Fair Trials Not Executions

Dear reader,

I apologize. My PC got a virus, I believe. I only use one of my computers to access this blog because, as you may know, I am a paranoid schizophrenic who still cannot quite fathom that shady organizations or legitimate government organizations are NOT monitoring this blog and my IP addresses...which makes this computer the only trusted computer to blog from (sometimes I just follow paranoid practices because it is almost instinctual, I could be wrong but frankly I don't intend to check this time).

Perhaps you have forgotten about me, that strange paranoid schizophrenic woman who claims to be a law-abiding graduate student determined to end discrimination against the mentally ill. I never forgot about this blog, I just could not access the internet until today. During this time, I have been successfully continuing my studies in the Master's program (well, except for data structures, a computer science class, which I am most assuredly failing going into finals), posting updates all over facebook, and reading the news.

The country is experiencing social upheaval.

There has also been a lot of media around social justice issues lately (i.e. Garner/Ferguson). I will take this time to express my solidarity for ending police brutality against Blacks and Latinos. My city (where I was born and raised) has a high population of poor Blacks and Latinos (and I grew up on welfare to an unmarried Latina mother--yeah, I am that baby all grown up). I sympathize with the protesters and my city has a long list of slaughtered drug dealers and alleged gang members who never got to a fair trial, they just got 'smoked' (as the newspaper quoted one of the living witnesses as hearing a police officer talk about how he smoked the guy).

"You give us the cards to play with and then bust us for gambling." ---Malcolm X

Society, rich people, housing zoning committees, whoever decides where people get to live, tend to approve of minorities living beside other minorities--and not by them. I grew up across the street from million dollar homes owned primarily by Anglo-Americans with white-collar jobs. Across the street from this ideal, police-patrolled neighborhood was a big street upon which dozens and dozens of cheap and ill-maintained apartments were crammed beside each other.There, the front lawn of the nice house across the street was larger than the inside of the entire apartment for three (though, if there were three rooms, there were most likely six or more people living there because the only other place would be the homeless shelter). I grew up down a tiny side street, an alley, really, where cops didn't go patrol unless they got multiple calls insisting they come arrest somebody for domestic violence, assault, child abuse, whatever. This was in the 1980's- 1990's when my city still had not created a special police tactical unit for hunting down alleged gang members (who may or may not be actively committing crimes), holding them up to search them and their families' houses, and to arrest them and anyone present.

Now there is a tactical unit for patrolling the high crime areas in my city, but they still don't go into my old neighborhood street. I know because I obsessively return to see if anything has changed. It has not. I drive in my 2000 shiny black sedan into streets where few drive due to high rates of poverty and DUI charges and watch as the neighborhood people watch me as I drive past. They don't go to college. They have criminal records. They are on social aid programs. I know this because the cul-de-sac was so jam-packed with apartments that everything that happened next door, or downstairs, or in the next apartment, was fully audible to me from my bedroom. This was the one place where landlords would accept tenants with criminal records, evictions, and terrible credit. Not all poor people are criminals, but those who are hold the rest of us hostage and the police just spend their time patrolling the nice neighborhoods to protect the rich from my neighbors, while pretending like there was no need to secure safety for those of us in the bad neighborhoods. Everything is a mess. One of my psychiatrists once asked me if I really thought I was being paranoid or realistic in my neighborhood when I thought someone gave me a weird look or they were about to lose their temper. "Is that really your sickness or is it just the situation," he asked. I shrugged. I always associate schizophrenia with the feelings I got living in that crappy neighborhood. I spent a lot of time indoors (i.e. all of it from age 5 to age 15) to avoid the pull of gangs and crime and just general shadiness. That is a lot of time to spend feeling fear and thinking obsessively about death and crime.

There is some evidence that schizophrenia is genetic but that there can be environmental stress triggers that increase or spur on mild or latent symptoms. I highly believe that. My brain is naturally suited to believe that you are thinking about robbing and assaulting me as I walk to my apartment because of its schizophrenia. Add to that the daily crime rate in that tiny block-sized cul-de-sac of crap apartments, and you can see how my brain wound up getting totally fried by paranoia and fear. Despite this, I really do attribute my ability to escape that neighborhood mostly to my paranoia about keeping six feet away from anyone, even as we pass on the side walk. My paranoia came in handy in that environment. My crazy also worked to keep an air of "keep away from that crazy b&^%$" around me at all times so that my neighbors did not ever EVER ever rob me or jump me or assault me or anything except on bad days when they mocked me for carrying books or dressing all in black like a little poor, Mexican-American goth.

I got out. I have a Bachelor's degree from the University. I am a graduate student. I own two cars, both post-year 2000. My credit score is 640, not too shabby considering the person who I was raised by had a credit score below 350. I am out. but the issues are not over. Should I just go mingle at the cocktail parties with the surburbanites? Is that not the American Dream? I would love to. I really would love to just mindlessly drink cocktails and chat about the stock market. My heart, my soul, my paranoia, they are all still in that crap neighborhood where I spent ten years hiding indoors to avoid crime. I do not want that for the kids there. I see them on my weekly (sometimes nightly) drives into the cul-de-sac to revisit my childhood home. They stand in the doorway behind screen gates, sometimes they even wander around in what would be adorable little packs if it were not for the knowledge that they are likely being apprenticed in crime by someone older. The men stand around in the shadows wearing baggy pants and gang colors. They drink forties and smoke blunts. They stare as I drive by slowly. I always have my marijuana pipe handy for that trip because it makes me look like I just pulled into the neighborhood to smoke discretely. This might sound horrible, but it is for my safety, so I am allowed to drive through the neighborhood and out of the neighborhood without anyone approaching or yelling something at me. It works. There is some code, or social etiquette, that I am familiar with which allows me to enter the neighborhood without being seen with distrust (i.e. a snitch, a lost driver). Yes, it is shady, it is a criminal hang-out, why would I go back? It is home. The crime in the air is as much a part of my childhood as McDonalds or Barbie. If you don't understand that, you will never understand the protests for Garner, Ferguson, Rice, etc....society has allowed for class and racial segregation in housing, not only that but they have crammed these segregated communities into cheap apartment complexes which the police sporadically patrol (unless the cop is out for action, in which he WILL drive down the little alley street into our neighborhood). Seriously, 'Merica, what did you expect? Crime is bad. Executions are also Bad. Fair Trials are good. I say YES TO FAIR TRIALS!


I will write again tomorrow. For now, I just wanted to pop in to say that I am here, alive, going into finals in my graduate program, and I still have immense gratitude and utter curiosity for those who venture into this blog to read, I know this ain't no Sunday morning reading! :)

#FergusonSolidarity
#FairTrialsNotExecutions

Schizophrenia and the Next Generation of Skitzes

I am troubled by the state of mental health care in America. Most of this blog comments on my personal experiences in mental health facilities, but I often include links to news articles about mental health issues that I found on yahoo or msn.

Today I found an article that made me feel hopeful for the next generation of schizophrenics. According to the Washington Post, there are new early-intervention programs geared at teenagers and young adults whose pre-psychotic symptoms have already begun to spring up. Pre-psychotic symptoms can include a lot of the negative symptoms such as lack of motivation, loss of affect, and social withdrawal. The social withdrawal part is a huge issue that needs dealing with. For people whose lines between reality and unreality blur, often times a neutral third party can provide a much needed balance in perspective. Personally, I know that my cousins and close family members were the only thing that kept me from talking out loud to myself or shutting out the external world entirely. They provided a non-psychotic mentality to combat my psychotic mentality. Of course, Abilify, the anti-psychotic drug, is what finally eliminated the positive symptoms (i.e.  hallucinations, voices, feelings of persecution, paranoia), but I would not have been able to complete college without the support of a social network.

Unlike most schizophrenics, I finished college after I had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The majority of my 20's were spent being sent repeatedly to mental institutions. I call that time the "Lost Decade" because I could only focus on keeping my head above water. Sure, I worked part-time at multiple jobs and attended a community college part-time, but I was never able to maintain my normalcy until about 2010. Enter a rehabilitation program designed to retrain severely mentally ill people to reintegrate into society. After the intensive 6 month, out-patient program, I was released into the care of another mental health care provider where I consistently met with my doctor and a counselor. The toll of being mentally ill had drained me psychologically and I needed someone to talk to about the repercussions of my psychotic episodes (I often experienced "flash backs" of my psychotic episodes and the time in the hospitals. The scent and taste of orange juice is repellent to me because it reminds me of being ordered to drink my orange juice and milk inside a mental health hospital every day by one of the mental health techs. Also, anything that has to do with lack of privacy (aka the Snowden Affair) triggers moments of abject fear of persecution and mind control). The therapy allowed me to bridge the gap between my internal world and the external world through the guidance of a counselor. I do not, of course, believe therapy is the "solution" to schizophrenia, but it is an important addition to the treatment plan.

Since 2011, I have been a return University student living a double life. One life involves attending classes, making social connections, getting good grades, and entering the Master's program right after I received my Bachelor's degree from a California State University. The other life involved constant monitoring by a team of health care professionals who often called me unexpectedly to have me tell them about my day to day life and what my major sources of stress were. This might sound extreme, but it worked. The program managed to re-install the social functions that I lost during my psychotic episodes. I cannot detail the many ways that treating the negative (aka social) symptoms associated with schizophrenia can help the person reintegrate into society without freaking everybody out (not that your freaking out is our problem, that is society's stigmatization problem, but it is true that our spontaneous fits of unprovoked laughter can unnerve you Normals).

This new consideration of treating the negative symptoms is truly a benefit to schizophrenics and to society in general. This Washington Post link details a new, social reintegration approach to dealing with negative symptoms before they morph into full blown positive symptoms (i.e. voices, visual hallucinations). The best part is that it is aimed at young adults who are at a perceived risk of developing the disease (who defines what constitutes "risk" in an alleged pre-schizophrenic is a topic for another blog post, but I should note that there is the potential of misdiagnosing people). The article goes on to say that the state of Maine has seen hospitalizations for newly psychotic patients has dropped by over 30% (as cited in the Washington Post, edit: July 16th, 2014 by the journalist S. Shomashekhar).

As a thirty-one year old with schizophrenia, this is wonderful news, if not for me, then for the next generation of schizophrenics who are growing up in the wake of the recent mass murders committed by alleged---I repeat---alleged---shooters with mental illness. Being raised in a society where one is perceived as a threat to the community despite one's obedience of the law is unjust. I cannot stand by quietly and allow this mass hysteria to ruin the lives of my fellow skitzes. This article shows that there is no need for society to alienate us (we do this fairly well on our own, anyway) and that intervention by society can spawn a generation of schizophrenics who can fully re-enter society.

Thank you, Washington Post and the state of Maine, for not seeing us as disposable creatures meant to be warehoused in a cold and often neglectful mental institution! You have made my day by sharing this story of hope for the next generation. It might be too late for me to recover from the emotional scars of the mental hospital, but it is not too late for the next generation of skitzes.

To you, generation of new skitzes, I advise you to take advantage of these opportunities and to take comfort in knowing that your generation will not experience the mental asylums the way I did. There is hope in little things. Hope in a smile of a stranger, hope in that moment of silence when the voices stop, hope in a healing society!

Here is the link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/promising-new-approach-helps-curb-early-schizophrenia-in-teens-young-adults/2014/08/06/82609e74-fd77-11e3-b1f4-8e77c632c07b_story.html

Summer Update: No Work and Sexting

I suddenly have free time due to the fact that nobody hired me for summer work. I have decided to take this as a positive in that I can study for my intermediate computer programming class I am enrolled in for fall, my last semester at the University.

I am about to complete my Master's degree in my field, after two years. I started this blog as a returning adult student attempting to complete my Bachelor's degree. I just needed a safe place to ramble on about my mental illness and the loss of my loved ones, this blog became it. I had no idea that I would keep blogging off and on throughout the following years. Over time, I have built a sense of purpose: I must advocate for the rights of the mentally ill and prove, through my own actions, that a mental patient can be fully reintegrated into society and be productive and live a fulfilled life. Most recently though, I have found myself ranting against the social stigma and posting links to online articles about mental patients who became successful in life despite their illness.

Sometimes my purpose is too strong and I feel that I might be alienating some people. Other times, I feel that I must speak out, even write all in CAPS, to express the deep-seated fear that has been instilled in me by the mental asylums.

But everyone needs a breather now and then....

I promised this guy I would not tell a soul. I made him swear not to tell anybody either. We've been webcamming. Yes, webcamming. I invented a new verb and it is a sexy verb. Basically, we just take turns in front of the camera for hours at a time, trying to please each other visually. He made me swear not to tell, for some reasons which I cannot deny: a) I am overweight and he is fantastically fit and ripped everywhere....and hung. He could do better than me and we both know it, b) he is about ten years younger than me (21 to my 31) and that in itself is kind of taboo, and c) He is auditioning for movies and getting call-backs, which means he has to be on his best behavior and only date the "right type of woman." So, due to a, b, and c, I can not tell a soul. Except maybe you, reader, who are privy to practically everything that goes on in my private life. Also, I might be bragging right now, just a little bit. Sorry.

My therapist told me I had issues with intimacy. Not sexual intimacy but at the crossroads where sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy meet. I usually have a sexual partner for my sexual needs and a male friend for my emotional needs. I am seriously not selfish, I just can't wrap my mind around how to get one male into both of these roles. My therapist told me that it sounds like I need emotional distance from sexual partners and physical distance from my non-sexual friends. I hate this, but I think he is right. I blame my natural skittishness and a series of unfortunate encounters for my ambivalence towards relationships.

I like webcamming with this particular guy because he provides both sexual and emotional support for me---from a distance, a distance larger than the length of the Pacific Ocean (he lives overseas). This means that I can feel incredibly close to him and know that I might never actually meet him in person, ever. Rather than take this as an experiment in soul-crushing heart-ache, I am rather fond of this arrangement....and I really feel weird about being fond of this arrangement. To make matters more complicated, my male friend (platonic friend only) invited me over to his apartment to hang out. I went over there, honestly, wanting to sleep with the guy, but I couldn't work up the courage to seduce him so instead we talked for four hours straight. Then I went home and sexted with the guy overseas. Did I feel guilty? Yes and no. My local friend is also younger and I don't want him to get enmeshed with an older woman who has relationship issues (me), but I adore him and he makes me laugh. I always feel warm and cuddled after we hang out together. I do not think he would mind at all if I mentioned that I was webcamming with some guy, but I would rather keep that to myself, especially because I secretly have a crush on my local friend. Webcamming guy, on the other hand, would definitely not approve of me hanging out alone with my local friend. I don't tell him anything. I do not want to lose what we have, but I do not want to lose what I have with my local friend. The solution I have stumbled on is to just keep my private life private even from those within my private life. Does that make sense?

Most women I meet are socialized to want to marry one man, to love one man, and to sleep with one man. I am not like these women. I am fiercely loyal, but my idea of loyalty is slightly different. Flings mean little to me, they are like annoying mosquito bites that I have to scratch, illicit trysts that do not reflect my true feelings, just pure sensation. Yet I love the sensation of a tryst! There is nothing so fleetingly magical, so ephemerally fantastic, as a one-night stand. Yes, I am like other women in that I get angry if the guy doesn't call back (although for me, a call-back might be a month down the line, which is fine for me), and I get jealous if I see my fling flirting with other women, but overall I do not share the same singular passion that other women have. This would be why I still live at home, have never married or had children, and is the reason why my "relationships" last a total of 5 months per man.

I sigh as I sit here, wondering if I suffer from some horrible cougar-esque Peter Pan complex or if these guys themselves have some mommy complex that dooms me to immature and unbalanced relationships. Whatever it is, I love them in my strange ways, deeply and intensely.

This summer I have done nothing except practice programming, look for work (to no avail), and gotten myself mired into bizarre pseudo-relationships to the point where my shrink needs a diagram to sort through the male characters in my life. Don't cry for me, Argentina. I might wail about my confusing private life, but in the end, I love it, I love them. In a way, I love you, too, just for reading through this post.

My last post was a little bleak. I blame the hot weather in my city, and my ever changing internal moods for that.

I discussed the abuse at the hospitals with my therapist. Well, I didn't so much discuss things as I ranted and raved for a good hour about the injustices in the American mental health care system. Finally, he stitched me back together in about five minutes of behavioral modification (or cognitive behavioral therapy, whichever term you prefer), altered my perspective, and sent me home feeling like a little embarrassed for losing my patience.

I have this love hate relationship with the county mental health system. They were both the people who hurt me and the people who saved me and helped me to recover. Sometimes, the same person is in both categories.

I have been a ward of the county's mental health program since the age of 22-23 (previous to that I was enrolled in private insurance under my mother which warehoused me in the hospital that was actually pretty fancy back in the day, with lavish cakes for dessert and non-stop art therapy). For the bulk of the time I was with the county I felt ignored, belittled, maligned, and neglected. At one county center my doctor was a new person every three months, the previous doctor having quit or gotten fired, and it was a stressful relaying all the painful bits of my life to a new doctor every three months.

Then again, the county provided free medicine so long as I entered a rehabilitation program, but that was years later, in approximately 2008-2009. The county both provided for me and left me to my madness with no concern for my well being. It was a confusing time, my enemies were my carers and my carers weren't caring....but they could care at random and unexpected moments. If this sounds confusing, that is exactly what I felt. Confused. Alone. Tormented by internal voices and treated as a leper by the external world. But there were moments of refuge. I found refuge with other schizophrenics and bipolar people. I made unlikely friends: from different social classes, of different races, and different religions. The only thing that bonded us was our shared experience of forced hospitalization. Despite what we were (or had been) on the outside, once inside we became blank, generic mental patients; interchangeable cogs in a machine we had no control over.

I cannot relay just how startling it can be to have staff not speak to you when they approach you to take your blood pressure. It is a silent act between a nurse and whatever that person saw me as: a sick person, maybe, or maybe they saw me as a sick thing, a thing that was more like an animal than like them. It is when you have been dehumanized to this point that something kicks in: a final coping mechanism. A last ditch effort to find human decency where there is none. Every smile becomes a source of fuel, more powerful than the watered down decaf coffee they serve on the wards. A smile could make the boredom tolerable, could make the interactions with the volatile patients tolerable, make being in captivity while the world moves around without you---tolerable. The bonds I made with the other schizophrenics are deep. I still run into someone from the hospital from time to time (in the county behavioral center, on the bus, etc...) they have always cracked a wide grin, approached me, sometimes hugged me, always asked how I was and if I remembered this group or that hospital from the past. I will not lie, I both cringe and breathe a sigh of relief whenever I run into another former patient. I cringe because I am almost done with my Master's degree now (I am going to be in my final semester this fall), I  have been passably healthy and out of the hospital for 5-6 years now, I have new hobbies, new friends, a new life---I pretend like I was not that sick person banging on the bullet-proof window rambling about suicide and CIA agents; I cringe because it hurts to remember the damage. Yet, I breathe a sigh of relief because I can finally smile my real smile at somebody who knew the "real me." There is a kinship between us former mental patients based on the mutual experience of being dehumanized, marginalized, imprisoned, all for our own good.We are what society mocks, at least when they are not busy building up hysteria around us because of some sociopath who may or may not have also had the label of schizophrenic, bipolar, or autistic at some point in their pasts. I strongly disagree with the idea that schizophrenia, bipolar, or autism disorder is the root (or even tangential) cause of mass murders. I have known many great men and women who were totally insane. One of the kindest woman on the wards was a middle-aged African-American lady who said she heard non-stop golden oldies playing like a radio in her head to the point where she could hear and do nothing else (except sing along, which, to my great amusement, she did frequently). I must remember this woman and the others whenever I get angry about the hospitals. There was cruelty, yes, but there was also random acts of love and compassion that I have never found on the Outside.

I will always love those that I met on the inside: who found a way to keep their souls through everything. They are like me. I am like them. This reminds me of a book by Philip K. Dick called "Clans of the Alphane Moon," a science fiction tale about a future where the mentally ill were rocketed en mass into outer-space, to colonize their own planet without infringing on the realities of the Normals. It is a great book! I  highly recommend it due to its unique insight into the quirks of those with mental illnesses and its laugh out loud style humor. On this random note, I bid you adieu. 

My Diagnosis: AKA Just to clarify I am not a sociopath

To recap my diagnosis: I am schizo-affective. I even have my own printed out copy of the main file of my on record with the county mental health office. I am not a sociopath. I have to say this with half a smile because I keep seeing "female sociopath" and "sociopathic women" in the stats area for this blog. I smile because of all the decades that mental health workers have cared for me, they have never ever said I have sociopathic tendencies. It is the one thing I am not (thankfully).
These are the things that I have been diagnosed with (soociopathy not being one of them):
bipolar
schizophrenic, paranoid sub-type
schizo-affective
dual diagnosis (diagnosis + cannabis abuse)
ptsd (don't ask me why)

Humorously, someone out in the web must have decided I was a sociopath and linked it to my blog, which is fair, I guess, except they got the diagnosis wrong. Arm chair psychiatrists, what can I say?

Anyways, thanks to those who read with an open mind. The world out there for people like me is very unkind and society is quick to label those of us with a mental health diagnosis as violent, or potentially violent.

I can assure you that I am indeed a graduate student who has no criminal record whatsoever (and I don't even cheat on taxes or speed while driving!). I am indeed disabled cognitively when having an episode. I am not a sociopath. It would offend me except that I recognize the deep-seated hostility and fear of those who would decide I qualify as a sociopath -- it is not sociopathy, it is a furious wrath that has built up over years of both abuse and negligence in the mental hospitals. If you were me, you would be pissed, too.

Who works at Mental Hospitals?

A criminology professor once told a class I was taking that people who have power complexes and want to dominate and control other human beings tended to flock towards jobs in mental hospitals. There, they could exert their power over an unwilling person with the justification that "they're just not like us." What do I mean by "exerting power"? One of the times (this is only ONE of the many times) that I was sexually abused in the mental hospital, the staff saw ---watched---an older male patient enter my room (I was not used to door locks in psych wards because many do not allow for even a moment's privacy, this will be pertinent later). They were not even five feet away at the desk, with my door practically facing them. The man came in and he was already stripped down to his boxer shorts. He pulled out his genitals and began to masturbate. Nobody stopped him, everybody saw him. I had to get aggressive by yelling at him to "get the f out" while kicking the air around him. Even though I was yelling, nobody came, nobody helped, nobody even feigned concern. I chased him away and went back to sleep (I can sleep through anything because I have been abused in the hospitals enough where it is not anything to lose my sleep over anymore).

The next day my doctor came into my room (everyone, EVERYONE can go into your room. This is supposed to be just for staff to check we're not dead, but in reality this means other mental patients, ex-felons, whoever happens to be detained at the moment).

"Why didn't you go to group?" the doctor asked. Silly question. Once my psychosis stops, I realize that my major psychological issue is being cooped up in a psych ward with a bunch of predators (be they the rare, hostile mental patient or the more common sociopathic employees that do the checks). How exactly will group treat the fact that I hate the mental health care system and see it as an archaic throw-back to lobotomy days? I can just imagine being told to go back to my room because my ideas were "disturbing to the other patients' well being".

I muttered something to my doctor about hating group and then I blurted out that I was boycotting everything outside my bed to protest that old male who trespassed and was probably about to rape me.

"WHO?" Yelled the doctor. See, doctors really are not in charge. They think they are and they should be, but they are not on the ward nearly long enough to understand the dynamics that exists behind locked doors.

"That f^$ right there," I yelled, pointing my finger at the offender, who had been moved to a room directly visible from my own bed. The doctor fumed, but again, doctors don't have nearly as much power over my day-to-day life as the mental health technicians. He chased the offender, who went inside the bathroom. I went back to sleep, knowing KNOWING I would wake up and the offender would be on the same ward as myself, STILL. He did not get moved to another room, they just "had a talk with him." "We'll handle it," they said. One of these days someone is going to lift that rug off the floor and see the dirty horrors that you swept under the rug for decades.

Nobody came. Nobody saved me. That is what it is like inside the mental hospital. Here is a link to a video that is pretty close to what I have personally seen going on. Staff do tend to magnetically gravitate towards one patient in particular (someone who they see is easy to control). They can get verbally abusive. They are clever predators though: they are guilty of neglect and cover-ups but they keep their hands "clean" by not physically leaving marks on the patients. They have other ways to make a person suffer. At this hospital where a reporter went undercover as a mental health technician, it was revealed that there had been physical and psychological abuse of autistic, suicidal, and other marginalized groups.

In some country (name forgotten), the recovered mental health patients are hired to treat their own kind--so that a schizophrenic who is medicated and recovered, can work in the hospital alongside those like him who are still very, very sick. This model is beautiful because Normals have no idea what it is like to hear voices, or to feel hysterical fear for days on end. Other schizophrenics know what that is like, and we can feel a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion for those of our ilk who are still in their psychotic states. I would really much prefer to have a medicated schizophrenic looking after my well-being and protecting me than these Normals. They keep forgetting we are humans who feel pain when they hurt us.

BELOW: LINK to a 15 minute youtube video showing the inside of a locked ward (BBC took down the entire episode, but it might be floating out there in cyber-space). The title is "Undercover care: Abuse Exposed" by BBC panorama.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqg_UjWhmOM

Off the Grid for a Semester

I started this blog with the intention to share my personal experiences with what I thought was paranoid schizophrenia (now it is either schizo-affective or bipolar with psychosis, depending on which doctor you ask). Since then, I  have graduated from a CSU as a returning adult student, had a couple of menial jobs, entered graduate school for a Master's degree, volunteered at fundraisers, taken my medication almost every day, kept my doctor's appointment, and started working on my Master's thesis. At the age of 23 I was given a life sentence of chronic insanity: paranoid schizophrenia. I was told to go on disability and avoid stress and driving at all costs. I guess you can count me as one of those mental patients who did not listen to their doctor's advice. My doctor was actually pretty adamant that I stop driving because he thought I would think that other cars were following me. How outdated is that?! I am a modern, contemporary paranoid and we new paranoids know (yes, we know) that if any agency or shadowy figure really, truly wanted to follow us, they would do it via satellites. One cannot outrun the satellite. Why my former psychiatrist could not wrap his head around that logic is beyond me. But the point is now moot---I am neither on disability or taking the bus to get around.

My friend from high school recently came back into my life. At the moment, she is the only person alive who knows my secret (I'm a former mental patient) and who is not a member of my family. She finds it a little unusual that I "went off the grid" for about a decade, to return at the age of 27, newly rehabilitated from an outpatient center, to enter college, finish, continue with post-post secondary schooling, and ultimately, exhibit totally normal behaviors all the while proclaiming that I was a charlatan who was a mental hospital escapee and nothing else.

Mental wards are not day spas. They are co-ed deprivation tanks (when you are lucky, when you are unlucky they are torture chambers). The damage inflicted by other mental patients, mental health technicians, and fishy nurses has been done and, sadly, it looks permanent.

I would give my left pinky finger to ensure that the sexual assaults that happened to me in the psychiatric hospitals never happen to anybody else. But what can I do? I am on the outside, which technically makes me a success story. Some success story! I hide in my little room inside my family's house and type these private secrets to anybody with an internet connection. I still have all consuming anger at the way my sexual assaults were handled by administration (namely: ignore it, let it happen, pretend it didn't happen, minimize it, shuffle it under the rug, refuse to press charges, etc...etc...etc...).

The mental health care system in this country sucks. No other word explains it as succinctly. Imagine this: you get yanked out of bed, strapped to a gurney, restrained with leather cuffs on your wrists and ankles, silent people poke you (they don't talk because they don't see you as quite human) with various medical instruments, needles, blood pressure cuffs. Everything is supposed to be for your own good. Enter the triage center and all the police officers who think it is their job to interrogate people whose brains are already haywire. They just want to make sure you are not the next Sandy Hook killer, or the next James Holmes, or whichever sociopath you choose that may or may not have a dual diagnosis with a mental health issue. They leave you a little more screwed up then when you came in. Spend anywhere from 2 days to months in a "hospital" which is more like a detention center with designated arts and crafts time. Navigate around sociopaths who were dropped off by police who decided they were just nuts when they threatened to shoot up everybody (note: every other mental patient on the ward will not have this death-threat issue because we are NOT VIOLENT, except for the sociopaths who masquerade as one of us). Spend entire time avoiding certain mental patients with anger management issues. Spend entire time avoiding mental health technicians with anger management issues and power complexes. Take pills that have massive side-effects. Hand over civil rights, or rather, have them violently taken away for a period of time under the banner of "mental health treatment."

What should be done? What must be done? I cannot just go back into my day-to-day life and ignore the plight of my kin; those bipolar, schizophrenic, anxiety-riddled, depressive nutcases who are tormented not only by internal stress, but are also victimized in a detention camp with no human rights (aka the mental ward). I will continue to blog about all my experiences and when I have none left I will just ask other mental patients about their experiences and blog about that as well. It is time that the world knew how much contempt and neglect mental patients face in America.

This is the next civil rights movement. The right to equality for those of us who have had our rights taken away without committing a crime. Say no to unfair detention of mental patients! Say yes to transparency in how the mental health system runs in terms of administration! Say no to police murders of mental patients when it is avoidable!

 Our kind is neglected everywhere. However, with new medicines, those of us who are well want to treat our own kind with the respect and empathy they deserve and we don't want predators abusing our vulnerable population; be they sociopaths or mental health workers. Soon, we will rise, globally, in unison, in hospitals and in our places of employment or schooling---we will not be silent anymore. There may come a time when I have to be outed to the world in order to stand for what I believe in (equality and justice) and that scares me but I deal with it. I don't want to be treated like an animal, like a monster by people who don't understand mental health issues. I have two choices: fake normalcy and hide my condition, or drag my condition out into the open and demand reparations for the grave atrocities that occur daily to mental patients.  This blog is my attempt at the latter, in my own, modest way. Thank you for reading! If you are (or know anyone who is) a person with a mental health issue, spread this message: There is hope. People tried to steal our hope. Sometimes all our hope got stolen. But hope is like a plant that grows wherever you plant it. My hope is that our kind will be treated equally and with empathy. In fact, I demand that my hope get realized. I think you should demand that as well!

Mundane Life of a Schizophrenic Grad Student

I have not written anything lately because I am a pretty uninteresting person. I wake up, feed the cat, go to campus, attend classes, do assignments, meet and greet people, and go about my way. I don't walk around talking to myself or shouting at the voices. Yes, I have heard voices, but they are abstractions of my fear that I recognize as Not Real. I just really cannot stand to listen to them, which is why I have been so good about keeping up with my anti-psychotic medicine. With anti-psychotics I become anti-psychotic, which means that I have no delusions of grandeur, no ideas of persecution, no audio or visual hallucinations. I can blend in with the Normals. It's been about 5 years now since I was last in the mental hospital. I have worked very hard to keep myself out. I meditate, I am always questioning my perceptions, I stay busy volunteering or working or going to class, I make social bonds with Normals. I have a boring life. So boring everyone accuses me of faking mental illness! The last disability evaluater called my doctor an idiot and said I couldn't possibly be schizophrenic. My current therapist does not accept my schizo-affective diagnosis and says instead that I am only bipolar. Society has become confused as to what to do with the crazy woman who has been in and out of hospitals since age 19 (I'm 30 years old now). Now that I seem better people are too eager to assume I was misdiagnosed. I was not. I am partially schizophrenic. I have excessive amounts of dopamine. I cannot filter out everyday stimuli like the rest of you and my mind gets flooded with input---all of it somehow meaningful and cryptic. A car that drives by is not just a car it is a message of some kind, some kind of decipherable message that I must decode. That is the nature of psychosis: we live in lands of coded meanings, everything jumbled, word salads, neologisms (made up words), clanging words (nonsense rhymes).

The loose associations, the ever-present paranoia, the moments of manic euphoria, the unwavering certainty that my webcam has been hacked---this is my schizophrenia and I am okay with that. I am learning to live with the coded meanings, to ignore old habits, to build new habits based on concrete reality. However, despite being a recovered mental patient, I am still that dehumanized mental patient, roughed up in the hospitals, mistreated, hurt, attacked, restrained. There is no undoing what was done to me in those hospitals, but I can redo myself and my attitude and I chose to do so.

I want a new life with hope and financial stability. Three years ago I wanted a new life with a college education and I achieved that in 2012. Now I am expanding my hopes and dreams. I want to have a real career. I want to travel the world. I want to make so much money I could buy the expensive pharmaceutical drugs I need to maintain. I want to donate money to impoverished schools and help make the world a more educated place. The worst thing anyone ever did to me was steal my hope by telling me that I had a grave disease with no future. It was worse than the sexual assault I experienced in the hospital. Nothing is as depressing as being told that nothing will ever, ever get better and that you will always, always be on government aid. Yes, that is what they told me was my future.

Now I am a Master's degree student in my last full semester (I have to finish up my thesis next semester). I have a social life with Normal friends. I was working a part-time job as well and volunteering on the side, but I quit so that I could design a thesis study. Things are different, mostly in good ways.

If you have ever been told by a doctor, counselor, social worker, or anyone else that your life will not change, that you will always be unable to take care of yourself, and that you need nothing but "rest" and no stress, you're not alone. I was there, too. My doctor advised me to drop out of the community college to avoid the stress. Obviously, I didn't listen to him, as I transferred to a University and enrolled in the post-grad program. I want you to know that there is always hope, there is always something new, even a good night's sleep will alter your brain chemistry for the better. Don't let anyone make you feel hopelessness. That is the greatest crime the system has done to us mentally ill patients. It is not the patient dumping or restraints, it is the psychological destruction of a person's precious hope that is the worst torture of all.