G'day punters, and a big fat warm welcome back to the mpua hq. We're coming along at a lively pace today fellows, and I'm already down to the businees end of the game. Spliff up pronto! pronto!. Time's a wasting and I bring big news...
Todays post focuses on matters mental. I'm feeling it deeply. I'm wanting to show off another side to contemporary 'mental health issues'. Or as I'm insisting on calling them, psychiatric illnesses, afflictions and ailments and possibly, I'll allow the term disorders.
I love these terms because they are powerful, weighty, and authoritative. They are respectful words. and lend us much needed respectability They convey the suffering, the despair, and the poignancy of a person with a psych illness. This sometimes creates a little empathy and sympathy, and may help generate further understanding, and compassion
I'm opposed to terms like mental health issues and services, clients and consumers which, to me, seems deliberately flimsy, supposedly neutral and very departmental. They are soulless and empty words. They have no balls, no guts and no gumption. Beyond neutral they can also serve to further neuter, hobble and cripple often already crippled people.
Language like this shows us nothing of the passion and drama and zest for life that most psych afflicted people have.. One group of terms recognises us, and the weightiness of the illness, the other is dehumanising and acts to render us invisible(out of sight out of mind) They are nothing words lacking warmth, with little or no humanity.
So for me then, I like the old fashioned language of formality and dignity. I detest the supposed nuetrality of the language of bureaucracy and the politically correct.
I adore the old style colloquialisms and slang. Words and phrases like spaz, nutter, fruitcake cuckoo, off with the fairies, off your trolley, dropped your bundle, mad as a meat axe, crazy as a cut snake. You catch my drift, yes? The colour, the humour and the richness of this lingo speaks of care and genuine affection. I'm determined to resurrect them in the every day. Affection and good cheer should never be nuetralised and legislated out of existance.
Contrary to popular belief most mentals love the wordplay of these old addages,and do not consider these phrases to be jibes. If you can't take the piss what else is there when all hope seems lost? The gallows humour of the locked ward, and of the every day. These words delight us, honour us, and allow us our flawed humanity.
I'm dedicated this post to the beautiful and tragic Roni Levi He was fatally shot by the cops, at Bondi Beach in 1997. For being schitzophrenic in a public place. Some of the cops turned up dirty urines post shooting. Enquiries and editorials opined, but nothing brings this man back.
A commercial photographer was working on Bondi Beach, and captured the whole sorry shambles on camera. Frame by frame. That awful day, that poor mans violent death at the hands of The State. Exercuted by Agents of The State(the cops) Men and women who have the right to subdue any one of us, by any means necessary.
This police action has been life changing, and has informed for me in ways I am only now able to articulate. Pretty shitty day, that. For all concerned, I'd guess. Especially for Mr. Levi, and his family. Vale, good sir. The mpua shall offer our condolences, all these many years later. We mourn your passing, and the manner in which your life was taken.Let me me be upfront, from the word get go. These days, nearly six years and counting, I'm mostly high functioning, For a nutter. It's been said quite recently that I present well. I have just enough of a work ethic to pass in the straight world, and I'm robust and ambitious. These days I'm seen as successful in the management of my health. What I've been through to get back on track has been epic heroic and miraculous. So much so, that there are days when all I want is a ticker tape parade because I've seemingly conquered the unconquerable!
One time I was convinced that the building of the new Glebe Island Bridge(renamed Anzac) was a gift to me, from all of you for my valiant efforts, but that's another story, and I digress.
Since 1997, the affliction of Seasonally Affected Bi-Polar 1 has both ruled and ruined my life. Try forgiving that! Try intergrating that into you're life, making sure you can make spaz jokes with the best of them Picking your self up, dusting yourself off and starting all over again. Losing trust and faith in your self and the community because psychiatric care/ mental health might just be our last too hard basket.
Too many losses. A litany of loss.
The symptons of my bi-polar are hard to spot initially, and the ailment's seasonal, so it's fickle. Colours are brighter, every thing is sexy and vibrant, I have more energy, I begin to need much less sleep, my thoughts race, my libido wants action, my eyes begin to hurt, my thoughts race faster and become grandiouse. I become irritable and may be agressive Old grudges and resentments well passed thier use-by-date can surface. I have been violent and anti-social at times. Verbally, I am terryfying. Physically I feel unstoppable. Bulletproof, even.
Then I can begin to hear voices, and sometimes I have visions. That's the point of no return,so I am told. I am delusional and psychotic. It is at this point that I apperently pose a threat to myself,and to the public at large. I am seen as anything but compliant now. The only option isto exit stage left in a paddy wagon and head to the hospital with an available bed. Once there I am force-fed loads of psychoactive drugs to combat the malady. Rest and respite, and eventual recuperation.
I am by now exhausted and wound up all at once.
Medication, in most situations, continues to be trial and error. Experimental, and often taxing in the side effects.
Hospitals like Rozelle/ Callan Park are a balm for this tattered soul. I deeply regret the closure of this grand old asylum and teaching hospital. One of the best things about Rozelle/Callan Park aside from the river, the acres of gardens, and the comradery, is that once I am on an open ward, I can talk up a level of compliance, enough to have my keycard restored to me, and when the moment is good, I gather up my few effects and scarper.
On the lamb. A fugitive in my own lunchtime. I walk home, and break in through a back window. I have to break in to my own home because you never get your keys back until just prior to the discharge papers being signed. I buy some groceries, some beer, and have a queit time at home. Just me and Mr Resch's with the books, the bong and the boombox for company.
Within a fortnight or so there's a knock on the door, and feeling secure, I open it, as though I've forgotten I am mental, and sure enough it's the cops come to take me back to 'the farm' in the paddywagon. In light of my unauthored departure from hospital, I am listed as a missing person, and this increases the anxiety of family and friends
For all the good intentions and rhetoric, psyche hospitals are run as prisons. Administered in this State under a Mental Health Act that's not had that much ammendment since Federation in 1901. Especially if you measure psych care and services against other general and specialied health. Bloody sad to starve sick people of assistance. Makes a person feel like a burden just for getting ill. We are stigmatised and criminalised and our lives are dangerously interrupted, time and time again. By both the illness and the compulsory treatment plans.
I just don't get the cops involvement. Its brutal, dehumaanising, traumatic, and far too often fatal. If funded appropriately, the cops would become totally redundant and unnecessary, in the delivery of services pertaining to psyche care. I'm like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I have a dream, and I'll make it a reality by any means necessary. By hook or by bloody crook.
Psychiatric care/mental health is also a civil liberties and a human rights issue. My liberties and rights are forfeit the minute the cops are called in. Each and every time.
I've become an expert, over the years in managing loss and mistrust by using humour, wit, and a joi de vie that fluctuates with the seasons, as a weapon, as a shield, and also as a release.
I'm learning how to get well sooner, rather than later. I'm learning how to connect to the few services I can afford. I'm learning to relax and take it easy, as I try to medicate excercise and diet it all away. The very many daily acts to depersonalise my self so you all feel more comfortable.
I aim to never be taken by force again. That's my definition of freedom. It may explain my compliance(colour me beige) but all in all, I think it shows a healthy level of self preservation. I think, that it's time for spazoids like myself to stand up and be counted. I'm feeling duty bound, and well enough (did I mention the accompanying exhaustion?) to trumpet the changes, to ring them in so to speak, and to try to engage with you, dear reader.
Along the way, we might share an occasional exchange of thought and opinion which according to my late grandfather, are like bottoms, in that everyone's got one.
Here at the mpua we've got more opinions than we know what to do with, so today we're gonna throw a whole bunch of them out into the ether, and see what, if anything, comes back to us. Like a game of boomerangs-but with whitefella words, language and ideas.
To kick us off, I'm going to speak from very personal experience about how me and mental health services first met, or should I say collided. I was in my final year at university. I had been invited into post-grad course work. I was a shiny new talent, showcasing my wares and assets all over this cities artistic fringes. I was studying on a full time basis, working part-time, single parenting a young child, and running a small but costly habit. Issues of addiction abounded in my daily life. Sick of myself and sick of the habit, I stopped using, and quite gently entered a fugue like state known as psychosis. I brokedown nervously.
I've often descibed it as having had my central nervous system wake up(via an amatuer and ineffectual home detox) only to find find a note on the kitchen table saying the brain was away on a fishing trip for an indetrminate while.
I awoke one night in my lovers bed, to a yellow fullmoon with a dreamtime voice telling me to leave now! That the house, like me, was unclean! In my jammies I walked the cold deserted streets not sure of much at all. Everytime i stopped, the moon ordered me on. My first aural hallucinations.
Walking back to my lovers house and sitting, slumping, cold and sleepy on her doorstep, not able to rouse her from her slumber. I was no longer sure of my place in the world.
The people around me did what they could, and it constantly confirmed my worst fears; they were as out of their depths as I was. Eventually, I attended an appointment with the registrar at the local health centre. She ordered me to hospital. When I declined, left the building and began the long walk home, I was stopped by the police, bundled into the back of a police paddy wagon and taken to hospital where I was immediately admitted, sedated and put to bed.
Aaah, the uber bex and the good lie down. Because I was honest about my recent drug history, this first episode was written up, and explained away as a D&A psychosis. It is worth noting that recent innovating thinking in psychaitry, backed up by studies and research, show that while drug and alcohol use can part of the wider diagnosis, it is seldom the sole or root cause of episodes of ill health. This is called a dual diagnosis.
Eventually visitors visited, eventually i was moved to an open ward, eventually the visitors dried up because me and my situation made people uncomfortable. It was too confronting. Too squalid, too sad, too defeating. Too scary.I wouldn't shower because there was no lock on the door. I refused to let them take my bedding or my laundry. The smell of my psycho-active drug affected sweat smell was the strongest and only thing I had had left. I was in a locked ward. There was no escape. I was made to ask for my cigarettes. I was not allowed a lighter. I had no freedom and felt truly alone, confused and helpless
I was under constant surveillence, and dependant on the kindness of strangers.
I was comfortably numb. I was humbled over time, by the mostly caring and cheerful intelligent psych nurses, who helped as best they could. There were a few nurse rachette(cukoos nest) moments, which only added to the trauma and the drama. I felt glad, sort of, that I was finally getting help to get well. I was embarrassed to be this needy. I was annoyed by this predicament. I hated myself. I felt like a failure, a traitor to the cause, and that I was letting everybody down.
Not part of the old life plan, what what!.
Whatever my visitors were thinking, showed in thier manner. They began to influence, deeply, how I was to see myself, my life, and my future. The fractured lens of grief. I felt broken, ashamed, defective and bruised. This was reflected back to me, constantly, by the people in my life. This time I had really gone too far. I believed I was a fucked unit, a spaz, another dumbfuck clusterfuck junkie who was getting all the payback, karmically, for her dilettante ways
As though the cosmic chickens had come home to roost.
You get the picture? I believed that it was all my fault. That I needed to repent my wicked ways, learn the lesson, and move along like a good little doggie. I also felt strongly that I was being cast out of the garden of eden that had once been my earthly paradise.
There is nothing that smarts more than to feel so thouroughly abandoned and debased in your hour of need. I'm aware that I've gotten a little bible-flowery just then, punters, but understand this: psych illnesses are very old testament. It can be hugely apocalyptic when your psyche is fragmenting. We are systemically and socially abandoned all of the time, us people of the lost marbles tribe.Eventually I was discharged. This meant seeing a magistrate again, and agreeing to a community treatment order. Like bail conditions, an order of this type is legally binding document, with penalties for non-compliance. I was also given a clean bill of health by a team of doctors, nurses, and the obligatory social worker. All of these people, including my family, my lover, and my friends had more say in my life than I did.
I felt like a real nobody. I felt like an abject and pathetic loser. It occurs to me, all these years later that breaking your will and your spirit (by whatever means necessary) is still seen as necessary and therapeutic. That in time, you'll eventually see the wisdom of these barbaric ways. It's for your own good. It's all for the best. Its policy and procedure, my dear. Don't fret about it, don't think about it, and above all, don't dwell upon it.
To become compliant and complicit with the machinations of the medical-legal model. To become teachable. as the buddhists and the twelve steppers might say. To learn to love your illness in order to heal your life.! To learn to pretend. To pretend it matters not, that eventually all of your old mates are too busy to see you. To try to move on and upwards and forward. To be angry and exhausted and full of sorrow and remorse.It seems that I'm pushing for legitimacy. Blood oath I am! I want to talk about how fucked the Mental Health Act is. I want to say, again and again, that police and medical staff routinely overstep the bounds, safe from censure, because we're in an enfeebled way, and the dastardly Act backs thier misbehavior.
When I was mistreated and manhandled by the cops one time, and I asked for assistance to document my injuries, I was told by a kindly nurse, that a copper photographer was mandatory, so no we couldn't take pics with a smart phone. I was in no shape to be any where near a cop! It was cops that had just mashed me in the privacy of my home.
I went to lock a kitchen window and they thought I was getting a knife. They contained me by forcing me face down into a rug, kneeling on me to restrain me. They nearly bloody hog tied me! I resisted valiantly(like the peacenick I was) which probably enflamed them, as they cuffed me (with more than one set or type of cuff) and half dragged, half carried me forcibly into the paddywagon. Lights and siren flashing. Burning rubber. Very old school.Very criminal.
As my neighbor let them in with my spare key, I ran outside and turned on the hose full bore to create a diversion, if need be. They looked like they meant business. Sporting both latex and leather gloves, hands on batons they adanced into the hall, I was close enough to see badges, I ran outside telling them I'd left the hose .on, I wrote thier names and badge no's on the fence and once inside grew very scared. because they wouldnt let me secure the house.
When I finally got home from the hospital it was to a crimescene. Anything and everything of value had been taken..
In the 80's we used to say that the NSW police force were the best that money could buy.That's still true for me. I's a corrupt action whern we are harmed or killed by cops claiming provocation and self defence. Or when our wider society allows a barbaric and repressive Act to still be in use. The Act gives carte blanche, and such sweeping powers, to everyone but the ones that need it most.The Mental Health Act is so totally disenfranchising. We are rendered absolutely powerless in it's maladministration as in its administration. It's a nasty piece of legalise, for sure, for sure.
Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!
Cops get aproximately five hours of psyche 101, as part of thier basic training at the academy. That's right, five hours! To become a shrink takes eight plus years To become a nurse takes four to six years, to become a social worker takes four plus years. Five hours for cops who are the frontline forces; is seen as sufficient, in reality this is ludicrous but true. Some cops are tops-others are arseholes. Simple really and probably reflective of the wider culture, Except that cops have the power to take a life within the scope and latitude of The Mental Health Act.
And it really is luck of the draw. Like the fuzz, some crisis team nurses are fab. Others turn out to be crude ratbags and bastards From this moment on, if and when The State is next made aware of my disorder and predicament. I want a shrink present. I want the crisis team to bring a teabun and a friendly manner. And if cops attend they do so with dignity and resprct or it's at their own risk.
I should be able to go to hospital in a health dept car, or ambulance (Or god forbid! a taxi, or my mums car) I should definitely be able to go with my dignity intact. I think it's cruel to be mean to spazoids like me. I shouldn't think that Stephen Fry or the late and kooky Spike Milligan suffer quite the level of indignity that public inpatients do.(They are my poster boys of bi-polar)
She cried, my lovely neighbor when she came to visit in the hospital. Cried for my injuries and cried for the cops, because she likes me. She had trusted them to do the right thing. She also gave me back the spare key. I took it too. Wouldn't you?
If a cop or nurse or doctor mistreats an inpatient and nobody sees it, did the tree really fall?
For years after that I startled whenever a cop was nearby. Literally jumped at the sight of them and their paddy wagons .At hospital that day, I politely declined the cop photographer and instead I accepted the offer of an uber pill and compliantly slept off the injury done to me. I pretended amnesia for years and only allowed myself wry comments to most folk and hid the depth of my fury, from myself as much as others.Coincidently the very last hospitalisation was, like the very first, drug related. Having maintained good attendence at 12 step meetings, I realised one day that for the first time in many years that I wanted to use. I also gave in to the urge pretty quickly. Four or so sleepless nights later, had me ringing for help. Mistakenly I think I dialed 000 because I was put through to the cops. Maybe also some psyche nurses from acute care/crisis team surfaced.
Again the decisions were all made for me. and hop into the back of the wagon please love, seems so bloody fucken familiar, which is a bit of a worry, really. Except that it's routine to have lots of what Spike Milligan used to call sanatarium time.. Like my bex and the good lie down. Or the the hidden wonders and mysterious depths of the hubbly bubbly.
Before I bid thee good day gentle men, ther's a couple of last minute matters arising. Read up on Aboriginal, Greek and Roman mythologies and dreamtime myths. They shape our psyches and in turn inform us socially and systemically. Such is the power of creative an culturally produced mythos.
I want to whet your appetites fellows all, here's a little taste of the myth of Icarus, For your listening pleasure, may we suggest this fine local tune as an accompaniment to the mythology you're currently perusing. This song is the unofficial anthem for paranoid folk everywhere. Yes, that's right noble savages all, it's the local band Men At Work http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPlNzWbX9c8 with an old song called Who Can It Be Now.
So let's leave it there for the moment, good fellows all. If it feels unfinished it's because it is. It's enough that, together, we've begun this odyssy to converse outside of the shrinks or health centres rooms. It's not exactly palatable among the dinner set or cafe culture crowd, or is it? Time will tell, that's for sure. To this effect we're thinking about starting up a crafty group to be called The Lost Marble Society. We could meet monthly in the basket weaving room, here at the mpua hq. It's a social event for the mentals and thier friends. All welcome, bring a plate and some bevvies, and we'll handle the rest. Hope you can come along and if we get the numbers we'll make a day of it.
Don't forget to check out the link below. These people lead the way in psych care and education. Truly a centre of excellence. Thank you black dog Institute. the black dog is named for Sir Winston Churchill, former PM of England, during WW11. He suffered the black dogs of depression and despair. A spaz was in charge of the war! Cool
Until the next time time our paths cross, be kind to each other. See yas!
Black dog institute
