A ha!

I am deficient in iron. So says the blood tests. So now I have to take ferrous sulphate twice a day and hopefully my immune system will be back to normal. Which is good because these colds and flus are really wearing me down, I think I can handle being crazy better than being physically sick. But I’m not going to debate the personal impact of physical versus mental health. I want to be healthy in every way possible.

I watched Little Miss Sunshine this afternoon, it was really sweet. Oh man, I want to say something about the narrative structure but obviously I’m still ill and mostly awake only because I am terribly hungry.

Fat free hot dogs are disgusting, I had to give mine to the dogs. I don’t know why we insist on buying fat free everythings. Sometimes fat is just nice okay.

Bad Tops

Bad tops suck.

I knew I was into BDSM for sure when I was nineteen, although I had inklings of my particular kink way, way back in time. When I came out as a perv it was as a bottom into submission and masochism, now I’m more of a switch although I have to say I still prefer being the bottom most of the time. Lucky for me I came out in Vancouver, which is practically crawling in leatherfolk. I think if I went back and took a poll, most of my friends were kinksters in some way or another.

But I have to say, I have had a really really really hard time finding good tops.

I’m not going to say all tops are bad, because some are really good. I just wasn’t lucky enough to date any of them. And I don’t think it wasn’t because they weren’t genuinely perverse. I’m sure they liked BDSM, it just never clicked with me because of some weird stuff. I’ll try to explain why.

I think I have a different perspective on this now because I have a friend who somehow brings out my submissive side without any effort at all, and I think I know why.

She’s NICE to me.

It’s true, and such a basic thing. If you treat your bottom like shit in your daily life or activities, you’re going to get shit in your scenes. I can’t go very far with someone I don’t trust, and then it makes them pissy because they think I’m being a bratty bottom or not a bottom or a bazillion other assumptions. But really, it’s just that I’m not going to submit to someone who’s treating me like crap outside of scenes. If someone’s going to rub my face in them flirting or being with other people, fine, but I’ll be damned if they’re going to have much fun finding out all the things I can do. Obviously they’re not concentrating on me, and if that’s the case then I can’t relax enough to know they’re going to pick up on my subtle submissive cues that tell them how far they can go or if I’m reaching my limits. And I prefer not having to use my safeword if I can help it. I will use it, but I guess I like knowing that someone’s wise enough to see when my body can’t take much more or whatever.

Basically, a good top is someone who likes playing with ideas of power, but knows that in the end they really have to win over the trust and affection of their intended bottom to make a scene work. If I’m wooed and flirted with and treated like how anyone would treat a hot and sexy girlfriend or date, then I’m able to let down my guard and go through the voluminous list of terrible and fun things that they can do to me. It’s really all about trust and being cared for. I don’t want to go hardcore into a heavy scene with someone who’s only being a top because they think it makes them Queen Shit. It’s probably not going to be fun, and it’s definitely not going to be safe, and who wants that?

Okay, and now my cold is winning over me, again, and I am switching back to reading blogs for a while.

7 vials of blood!

Last night I had this trippy dream I was in some abandoned lot and then some malevolent guy in a balaclava was driving around and I realized I was going to be one of the Missing Women, and then I got saved by Cute Toppy Girl who had spectacular cleavage, and then she made me walk around in revealing clothes and we were going to have lunch with the guy we had a three way with in high school. And then I woke up and . . .

I was all doped up and my mom drove me to the doctor early this morning. She’s checking my iron levels, Epival levels, electrolytes, blood sugar, thyroid, hiv status, and a bazillion other things. Anyway, I ended up having seven vials of blood being taken to go through a battery of tests. The good news is that this is the first time I wasn’t told that I had highly toxic epival levels. Currently I’m on 750mg of Epival (that’s Depakote to you Americans). However I have to admit I was a chicken and didn’t say anything about wanting to get off psych meds completely.

I STILL have the Lamictal rash, although it is slight compared to the initial outbreak.

Then since I didn’t have the strength to take the bus home, I had to sit in on my mom’s art history class and hear all about Pudlo Pudlat, who’s a really funny artist by the way. This was my favorite piece by him, “Imposed Migration,” which shows a walrus, polar bear, and musk ox being airlifted out of the arctic.

Actually, he did a better helicopter in a different piece.

I feel gross, yucky, bleh. After the Pudlo Pudlat lecture mom drove me home and I watched The Night Listener. Robin Williams as Armistead Maupin was kind of bizarre, but I think it got the gist of the book, and it was a true story, which I suspected when I first read the Night Listener. I read it at an apartment I was subletting in Montreal, it was so cute, it was a gay man’s apartment and he had like, 18 gay porn videos, and a copy of Breakfast At Tiffany’s. I have to say I appreciated the gay porn better than Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He also had great fag classics like Picture of Dorian Grey and Isherwood’s Berlin Novels.

It was sweet, in a strange way, strange quebecois insects and the steady certainty of gay pornography.

Then I passed out for three hours and had a dream I was in a John Cameron Mitchell musical where he was like, the torso of a blow up doll, but made out of jello, and just kind of laying in the sand wriggling and singing opera.

Then I watched Who Killed The Electric Car and I was trying really hard to feel some kind of socially conscious outrage, but it was so LA centric that I found it hard to take seriously. I dunno. It was okay. But it wasn’t as eye opening as say, Waco Rules of Engagement. I kept feeling my attention drift to some lesbian BDSM erotica which I had read dozens of times before and which I never liked in the first place because it had too many run on sentences.

Now I’m watching Talk To Her, since Volver isn’t in the theatres anymore and I wanted to watch some pretty Almodovar. But I had to take a break.

Life’s pretty boring. Mostly I’m just laying in my room with the humidifier on. I’m trying to give myself a break from thinking, and it’s probably a good thing. Thinking about psych trauma anyway.

Raindrops keep falling on my head . . .

I hope these tests show SOMETHING, even if it’s just that I have to eat more red meat or something. I’m not really worried about the hiv test, because I really haven’t done anything since my last test. I guess I just wanted it to be totally absolutely sure. This must be my eighth hiv test now. I’m curious about the thyroid screen though, because the psychic I saw said I should get it tested, and she’s been eerily correct about everything else. Next monday I’ll find out what’s going on. In the meantime, I just want this cold to go away.

My throat feels miles better, just sort of swollen and sore.

Loren Mosher

This is a reposting of Loren Mosher’s resignation to the American Psychiatric Association. It can be found here and there on the internet, so I thought I’d put it here too, to remind myself that even among psychiatrists there are those who are looking for an alternative system of healing. Mosher headed the Soteria project which took people in psychosis and helped them through it in a home environment without medication. People recovered as well as or better than in hospitals and it was nearly half as expensive as regular hospital care. But since it didn’t jive with the medical theories of psychiatric illnesses it was largely disregarded. He died in 2004 but left a lot of amazing research in alternative treatments and is kind of a hero among psych survivors.
———–

Loren R. Mosher, M.D. to Rodrigo Munoz, M.D., President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA)

Dear Rod,

After nearly three decades as a member it is with a mixture of pleasure and disappointment that I submit this letter of resignation from the American Psychiatric Association. The major reason for this action is my belief that I am actually resigning from the American Psychopharmacological Association. Luckily, the organization’s true identity requires no change in the acronym.

Unfortunately, APA reflects, and reinforces, in word and deed, our drug dependent society. Yet it helps wage war on “drugs”. “Dual diagnosis” clients are a major problem for the field but not because of the “good” drugs we prescribe. “Bad” ones are those that are obtained mostly without a prescription. A Marxist would observe that being a good capitalist organization, APA likes only those drugs from which it can derive a profit — directly or indirectly. This is not a group for me. At this point in history, in my view, psychiatry has been almost completely bought out by the drug companies. The APA could not continue without the pharmaceutical company support of meetings, symposia, workshops, journal advertising, grand rounds luncheons, unrestricted educational grants etc. etc. Psychiatrists have become the minions of drug company promotions. APA, of course, maintains that its independence and autonomy are not compromised in this enmeshed situation. Anyone with the least bit of common sense attending the annual meeting would observe how the drug company exhibits and “industry sponsored symposia” draw crowds with their various enticements, while the serious scientific sessions are barely attended. Psychiatric training reflects their influence as well: the most important part of a resident’s curriculum is the art and quasi-science of dealing drugs, i.e., prescription writing.

These psychopharmacological limitations on our abilities to be complete physicians also limit our intellectual horizons. No longer do we seek to understand whole persons in their social contexts — rather we are there to realign our patients’ neurotransmitters. The problem is that it is very difficult to have a relationship with a neurotransmitter — whatever its configuration. So, our guild organization provides a rationale, by its neurobiological tunnel vision, for keeping our distance from the molecule conglomerates we have come to define as patients. We condone and promote the widespread use and misuse of toxic chemicals that we know have serious long term effects — tardive dyskinesia, tardive dementia and serious withdrawal syndromes. So, do I want to be a drug company patsy who treats molecules with their formulary? No, thank you very much. It saddens me that after 35 years as a psychiatrist I look forward to being dissociated from such an organization. In no way does it represent my interests. It is not within my capacities to buy into the current biomedical-reductionistic model heralded by the psychiatric leadership as once again marrying us to somatic medicine. This is a matter of fashion, politics and, like the pharmaceutical house connection, money.

In addition, APA has entered into an unholy alliance with NAMI (I don’t remember the members being asked if they supported such an association) such that the two organizations have adopted similar public belief systems about the nature of madness. While professing itself the “champion of their clients” the APA is supporting non-clients, the parents, in their wishes to be in control, via legally enforced dependency, of their mad/bad offspring: NAMI with tacit APA approval, has set out a pro-neuroleptic drug and easy commitment-institutionalization agenda that violates the civil rights of their offspring. For the most part we stand by and allow this fascistic agenda to move forward. Their psychiatric god, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, is allowed to diagnose and recommend treatment to those in the NAMI organization with whom he disagrees. Clearly, a violation of medical ethics. Does APA protest? Of course not, because he is speaking what APA agrees with, but can’t explicitly espouse. He is allowed to be a foil; after all – he is no longer a member of APA. (Slick work APA!) The shortsightedness of this marriage of convenience between APA, NAMI, and the drug companies (who gleefully support both groups because of their shared pro-drug stance) is an abomination. I want no part of a psychiatry of oppression and social control.

“Biologically based brain diseases” are certainly convenient for families and practitioners alike. It is no-fault insurance against personal responsibility. We are all just helplessly caught up in a swirl of brain pathology for which no one, except DNA, is responsible. Now, to begin with, anything that has an anatomically defined specific brain pathology becomes the province of neurology (syphilis is an excellent example). So, to be consistent with this “brain disease” view, all the major psychiatric disorders would become the territory of our neurologic colleagues. Without having surveyed them I believe they would eschew responsibility for these problematic individuals. However, consistency would demand our giving over “biologic brain diseases” to them. The fact that there is no evidence confirming the brain disease attribution is, at this point, irrelevant. What we are dealing with here is fashion, politics and money. This level of intellectual /scientific dishonesty is just too egregious for me to continue to support by my membership.

I view with no surprise that psychiatric training is being systematically disavowed by American medical school graduates. This must give us cause for concern about the state of today’s psychiatry. It must mean — at least in part that they view psychiatry as being very limited and unchallenging. To me it seems clear that we are headed toward a situation in which, except for academics, most psychiatric practitioners will have no real, relationships — so vital to the healing process — with the disturbed and disturbing persons they treat. Their sole role will be that of prescription writers — ciphers in the guise of being “helpers”.

Finally, why must the APA pretend to know more than it does? DSM IV is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document. To its credit it says so — although its brief apologia is rarely noted. DSM IV has become a bible and a money making best seller — its major failings notwithstanding. It confines and defines practice, some take it seriously, others more realistically. It is the way to get paid. Diagnostic reliability is easy to attain for research projects. The issue is what do the categories tell us? Do they in fact accurately represent the person with a problem? They don’t, and can’t, because there are no external validating criteria for psychiatric diagnoses. There is neither a blood test nor specific anatomic lesions for any major psychiatric disorder. So, where are we? APA as an organization has implicitly (sometimes explicitly as well) bought into a theoretical hoax. Is psychiatry a hoax — as practiced today? Unfortunately, the answer is mostly yes.

What do I recommend to the organization upon leaving after experiencing three decades of its history?

1. To begin with, let us be ourselves. Stop taking on unholy alliances without the members’ permission.
2. Get real about science, politics and money. Label each for what it is — that is, be honest.
3.Get out of bed with NAMI and the drug companies. APA should align itself, if one believes its rhetoric, with the true consumer groups, i.e., the ex-patients, psychiatric survivors etc.
4.Talk to the membership — I can’t be alone in my views.

We seem to have forgotten a basic principle — the need to be patient/client/consumer satisfaction oriented. I always remember Manfred Bleuler’s wisdom: “Loren, you must never forget that you are your patient’s employee.” In the end they will determine whether or not psychiatry survives in the service marketplace.

Wannabe Saviours

I still feel like crap, but I’m continuing to take all of my vitamins and supplements and homeopathic stuff and the last psych med I’m on, Epival. The blockage in my throat is mostly gone, there’s just a dull pain there now. For the most part I don’t really know what’s going on in my body. I think these recurring illnesses are really bothering me. I’m seeing my g.p. tomorrow, so I’ll see what she has to say about it. God I’m cold.

I didn’t really expect that this attempt at healing would be so painful, I mean, physically painful. I suppose that’s what happens in healing. And I’m also having trouble dealing with incredible bouts of anger and sadness related to being hospitalized.

Last night I was thinking about this idea of spiritual pain and being victimized by the psychiatric industry, and then I was thinking about what it does to the perpetrators of psychiatric abuse. I mean, they think they’re doing good things, they honestly believe they are helping people, and they get feedback from people around them that they are doing good work. But there must be some kind of huge spiritual damage that they’re wreaking on themselves. I’ve never thought about the negative stuff that happens to perpetrators before. I know at death people have to face whatever pain they’ve caused in their lifetimes that they never atoned for. I don’t know what that would look like for someone who has hurt hundreds, thousands of people during the course of an illustrious career.

I’m sure there are people working in that field who haven’t hurt others, but a lot fewer than you would expect. Even people who are very kind are still complicit in what happens on psych wards.

I can’t change the past. And I can’t make people who hurt me see that they hurt me. I wish I could get some kind of compensation for four years of hell, but I probably can’t. And I wish I knew for sure no one would throw me in a bin again, but I don’t know. My mom doesn’t even recognize when I’m being discriminated against for being a nutter, and for the most part other people will agree with me in principle that psych wards are abusive, but won’t do the work to find out an alternative for me. I’m applying to grad school now to write my thesis on alternative ways of dealing with people in psychosis, which will be a fun project. But then I’m worried even after I do that, even after I lay out an entire blueprint for people to treat me humanely, it won’t be followed. It’s frustrating.

Maybe people will kill me with their kindness. I don’t know. I don’t want to be another statistic, one more person killed by meds, or restraints, or whatever. But I can’t help it much either, except to keep doing some kind of advocacy and activist work around raising awareness.

And really, the psychiatric industry is crumbling. People are starting to realize that new illnesses are being invented for things no one really worried about before. I mean, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, ugh, what a crock. Mother Jones had ODD don’t you know? Med students don’t want to go into psychiatry anymore, in the medical field it’s viewed as a bit of a sham.

I’m not saying mental illnesses don’t exist. I am saying, however, that psychiatry has limited the scope of how we can identify and properly treat mental illnesses. A quarter of people being treated for MI’s actually have physical illnesses creating their psychiatric problems. And while the DSM says once an underlying condition is discovered, the psych label has to be abandoned, it’s not happening anymore. Now people have the psych label in addition to their thyroid condition or epilepsy or whatever is going on. And I think the reason for that is purely monetary, big bucks can be made in making sure someone is still identified as a psych patient.

Maybe there are some people with the brain chemical thing going on. But I am seriously doubtful that brain chemicals account for all MIs.

Personally, I think something like bipolar disorder refers to a set of symptoms more than an actual disease. I think a LOT of things cause bipolar disorder, and it’s different for everyone. And our health care system isn’t responsible enough these days to actually provide thorough medical work ups of people with bipolar disorder to find out how to adequately treat them.

So I dunno, it’s a strange thing. I know one thing is for sure, whoever puts me in the hands of the psychiatric industry again in the future is not going to be in my life anymore. I can’t hack the wannabe saviours.

Spiritual Emergence

Oh what the hell. I think, actually I know, I am going through some kind of massive spiritual transformation. I don’t know when it started, but I know it kicked off the Psychosis. I think there were things that could have been done for me around that time specifically which would have made it an easier transition, but obviously that didn’t happen.

I never really paid much attention to stuff about kundalini or chakras, but I didn’t pay much attention to Bipolar Disorder or Temporal Lobe Epilepsy either. Still, I’ve been reading about kundalini rising because a lot of the symptoms are corresponding to what I’ve been going through, particularly some of the things which people maybe haven’t heard me talk about. In the past year my capacity to see spirits has grown exponentially, to the point where seeing something out of the ordinary is, well, ordinary. I know during my hospitalization I had some INTENSE heat coming out of the top of my head, and I was practically shaking and trembling the entire time I was there, not to mention feeling electrical energy roar through my body. Not only that, but I had God realization, which if you’re not ready for does flip one out. I think it’s tempered a lot, I have some more humility around it so I can deal with it. But having a bunch of doctors follow me around pathologizing everything I did did not help me figure this out at all.

In fact, a lot of people warn folks away from kundalini awakenings because there’s a high chance of ending up in psychosis or psychiatric wards, etc. Oops.

I am thinking of all the people I know personally who have gone to the bin in manic states, and how they can all tell you some really advanced theological ideas that they’ve learned solely from going nuts. Something is there.

There are other physical symptoms which have been coming up. There was a week where I kept vomiting up phlegm, I mean HUGE amounts of phlegm, which would then mostly vanish except for small blobs. It was really weird. Then I heard sometimes that happens when a blockage in the solar plexus is being cleared. And then in the last couple of days I got this knot in my throat, which corresponds to vishnu granthi talked about with kundalini rising, it’s kind of a block that keeps energy from going up.

I don’t know what I think of all this. But a lot of people out there are noticing people having spontaneous kundalini awakenings these days, even people who aren’t spiritual at all. I can’t even eat some of the things I used to really like. My body is totally changing on me, and so are my thoughts. In a lot of ways it’s good, because I know I have a lot of healing to do and it can help with that. In other ways it’s not so good, people already think I’m a freak and if I also say I’m having a spiritual emergence then they’ll get even more strange. My mom herself is a die hard born again atheist, so I feel particularly vulnerable around her just because I don’t think she’s safe.

It’s still a health issue essentially, except that it involves spiritual, mental, and physical health all together. And essentially, while it’s a different name with different theories behind it, I’ve already started to discover what works for me. I guess the only big thing is that over the past year it’s really affected my physical health, and that’s been really hard. I could deal with the funny brain stuff, that’s been around for ages, but these die offs keep pissing me off. It feels really crappy.

I’m not interested in becoming only a spiritual person though, like, hmm, maybe you know what I mean. I don’t want to lose sight of the real world and actual human suffering. And I think in that regard it’s actually been a very different kind of spiritual growth than one would think. I think it’s been more about grappling with the fact that I need to learn to take care of or help other people to the best of my capacity. I know I need to spend a lot of time taking care of myself, maybe not so much in the future but right now, but I still want to create work that will improve the lives of millions more people than just myself.

I’ve also realized that I have to put aside thoughts of fame in regard to my film practice. I know it will happen anyway, but I think it’s an illusion that can trap people in their artistic growth. It can be a pitfall, where the desire to be loved overwhelms the desire to tell the truth. I guess I want to focus more on the work itself and spend little time indulging the Persona.

So there are a lot of things I am coming to understand, along with my body evolving, and I think ultimately it’s a good thing. HOWEVER, I would also give a warning to people trying to jump start a spiritual evolution without doing the ground work that it can put you through YEARS of hell and has the potential of destroying everything you ever knew, particularly for those of us living in the colonized West.

I also don’t think it would necessarily have taken this long if I hadn’t been on heavy duty psych drugs for eight years. Detoxing from the meds is what is scaring me right now, but it seems the only other option from withdrawal is death, and I’m not ready for that either.

Throat

I am just writing to let people know I am okay. I seem to be having some kind of problem with my throat which makes me unable to speak English, although I can manage Cree more easily, I guess Cree sounds are made just before this energy blockage in my throat. It feels like I’m being strangled and it really hurts, but I can breath perfectly fine and swallow without any problems besides pain. Either way, I think I know what it is that’s going on and I am probably going to retreat from the world for the weekend to try and deal with it because it is interfering with my daily life. I may act a little strangely, so I hope no one tries to “help” me again. If it does become a more serious problem I’ll go see a doctor, although I have concluded doctors don’t know what they’re doing and will probably try and tell me it is a psychiatric issue, even if something really is going on with my throat. Either way, if I have to go to the ER it definitely won’t be City Hospital.

However, I do have a pretty good idea what it is, and so I’m just working with certain exercises to try and open it up again and get this knot to untie itself. I’m not sure what will happen to me after, but hopefully it will be okay.

And hopefully people will be smart or respectful enough to leave me alone.

Jesse

I didn’t really know you, we met a few times when I got Schrodinger and you were a nice guy, busy with all your gear out on the acreage. I heard about you a lot though, through your mom. And I remember she and my mom used to talk about us, because we both went crazy around the same time. You were on meth and got manic, and I was on Effexor and got manic. It was that time when a whole bunch of people I knew had manic episodes incidentally. I’m not sure why it all happened in that time frame. I know it was just after Clint Alberta committed suicide jumping off a Toronto viaduct. I didn’t know him either, but I had friends who did, and I remember how it impacted the Aboriginal and Film communities. And so I heard about all the things that happened in your life too, I was really hoping you would make it.

I was at your funeral today. I was surprised to find out you were just 23. You did a lot in your life, and a lot of people really loved you. I’m sure a lot of people are asking why right now. And I know why. I mean, I don’t know your specific reason, but I know the feelings you must have felt. I know how scared you must have been, and desperate. I know what it’s like to have a night where you’re not sure there will be a sunrise. I know how time slows down, how every minute aches.

I know what that kind of pain feels like. And I know how alone it feels.

Sometimes people think people who commit suicide are selfish or spiteful, but it’s not true, not with the people I’ve known who’ve done it or thought about it. It really does hurt that much.

I don’t think anyone can judge you for what you did, because I don’t think anyone besides you knows exactly how much suffering you were in. I wish this was a world where people like you and I had less barriers to living with bipolar, places we could have met and talked and figured out things we needed as a minimum to be able to survive. And the sad thing is, you were doing it, you were figuring out how to make a good life for yourself. Even then it happened.

It’s the one thing I hate the most about bipolar, knowing I’ve been trying to check out for the last twenty one years. I hate it. I don’t know why I never did it. I wasn’t smarter than you, or loved more, or anything. In fact, I even did meth for a while when I was nineteen too. Why does one person make it and another doesn’t? There’s no answer. It’s the mystery of manic depression. It’s a brilliant, funny, scary, deadly disability. And it’s so complex, there aren’t easy answers at all.

My friend Elaine was so lost for a while after Clint died. They were going to make films together, he was just waiting for her to get out of Emily Carr. A lot of people had big dreams for him, and they had big dreams for you too. It’s going to be rough seeing how much this impacts all the people in your life, and people you might not even have known well. I know you’re in a beautiful place, with people taking care of your battle scars from this round on earth. I also know I can’t think about that beautiful place you’re in right now, because it’s too damned alluring sometimes.

Jesse Allan (Duvall) Loewy
July 24 1983 – January 28 2007

Various Thoughts on Disability and Human Rights

I did a bit more reading on this missing women, someone made a site that has profiles of all the women Pickton is being charged with murdering. I was sadly not terribly shocked to see that a number of the murdered women had disabilities of various kinds, mainly brain related disabilities like manic depression and developmental disabilities. I think it’s something we don’t recognize, that a lot of survival sex workers are people with disabilities. I remember when two women I knew started doing sex work again it was because they weren’t able to survive on their disability payments and sex work was the only kind of job they had access to that paid well and didn’t involve a set schedule.

You can read about the murdered and missing women here.

Disability does pay crap. And I’m not sure why we as a society think that’s okay. I was reading somewhere about Community Treatment Orders and how arbitrary they are. An example was given that someone on disability or welfare who has only one piece of food in their cupboards could be hospitalized involuntarily for not being able to take care of themselves, even if they have no food simply because they’re living in poverty.

I really think this anniversary has changed a lot of what I feel about the hospital. I used to be really upset that it all happened to me. Now I’m really upset that this happens everyday to a lot of people. And things have happened during this anniversary that have made me feel more in touch with the larger scope of disability rights activists. First there was the Ashley “Treatment,” and then my body being on the verge of organ failiure due to my medication, and then learning about the Critical Disability Studies program, and then reading blogs of other people with disabilities, being denied proper medical treatment because of my disability, deciding to try life without psych meds, and then the saddest of all, finding out another bipolar person died because of their disability. I’ve realized it’s not useful for me to just hold it all inside and feel insular. My experience and feelings are all valid, I just mean that I want to have more contact and alliances with other people with disabilities, of all kinds, and to try and create change around it.

I wanted to be really conscious of what was going on in my healing process this anniversary, so I expected to go through it in a certain way, dealing with certain things. That didn’t happen. But I think it turned out better this way. It feels more like joining a larger world of people struggling with these issues than being all on my own. And I think I’m even more hyper aware of my issues being largely a human rights issue. Why did anyone think the psych ward was a good place for me? How come I had no say in my treatment? And why the hell did people keep assuming I had left my body and they could treat me like shit and I wouldn’t remember? I remember stuff. I had feelings. But somehow I became a non-human for six weeks, and people assumed that was okay, and then wondered why I had such a hard time after.

Having a major psychotic episode was not the worst thing that happened to me. Being hospitalized, the hospital itself, was specifically what fucked me up. Taking medication is what specifically fucked me up. The way people treated me was what made me want to die. Hearing and feeling things that weren’t there wasn’t the big issue that has haunted me. In fact, psychosis was actually pleasant and therapeutic until everyone got terrified and incarcerated me.

Here’s a radical thought: what if psychosis is the minds way of healing itself? It’s like in medicine, symptoms are cured but illnesses are not. I think psychosis is a symptom. We’re finally now realizing that fevers are an important aspect of the immune system fighting off a virus, and while people still try to get rid of fevers, that practice is falling out of favour.

Psychotic episodes allowed to go through their natural process take on average three months. That sounds like a long time, but it’s actually not really. If I had a choice between what I went through and a psychotic episode lasting three months, I would go with the episode. I think there were some things I was trying to heal that I didn’t get to finish up, and it’s taken me WAY longer because I wasn’t allowed to heal the way I was meant to heal.

I think we need to take a different look at psychosis. It is not necessarily a negative thing to undergo, as long as people aren’t forcibly injecting you with Thorazine and strapping you down to a bed for hours while you scream and ignoring requests for medical attention and yelling at you and telling you you’re not human and teasing you about having to behave to get proper care. The horrors of mental illness are the horrors we place on it.

I think there is something I adopted from the drug culture that actually helps me out more than medical intervention. People using psychedelic drugs often have babysitters, someone not on drugs who will hang around and make sure no one puts their hand on a burner or falls off a roof. It’s a really simple little rule around mind altering drug use, and it’s also a tool that people with mental illnesses have used for years. I had two great babysitters who unfortunately live in other places now, but they could be counted on to spend time with me while I was in danger of committing suicide. There wasn’t a huge power imbalance along with it either, they were just my friends making sure I wasn’t going to get hurt.

I think it’s harder to find a babysitter for a psychotic episode, because it lasts a long time and is way more active than a suicidal depression, but I know that there are alternative places out there and private homes for people in psychosis.

Anyway, I’m really liking that this anniversary has brought me to a point where I want to be active within the world in making sure human rights violations don’t continue to happen to people with disabilities. I think there are still things I’m not as aware of as I could be, particularly with non MI related disabilities, but I like that I am learning them. Finding out about other people with disabilities is teaching me more about myself than I expected.

Elegy

I saw my friend Archer Pechawis’ performances last night, including Elegy, which made me cry. It’s about the missing women, Cris Derksen reads out the names and birthdates of the women while he lights a candle for each one. And it’s so simple, but after about seven candles when he just kept lighting more and more the weight of how many women died becomes so clear. About 65 women went missing or so. And I also started thinking about people I knew who worked low track at some point during the murders, and just realizing how scary it was, especially when my lover started hitting the stroll during all that happening.

And it’s weird to listen to the media talk about these women, blaming them for being murdered because they were using drugs, like if they’d just stopped using drugs they wouldn’t have been sex workers anymore and they would have gone on to live regular lives. It’s creepy and simplistic. And this idea that these women were transient and no one noticed them going missing. BULLSHIT. When I moved to Van in 1996 people were talking about the missing women, people were agitating the police to actually get off their asses and do something about it. I remember when protests were being held because there was only one officer assigned to the case for YEARS. And sex workers call their moms like anyone else. Just because they’re doing sex work doesn’t mean they’re cut off from their communities. These women are like anyone else, they have friends, family, lovers, they don’t have only johns and the police in their lives, that’s such a dumb idea.

I also have to say something about the media depictions of the downtown eastside right now, and you’ll see it a lot if you’re watching trial coverage. All the shots are those goddamn drive by camera shots. And it makes these women look more like people for sale than if the footage was shot in a more honest way. Right now it’s all John-cam footage. The downtown eastside is different if you’re gathering footage on foot, the way most of the people in the area travel. That all being said, there are some HUGE issues around taking footage of the downtown eastside and I personally don’t even film there, and won’t, ever. I was a camera person for a film school friend and we were right at Main and Hastings and it was awful, the crew had to talk the director into leaving. If you really want to get good footage of the downtown eastside, you have to give your camera to the residents and let them shoot it for you, and they will, they’re very conscious of having a hand in the creation of images of their neighborhood. Rebecca Belmore has some really amazing things she does to approach marginalized communities to either get footage or do performance work in those areas. You can be ethical about it. But I don’t think a lot of the international press are aware of these issues. Really, someone should do a workshop for the press about the particular ethics and informal regulations of filming in the DTES.

I guess I’m worried about the DTES folks. It was such a long struggle to get justice, and while I don’t think this trial will get justice for these women irregardless of the verdict (because I don’t believe Pickton was a solitary agent), I think it’s opening up more avenues for the exploitation of the people living in that neighborhood. WISH is doing some good work trying to protect the women working by giving them information on their rights with the media and so on. It’s such a vulnerable neighborhood though, and now the whole world is staring at it. I am especially worried because some of those women are going to be exposed as sex workers to their families and so on. Apparently one woman had her full name and the illegal drugs she used published in a major newspaper and her family saw it, and she really just didn’t know that could happen. I really hate hearing about stuff like that, and I know it’s going to keep happening.