So kind of you to say so, Kalhoun especially after that one, which kind of rambles all over the damn place.
::::: on preview – Hi, Welfy!! Erin the Willow Welf 
Yeah, I do think so, I thnk it applies to bipolar and to major depression as well. ::::::::
The point I should have emphasized in there and didn’t: they don’t have two parallel care strategies, versions of the official “word”, sets of available medications, and institutions – one set for people who come to them seeking help, if any help is available, for actual bioneurological problems, if that’s what’s causing their horrible symptoms; and one set for people who are brought in for attempting suicide or acting aggressive in a weird unpredictable way or standing smack dab in the middle of 6th Avenue and having a loud obscenity-laced conversation with someone who isn’t there.
You see, there’s no place to take suicidal people who are suicidal but not displaying specific signs of neurochemistry disorders, other than to the psych ward. There’s no mechanism for dealing with a belligerent woman in the park who doesn’t exhibit definitive symptoms of neurotransmitter dysfunction but who wanders up to strangers and starts in on them about whether or not they know about the rats and if Mayor Bloomberg put them there in her neighborhood at the request of people like you who want to run her out so they can get her apartment – I mean, we could arrest her if she actually hits them, or run her in for disturbing the peace (but she’ll be released shortly), but the best way of getting her the hell out of the park is a police-instigated psych detention. Same with the dirty guy arguing in the middle of 6th Ave, even if it turns out he isn’t “hearing voices” and is just royally pissed at the security guard at the homeless men’s shelter and is ranting at him in absentia and doesn’t give a fuck if he gets hit by a car or upsets the folks trying to drive them.
The profession doesn’t make that differentiation. The psychiatrists and psych nurses don’t. The distinction is elided. Meaning if DoperChic’s sister goes there, she gets the undifferentiated General Purpose Psychiatric Treatment.
**Kalhoun**, I was a university student. In the year preceding that, and the first semester of it, I was often intensely lonely and miserable and felt so totally a misfit amongst people and had no clear sense of why, didn’t like the social and political world I lived in, and I wanted “things” – my life, my self, my social circumstances – to be different and was willing, especially during my low moments, to entertain the possibility that the problem was in me. I went on several occasions to various clinics and “talked to someone”, and in the fall of my freshman year there was told “Oh, what you’ve got is a chemical imbalance in the brain, they know what causes that now, and there’s a pill that you take to address it” and they gave me a prescription for Stelazine (a powerful neuroleptic of the phenothiazide class, akin to Thorazine but stronger) along with some sample pills which I took for a week but didn’t like how they made me feel. I quit taking them and told them they were not for me.
In late December of that year I had a sort of crisis and came out of it with a growing sense that I did understand something about myself, a way in which I was different, not wrong or sick but different, and I began trying to put it into words. By February or so, I was dwelling on it constantly; I’d wake up at 3 am and find some scratch paper and jot down some notes, and then I’d be excited when I woke up the next morning and they still seemed to make sense, to extend my sense that I was understanding things. Most importantly, it seemed an entirely new understanding, something I’d never read about, and I thought it explained a lot more than just me and my sense of alienation, so I wrote more and more, lots of it very impromptu in pen on the backs of xeroxed pages of some professor’s syllabus or whatever I could find; and I showed it to people, actively soliciting feedback, does this stuff ring true for you folks, does this seem important?
It often looked like this. I was, at times, doing things like sitting in a bathrobe smoking in my dorm room and tapping the ashes onto an array of regular Lincoln cents which I dubbed the “J C Pennies” and through which I was conjuring / channelling the legacy of Jesus Christ / the promised return of the messiah.
My “stuff” was about feminism and gender. Think of it as “heterosexual sissy comes out of closet, militant-style, opposes patriarchy, heralds radical feminists as his allies”. Some of the folks I tried to communicate with were “feminist representatives” (in my mind at any rate) such as Sandy Kills Pretty Enemy, a Native American running the Rape Crisis Center on campus; others included poetry instructor of a course on Individual Identity, a biology teacher teaching Human Sexuality, and some of the personnel at the Peer Counseling Center on campus. They found me disturbing. I was not making overt claims so much as hinting and having a lot of fun with it, but I’m sure I gave people reason to think that I thought I was the fulfullment of prophecy concerning the Second Coming and that the writings I was dispensing were of paramount important and that the world was gonna be polarized into those who read it and sided with me and those who read it and felt threatened by it and sided against me, etc. And I did at times believe that the entire fabric of reality was something that would bend and reshape around sufficiently important ideas…mine, for instance.
I was called aside and told that I really needed to talk to the doctors at the facility who needed to do a mental eval on me. I went (figuring “OK, I get a clean bill of health and then we’ve got that out of the way, aside from which this stuff oughta be relevant to them too, explain a lot of what they have to deal with as well”). I am asked to sign a consent form. I think “OK, makes sense, you go to dentist you sign an “I agree the doc is gonna do things to my teeth”; this is a shrink, their treatment is talk (! a lot I knew !), so I need to consent to talk with the shrink”. I sign.
They say come this way. They take me behind doors and lock them and they demand my shoestrings and belt so I won’t hang myself (I don’t comply), in response to my question they say I won’t actually see the doctor until Tuesday and this is Friday and I can’t leave until/unless the doctor says I can, and after awhile staff members physically tackle me and rip out my shoelaces and belt and have me tied face-down in six-way restraints and hauled into seclusion room and I get shot up with Thorazine 5-6 times until I’m too mind-fogged to continue arguing, yelling, singing 60s-era protest songs, etc and just lie there in a haze. I am officially withdrawn from university studenthood without my consent at this time.
And that’s how I became a mental patient. My initial dx was bipolar (actually manic-depressive back then); paranoid schiz with delusions of grandeur came later. I was not declared “well” or even “in remission” and allowed to leave at the end of the cycle, I took a door of the fucking hinges and escaped the place and hitched out of the state. (For sake of relative brevity I’m condensing a bit here)
Do a backsearch for other threads as I described above, I’ve talked about how I cope without meds and whether or not I think I actually do or do not have a mental illness and so forth, and the measures I take to create and maintain a very very reasonable perceived persona as an “out and open and untreated and escaped” schizophrenic.
: to Welfy.