also going to be looking into how ritual abuse survivors recover, because I think that’s the most similar area of trauma to what happened to me. Basically I’m switching my research focus for a while to recovery, to getting myself out of this shit and not relying on anyone else, because I’m scared to death of everyone else.

The issue too, of course, is that I have emotional overexcitabilities, which makes this really intense. I think I can do it though. I have to, obviously I can’t depend on the traditional psych system to help me, not when they did this to me in the first place.

The funny thing is, the person I trust the most right now, besides Cuz Deanna, is someone I hadn’t expected at all. It’s actually really nice, it’s so unexpected that it gives me hope. I don’t know who my friends are going to be anymore, people got really used to me being The Crazy Lady that I don’t know how many can actually follow now that that label is gone.

And it’s ironic, when I think about this word Normal. Normal used to be something to aspire to, when I was crazy, it was the way I should be, the way I would be when I was fixed. And I was Less Than. Suddenly my diagnosis is wrong, I’m not crazy, I’m a genius, and acting like geniuses are supposed to act, with the same personal issues geniuses generally have. And suddenly Normal is Less Than.

I don’t think being Normal is a bad thing, unless you inflict it on others!! But it’s funny, when I said Normal and was coming from a psych patient perspective, people could feel good about themselves. Now when I say Normal it means the average population outside of Gifted people, and it makes people feel bad about themselves. What the fuck? That is a total mind fuck that is.

Did you know that when a Sun dies it becomes a diamond? That image is so beautiful. I don’t want to be dead anymore, but I do want to be a diamond.

This is not the Church of my people!

Wow, that last post was the hardest post I’ve ever written!!!! But really, I don’t want to come across as little miss perfect smarty pants who got fucked over, even if that is true some of the time. People have faults, perfection is near impossible, but as long as we can learn to practice love then we just might survive this funny planet. And I am trying to love the people who hurt me, because some of them didn’t know they were being violent. That’s a terrible excuse though, but, ehhn! I just think cycles of abuse need to stop, and people need to accept differences. That’s not so radical is it?

But enough heavy things for today.

Schrodinger went to his birthday party yesterday and met his two sisters George and Alex again. I think we all wondered if they would remember each other at all. Nope. They huffed and hissed and ran away from each other. And then we all ate an unusual gourmet cake made of salmon and cous cous, which the cats ate too. It was very cute, even though Schrodinger ended up under a cabinet and the other cats ended up guarding their food cupboard. Kitties are funny.

As much as I’m talking about my past here these days, I’m actually thinking more about my future. When I saw this amazing psychic in January she told me I had, more than other people, the ability to create my own future the way I liked. And apparently good things are going to happen, although sometimes they will look near impossible. I keep hearing people run around talking about The Secret from Oprah, something about if you think positively good things will come. I don’t know, I think sometimes you have to get through a lot of negative before the positive thoughts start showing up. But maybe that is just my process. Not that I want negative things to happen to me.

I’m starting to get my sense of humour back, strangely enough, although it’s not coming through in my blog yet. I don’t really want to become super serious to the point that things aren’t funny anymore. Lots of things in this world are perfectly hilarious. Margaret Cho is serious AND hilarious, and so is Kurt Vonnegut. I remember reading some psychologist thought that humour is really just an avoidance technique and that laughing is some kind of denial mechanism. That’s really funny! I would hate to try and tell jokes to that psychologist.

Anyway, enough of me, here’s some humour to lighten your day.

Margaret Cho is reminded that she’s Asian

Eddie Izzard talks about the Church of England (Known in Canada as the Anglican Church, and oddly enough the one I attend at Christmas and Easter.)

A funny thing about the Anglican church is that some of my family are in that particular branch of Christianity and so it’s the one I got used to. I tried to find some gay christian groups in Vancouver to worship with but I ended up with some Baptists and I’m sad to say I didn’t appreciate the service. Why, I don’t know, I thought they were too damned happy for church! LOL.

But I believe in peace, bitch

I kind of threw out a creepy tidbit about my past way back when I talked about being gifted and in the regular school system for four months in Grade 8 in a little redneck town called Merritt, in the interior of British Columbia. For an example of how redneck Merritt is, that’s where a police officer is being charged with torture under the status of war crimes, a first in this country and hopefully not the last, because Canada has some goons in the police forces everywhere (like a lot of places).

So I had moved with my mom, she got a job out there. Merritt only has two high schools, one was huge and very violent, I had to leave after a week because I was getting shoved all the time, mostly because of my gender which is unknown at best. I ended up at the junior high, which was no less violent. I mean sexual assaults and harrassment and vicious fucking shit. I had three friends, of three races, and that was a big no no in Merritt. The school guidance counsellor told my mom I shouldn’t be friends with a girl from India because they had conservative beliefs and she was going to end up married off and out of school anyway. I may have mentioned I wasn’t good in math COMPARED to the other gifted people, but I still pulled in A averages. At the school in Merritt the math teacher decided since I was native my A’s in his tests were a fluke, and gave me a C because he thought it was more indicative of my ability.

I went to a very dark place internally. Not only was I being bullied for being transgender, I was also failing in my academics because none of my teachers believed an aboriginal could actually be smart. I became very withdrawn, and the only interesting thing I learned was how to shoot a gun. We actually had a whole class devoted to using firearms, and like everything else I picked up on it really fast. I could name all the parts, tell you how to use it, and eventually I actually did start going to the shooting range, where it turned out I was an excellent shot if I had a bit more practice.

Nobody liked me, no one understood me, and all my differences marked me out for hatred. So I hated back. I didn’t know how to explain what they were doing to me, because if I cried they jeered at me more. So finally I started thinking about the fact that they were violent towards me and it was slowly murdering me. I was going to kill myself, there was no doubt about it, but I was going to take as many of them with me as I could. They seemed incapable of feeling any kind of empathy, and to me that meant they weren’t human. So killing them wasn’t as bad as it should have been.

Obviously, it never happened, and thank fucking god. My mom realized something was seriously wrong with me, and we moved away before the end of the semester. I spent my last two months of grade eight back in the gifted program in Saskatoon, I think they knew something had seriously happened to me over there but I wasn’t talking. I ended up going to high school with some of my friends from that program, and I dressed in black and hid for half a year, until I came out of the closet and things actually started looking up for me again. But it still scares me, when I think how close I came to creating more evil in the world. That really scares me.

It’s easy to become a perpetrator, unfortunately, which is why I knew after Sept 11 that America was going to lash out in a really evil way. However, I have to say that healing from victimization is remarkably easier compared to healing from victimization and perpetuating the original abuse on someone else. I’ve observed survivors and survivor-perpetrators, and I can tell you that survivors bounce back a lot easier, while a perpetrator either carries immense guilt forever or shuts off all emotions in order to justify the bad things they have done. Because when you destroy someone, you are really destroying yourself. And in order to pretend that outward violence isn’t self destructive, people have to compartmentalize themselves from the things they have hurt and destroyed.

I know some people maybe think considered all the shit I’ve been through I should want revenge, and I won’t deny that the impulses are there. But you can acknowledge your own darkness without inflicting it on others. I know that school shootings are horrible things in the world, I don’t deny that at all. But where was the compassion when those shooters were being emotionally tortured? Why did teachers allow me to be bullied, instead of stopping it? I don’t know. That’s a darkness I don’t really want to understand, although I probably should if I want to stop it.

Really though, I have turned away from any ideas of violence. It’s not right. I do have a dark side, but I have non-destructive outlets for that. And I think it’s important we acknowledge that we do have capacities for violence, because otherwise shit just keeps happening. I can’t hurt people, it’s not in my nature. I can think about it, but thinking and doing are different things. I did want to hurt the people who helped put me in the hospital, but I’ve let it go now. They were uneducated, uninformed, and unable to understand. I know they wanted to, and I know they thought they were doing a good thing, and I know they might even hang on to that for the rest of their lives, but I really have no control over how they deal with it. And I’m glad I don’t, I don’t really want to run around forcing education on people the way normalcy was forced on me. If people want to practice empathy and understanding, thank goodness. But if not, I just hope they stay away from me.

I should also mention, before Merritt, and a year afterwards and ever since, I was/am a pacifist. I was born a pacifist. I marched in anti-nuke rallies, anti-war rallies, I cried when other people got hurt. I almost became like too many other people are, and I’m glad I didn’t. Even when some girls jumped me when I was a teenager, I never hit back. I knew they would hit harder if I did. I’m sure people thought I was a wuss, but I couldn’t hurt them, at all. I wanted to be better than them, even though one punched me in the eye so many times I have a cataract now.

Violence is fucked up yo! Sex is far better, and consensual s/m is even better! Okay, that last part is really just me.

In a nutshell

For those who don’t know my eight year psych history, or what the hell happened to get me from point A to point B, with stops at Z F and Q in between, here’s the summary (just for future reference):

I had a bipolar II diagnosis for four years which involved putting me on an antipsychotic, an antidepressant, and a mood stabilizer all at the same time. I started out my psych history by going to get antidepressants, which I took for four years. I was having some suicidal feelings, I felt out of place, I didn’t fit it, my childhood had a lot of abuse, basically I had existential depression. I could have been helped by talking through it, but my therapist didn’t know anything about gifteds and I didn’t know I was in a process of positive disintegration. I was unable to fit into the mainstream and it made me feel that there was something wrong with me. I had also been raped not long before my therapist encouraged me to either check into the hospital or get a prescription for antidepressants. I got a prescription for Paxil.

SSRI’s have various psychological side effects, including withdrawal symptoms which create auditory hallucinations, random electrical impulses shooting through your body (The Zaps), insomnia, and at the worst case, akathisia. That’s a fancy term for what is essentially mania. Jacked up on enough SSRI’s, you WILL go manic, and that’s what happened to me four years later. The initial high of SSRI’s had worn off, and I still felt badly. Not only that but I was having physiological symptoms in my body and was basically being tortured by the medication neurologically. The doctor kept deciding I could be happier, and the prescription went up to the top level that can be safely prescribed. I should also mention my doctor was a general practitioner, a common experience for people on SSRI’s. Eventually I snapped, I stopped eating, bathing, started ranting and raving and dressing weird. I was officially in psychosis. Some well intentioned but misguided friends took me to the psychiatric ward.

A French psychiatric ward. I don’t speak french, and most of the staff didn’t speak english. This was in Canada. There were english speaking psychiatric wards, but I wasn’t living in the proper jurisdiction to be allowed to go there.

The doctors never really took a history, I spent less than two hours with psychiatrists over the course of six weeks. My treatment was determined the day I went in, without a doctor actually talking to me. I was labeled Bipolar II, with possible Schizoaffective disorder. No one asked if I was gifted, and no one knew what that meant either, including myself. I was told that disagreeing with the diagnosis PROVED I was sick and lacked insight into my condition. Accepting the label was required before I was permitted to leave the hospital. Everything about me became wrong.

The medication I was put on cause me to have seizures, hear voices, get depressed, have painful energy in my body, gain 80 pounds, some people get diabetes from the drugs too. I had brain damage, my memory was shot completely, I couldn’t move much, I started sleeping all the time, and I was unable to hold down a job. I became disabled. I accepted this because I was crazy, and crazy people are disabled people. But as I wandered half dead through various outpatient service centres, I started meeting more politicized crazy people.

Over four years I researched psychiatry, the case studies of the medications I was on, psychiatric thoughts of madness, the history of psychiatry, and eventually the stories of other people who had been in the system and gotten out and off the drugs and recovered. Eventually I almost died twice because of my medication, one started having toxic blood levels, which was indicating liver damage. The other one caused a rash which can sometimes result in Steven-Johnsons Syndrome, basically your skin blisters and falls off, a lot of people die from it, the recovery rates are poor. I was getting off my medication and trying alternative treatments (homeopathy and supplements like Omega 3-6-9, and Iron, which it turns out I’m deficient in). That’s when I suddenly wondered if being gifted had anything to do with being “crazy.” And I read about positive disintegration and overexcitabilities.

I’m off medication now, and a lot of negative things I assumed was me being crazy turns out to have been related to the medication. For eight years I have tried to fit in with society and I almost died.

I think a lot of people with Bipolar II have been seriously misdiagnosed, there is little being done in psychiatry to find out if there is a reason someone feels crappy. So no, I don’t believe you can say there are real bipolars out there. I know we’re supposed to believe that, but I think a lot of people, given REAL care that is about them rather than the needs of the people around them, have a good chance of recovery. That sounds awful to some people, but believe me, I’ve done the research, not with a government grant, but I’ve read enough volumes to know whereof I speak. The drugs are actually called chemical lobotomies by the doctors who invented them.

And by the way, during my research I found out they cannot prove a brain chemical link to madness. Some psychiatric survivors involved in Mind Freedom challenged the APA to release their research proving conclusively a link, and the response was basically, no, we have no proof, BUT we know it’s true.

Woah

Sensual overexcitability fucking rules.

How to twist an idea

It should come as no surprise that knowledge is often coloured by preconceived judgments and values, and that someone’s words can be twisted to serve an alternate purpose than what was really meant. In spectatorship theory, multiple readings are a given, as much as you want a film to mean something specific, someone can come along, get a different meaning, and it is no less valid to them. Does that mean it’s the right or wrong meaning? Or that you failed to make sure your intention was clear? I don’t know.

What I do know is this little tidbit I picked up last night from Vonnegut’s A Man Without A Country. The infamous quote by Karl Marx, “Religion is the opiate of the masses” has been assumed to mean that religion is worthless, a form of willing delusion which people engage in. We have to see that we’re looking at that through ideas around things such as drug addictions and our judgments of the people who use drugs and our own limited understanding of why they would use drugs. Vonnegut pointed out that Marx was in fact an opium user, and at the time it was the most effective painkiller around. Can you imagine if he has said something in contemporary lingo that had less stigma, like “Religion is the Tylenol of the masses.”

What he meant is that religious concepts alieviate human suffering, which is a very different meaning than the one most accept.

But the alternate meaning held more value for people who wanted to use it in nefarious ways, by shutting down religious institutions in Communist dictatorships.

I should also say Communism is not a negative thing any more than Christianity (Vonnegut also says this), it’s the Application of communism in a totalitarian form that is negative.

An ideology can be twisted to serve any purpose, which is why context is important. For instance, psychiatry has at it’s basis a very humanitarian principle, that people have psychological distress and need care and compassion. HOWEVER, various assumptions and ideologies have been Applied in psychiatry which make it’s practice today a negative thing. Capitalism would be one of the worst forces which have shaped psychiatry as we know it. A sick patient is worth more than a healthy one, it creates jobs in the pharmaceutical industry which can keep making them take expensive pills that while not curing create a docility which makes people easier to control. And then there are the hospitals, which need patients to keep returning because it’s very profitable. My own hospitalization cost $24 000. Then there are the outpatient service organizations, the cost of psychiatrist, therapist, psychologist appointments, etc etc. It makes a lot of money For Certain People. In the long run though it costs a lot of money too, a person unable to work because their medication has destroyed the ability to remember or to move around even won’t be able to support themselves. They become more dependent on a system which needs their dependence. They will live in poverty and that creates more psychological distress. It’s a cycle which is hard to get out of.

What would revolutionize psychiatry is to eliminate the rewards of capitalist intervention. How that could be done without also hindering the funds available to help people with psychiatric disabilities, temporary or not, I don’t know. I’m trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater anymore. Some psychiatrists had some very good ideas, like R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, and Loren Mosher. And some, like Benjamin Rush, had some really appalling ideas. But Benjamin Rush is still highly regarded in psychiatry, while Loren Mosher is considered a bit of a kook.

I’m not really going to come up with a good answer to the question of removing totalitarian capitalist ideology from psychiatry yet, but maybe someone else can. I do think we need to set up more Soteria houses, more structure for alternative care. There are some alternatives around. What we really need is a handbook for the lay person to care for someone in an extreme state without inflicting further psychological damage. One thing to know is that if someone is having a delusion, it’s not your place to make a judgment about that and try to tell them that their delusion isn’t real. It might be VERY real, but they can’t communicate about it in a way that makes sense to you. For instance, I ran around saying I was god, and people got really pissy about that. But in fact I am god, like everything is in this world, in a Buddhist idea of it and in a quantum physics sense. However I couldn’t explain that at the time, and no one wanted me to anyway.

My morning thoughts anyway.

Hippocratic Oath

Short video about psychiatric abuse.

BOOKS!!!!

I’m doing a bit better today than yesterday. It really is amazing how much I’ve improved mainly from quitting my medication. I went to the bookstore today and got a whole bunch of stuff. I have Classics In Cree, a cd of songs like Amazing Grace and Wind Beneath My Wings all in Cree! I’m learning cree so learning it through music might work better for me. My Grampa’s writing up little lessons for me too, I have to practice those. I also got A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut, it’s sort of a collection of essays and thoughts and autobiographical details. I love his work, Slaughterhouse Five is my favorite anti-war novel. And his narrative style is so humourous, he basically starts out each story by telling you how it will end, you always know the destination. I also got Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, who wrote Guns Germs and Steel. I loved Guns Germs and Steel so I’m looking forward to this one. It’s about great civilizations collapsing due to environmental catastrophes.

I remember in elementary school when we did our ongoing Save the Planet curriculum I had a nightmare that we were driving and I saw a hole in the sky, but it was like stars against a night sky exposed through this tear in blue sky. It scared the hell out of me. And that was in the late 80’s and still no one’s done anything to effectively counteract it.

I also got Identity And Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen, which talks about how divisions in humankind have been marked with violence because of confused hatred. The cover has my favorite painting by David on it, Les Sabines. When I saw it at the Louvre I burst into tears. It’s huge and shows the Sabine women stopping a war between the Sabine men and the Roman men, because their children are a mix of Roman and Sabine. But there’s one kid, he looks about two or something, he’s the only figure in the painting who meets your gaze and he has such a haunted quality about him, like he’s totally aware that his identity is in conflict due to intertribal warfare and hatred. And it was like looking into my own eyes. I love that painting.

I also got a copy of Velcrow Ripper’s Scared Sacred, because it’s a really good film.

Now I have all kinds of things to read. I like reading on the internet, but there is something about a book, I dunno. And some people prefer library books, but I’m one of those people that just has to have books forever, because I like revisiting them. I’ll sometimes go back to a book just to read one paragraph again.

Someone online was talking about how we’re moving out of an era of specialization and back towards a respect for people with various knowledges. I hope that’s true. I think the compartmentalization of ideas and knowledge can be dangerous, it leads to reliance on too many different specialists, and a more global cohesive understanding of the world is lost. I know there are certain branches of knowledge I know more about than others, but I still, yeah, I’m a know it all. It’s good though, because you can apply things in an interdisciplinary way.

Some people were vaguely suspicious of me choosing to try for a graduate program outside of film, because it’s not really seen as what I should be doing or something. But I love ideas, and I feel like I can keep learning film outside of universities, and maybe it’s even better to learn outside of university. Not that I begrudge doing my undergraduate degree in film, I think that was a wise move. I did learn a lot, and I had a lot of fun, and the security guard laughed at me one day because I had a frame of 16mm taped to my forehead and I didn’t know it. Yep. I have fond memories of film school.

Anyway, I am alternating between mourning myself over the last four years, and being super excited about just being me for the rest of my life, without a diagnosis hanging over my head. I’m going to be okay. I’ll have some sad days though, and flashbacks, and I’m sure I’ll cycle through anger more than a few times. But as Toni Morrison says, Anger is good, there is a presence in anger.

Glimpses of the Higgs Boson (AKA God Particle)

We’re close to a unification theory, so exciting, oh my god! There’s been some advances in finding the Higgs Boson, I’ll explain this in laymans terms sometime when I have the time, but here’s a link to it.

Some people think spirituality isn’t supported by science. Au Contraire mon frere!

Mental Age, very silly

Do you remember way way back during the Ashley X posts I said how mental age was a really stupid thing? Well, I still think it is, but I was shocked to find out that they apply mental age to gifted people as well. I checked mine out according to the oh so scientific calculations. They tell me my mental age is 50!! What? I am like a 50 year old? That doesn’t make any sense, I know some fifty year olds and they can be really silly odd people. And then I think, well of course, I am also silly and odd. But really, I don’t think it means anything. Does it tell the general public more about me? “Yes, Thirza Cuthand is a 50 year old in the body of a 28 year old.” Pshaw!

I think that asynchronous development, whether that is people like my sister or people like me, takes you out of this mental age bullshit. We’re different, we are unmeasurable. I don’t think you can try to squish either my sister or I into these silly categories of mental age. I was really sad the other day and spent an hour getting hugged and tickled by my sister until she was sure I was okay, that’s a really wise thing to do. She has this incredible light about her, it transcends such a limited view as mental age. Her worker told us that she was in the Mendel Art Gallery and pointed out my video to the worker, she recognized I made it. This particular video doesn’t have my voice, or any images of me in it. But she knew I made it. She can also recognize our Dad’s artwork, and our Mom’s artwork. I know there’s something incredible going on in her head, something maybe so profound none of us can understand it. And I love her for that. She’s the coolest person I know.

It’s probably funny thinking both my sister and I ended up on far ends of the bell curve and still really care for each other and maybe even understand each other better because of it. I don’t know how it affected my mom’s parenting, I mean neither of us fit the developmental models of childhood at all so pretty much all the child rearing books were useless. The only thing Sky got on time for her age was her period, and I remember she was so proud of it, like finally she could look at me and say “Ha! Little smarty pants, I finally beat you to something!” I remember I learned to walk not long after she finally learned and she was so pissed off about it she kept pushing me over. Obviously we worked things out. And I was the one who spent two years advocating for her to have a pet cat, which she loved to pieces. I knew she loved cats, I didn’t understand cats much myself, but I knew she needed to have one. And he was her best friend for a long time, he died this past fall at the ripe age of eighteen.

I’ve decided to release my new video, Madness in Four Actions, on Youtube, hopefully tonight but maybe just sometime this weekend, I have to tweak a couple of things. It’s the first video I’ve made that has used mostly other people’s thoughts all collaged together. I did that for a reason, people often try to make my experience in the psych system an anomaly, or else just don’t believe me because I’m “crazy.” So I realized I had to tell my experience by using other people’s words for a change, so that people realize this is a larger issue than just me. I use my life experiences a lot, but I’ve always thought about them in the larger context, but sometimes people don’t see that and assume I’m being narccistic or something. Anyway, I am also going to be submitting that video to the usual distributors, but I think it’s important for me that it’s seen by a wider audience than just the people who go to festivals. And trust me, the screener copy will be of a way better quality than the Youtube version, it’s still worth it to see the original. I also used psychiatrists words a few times, contrarians like R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, yes, but they have some insight AND the professional cred, and as horrid as it is to depend on professional cred, sometimes that’s the only way people recognize something as being valid. I personally think survivors stories are important, more important than psychiatrists assumptions about us, but there are a few folks in the system who actually know what they are talking about.

I’m thinking about something else too, and excuse the following run on sentence structure. Since this is a Level 1 society, since Primary Integration is highest in psychopaths and moderate in average people, since advanced development involves personal crisis which eventually leads to Level 5, and since that means divergent and original thinking which threatens the status quo and thus level 1 and thus psychopaths who have a good thing going . . . does that mean that mental health is being largely determined by psychopaths?

Chew on that!