Other misdiagnosis stories

I feel like I should add that misdiagnosis happens a lot in psychiatry, a lot of things can create mental health issues.

Brain tumour misdiagnosed as Schizophrenia.

Menopause misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder. Talks about the signs of menopause and the effects related to psychiatric drugs, including Akathisia from antidepressants, which is how I became diagnosed as manic.

Assorted Psychiatric Distortions from Amanda at Ballastexistenz, the experience of misdiagnosis and being a part of the psych survivor movement.

Political Dissendents diagnosed with “political monomania” and incarcerated in China, I hear this is also going on in Russia, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also happening in the States or here. “The medical report states that at the time of his release Wang was still suffering from these allegedly dangerous psychiatric conditions. While suggesting that he was otherwise quite normal, the report notes: When the topic of conversation turns to politics his [mental] activities are still characterized by delusions of grandeur, litigation mania, and a conspicuously enhanced pathological will.” His treatment was chlorpromazine (aka Thorazine, which was also used on me).

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy can be misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder. This is written from a psych perspective, but I wanted to include it.

Various psychiatric survivor stories.

A discussion of the proposal to include Spiritual and Religious Problems in the DSM, including the history of psychiatry’s prejudice to religion and spirituality.

Abuse survivors misdiagnosed with various illnesses. As a rape survivor let me just say that being forced to spend 6 weeks in the company of a man who keeps attempting rape, well, it doesn’t fucking help now does it!!!

Psychiatric Abuse website including contacts to human rights groups for UK folks.

Will Hal’s Recovery Story and continued work in the psychiatric survivor movement. This story parallels some of mine.

Misdiagnosis and dual diagnosis of gifted children.

Okay, and just a funny side note, right now Itunes is playing Heart’s Crazy On You.

Meaningless Suffering

Things are . . . weird. I was hoping to god I would get off medication, go back to being me, and voila! Find myself happily at Secondary Integration and just be whoever the hell I am. Now I see I’m still in directed multilevel disintegration, which is, I dunno. No, it’s good, it’s just still pretty intense. I feel like my process has been held back four years. I know I have accomplished some things, but there’s still, I don’t know, SOMETHING. I’m still kind of afraid of leaving certain things behind, although I’m at the point of no return on that one. I didn’t realize how fucked up I would feel about the misdiagnosis thing. I mean, on one hand I’m really happy to figure out what the hell is actually the deal with me, but on the other hand it makes things very different, it means trying to find meaning in some pretty horrific stuff that happened because I was a psych patient.

Maher Arar is coming to Saskatoon in April to give a talk on Civil Liberties, I want to go see it. I wonder how he’s doing, what his healing process is looking like. And how does someone make meaning out of injustice? I don’t know.

I think I did find some meaning in all the shit I endured, but it got to the point where sticking with that diagnosis was quite literally going to kill me, even though I already felt kind of dead. And not “oh I’m crazy and broken” dead, more like medicated dead, take your pills, don’t rock the boat, all those terrible side effects are natural and you should just accept them.

The side effects were terrible. In fact, while my emotions feel intense again, it’s still thousands times better than being on medication. A lot of stuff which I had assumed was part and parcel of who I was turned out to have been med related, and I have no idea how to deal with that. I don’t hear things, don’t have seizures, I’m not shaking, I don’t get pounding sharp headaches, my body isn’t getting electrical zaps, my memory is pretty fuckin’ awesome again. I don’t know, I don’t know how to deal with the fact that I got majorly screwed over by the psych industry. And I don’t like being placed in a different category than my friends, in some ways I really miss the disabled label, as strange as that may sound. I spent so much time learning about bipolar disorder and struggling for the rights of other people with bipolar and now the diagnosis is wrong. How do I, arg! I hate that suddenly I’m a martyr, and I hate that suddenly people can say “Well psych wards were bad for you, because you were misdiagnosed, but they are fine for everyone else.” No! That’s not the message. I hate that suddenly positive disintegration is natural for me, but for other people it is still a mental disturbance. What the fuck?? That makes no sense at all.

The thing is in a lot of ways nothing has changed, my history is the same, I still experienced a psychotic episode, and I still have inner turmoil. And I’m still scared. I’m scared of people who don’t understand, or who kind of smirk when they find out I was in a bin. I’m scared people will start saying fucked up shit about crazy people to me because I’m not one of THOSE people anymore. Fuck. And even worse, I’m scared people will be so oblivious to what intelligence looks and sounds like that I’ll find myself in four point restraints again being given medication that eradicates my higher brain functioning and being forced to say thank you.

And the thing is, I understand pretty much all the people I knew in the psych ward. I didn’t see sickness, just a process they seemed to be undergoing. But once you get in that system, there is an idea of chronic “sickness.” Even if you do recover it’s just called remission, and it’s assumed it will always come back. I was always kind of suspicious of the diagnoses, but now I’m seeing that it’s a really limited way of looking at someone’s life. I know a lot of my friends in the psych system have histories of abuse, but it’s like people would rather give a pill to make those things go away than to help someone work through it. I have a friend who went to the ward because of rape trauma and she was specifically told not to seek counselling to deal with it. That happens a lot more than we would think.

I remember watching Jane Campion’s An Angel At My Table and when Janet Frame escapes lobotomy only after winning a major literary award, I felt kind of confused. I mean, she gets this letter that’s basically like “Sorry for the ECT, turns out you’re not schizophrenic,” and I always wondered how the hell she dealt with that. How do you create meaning out of torture and misunderstanding? And then, I can’t turn my back on all the other people I know who are being tortured. We still live in the dark ages.

The saddest thing is that through these four years of being a psych patient and doing research, I’ve discovered that not only is there no proof that brain chemicals have anything to do with what’s called mental illness, but the medications actually cause brain damage, and not only that but there have been various alternative treatment options that are proven to WORK, often far better than what’s being offered now, but they aren’t being offered because they don’t amass profit. And now family based lobby groups are advocating for all kinds of mental health “screening” so that people can be “treated.” Teen Screen down in the states would be one of them, and it is FUCKED UP. Basically teenagers, who are all fucked up just because that’s what happens in adolescence, fill in a questionnaire and then are “assessed” based on their answers.

I’m really sad. I missed out on four years of my life because I was all drugged up with antipsychotics and antimanic medication. How the fuck to I give that any meaning? And where the hell do I go from here?

I currently have a pet theory on what I call Atomic Thinking and Subatomic Thinking. It needs to be fleshed out a bit more, but it deals with Atomic Level thinking, or what we see in the usual world according to classical physics. And then there’s Subatomic Level thinking, which is more concerned with the unseen, the reality underlying this one where the laws of physics completely changes. I think in psychiatry we’ve applied Atomic level thinking to Subatomic level crises. R.D. Laing talked once about a patient who told him she was Switzerland, and instead of acting like she was spewing rubbish he gave it some serious thought, considered the military/political state of Switzerland, and realized she was essentially saying “I am freedom.” Or basically, a desire for freedom. And I think he was right. People need to learn to be more creative in thinking about what crazy people are saying. It makes sense if you think about what people say, if you’re open to the fact that there are leaps in thinking patterns but that they are not random.

And then of course I still have personal issues I’m working through, and that is hard. I have an easier time being victimized than standing up for myself, and I don’t know if that’s because I was taught to think that way or if that’s really the way I am. I’m so confused.

Lots to think about. Lots to cry about.

Trusting Oneself

I was raised to be a nicey nice person I think, or I wanted to emulate it. God it’s difficult! I think that some people assume having some kind of spiritual consciousness means letting go of fury at injustice and oppression and it’s so not true. I’m starting to read a new book which I’m really excited about, called The Politics Of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted, by Obery M. Hendricks. I started reading it last night but I was fretting about some interpersonal stuff that happened earlier in the day so I wasn’t absorbing it as well as I wanted to. I’ll try again today. But I am interested by this process of co-opting liberating revolutionary thought and reintegrating it to fit the ruling elite’s dogma. It happens all the time, in all religions and philosophies including First Nations spirituality. I think maybe part of it is that people have a hard time accessing a variety of sources and drawing their own conclusions, it’s a lot more comforting to draw from one source and make it fit with something you maybe already decided.

I didn’t want to believe in Jesus. I do now. But I don’t call myself a Christian, and I don’t consider it the One True Way. I think he’s a fascinating revolutionary figure who has been co-opted by the dominant paradigm. I want to know who he is and what he thought, not what other people decided he thought. But reading about Jesus and his life was the step towards open mindedness that I had to take, which doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s step. I kind of threw him away before, based mainly on fundamentalism. Now I see it differently, learning about him taught me a lot, mostly how to think for myself. I was raised pretty liberal, but that also meant I wasn’t supposed to investigate ideologies which were utilized in the name of power and control over the population. But I think that’s precisly why I wanted to learn about him, in the end. Not that I want to have some kind of biblical quotation show down with Fred Phelps and Billy Graham, fuck that would suck ass. I hope to learn about Islam next, I know some things about it, but not a lot. I know Mohammed had some really feminist ideas, and that’s exciting. He also thought Jesus was a cool dude, which is sweet.

I know there’s some thoughts out there that Jesus is actually based on an early Phoenician myth, (it it Phoenician? I can’t find my source to cite) which supposedly means if that’s true then I shouldn’t give a damn about Jesus. But even if he is a mythical figure who has been reconcieved, that doesn’t mean the story doesn’t have relevance. Pan’s Labyrinth is a mythical story, but it had a lot of relevance to me. I feel like an Ophelia in a world of Captain Vidals.

I didn’t really want to devote this whole post to Jesus though. I actually just wanted to talk about learning to think for myself.

Tangent:

It’s Schrodinger’s birthday tomorrow, he is a year old! And a bad kitty! I had some triscuits by my bed from when I was sick and watching movies all day and he’s been eating them. Which isn’t so bad, except he’s eating them in my bed. So I’ll go downstairs and get into bed and find a crumbled up pile of triscuit crumbs. Such a mess. Anyway, last night I was fretting and he came along and climbed over the clock radio to get a triscuit (yes, I’ll clean them up eventually) and then he went away. And I was fretting about something and then as I was laying awake in the dark I looked at the clock and it said 4:47. And I was like “What! Have I been worrying for that long!?” And i got kind of weird feeling, like I couldn’t trust my perception of time even and I went to sleep and I woke up and the clock said 10:00 so I got up and dressed and went upstairs to feed all the animals and it was pitch black outside. I was so confused, and the clock upstairs read 6:00. And the funny thing is it did feel like 6 in the morning, but I wasn’t trusting myself, I was going by what my alarm clock said, even though my alarm clock had been altered by Schrodinger’s desire to eat triscuits.

Schrodinger is having a birthday party on Saturday. I’ve never gone to a birthday party for a cat, but a little boy who got two of his brothers has organized a family reunion of kitties, I have no idea what to expect. If Schrodinger turns into a big bully and beats up all his siblings we’ll have to put him in his kennel for the party. I’ve never seen cats reunited, I don’t know if they forget each other or not, but I guess I will find out.

Action Alert: Transphobia at the New York Post

This comes care of Jack at Angry Brown Butch (link in sidebar). Jack’s blog has the articles linked if you want to read them.

ACTION ALERT: Tell the NY Post to quit its transphobic “reporting”

NOTE TO OTHER BLOGGERS: Please link to or repost this!

An important victory was recently won in the struggle for trans rights, specifically around health care. Judge Sheldon Rand of the Manhattan Family Court found, for the second time, that the City of New York is obligated to pay for the sexual reassignment surgery of Mariah Lopez, a young trans woman of color who was denied this important and necessary medical care while in the care of the NYC foster system. The City is constitutionally required to provide adequate medical coverage for all children in its care, and SRS is a medically approved procedure, one that is often necessary for trans people. In the decision, Judge Rand wrote: “Mariah L. should be treated in order that she may go on with her life and be in a body which blends with the gender with which she identifies.”*

Fortunately, Judge Rand was far more understanding and respectful than most of the media coverage, which has ranged from iffy to downright disgusting. (This article from PinkNews.co.uk is the most respectful one I’ve found thus far.)

Worst of all has been the coverage from the New York Post. Now, anyone who’s familiar with this sorry excuse for a newspaper should know that it’s usually chock full of shoddy, sensationalist, decidedly conservative-leaning rubbish that they attempt to pass off as journalism, so racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia are all par for the course. But the two pieces that they’ve run on this story – an “article” entitled “Free To Be He-She” and the even worse editorial, “Justice Isn’t That Blind” – are really just awful and enraging.

The New York Post needs to be sent a strong message: quit the transphobic “reporting”! Show some respect, some decency, and some attention to journalistic standards.

I ask all of you to join me in writing to the Post and giving them a piece of your mind. Below is a letter to the Post. You can copy and paste it as is, or you can add your own touches to it or write something completely new. Whichever one you choose, send it to letters@nypost.com and janon.fisher@nypost.com (the writer of the first article.) (It would be great if you also commented here, so I can get a gauge of how many emails they’re getting.)

***START OF EMAIL – START COPYING HERE***

SUBJECT: NY Post: Quit the Transphobic Reporting!

I was angered by the Post’s coverage of the recent Manhattan Family Court decision in favor of Mariah Lopez (”Free to be he-she,” February 25, and “Justice isn’t that blind,” February 27). Both articles were deeply disrespectful of Ms. Lopez’s gender identity. By referring to her as a “he-she,” a “wannabe woman,” and, in the editorial, using her old name and incorrect pronouns in direct violation of AP style guidelines, the Post has clearly demonstrated that it is more interested in playing to societal prejudice towards transgender people than in following good journalistic practices and treating trans people with the respect that they deserve.

Additionally, the articles’ sensational treatment of this story ignored the fact that the ACS is required by law to provide medically-approved treatment to children under its care, and that Ms. Lopez was indeed a child under the care of the ACS when she initially sought transgender health care, including sexual reassignment surgery. Ms. Lopez was denied access to a necessary treatment that is widely approved by the medical community. Judge Rand’s decision will hopefully ensure that no other child, trans or not, will be denied treatment in the future simply due to prejudice.

YOUR NAME HERE
YOUR CITY HERE

***END OF EMAIL – STOP COPYING HERE***

* Partly in anticipation of certain questions, I’d like to clarify that I don’t believe that SRS is always a necessary part of a trans person’s transition. Transition can mean all sorts of things, many of which are not medical or surgical; it’s all about what one feels is right for them. I think it’s important, actually, to get away from a medicalization of trans-ness, because that often leads to people passing judgment on who’s “really” or “fully” trans or not based on their medical history. Which is, of course, complete bullshit, given that not everyone chooses – or can afford or access – the same treatment.

Capital L Love

I’ve had really shitty luck with romantic relationships. I’m not really going to parse my lacklustre lovelife here though. I have known two women who I could happily spend the rest of my life with, but I don’t think either of them believed me. Oh well.

There is one love in my life that has remained almost constant. Film. I just love it so much, my god. I love every part of it, I love the process, I love the research, the writing, the thinking, the production, editing and editing and editing. I love being confronted with a problem or something that isn’t working and I’ll just struggle with it and suddenly a huge thought orgasm happens and I practically run around the block screaming with joy. I love working with people to realize a vision of mine, and I love when they start having visions about it too, and it just starts coming together and everyone gets excited.

During the Oscars I noticed the people winning awards for Pan’s Labyrinth had such reverence for Guillermo Del Toro, they were so moved to be a part of his vision, and to further it and make it grow. I was so touched, that is the mark of a good director. To make something so beautiful that the people working on it feel it as a passion more than a job.

I love the obsession that happens with film, it is such an intense process. When I’m in the thick of it EVERY thought is devoted to that film. I wake up puzzling over it and I go to sleep puzzling over it and I dream about it. Some of my most profound editing moments have happened while I’ve been asleep. I have almost died at least once trying to make a film come to life, I think it was worth it but people still don’t know how to feel about that particular work. Maybe it’s before it’s time.

I’ve had the worst time with this screenplay I’ve been working on. It’s been three and a half years of slogging through it. I’ve learned a lot about writing feature length work, but there was something missing, I could not put my finger on it. I had never had such a hard time working through an idea. And now that I’ve been getting off of my medication I figured it out. It’s THE MEDICATION that was hindering the process. One shot which I have agonized over for at least two years suddenly came into such clear focus. I was writing it in a literal way with a voice over to explain it, but suddenly I saw this vision of what the feeling was in that moment. And it is such a horrifying vision but so dazzling in it’s clarity and perfection. I practically creamed my jeans when I saw it. Not that it’s sexy per se, but if you love thought and ideas as much as me that kind of breakthrough is climactic. Wow. I was so speechless just imagining it, down to each grain of 35mm depth. And I saw more things, I saw where I was crippling it because of what I felt I OUGHT to say, rather than the truth. Because the truth is so complex, and in a certain way so special and sacred, I didn’t want it trampled.

But making a film about what I thought I should say rather than what needed to be said, I can’t do that. It feels tawdry, like I’m being superficial with this one thing I adore and which adores me back in it’s own idiosyncratic, demanding, intense way. When it works, when my process really works, it feels more like I am channeling from some higher more divine source. I can’t explain it, except that it’s like accessing higher consciousness. Like being a conduit. And the medication shut off that conduit. Stuff leaked through sometimes, but the total all encompassing power of pure thought never tore through my body the way it normally did. I think when that kind of divine inspiration and obsession hits, people can get kind of uncomfortable. I’ve been known to bathe less frequently, have uncombed hair, and sometimes even forget to eat when I’m in that state. I don’t think that’s bad really, but it does show you where all my energy goes.

I have missed that feeling, I have missed love. Without my extremes, I also lose my passions. And when I lose my passions I feel I have lost everything. Being medicated felt like the bleakest period of brokenheartedness I have ever felt. Not even losing my first true love hurt that much. And I felt scared to tell the truth to people. I never felt that the bipolar diagnosis fit me exactly, but I was told I HAD to accept it, I had no choice but to accept it, and if I disagreed it meant I was sick again. And I remember when I was in the hospital when I started losing who I was. I don’t mean the psychosis, that was me, completely, just amped up to a huge degree. No, I remember I was on 20mg of Zyprexa and lithium and ativan and I was reading a book and suddenly the words started changing, they started to disappear and fade away. And I remember trying to collect them again, I would read the sentence over and over and each time I would get two words in and the rest of the words would vanish from my memory. It was like watching my brain get sliced and parsed and diced into miniscule fragments. And I wasn’t ever really the same after. I adapted in certain ways, but that brilliance, that access to knowledge and understanding was gone. In a lot of ways it felt like my very soul had been ripped out of me. And then I was supposed to be grateful.

I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was really close for at least a year, and then somewhat close for the rest of the time until now. I think people just assumed it was the psychosis that smashed up my brain, but it wasn’t, it was the chemicals.

And now my love has returned. I don’t want to ever lose it again.

SLEEPY!

In case you didn’t notice, I’ve been off medication totally for almost a week. I was a bit worried I would flip out, and watching my thinking process start up again, and my emotions return, was a little freaky. I haven’t known myself for four years, and so I really don’t even remember what it’s like to be me. Not to mention a lot of my existential depression has been resolved and I’m slowly but surely creeping into Secondary Integration, which is such a relief because I don’t feel so tortured.

I think I also found a lovely seed of an idea to explain “sane” and “insane” dichotomies, and it’s a lovely thought to chew on. It’s using the principles of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. Things change when they are observed, a photon is a wave, but when observed it is a particle. So let’s say everyone is mainly seeing particles, but for whatever reason when YOU see it, it is a wave. And then you say “That is a wave” and people get upset and say “Absolutely not! It is a particle, that is as clear as the nose on my face!” Then there’s a big argument of course, and the people who see particles try to reform the person who sees waves, but in reality BOTH of those things can be true at the same time. I’m really liking this idea, because it means no one is wrong, except they don’t understand each other. I’m going to have to go in this direction somewhat more.

I’m also expanding on this Oneness/God idea. Someone on a board said they didn’t think we were all the same person but we are part of a whole, and I just got it. Let’s say you are a finger and you are part of the same person as a toe, that doesn’t mean you are a toe and that doesn’t mean the toe is a finger. But it does mean that if the fingers decide to attack the toes for not being fingers then something really goofy is going on. But if you can’t see in that holistic view, then you will always think those two things are completely seperate entities.

But mostly, I’m kind of glad to be over playing with ideas to such a high degree, I think because I solved some problems that were bothering me. I will expand on them more later, but now the fact that I was awake more than asleep is catching up, and so I am sleepy. But not crashing, just a content sleepiness, like my brain did a job well done and can now have a playful and light weekend. Whew!

Creativity

I think sometimes people get scared by the creative process, or maybe sometimes it looks scary from the outside. Or sometimes someone’s process is terribly different. Here’s a bunch of Youtube videos about creativity in various fields.

Tori Amos’ song Crazy made a lot of sense to me at one time. I think especially because she talks about looking mad until things get put into an order at the very end. This is a link to her singing Crazy and talking about her relationship to pianos.

What you waiting for? This music video by Gwen Stefani reminds me of what my internal world looks like when I’m creating something.

David Lynch talks about creativity, filmmaking, and higher consciousness.

Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison get into a spat about direct vs. alternating current. Kind of a tortured re-enactment, but fascinating nonetheless in describing Tesla’s creative process.

An animator shows us the Creative Process.

Angelina Jolie talks on Inside the Actor’s Studio about her experience working on Gia, a biography of lesbian supermodel Gia Carangi. Part 2 of 5.

Mozart accidentally pisses Salieri off in Amadeus.

The Q and I

I guess I should talk a little bit more about this thang called Giftedness, because I knew people get pissed off by the concept. It’s seen as being “better” or “superior,” but if you experienced it I don’t think you would really like it. It takes a long time to accept. I find it funny that suddenly, instead of being disabled I am considered Very Abled, because I don’t really feel like that at all. I have pretty much every Overexcitability that one can have, and among various things it means I get sensory overload pretty easy, which is why I’m fairly introverted. Giftedness is more than a high I.Q. score. It’s a different way of experiencing the world, things are heightened, to varying degrees. There’s some thought that Gifted people actually have different physiological structures to the norm. Not everyone who has a high I.Q. score is empathetic or has entelechy. There are various combos of qualities in the gifted population, all resulting in very different ways of thinking, but marked by a strong desire to understand.

I should also mention that I.Q. testing is not an accurate assessment of someone’s intelligence. For one thing, if you communicate in a very different way, or think in visual terms instead of verbal/mathematic terms, you probably won’t score as well as someone else. They’ve been designed for specific types of people with specific thinking patterns and communication abilities, and they are only “accurate” within a particular range. There are now people trying to identify Gifted people under different standards, or a constellation of attributes noted in the population. One thing I’ve noticed is that we know who each other is generally. What I know is that when I was picked out of the general school system, I wasn’t told my I.Q., I don’t think anyone was, because then it would mean we would tailor our expectations of ourselves to a test score.

I think a number of people in my inner circle are Gifties, but they haven’t identified themselves as such to me. It’s too bad, because a lot of people in my inner circle are also struggling with psych diagnoses, and I’m not sure if they know that they’re Gifted and if they know that there are specific reasons they’ve been reacting to stimuli a certain way their whole lives. I’m pretty modest about my intelligence, or at least I try to be, or at least I was made to be, and the only reason I really brought it up here is because it means the dominant psychiatric thought concerning the reasons for my life were blatantly wrong. This does not mean I think there are Real mental patients who deserve psych wards, no. Not at all. Psychiatric survivors are my friends, they are the people who have nurtured me when I was having a really hard time. I will not put myself above them just because they didn’t get a high I.Q. score, or because they did and don’t know it, or whatever. If it wasn’t for the C/S/X movement, I would still be on medication, still feeling dumb and sad and trapped, still losing my hair and getting diabetes or what have you. I still consider myself a psych survivor. I still want to be in that movement.

But I am trying to talk about Giftedness because we have been getting diagnosed with all kinds of pathologies based on our difference. There are concerns particular to Gifted people, and I wish someone had told me about it when I was younger. I know sometimes people in the “helping” professions are taught about our population, but quite often they are not. Sometimes people don’t even BOTHER to teach about us just because we are seen as so rare as to not matter, or to be considered so Very Abled that we can survive on our own with no outside assistance. That’s not true. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t gotten specialized education, or if I hadn’t been taken out of a general population which resented me. But too often education is the only specific need that people are concerned about with Gifted people, when so much of who we are pervades every aspect of our identity.

I think I’ll just end with a few interesting articles if you do want to know more, so you don’t think I’m bullshitting you.

Gifted Adults

Can you hear the flowers sing? Issues for Gifted Adults

Positive Disintegration

Overexcitabilities Used to Predict Giftedness

Misdiagnosis of the Gifted

And just for fun, here’s a profile of an INFP personality according to the Myers-Briggs system, I’m one. We’re only 1% of the general population, but are highly over represented in the Gifted population for whatever reason.

Grey Goo and You: Cultivating Difference

I’m being more honest about what I think in my blog, but in real life I am hiding from the people around me. Fear is a powerful tool, but in a negative way. Once we start stepping out of the acceptable bounds and into who we really are, everything becomes shaky. There is the internal crisis, trying to accept yourself when all the good sheep want you to go back to the way you were, even if that is a really unhealthy position. In my family of origin I was often picked on because I had emotional overexcitabilities that could be ridiculed. If I cried for being teased (which is a form of abuse) then they could also tell me I was wrong to cry, that I was overreacting, and that in fact they were trying to improve me by breaking me down. Emotionally breaking someone down does not make them stronger, and I know because I once planned a school shooting while I was in junior high in a redneck town being severely bullied. I can tell you about that another time, suffice it to say the only reasons I wasn’t the first Dylan Klebold was because a .22 didn’t hold enough rounds and because we moved right away. But I was an eerily accurate marksman.

People appreciate violence as a response more than tears. I don’t know why, it’s kind of sick. I did get internal abusers in my head, kind of like the internal psychiatrist I mentioned several posts ago. Getting them out is really hard, and when people see that you are starting to transcend the role you’ve been given they get really insecure. It may sound awful to say that people have investments in my psych diagnosis, but it is true. I even invested in my diagnosis, even though it told me nothing about myself when seen from the contemporary biochemical medical model. I don’t like this idea that people are so powerful they can just decide to stop being “mentally ill.” That’s wrongheaded. On the other hand, I don’t like the ideas that come along with the concept of mental illness, ones which are founded mainly on stigma and assumption than understanding. I think we favour victims over people who actually recover. But this is getting into some serious territory I am still chewing on, basically what I mean is that powerlessness is encouraged in certain individuals, usually those who are different in quantifiable ways.

When I say we are all essentially the same person in a spiritual sense, I am not saying it so that we can all have a nice calm bovine approach to life. This is a very difficult concept to grapple with. And being from the same source does not mean that difference should be denied. There are very real and important reasons that we have such diversity on this planet. I do not want to live on a planet full of all Thirza’s, I would get bored. I need all kinds of people who are seeing things in different ways from different positions so that they can bring up ideas I would not think about on my own.

Homogenity is a dangerous thing, it’s not growthful to keep differences from evolving. And for this I will go to a theory I’ve always loved, because of it’s apocalyptic nature and because of the image it evokes. This is called The Grey Goo Theory.

The Grey Goo theory begins with self replicating nanobots. These nanobots are designed to take any kind of organic matter and break it down and build it up into an identical model of itself, which also goes on to self replicate using organic matter, and on and on. Once this process starts, there is no way to stop it. Scientists have estimated that self replicating nanobots run amok can convert the entire PLANET into grey goo within seventeen hours. And that’s not just plants and houses and televisions and blenders being transformed into goo, that’s also people and dogs and monkeys and every living thing.

Now, you can just look at this from a literal perspective and say “well geez, don’t make self replicating nanobots then.” Yes, but consider it in a different way, how could this Grey Goo theory be applied to contemporary practices of colonialism, religion, or psychiatry? A vast majority of people are self replicating nanobots on this planet. Just because you make someone think or feel in a way which is more similar to the way you think or feel doesn’t mean you have improved them. Same with all differences, I have a fondness for red heads, but if ALL the women in the world were red heads I’d wouldn’t be so enamoured with the uniqueness of it, and probably a lot of people would be upset because they like brunettes or blondes or people with titian hair.

Don’t grey goo the grey matter!

I’m trying to learn how to trust the people around me though, I know at a certain point I just have to hope they “get it,” ya know? People can do crappy things to each other but still end up evolving into amazing people. If I didn’t believe that I don’t think I would still be here.

And now I’d like to post Amanda Bagg’s amazing video “In My Language,” because I think it elucidates the importance of difference the best. This is my favorite video that I’ve seen recently, and was made in response to the Ashley Treatment. I’ve wanted to post it here for a while, but I never found the right post to accompany it.

Reaching out and reaching in
Holding out holding in
I believe
This is heaven to no one else but me
And I’ll defend it as long as I can be
Left here to linger in silence
If I choose to
Would you try to understand
– Elsewhere by Sarah McLachlan

The Authoritarians

I was pointed in the direction of this link to an online book from the University of Manitoba on Authoritarianism. I highly suggest reading at least Chapter 1 to understand how we got to this point. It’s easy for us to demonize bad leaders, but this makes one look at the fact that it is the followers who are giving these people power. Have a look.