The Yellow Ward

“It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw–not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.” – The Yellow Wallpaper

“Is there a reason you’ve chosen to paint this ward in this shade of yellow?” I was specifically thinking of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which I assumed was an obvious cultural reference (it isn’t). However they didn’t get it and just started telling me about using whatever paint gets donated. How can people working in a psych institution not get the Gilman reference? It’s like not being insulted when I call them Nurse Rached.

Briefly, The Yellow Wallpaper charts a woman’s descent into madness while using the yellow wallpaper of the room she’s imprisoned in as a focal point for obsessive ruminations. It’s written by a psych survivor in the pre-med era.

In her own words:

“For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia–and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887.

“Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.”

The irony of psychiatry is that time and time again the survivors who finally leave it altogether (or as much as is legally possible) go on to do great amazing and wonderous things, sometimes specifically to spite their doctors. It is clear that psychiatrists are not psychics and can’t truly say someone will be dependent on medication and be insane for the rest of their lives. But they do. And once someone sets up THOSE kinds of expectations in someone, it’s hard to see and move beyond it unless you have some really supportive people. Currently mental illnesses are theories, we know people have clusters of specific symptoms, but we really don’t totally know WHY. There isn’t a test one can do and underlying issues are never investigated. The most likely causes of mental illness symptomology involve trauma or abuse of one kind or another. Social factors like racism, homophobia, and poverty have far more impact on mental health than mere genes. Even beyond that, mental illness is more often a judgement call. I can easily say someone is crazy because they act or think in ways different from myself, but psychiatrists have the legal and medical pull to make that person’s life a living hell. And the cures are often worse than the initial issues.

How would reducing someones life to rote domestic duties cure their depression? It doesn’t, it made Gilman crazier, and the only way she got out was to buck doctors orders and have an intellectual life again. The only way I started feeling more human and in control was to kick Olanzapine. I am beginning to suspect that psychiatry is designed to create mental distress in patients rather than allieviate it. So many alternatives have been shown to be superior to the current medical model (the Quakers had it going on!), and yet we’re still using the psychiatric model born out of Nazism (the heavy neuroleptics have their basis in Nazi experimentation) which we already know compounds mental health issues.

Either way, I am still researching the way out of the system. It’s tricky. I’m just sick of the Yellow Ward and the Yellow Wallpaper and all the Yellow Pills.

You’re going to help me, bitch!

I’ve been trying to commit this year’s 4th Anniversary of the Psych Ward to personal reflection and growth and I’ve noticed that some major issues have been presenting themselves which I was totally not expecting. One thing I wanted to really work on is the repeated rape attempts I endured in the hospital, but in a larger scope I am recognizing that it wasn’t this one element which negatively impacted me for so long. It was the whole concept of the hospital itself and of contemporary psychiatric treatment. Of COURSE I wouldn’t be protected from a rapist in the hospital, for one thing I was “crazy” so nothing I said mattered, even when I went to the nurses station for medical attention because of 1st degree burns. Of COURSE these things would happen because being raped would not be worse than being allowed to be “crazy” and unmedicated. Of COURSE I wouldn’t have input into my own treatment, because I am “crazy” and therefore intellectually diminished.

It’s not just about how I could have been raped (for the second time), or that I’ve been on brain damaging drugs, or that people still watch horror movies with crazy antagonists, or that whenever my mother talks about someone she doesn’t like she says they’re bipolar. It all really comes down to this essential idea of human rights. And not just human rights, but the fact that even among human rights activists there is still this idea of forming a hierarchy of whose human rights are worth MORE than other’s human rights. I had a huge blow out fight with my mom earlier today about Dr. Dickwad and having my right to proper health care violated. She was trying to assert that racism was a more damaging form of discrimination than crazyphobia. I blew up. KA-BOOM!! There is no human rights violation that is more or less important than another. Sexism does not outweigh transphobia. Racism does not outweigh crazyphobia. Homophobia is not more important than racism. They are all equally important. Anytime someone’s human rights are infringed there is a problem, and everyone’s liberation is tied in with that. The concept of a human rights hierarchy is just a fall back to the original hierarchy which created all the hateful isms in the first place. We can’t say “Okay, let’s deal with this one thing and then after we win equality on that basis we’ll deal with your little oppression over here.”

As someone with multiple identities which are oppressed, I don’t value or fight for one more than the others. However, I currently am very invested in disability rights because legally I am on shaky ground in terms of rights. While I am included in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I can still be subjected to CTO’s, and I still could have been sent to the ward yesterday because a doctor seeing me for five minutes assumed I was actively batty. Legally, I don’t have a lot of protection. Even emancipating myself from the psychiatric industry is going to be a long hard struggle and I could always be thrown back in the bin if my mom thinks I’m too emotional or back talking. Legally I am a 28 year old adult woman. But in Dr. Dickwad’s eyes I am a “young girl.”

Psychiatric labels aren’t only used for people with genuine neurological problems. They are also used to crush dissent. Step out of line, be defiant, demand equality, stray from a medical definition of normalcy, be poor, and you too could be in the ward. If you get angry about your treatment, it’s because you’re crazy. If you cry because you’re being abused, you’re crazy. If you demand to see a lawyer, you’re crazy. If you try to keep from showing emotions, you have “flat affect” and you’re crazy. If you ask for a second opinion or alternative treatments or try to be a pro-active health consumer, you’re crazy. There is no way out of the ward except to acquiese to doctor’s orders and judgements, to be docile and compliant and take the meds and agree that you have a serious illness which now puts you in a second class citizenship. If my mom was irritated with me, she could easily call the cops and have them haul me to the bin at any given moment. I know this.

So, I am tired of being at the mercy of the medical establishment. I am tired of the ball and chain medical file which follows me around. I want out, for good. I don’t want to see one more psychiatrist. I don’t want to try one more new miracle wonderkind drug. I don’t want some creepy chemicals with no long term studies mucking around with my brain. How many psych industry inmates commit suicide just to get AWAY from it? I’m tempted to myself.

Although to be honest I would probably run away and change my identity before I did that.

The thing is, I have a brain that works really well. I don’t talk in front of people super well, but I am a pretty good thinker and I have that kind of burning passion that’s useful in creating change. I can’t snuff it because I know I can be awfully useful.

So, this is the year where I am going to apply for every single thing I possibly can. Already the Canadian Film Centre has my application for the FFP. Outfest has a deadline coming up. Canada Council and Sask Arts Grant deadlines are coming up in a couple of months. And the beginning of March is the deadline for the Critical Disability Studies MA at York. There’s a program in New Zealand for a month long writer’s retreat. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. But I think if I just keep going, keep applying, keep making films, something will come out of it. My ideal life would be to write critical theory, be active in the Psychiatric Survivors Movement, and make short and feature films. That’s all I really want. I don’t even care about the girlfriend thing or having a family or being fabulously rich or winning a major award. I just want to have a home, food, clothing, my support animals, undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees, and the resources to live full time doing the above three things. And by the time I die, hopefully at a very old age, I just want the world to be better because I was here.

Next week I am seeing a psychic and hopefully she can give me some advice or guidance on where I’ve been and where I’m going. I really don’t know if I’ll stay in Saskatoon now. Toronto has a horrid psych industry, but it’s also the epicentre of the Mad Movement in Canada, and it has a really diverse population otherwise, along with a film and video community. Sure, maybe the apocalypse will happen and I’ll be stuck in T.O. and the CN tower will fall, but maybe that’s just where I’m supposed to be. Who knows? Maybe I won’t end up in Toronto. Maybe I’ll go for the MA program and then move back here. I really don’t know.

Really, I just want to have the freedom to be ornery, happy, sad, super in love, crabby, angry, and all those other emotions which people outside of the psych industry take for granted. I have a right to have emotions.

Who Ate The Pube Cake?

Tomorrow the show opens. I have to dress clean and beautiful and stand around making small talk. The media are going to preview the show at 11am, I don’t know if I will drop by for it or not. I do alright talking to the media. I’m excited to see my friend Rebecca though, and my friend Archer is coming in at the end of the month too. Another person from the Grunt millieu. He’s hilarious. Once when Lynn and I were walking around in the hood we found him intently tinkering with his NDN car installing the most whack sound system I’ve ever seen. It was very Powwow Highway. I don’t remember if it was the Toasted Marshmallow, maybe he had gotten a new car by then. One halloween someone set the car in front of his on fire and so the whole front of his white car had a scorched distressed look to it. Hence the Toasted Marshmallow moniker.

One time my friend and I were getting a ride in Marie Baker’s fifth-hand station wagon and while she was trying to show off her new wheels she sped down 7th Ave and a hubcap flew off in a grand jeté.

PUBE STORIES!

Marie Baker reminded me of these. The first is her story. Shawna Dempsey used to do this performance where she masturbated with a chocolate cake and one time Marie Baker happened upon the stage just afterwards, NOT having seen the performance. She saw all this crumbled cake on the ground so she ate some of it because it looked perfectly fine (if you knew Marie Baker you would understand why she’d do this). When I told her where it came from she said “You mean I ate of her bush!?”

This is not the only pube-cake eating story involving performance art though.

During Art’s Birthday at the Western Front, Margaret Dragu did a web based performance that involved me holding a slice of cake while she cut off her pubic hair and sprinkled it on the cake then kissed me.

Well what do you do with a pube sprinkled cake? I put it on a plinth and then later at a function in the same space, cake was being served. My friend Lynn and I watched that Dragu Pube Cake and sure enough, by the end of the night there was a plate with scrapings of crumbs. Who ate the Pube Cake? It’s the eternal question. I told Margaret about it later, I think she got a kick out of it.

SPEAKING of cake, my friends Cindy and Megan told us all about Annie Sprinkle’s wedding over in Calgary this past Sunday. They were in charge of making a three tiered cake, which had four breasts on the top. Megan promises to put it on Flickr soon. Apparently it was mucho fun, and they got to help the blushing brides get their outfits on. So jealous.

I think if you get married you either have to be COMPLETELY over the top, or you have to do a quiet lets-run-to-the-courthouse kind of a thing. Or maybe that is just me. I like extremes.

All I know is, if I do have a wedding cake I’m going to make pubes out of icing and put them all over it. Or maybe delicate marzipan pubes, or sugar glass pubes.

OMG! OMG! OMG!

I keep trolling around for the next degree program that interests me. I’m terribly keen on getting a PhD in The History of Consciousness at UCSC, but I hesitate spending that many years in the States right now. I don’t want to do an MFA because I more interested in expanding my academic knowledge beyond artistic practice.

And then this shit happened at ER and while scoping out disability law I came across a masters program at York University in Critical Disability Studies. Holy shit, oh my god, that would be so awesome! I am practically jizzing my pants reading the program brochure.

Anyway, I have a doctors appointment, with my REGULAR doctor, in half an hour so I should dash. And I have to drop by my old alternative medicine doctor’s office and make an appointment so he can give me snake venom or something to get rid of this rash.

Death of a Psych Hospital

Some inspirational Youtube-ing.

Inside Edgewood (after being abandoned for 16 years). Kind of a goofy clip but at least it shows you the interior of a psych institute complete with barred windows.

Edgewood State Hospital’s demise.

MOTHERFUCK!

Okay, officially City hospital in Saskatoon is completely discriminatory towards persons with mental illnesses. I waited for hours in ER to see someone after fighting with an admitting nurse about why I was there because of a rash. Then I finally get in to see the doctor, Dr. Clifford T. Chase, who as soon as he found out I had bipolar disorder started talking down to me like I was an idiot. He seemed more interested in pontificating on bipolar disorder and telling me what it was than inquiring about my rash and the additional symptoms I would be presenting with. When I told him I was there specifically because Lamictal comes with a black box warning about fatal rashes he just dismissed me as someone “reading things on the internet.” Uh, no, that’s in the side effect profile that comes with the goddamn medication and fatal skin rashes with Lamictal are very well documented. He made some very general assumptions, like assuming I was manic for four years. He interrogated me on my psych history which was not the issue whatsoever, and then instead of giving me specific injections I may need to keep this from going into Steven-Johnson’s Syndrome and making sure I had blood levels checked for a week, he gave me a referral to a psychiatrist.

WHAT. THE. FUCK!?

And the sad thing is I KNEW this was going to happen, I so knew it. As soon as I said bipolar I wasn’t a person anymore, I was just some silly crazy person who was upset over a little rash. He didn’t say anything like “No, that doesn’t look like Steven-Johnson’s Syndrome, you’ll be fine.” He gave me a fucking psych referral and some fucking benadryl. And he never even let me talk really, he just carried on feeling all smug and superior because he has a bipolar son so he knows all about nutters. Fucking ass. Anyway, on the epileptic message board I posted on where they told me to go to ER, someone said to make a complaint with administration. So I will.

What the fuck is wrong with front line health workers? And what the hell is wrong with doctors? I wonder if I should file a human rights complaint. At the very least I will say publicly here and now that Dr. Chase should not be practicing medicine if he can’t put aside his prejudices and actually listen to his patient’s concerns.

By the way, Steven-Johnson’s syndrome starts out as a rash which then blisters and causes large pieces of skin to literally fall off of your body. It’s fatal because then infections develop, and people with it often have to spend a month in the hospital in the most sterile place they have while also getting skin grafts. It is VERY serious and I’m sick of goddamn front line health workers not even knowing what a black box warning means. So tomorrow I will see my regular doctor, hopefully, and I will tell her what happened to me at City. And I will chew out City admin, and hopefully they won’t also be discriminatory.

I’m also making an appointment with an old doctor I used to see long ago who practices alternative medicine. He’s REALLY good, and hopefully he can give me something to get rid of this rash and also help me find an alternative to drugs.

I almost thought he was going to send me to the bin, he had that sickening smile that means “you need a psych evaluation.” Motherfucker. I hope he loses his license.

On my way to ER

Back soon.

I Don’t Like The Drugs But The Drugs Like Me

I’ve been taking psychiatric medicine for my entire adult life, and after eight years I can honestly say, it has not improved my condition. I have been on about twelve different medications in different combinations, none of which completely worked. Maybe it stopped me from committing suicide, but maybe there were other ways of avoiding suicide too. Sometimes it even made me suicidal. It definitely made me manic. Either way, the beneficial effects have been negated by long term brain damage. I have tremors now that I doubt will ever go away. I’ve been in perilous near fatal drug related situations for a few months now. I hear things when I didn’t hear things before. My intelligence and creativity have been dampened. I’m just tired of it. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to feel like doctors have more control over my life than I do. I don’t want to feel like if a major catastrophe happened and I was unable to get medication, I would lose it. I just don’t want this life anymore. Something has to change.

I know someone who had a major manic episode and since then has become a devout buddhist and has lived a completely normal life for decades just doing meditation (and I’m sure eating healthy and other things). People have managed both epilepsy and bipolar disorder only using marijuana, which I know for a fact DOES work for me and has no side effects aside from the munchies. And here in Canada I could apply for a license to use and grow medicinal marijuana (which has been approved for epilepsy and with a persuasive doctor’s note, bipolar too). And then there are various other therapies, the whole exercise thing, etc etc.

I’m going to wait until I see this neurologist. I want to know that I have temporal lobe epilepsy for sure and then I want to find out if that is what has been called “bipolar,” or what. If it is ONLY temporal lobe epilepsy it will be easier to get a license to possess and grow marijuana. If not, it will just be a more involved process. It’s not as simple as TLE and Bipolar either, I also have PTSD, OCD, and Social Anxiety Disorder, all of which respond to medical marijuana.

If I smoke up everyday my seizures go down about 90%. And my moods become a non-issue. In fact, thinking back on it, if I had marijuana when I was suicidal it would go away. I don’t remember a single Long Bleak Night when I had marijuana around. And plus when my moods get really fucked, it usually involves messed up sleep patterns, and marijuana makes me sleepy if I smoke before bedtime.

I have never cried while on marijuana and I have never run around going “Woot!” on marijuana either. Sometimes I get paranoid, but ONLY when I’m worried someone might smell it and call the cops, which is also silly because Canadian police usually don’t care about pot (with exceptions, I know a relative who will go unnamed was tossed in the hoosegow once for having pot).

But I don’t want to rely on ONLY marijuana, obviously. I want to do everything else I possibly can because I do know seizures and suicide aren’t fun. I know there are a few Buddhist groups in town who meet Tuesdays and Thursdays to meditate and then have discussions. I could do that. I think meditation would help me focus my mind a lot better. Yoga would probably help too. There’s a doctor who specializes in Chinese Medicine who got rid of my depression for most of my teen years. I was still dramatic like any teenager, but I wasn’t trying to hang myself like when I was a kid. I know he still practices. I have a shitty diet and I could do better on that front. There are tons of things I can do basically besides medication. And with no long term damage either. Yes, people say marijuana causes brain damage, but I know people who have used it on a regular basis for decades with no ill effects. And the drugs I’m on now have caused more severe brain damage in a much shorter time.

I wouldn’t have been able to do this in Vancouver, when I had no money to buy groceries, or in Montreal, when, uh, life just sucked and I didn’t know where any resources were. But I do have some stability here and I feel like I have the support to do it.

It’s just getting away from the psych industry that freaks me out. They take so much from you that eventually you really do believe you can’t live without them. It’s like being in an abusive relationship and not feeling that you deserve better.

I know there’s a chance I could have a major psychosis again, and I would use Zyprexa and Ativan as needed to bring me down should that happen, but I never want to be on long term drugs again. I have to talk with my doc about this and see if she’ll be supportive. She’s pretty open minded, so I hope so. And in theory I can get off these drugs if I’m in remission.

So yes, I have to do some research, talk to doctors, friends who are off drugs and doing fine, find a good therapist. It’s not going to happen right away, but by May I hope to be off all of my medication.

God, I had a dream I was reading Frankenstein and suddenly came across a passage where Mary Shelley wrote something along the lines of “I don’t know if people know the turmoil I am in as I write this. I am in a disturbed state of being,” and basically went on describing going crazy and then went back to her story in the next paragraph. Mary Shelley did have mood disorders btw.

Psychiatric Industry

It is lunch. Hurrah!

Back in the regular world of living with insanity, I noticed some things recently.

I had called the HealthLine when The Rash showed up. The nurse I talked to was very thorough, although I still felt that she didn’t know much about lamotrigine. Still, she made sure I wasn’t having some really serious complications, which was good. And when I said I had bipolar disorder she didn’t treat me like I was a child, which was nice. She told me to go to a walk in clinic to get it assessed, so I did.

The doctor I saw at the walk in clinic had VERY little knowledge about what issues I was having. He didn’t know what lamotrigine was. He had to run off and look in a book for what I was talking about. And then in the end he just told me to go make an appointment with my regular doctor and lower my dose. I don’t think he realized that the rash could be a sign of a serious complication. It was so frustrating.

I’m lucky in that my regular doctor does know a lot about what I’m dealing with, and what she doesn’t know she isn’t afraid to go and independently study. She really doesn’t muck around with me. And she takes my File that now follows me for the rest of my life with a grain of salt. Even though it says there are certain drugs I should be on FOREVER, she doesn’t follow it. And it has helped a lot, she helped me get off one drug which had dramatically reduced my quality of life for three and a half years. I can finally feel emotions again, and think, and be creative. Before my hospitalization I averaged one short video a year. After hospitalization I only made ONE in four years. So as you can imagine, I was glad to ditch olanzapine forever. Fuck you Zyprexa!!!

But I also noticed some other things. When it did look like I might have to go to emergency I realized I didn’t want to. And the reason was that if I went to emergency and I did have to be admitted and they did find out I was taking the medication for Bipolar disorder, I was worried I would be put into the psych ward again. And it’s a very real possibility. And it made me realize why many other people with mental illnesses have poor health care. It’s not that we don’t notice something is wrong with us, or that we don’t know we urgently need health care, it’s that we’ve been seriously wounded by the psychiatric industry and the possibility of getting sent to the psych ward again for a non-psych related health problem is so terrifying. One of the reasons abuse is permitted in psych wards is because if we’re punished then we might not have the audacity to go crazy again and therefore end up at the hospital. But what really happens is that ex-inmates go to such lengths to avoid the hospital that other health problems aren’t addressed later on.

I am using the words Psychiatric Industry rather than mental health system or psychiatric system because those words imply that healing is actually possible within them. The fact is, psychiatry is founded on principals of capitalism. My 6 week psych ward stay cost $20 000. That’s more than I paid for five years of tuition at film school. Old timey wards like Bedlam housed inmates who were paid for by family or husbands who didn’t want to deal with their relatives or wives who were eccentric or acting out. Often times people imprisoned in these places didn’t originally have mental health problems, but they did after they lived there a while. And it was a very profitable industry. You could charge a lot of money and provide substandard housing, there were no mattresses, only piles of straw. The food served was the cheapest stuff they could find. And people running the wards made a killing. Later on mental patients made great experiment subjects as well, and I’m sure someone was getting money for recommending various inmates for studies (this still goes on). Currently psych drugs account for a multibillion dollar industry, and the fact that the drugs go on to create more health problems like diabetes, tardive dyskenesia, high blood pressure, Parkinsons, etc, makes it MORE profitable because then additional drugs will be required, made by the same companies. And since psych drugs cause brain damage and often create MORE mental health problems, people can justify keeping us on them because we keep getting crazier and crazier.

If we do get off our drugs, we get worse, not because that’s who we really ARE, but because the drugs have been designed to worsen our condition if we withdraw from them. Quitting a drug your brain has become dependent on can seriously flip you out, and it would flip out anyone irregardless of whether or not they were mentally ill.

In Mad In America the author notes that people who have a mental health crisis in third world countries fare better than those of us in “Developed” nations. The simple reason being there are no drugs, no wards, and no psychiatrists. A person having a schizophrenic break will often remain in their community and be cared for by the local shaman. In fact, in an experiment in the sixties down in the states had a supervised home for people in the midst of psychotic episodes. There were no drugs used, just supervision. People had episodes lasting on average three months and then got out of it ON THEIR OWN. The people running the home noticed pretty much everyone went on to have a normal life afterwards. They said people did do things like run outside with no clothes on, but for the most part there wasn’t major trouble. And they also noticed that people were having life changing spiritual epiphanies, and letting them go through that process made them feel stronger and more capable once it was over.

The psychiatric industry is not about healing people, no matter what the people working within it may think. It has always been based on the principles of behaviour modification, on making sure the insane just don’t bother the normals. We may think we’ve advanced because people aren’t institutionalized like the olden times (although a lot still are), but the drugs are working in very similar ways. A patient may not have a manic episode again on Olanzapine, but neither will they feel deep emotions like love, compassion, anger, or sadness. Neither will they be able to think, or to effectively live a regular life of working, or to create, or to challenge the psychiatric industry. The people around them will be happy with the way they have changed, but the person who is really living that life will not be happy, and even worse, they won’t even know they aren’t happy.

Possibly the thing which frustrates me the most is that while I have done extensive research on the history of psychiatry, psychotropic drugs, neuroleptics and their origin in Fascism, the causes of bipolar disorder, etc etc etc, I still have to deal with people whose education is, to put it gently, limited. And yet they still assume they know better than me how I should be living or being treated because they are sane while I am crazy. It’s getting to the point where I want to make up bibliographies and hand them out to people and say “Look, before you start telling me this shit, you have to educate yourself by reading these twenty books, forty of these articles, and at least ten of these medical studies. Oh, and I also want you to spend a week in a ward.”

And to them I also say, it doesn’t take much to step over that line. Anyone could find themselves on the other side of a locked door, whether they have a mental illness or not. And once you do end up on the other side, you will be dogged by the psychiatric industry for the rest of your life.

Madness In Four Actions

Remember how earlier in this blog I mentioned that it’s the extended anniversary of my hospitalization from a psych drug induced mania? Well, now some weird fucking thing keeps happening with my computer. The language settings keep slipping to Canadian French, which means when it slips over I get shit like this when I type in quotations: Èè What the hell? It reminds me of every small petty annoyance I had living in Montreal. The French language is hijacking me! When I first got One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on DVD my friend turned it to the French language selection and I blew a gasket. “How could you be oblivious to such an obvious trigger!! Change it back right now!” I mean, the film itself was one big trigger, but making it an unintelligible language to me AGAIN, that would just slip me over the edge.

I’m having less triggers about hearing French. I quite like the language actually, I just think Quebec has some really shitty human rights abuses that go on unquestioned. I heard some FUCKED UP shit that they did to the warriors at OKA after the blockade went down and they got a hold of them, like torture under the Geneva conventions type shit. So many of those guys have snuffed it since.

Anyway, the video, which now has a name, is sitting in a DVD player at the Mendel, which is shut down this week for installation in all galleries. The video is called Madness In Four Actions, because it uses four repetitive actions performed by Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in the Miracle Worker. Taken out of context they are pretty interesting because they are so adversarial and yet so meaningless. And I also liked using it because Patty Duke did go on to have a diagnosis of manic depression. She even states “Although I don’t think that my bipolar disorder fully manifested itself until I was about 17, I had struggles with anxiety and depression throughout my childhood. I have to wonder, as I look at old films of mine when I was a child, where I got that shimmering, supernatural energy. It seems to me that it came from three things: mania, fear of the Rosses and talent.”

One thing I noticed about it is that it references repetitive loops I fall into when I get really upset about something. If I get so upset I lose higher communication skills I will, quite literally, repeat a short five word or less phrase over and over and over, sometimes 15 times. I guess I feel like if I say it enough people will understand I really mean it, because sometimes if I just say it the one time they don’t really clue in that it’s bothering me. So making Patty Duke slap Anne Bancroft around over and over was pretty fun.

I also liked that it was using tropes of performance art moreso than other videos I have done. And it was more of a collage than other videos too, everything was sampled, even the text. There are still a couple tiny things I want to tweak, but I’m taking a break for a couple weeks and doing it later for the copies I’ll send to distributors. I think I’m also going to burn a bunch of DVD’s to go with the Betacam master I’ll send in case people do use it for installation.

I saw my friend Megan’s work at the gallery too, it’s really good. She did Velveeta (my ex from art school) really well. And it’s from a photo of when Velveeta and I dated and she looks really happy, which is cute.

Anyway, I’m glad I got to make this video while I was having The Anniversary. I think it helped me resolve a lot of my feelings around being in the hospital. This is the first time I’ve actually tried to evoke what it feels like to be involuntarily committed and also the politics around it. I quoted R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, Benjamin Rush, and two survivors. And I read Mad In America during rendering times, for the second time. If you want to read a really good book on the psychiatric industry and it’s gross human rights violations throughout history, I recommend it. And it even describes an all too short humane alternative that worked and was abandoned around the turn of the century.

Once I am done being so exhausted I will compress it and post it on Youtube. In fact, I think I might use Youtube for videos more, maybe it will improve distribution.

Schrodinger is wandering around on the desk being cute. He’s such a sleek little weirdo.

I saw Paradise Now. REALLY GOOD, holy crap. I’ll have to write more about it later. Next I’m watching Mandalay, the second in Lars Von Trier’s American trilogy. I hope he doesn’t do something awful to the protagonist again, but I’m not holding my breath.