Best Friend Luke

When I was growing up my best friend was my cousin Luke. He wanted to start a pickle factory, and find fraggle rock. He was a sweet guy. And then he started changing. And then when he was fourteen he got hospitalized for the first time, ended up homeless during most of his teenage years, went in and out of institutions, and now lives in a group home and gets a shot in the butt once every two weeks. He’s been on heavy neuroleptics for so long that he blinks a lot, he gets really tired when his shot wears off, and he’s never gone back to school. And as soon as he went into the hospital, I just knew, that’s where I was going too. It was creepy to get such a horrible premonition, at least fifteen years before it happened.

I’m actually a second generation psych survivor in a way, I have an aunt who survived rounds of ECT and several involuntary admissions. She’s pretty open about it, and I remember growing up around her sometimes her siblings would start talking about something they’d done in their childhoods and she wouldn’t remember it at all. There’s just wide swaths of memory that are gone. I can’t imagine how frustrating that would feel, to have huge chunks of childhood missing. She was, and is, a fun auntie. I remember one time she was slightly hypomanic and had just gotten a deep fat fryer, and for an entire weekend she just made donut after donut. It was truly a sight to behold. Luke and I ate so many donuts. Sugar and cinnamon donuts. I don’t think she used the fryer again, she just wanted it for donut weekend.

In fact, way in the distant past, my grandfather had a brother who had a manic episode during the Second World War, and was convinced Nazi’s were coming to Little Pine. It’s funny to think about Nazi’s attacking a reservation in the middle of nowhere Canada, but it probably did feel really scary for him, god that would be a suck ass delusion to have.

So it goes, generation after generation. Most of the people in my family with bipolar disorder are doing decently well though. It makes for ornery family gatherings, but whatever.

One time when Luke and I were kids we pissed each other off in this, well, yeah, we were crazy kids. We were canoing with my grandparents and the lake got some whitecaps so we had to hunker down on an island. And I was really bored so I started collecting lichen, because I collected stuff as a kid, like rocks and neat sticks and stuff. And Luke started chasing me around yelling “She’s itchin’ for lichen!” and then I got mad at him and then he threw my lichen in the lake and I cried. It was, that was typical of our relationship. One time I was trying to ignore him by reading an illustrated copy of Heidi and he started singing “She’s got the heidi heidi ho!” and then he pointed at the picture of Heidi’s grandfather and said “The old man is down the road!” God he said the weirdest things. His diagnosis is schizophrenia by the way. He was so fun. It’s different between us now. We ended up both going to Coast when we lived in the Lower Mainland. He went to the Port Coquitlam Coast and I went to the Vancouver Coast. Coast is a clubhouse for people with mental illnesses. You can use the internet, do laundry, watch a movie, drink coffee, and get fed. HUGE plates, of terrible food. I’m sorry, but it’s true, mass cheaply made food is usually not very good. Thanksgiving dinners there were nice though.

That’s where we started meeting our crazy friends I guess. I mean, the ones in the system. Most of my friends are slightly crazy to varying degrees. But that’s where I started meeting consumers who were more politicized, or who weren’t consumers at all.

Once when we were kids Luke gave me a haircut that made me look like I had a lobotomy, we still have the pictures.

If it hadn’t been for Luke I wouldn’t have been immersed in the machismo of boyhood. He and his brother were supposed to take me to see Santa Bear Saves Christmas and instead we ended up at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I also saw V (a show about reptilians who ripped off their human skins), Knight Rider, all the Star Trek and Star Wars movies, and the Aliens series. My mom didn’t find out until much later, she was so upset, she was trying to do feminist media savvy filtering and I got corrupted anyway.

I wonder oftentimes how come he ended up where he is and I ended up where I am. Sometimes I think it’s because he’s a dark skinned aboriginal man and I’m a light skinned aboriginal woman. Race plays a HUGE role in how you’re treated in the psych system. I don’t know that he is schizophrenic, but he’s a brown man so he has a statistically higher probability of getting the schiz label over the other ones. It’s not that men of color are really more commonly schizophrenic, it’s that psychiatrists just label them more often. I know he’s been on experimental drugs more than once in his life. I also know that the aboriginal community in Canada is routinely used in drug testing.

The other day he called and was really upset, he had some microwave popcorn and someone else has to microwave it for him and they weren’t doing it for him. They were just sitting around ignoring him and all he wanted was some popcorn. God that pisses me off. And it’s the little things really, little crap like that that can be so abusive. Fuckers.

He and I aren’t best friends anymore, but we still have a lot in common.

Mens

I’m in the unusual position of having some very smoking hot fantasies about . . . boys. But not straight boys, repeat, NOT straight boys. Only gay boys. And not as a girl doing straight girl things with them, but more as a transfag doing man on man smoking hot sex. And not romantic sex either, hot raunchy dirty anonymous bruising each other up sex.

Okay, maybe anonymous is going too far, because there are at least four gay men in my life currently who, if I get the chance, I would totally pounce on, even though I know their names. I’m not sure what to do about it. I probably WILL do something about it in the future, but I don’t know what. And I want to make sure it’s with a guy that’s going to have sex with me the way I want to, as a boy. I haven’t thought too much about what that will look like. Well, that’s not true, I’ve thought about it a lot. I have the diagrams, the plans, the whole thing is mapped out in terms of specific things I want to do, with variances based on the possibility that the dude won’t be biologically male.

Which brings me to this word that I’m really weird about applying to myself and I don’t know why. Bisexual. I don’t know if that’s me. I guess in technical terms it is, but I still feel REALLY lesbian identified. The thing is, I don’t feel like a girl when I scope out boys, I feel like a guy. I feel like a lesbian and a gay man in the same body. And I feel trans. I guess I’m defaulting to the grand umbrella of Queer, which makes the most sense. But besides negotiating labels, I just want to sometimes be a gay man and sometimes be a butch dyke, and mostly just be me having hot sex with people I think are hot, who tend to be femme and butch gay men, and femme bisexual women, and butch lesbians. Usually femme bisexuals. My favorite top when I was coming out as a pervert was a gay man, who was usually a bottom incidentally. I think the BDSM community gives more space for gender and sexuality variance than the vanilla queer and straight communities, at least the BDSM community I came out in, which was pansexual.

Lucky for me there are gay men who appreciate other gay boys in biologically female bodies. I remember when a trans friend of mine offered to hook me up with black market testosterone I was kind of tempted, but at the same time, I dunno. In some ways I feel like I can negotiate my masculinity better in the body I currently have. Of course there are still going to be gay men who go all squeamy about pussy, just like there are still lesbians who shudder when they accidentally see penises. But I don’t particularly want to play with them anyway.

So what the hell am I? I dunno. I don’t want to limit myself to one gender or orientation particularly. It’s kind of funny though, because the girl I currently like told me gay men keep chasing her, and now I’m wondering if part of my attraction has to do with my gay male sensibility towards over the top femmes in some kind of a camp way. Who knows!!!

Maybe really I just like fucking queers, irregardless of gender or sexual orientation. There really isn’t any type of queer person I haven’t had a crush on at one point or another. I’m sort of an equal opportunist. The only people who don’t interest me are straight men and women, which is good because I don’t think they want me either.

All I know is I’m thinking of taking the word “lesbian” out of my professional bios and replacing it with queer, or boi, or something. Except now straight people are poaching the word boi.

Do we have a corner on the boi word anyone? Like is that a queer trademark? I seem to see straight men using it without being aware of the queerness attached to it.

Am I just biphobic? That’s terrible. I guess I don’t want to call myself a bisexual woman because it implies I would actually consider dating a straight man.

I remember when I was a teenager David Harrison came to Saskatoon with the Fringe to do his one man play and he spotted me in a crowd and came up specifically to give me a flyer for it. God, was I that obviously trans? Sometimes I feel so wigged out when I realize how easily other queers can pick me out. I guess I’m obviously a whatever I am.

I don’t like this idea of having to leave girl on girl sex behind though to have hot boy on boy sex. I want it all dammit!

Okay, and now I really have interrogated my own gender/sexuality far too much for one day, with no answers. Although if there are any cute gay men reading this who want to take me on a date, leave a comment! I like twinks and bikers.

Call me

I’m in an alright mood right now, it’s nice. I think because I figured some stuff out lately, and figured out what I want to do next. I have three deadlines coming up in the next month, so things are kind of wild right now, or they will be, or they SHOULD be!! I need to write up a few pages of my next screenplay. I haven’t usually overlapped projects so much, but I have to say I kind of like the pace of it, it goes with my brain well. I still need to talk to one of my references for grad school and FIND two more references for grad school. I have some people in mind, but it’s such a different direction to go into. There’s a residency in Toronto I want to apply for this summer, just because I haven’t applied to residencies before. I’ve had them, I just never applied like people usually do. So I want to beef up my resume by going vanity googling for shows I was in and didn’t know about. I have to figure out what particular things I need to change in my script, because I know it’s really just a slight alteration in a few scenes and I have it, but I’m all panicking and thinking about having to do the whole thing over.

And I have to finish those tweaks on my short video so that I can get it to the distributors. AND I wanted to make a compilation DVD of my work, and I’m thinking I should do it now. Or start it. Something. I want to get a newer copy of DVD Studio but I don’t know if you can buy it on it’s own anymore.

Sometimes I think the only reason I have a career is because I was so socially awkward that I had to do something else besides while away my youth with other people. I dunno. I can socialize sometimes, but maybe retreating from the world gave me a chance to live in my own head and be creative. I’m starting to not feel so bad about my dramatic teens and twenties. I started a career, that was a good thing. I never really understood people who didn’t have a career by the time they were twenty. I mean, I don’t think of a career as something where you’re guaranteed a solid income, but some kind of work that you’re passionate about.

So yeah, feeling better. I got an address book so that I can actually have people’s numbers again. So embarassing, I spent months without anyone’s number. Literally, I lost everyone’s number in June, just after Christopher died. And so I’m getting everyone’s number again, or putting them all in the same spot, or whatever. I was embarrassed to note that the first four numbers I put in was a current crushola, two ex girlfriends, and my last crush. In that order. What the hell. I guess my priorities are clear. The tragic part is I wasn’t even going to do anything about it until I had a fight with a close friend and she griped at me for not having any support network and then I realized it was true just because I lost my phone numbers and hers was only one of three numbers I could remember. And I couldn’t really remember Lynn or Velveeta’s numbers very often, I just randomly dialed similar numbers until I reached their place. And asking if Velveeta is there is a really weird thing to hear a total stranger say on your phone. Apparently they’ve been commiserating on getting bizarre phone messages from me, usually when I’m high. And freakin Dana, Miss Biennale, is hard to get a hold of, and I need to ask her for a reference for grad school. Last time I sent her an email I got some “Oh, I’m busy here in Barcelona” thing. Lucky ducky. Who knows where she is now. When I told her I was moving to Saskatoon she said “Oh, I always wanted to retire to Southern Saskatchewan. Or the South of France, I’m not sure.” Yeah, because they’re so similar! She’s great. She ate some west coast food I couldn’t finish and felt bad about because it was a cultural faux pas. Fish eggs are not vegetables, that was false advertising.

I never ate Oolican in Vancouver and I never ate Poutine in Montreal. I couldn’t do it. And now that I’ve said that, of course, the next time I go to either of those places I will be assaulted with the above mentioned delicacies.

So all in all, I really think I’ve finally turned a corner in my healing from The Ward. I feel like I can get back to the way life was four years before. Well, in a better way though. I saw a video on youtube about psychiatric survivors and they said people healed a lot better without medication because then they could think and feel. It does make a difference. I already feel like I have been able to have some really intense feelings this anniversary that have helped me resolve certain things, and even to see parts of me I don’t really like. It’s good for me.

Hey, does anyone remember party lines? As in, a group of people would share the same number and based on different rings would answer or not? Not Lavalife or other silly stuff. I knew a friend who was on a party line when I was a kid.

A few of my favorite clips

I need to think happy thoughts for a moment, so this post is a bit of a break and a chance for me to talk about the subject closest to my heart, film. This isn’t really a “best of” set of clips, merely a chance for me to put together some of my favorite scenes from a few films so that I can talk about them.

1. Blue In The Face by Wayne Wang

This is the largely improvisational follow up to Wayne Wang’s film Smoke. I liked Smoke a lot too. I really liked Blue In The Face for it’s use of the same actors in an improvisational setting. There’s a certain energy and “realness” you can get with improv, and I think we don’t use it enough as narrative filmmakers. A lot of films are written using improv techniques, but that’s different than just telling the characters to do whatever while the cameras roll.

This selection of scenes cuts between Lou Reed talking about why he’s lived in New York for 30 years, and why he smokes, with Harvey Keitel and Jim Jarmusch talking about smoking. And you see snippets of POC throughout, kinda weird since there were a lot of POC in the film and it’s made by an Asian director. A side note: the reason so many actors in old movies smoked all the time was because the directors had to give them some kind of an action to perform, and smoking was just a lazy way of keeping them moving. Directors are more savvy these days, but if you look at the old smoking films you’ll notice it usually happens during scenes where people just sit around talking.

2. Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! by Russ Meyer

I was lucky enough to see this on a 35mm print when I was in high school (not AT my high school though) and Tura Satana haunted my day dreams for months afterwards. This is the trippy intro. Those wiggly lines you see filling the screen are the optical track. If you look at a strip of film, like 16mm film, you’ll find the optical track on the side opposite the sprocket holes. It’s the CRAPPIEST form of audio possible, oh my god. It’s ironic because film is so gorgeous and so superior to video, yet it’s married to this scrawny squeaky form of audio. Basically it works the same way as the film, light goes through it and it gets read back into audio. But it squishes your sounds into pitifulness. I don’t know how Dolby works, but the audio you hear in theatres now is a far cry from original film sound.

Anyway, yes, dangerous go go dancers. And the lesbian gets teased for not being bisexual. It’s pretty entertaining.

3. Mullholland Drive by David Lynch

This is the scene in Club Silencio where they realize that they’re dead and have been dead for the entire first half of the movie. Okay, other people interpret it differently, but that’s what I get out of it. And I don’t feel bad about spoiling it because no one really knows what they’ve just seen when they watch it, except that the kissing scene between Naomi Watts and Laura Harring is fuckin’ hot! I’m tempted to start saying “Silencio” over and over the next time I sleep with someone just to wig them out. One thing I find fascinating about this flick is that it stars Nicole Kidman’s very famous, very closeted lover in a film about closeted hollywood lesbians. I sometimes wonder if Lynch specifically cast her because of it. Anyway, here is Rebekah Del Rio singing Crying. Oh man, Laura Harring is really hot. She kicks Tura Satana’s ass.

4. Velvet Goldmine by Todd Haynes

I like this scene with Christian Bale’s character identifying with the highly famous glam rock super star Brian Slade because I think it’s kind of a common experience in queer lives. There’s something comforting and relieving the first time you see a media figure or movie or whatever that connects to your own sexuality and identity. I dunno, I just get a soft little feeling at Christian Bale jumping up and down pointing to an androgenous bisexual rocker and yelling “That’s me!”

A side note, I remember when Todd Haynes was still in the early stages of his career with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Poison, and Dottie Gets Spanked was touring the festivals. God, have I been around that long?

5. The Hours by Stephen Daldry

This is the end scene with Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf. I think it’s my favorite scene of a psych patient trying to regain control over her own treatment for bipolar disorder. In this case she was sent off to the quiet small town of Richmond for what was then known as rest treatment. It’s still kind of practiced today. I don’t know why people think if they make crazy people REALLY bored we’ll get better. Either way, I actually saw The Hours on a day pass from the psych ward, almost exactly four years ago. I also find people try to tell me that I’m not really saying what I’m saying, that it’s just the bipolar talking. Bipolar doesn’t talk, asshole. It just sits around and makes suggestions for suicide.

My mom thought it was a REALLY bad idea for me to see this film, incidentally, because it has suicide in it. Which is ridiculous, because NOT talking about suicide doesn’t make me think of it less. Also, I think I just needed to see something about another bipolar person, especially one who made a huge difference to the world, in this case to literature.

6. Orlando by Sally Potter

So it makes sense then to end with the film made from the book written by Virginia Woolf to her lover Vita Sackville West. Orlando, in case you haven’t read or seen it, is about a Lord who lives for four centuries, during which he spontaneously transforms into a woman. It was kind of a love offering to Vita, and it’s really funny. Sally Potter’s film is so lush, jeez, I used to watch this film all the time in high school. Actually watching this scene of Orlando falling in love with Sasha, I realized that you can see certain aspects of “melancholy” that remind me of my own bipolar disorder and probably Virginia Woolf’s as well. I dunno, that’s just something I noticed after watching the Hours clip. In film school I found out Sally Potter trained as a dancer, which also explains some of the film.

Probably some of these clips will go offline eventually, but I recommend any of the films mentioned in this post. None of them are related to each other really though, except that I like them.

Kimberly Nixon vs Vancouver Rape Relief

Before I go to bed . . . again, I wanted to post barbara findlay’s statement on the decision of the BC Supreme Court to decline her client Kimberly Nixon’s appeal against Rape Relief. Barbara findlay is a noted lawyer for the queer community in Vancouver and was the lawyer for Little Sisters Book Emporium. I think something maybe other people in the blogs have failed to note about the Nixon decision is that it has a wide impact on many other issues of discrimination. Anytime the Supreme Court makes a decision, then that case can be applied to other cases. In this instance the doors have been opened for all organizations to decide who is and who is not allowed to be a part of their group based on their identity, be that trans, female, queer, native, etc etc. Also, it’s just disgusting to see so-called progressive women’s groups attacking transgendered and transsexual people. This decision is nothing to cheer about and is putting all minorities in jeopardy.

————-
I have sad news to report.

After a twelve-year, four-hearing battle, Kimberly Nixon’s case for trans
rights has been stopped in its tracks. Kimberly Nixon is a post-operative
transsexual woman who was expelled from Rape Relief, a Vancouver women’s service and shelter, because she was not “born a woman”.

She won a Rape Relief challenge which argued that trans women had no rights under the ‘gender’ section of the human rights code. And she won the largest amount of money ever awarded by the BC Human Rights Tribunal at the time.

But she lost when Rape Relief took judicial review (a form of appeal) of the human rights tribunal decision. Nixon lost again when we appealed to the B.C. Court of Appeal.

Because the Court of Appeal decision was 3-0 against Kimberly, we had to request permission to take our case to the Supreme Court of Canada. That court, which heard only ten cases in its winter term from across the country, decides which few of the cases in which an appeal is requested it can hear.

And today they refused to hear Kimberly Nixon’s.

What is the result?

The legal result is that in B.C. at least, the Court of Appeal judgement stands. That in turn means that any group organized on the basis of disability, on the basis of religion, etc, and that provides services, can REFUSE to provide those services to anyone in the group that they don’t like. They are free to discriminate.

Queers are particularly vulnerable to such discrimination. Disability groups have historically excluded people with HIV for example. Many religious groups exclude queers. There was a case this week in which a Victoria archbishop fired a priest and an administrator in the parish. The reason? The administrator had admitted to a parishioner that he was gay; the parishioner spoke to the bishop. The bishop told the priest to get rid of the administrator; the priest refused. So the priest was also terminated.

Under the Nixon decision, that is perfectly legal.

But there is another result. Kimberly’s case, though technically a loss, is a victory for trans people because it is through her courageous pursuit of this case over many years, and the profile that this case has had, that the Canadian women’s movement and in particular Canadian women’s shelters have had to come to grips with the issue of service to trans women. Happily, almost all women-only services across the country have developed policies inclusive of trans women.

Trans people will continue to use the courts as one strategy to achieve legal and social equality in this country.

Where to from here?

This case, though ‘persuasive’ to courts in other provinces, applies only In British Columbia. So anyone with a similar issue in another province can (and should) file a complaint. And people anywhere in Canada can file human rights complaints if they are discriminated against by anyone except a women-only service.

Costs

The Supreme Court of Canada ordered costs against Kimberly for the application for leave to appeal. It is our expectation that Rape Relief will content itself with its victory rather than to be so unkind as to go after Kimberly for money she does not have. Nixon, who is currently employed doing award-winning historical restorations in Vancouver, was on social assistance for nine years.

I am sure Kimberly would appreciate hearing from people. It is a lonely place that she is in right now. You can send mail to me at the address below; or email me at this address, and I will pass everything along to her.

Questions

If you have any questions please let me know.

barbara findlay
Counsel for Kimberly Nixon
The Law Office of barbara findlay QC
635-1033 Davie St.
Vancouver BC V6E 1M7
604 251-4356
F 604 251-4373

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.
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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.