Viktoria Modesta's Prototype & My 1st Cannabis Arrest

I am inserting a hyperlink to Viktoria Modesta's new music video, Protoype. The words that appear at the beginning are "forget what you know about disability." Startling, moving, transcendent, victorious, those are adjectives that describe this music video and the meaning behind it.

I am not physically disabled, just cognitively disabled, but this music video really resonated with me. It made me think of my own schizo-affective disorder and how I am perceived as broken, incomplete, genetically defective, or worse. How I question the System for the way myself and my kind are treated, both how humanely we are treated and also how our illnesses are treated in terms of medicines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA8inmHhx8c
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On My New Cannabis Charge

I still struggle with paranoia, but I am turning it into something that is not based in fear. My paranoia has begun to turn into a hyper-awareness of my status in society. Would you not be paranoid for yourself if you wrote a blog describing cover-ups of sexual and physical abuse in the psych facilities throughout the past decade, that you personally experienced? Would you not be afraid that county police are monitoring your statements online? I don't change my IP address, so it is pretty easy for authorities to track me down (which might explain why my pc internet connection is so slow on the only computer I use to access this blog). I am no longer paranoid about being killed. I am paranoid about my constitutional rights being continuously stripped away until there is nothing left, just a detainment center they refer to as a 'hospice' for mental patients.

Matters do not help that motorcycle officers keep pulling me over for infractions these past two months (2 fix-it tickets, 1 speeding ticket, and I am currently under investigation for driving while having cannabis and prozac in my system). Yes, I did get a DUI, my first ever. I feel like a criminal for taking my effing medications. I live in California where it IS legal for me drive so long as I had not smoked and then immediately driven away (I played pool for a long time, ate, etc...cop didn't care that I had an ear infection that messed up my balance, said it was cannabis and prozac from the several hours before--8 hours for the Prozac, actually). If this sounds like bunk, it is likely because my city has decided that marijuana is a Latino gang thing that must be eradicated, and to hell with all the medical patients standing in their way. The local newspaper had an article entitled "Sheriff !@&# declares war on pot." This is my home town. I have nowhere else to go until I get some money saved up and my Master's diploma. There is a whole lot more to the pot arrest, but I will save that for the NORML laywer I contacted. Just to be safe, though, if you are a mental patient, be leery of telling police officers what the medicines are actually used to treat. I don't know about the legality of this situation (HIPPA laws v. police) but I do know that once I said the words "mood stabilizer" my chances of him letting me go where all but nil. On the plus side, he did not shoot me over a dozen times like with that poor bipolar suburban teenage girl in the news recently.

Well, if anything goes worse from here, at least you, the reader, will know that for my first 31 years of my life I never was charged or accused of any crimes. The past two months have been pretty harsh, to be honest.

Well, no matter, what, they cannot take what I already achieved away from me. And, if worse comes to worse, there's always a one way trip to Venezuela.

All of us just prototypes for something better, no?

Comment on NY Blog about Succeeding While Mentally Ill

I don't think I am a good role model for people who have a mental illness. I have had rough periods where I associated with abusive men, I smoked marijuana, I partied. However, I'm not a criminal either. I'm human. A woman who grew up in a low-income neighborhood with all the stressors of gangs, drugs, school drop-out rates, and my own set of personal tragedies. There are people out there who have done much worse in life, people who are in jail, and many of them do not have a major mental illness. So that is a positive thing about me: I am law abiding. I try to be polite to people. I try to empathize with the pain of others.

The worst, most self-destructive periods of my life have been, ironically, when I was following doctors' orders to avoid stress. Alright, I will do nothing, I thought. Then I wound up tolerating the boredom and hopelessness by smoking marijuana and dating men who were unkind, to say the least. Not all the men were unkind, there were some gentle souls in there who were as lost and wandering in spirit as I was. We cared for each other, gave each other the support nobody else would dare give us.

I went through periods of unemployment because my doctor said I should not work. It made my life worse, as I could not afford the things that made me feel better: art supplies, music, internet, mp3 players, and books. I eventually found a menial job which made my life better but irked my psychiatrist. I lived with feeling like I had no right to put pepperoni on a pizza; who was I to make pizzas for money? This is a horrible thing to do a person, to make them feel so alienated from society that working a menial job makes them feel like they are doing something taboo. Don't tell me that to be poor and unemployed is in my best interest. Have you ever been penniless? How does that help me avoid stress?

Here is a link to a New York Times blog about people with a schizophrenic or schizo-affective diagnosis who are somehow high functioning and successful. I am in a bad mood right now because I read all the comments by readers following the article and the majority of these comments are lacking in critical thought. Many suggest that the mentally ill go back into the shadows and leave the real world for the "Normals." Many attack the study that proves schizophrenics can be successful. They suggest the results are a fluke, or worse, give "false hope" to the hopeless. False hope? If you are hopeless already, who is to say that false hope would make you anymore hopeless? I swear someone said this! Oxymoron.

Still, at least the New York Times is promoting equality, inclusion, and hope.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/studying-successful-people-with-mental-illness/

By Fall 2012 I will have my Bachelor's Degree. After I receive it, I will go job hunting or perhaps my application for graduate school will be approved. Either way, when I am stressed out with finals or mourning my recently departed love ones, I can always soothe myself by saying, "this could be worse. I could be lying in bed with nothing to do, with no reason to get out of bed, and nobody to believe I can succeed."

Thank you, New York Times Blogger! I am grateful to you for having the courage to post an article about a study that proves the mentally ill should not be treated like invalids!

Condition: Grave

"Grave," he said, his face attempting some semblance of empathy. He was my social worker who had been assigned to me during my stay in the psychiatric facility. He was in the process of telling me I had paranoid schizo-affective disorder and that I should go on disability. I remember slowly hunching over until my hair fell in front of my face, hiding my dazed expression. Grave. That was the only thing I could think: I have a Grave condition.


I wish I could say the schizophrenia miraculously went away, or that I Found Jesus Christ and learned to bear my burden---neither is the truth. Currently, I am not religious, nor am I completely sane. Too bad. Sanity and Jesus Christ seem to make life more bearable for the general population.
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I made friends with a grad student who I have in two classes. I just met her this month. She has a major disability in that she is blind. She asked to be my study buddy and I agreed. She does not know that I am also disabled; though in a different sense. I am cognitively disabled due to the schizophrenia. She does not know.

Today she mentioned she used to attend a private Christian college. I decided to steer the conversation away from religion but it was too late---she went off on how great a theocracy would be. Now I love the concept of Jesus very much, but I am not keen on any government that is religious. I like the separation between church and state. It is a brilliant idea; one that should be respected and maintained forever.

As a mentally disabled person, the United States constitution is the only thing that protects my rights and freedoms. It decrees I am your equal. I am writing this only because I don't know how to address my new friend. I like her, I just hold the idea of checks and balances and separation of church and state to be the core values of America. They are my core values, at least.

Then it kind of dawned on me that people with a mental handicap are either made to appear like evil wicked people or like "touched-by-God" people when in fact we are neither--we're just people. It has occurred to me that, due to ignorance, the majority of the population does not see disability as a genetic accident; they see it as some sort of God-inferred state, and this scares me because there is no science behind this.

Anyways, I just wanted to say that I am somebody who believes strongly in a scientific approach to understanding mental illness and disabilities in general.

Mental Health Budget Cuts

I'm not a politician. I'm not an accountant. I am, however, a paranoid schizophrenic with a long history of hospitalizations.

To a politician, mental health budget cuts means less taxes on the 99%. To an accountant, mental health budget cuts means more money in the piggy bank. To a person with depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, ADHD, autism, or any other mental health diagnosis, the mental health budget cuts means a bleak future, no medicine, no treatment, possibly no work, and general misery.

In a way I am lucky to have been forcibly hospitalized so often because the county realized it is much cheaper just to put me in a treatment program and put me on pharmaceutical assistance programs than it  costs to warehouse me like a piece of veal in a psych ward for a month every year. So I am one of the lucky ones that gets medication from a long-term care provider, and only because I've been deemed "institutionalized." Institutionalized means that I have been in the hospital so often that I've become almost dependent on the process of being 5150'd and locked up in order to recover.

The topic of recovery is a touchy issue for some. While there is no cure for paranoid schizo-affective disorder (schizo-affective=a combination of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia), there are medications that take away the positive symptoms such as delusions, paranoia, auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, and anxiety that results from experiencing these cognitive malfunctions. There is also behavioral modification therapy that focuses on re-integrating mental patients into society. These therapies, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, are sessions where a therapist asks about the persons life and tries to make the patient's outlook on his/her life to be more positive and productive.

For example, one of my goals in therapy was to become more social. My time in the hospitals made me feel like a freak, somebody nobody would want to associate with. My therapist reframed this idea for me by saying that I had a disability no different from a learning disability, and that a person's adverse reaction to my diagnosis did not reflect on myself. She also said that if I didn't feel comfortable telling people I am mentally disabled, I was not obliged to do so. Over time, I learned to manage my negative symptoms (negative symptoms=asocial tendencies, flat affect, indifference, lack of motivation). I smiled more, asked people about their days, made an effort to reach out with compliments, and pretty soon I had friends! Of course, none of them know I am schizophrenic, but that's because I am leery of telling the uninitiated about a disease barely anybody even understands. My point is that therapy provided a base to relay my fears about talking to people and through therapy, I was able to befriend graduate students and undergrads at my University without making a total ass out of myself. :)

Without the funding for outpatient services none of this would have been possible. I would be miserable, jobless, penniless, friendless, a drain on the welfare system, and hiding in my room all day, afraid of invisible assassins. The cost on taxpayers would be greater than it is now, and I'm not on government cash assistance! And if your answer is to say, just let them roam the streets and remove the burden off taxpayers---you're not thinking of what that entails. First, you probably know somebody who is mentally ill and you would probably prefer to pay 25 cents per paycheck rather than watch a loved one suffer. Second, think about the possibility of unmedicated psychotics wandering the streets wondering why you hate them so much---are YOU the assassin they're afraid of? Most of us aren't dangerous, but I'd be lying if I said NONE of us are dangerous unmedicated. There's bound to be some psychotics, depressives, manics, or whatever, out there who are unpredictable without the mind controlling effects of psychotropic medications. My point is, 25 cents isn't that much and it is worth it if it gets thousands of mentally ill people out of hospital beds and into jobs where they can be productive to society.

Thanks for reading!

Hope

I am heading to a graduate program forum this weekend. The forum is for upper-division undergraduates with a decent cumulative GPA who are curious about graduate school.

Two years ago I was a college drop-out who psychiatrists told not to bother with college anymore---it would just stress me out and cause another schizo-affective episode. Two years ago I was unemployed, lonely, twenty pounds heavier than I am now, and miserable.

What changed? I did. I demanded help from the county mental health system. I received that help, and then some. I began to think differently during cognitive behavioral therapy, seeing that I am not just a burden on society, but a person with a lot to offer. I started to occupy myself with hobbies, photography, painting, drawing, reading, studying a new language, until I was at peace with my life. Then, doors started to open. First, I was accepted into the University. Then, I managed to get through the semester without having any episodes, despite several deaths in my family that left me haunted and in mourning.

I made the dean's list. I got straight A's during the summer as well. Here I am, two years after being told to quit on my aspirations of a college degree, and I'm close to graduating with my B.A. Two years after being told that I'm a hopelessly disabled person who needs a disability check, I am really close to achieving my dream of being the first one in my extended family to get a B.A. from a major University.

Had I listened to those psychiatrists, I'd be miserable. I wouldn't know how to cope with the losses in my family. Being in college makes me feel like I have a purpose and that I can achieve what I want to achieve. It makes me feel like I'm doing some good in the world.

Had I listened to those naysayers, I'd be moping around, trying to fill the void with food or marijuana or material items. Looking back, I am glad I didn't listen to them. I am glad that I got in touch with a care-provider that encouraged me to reach for my dreams. I am glad I have a family that lets me live here rent free while I go to college!

Instead of listening to those psychiatrists. I took the road less traveled for somebody with a mental handicap. I forged ahead, making blunders, making mistakes, but carving a path nonetheless. This is me just bragging, I guess, but I also think it goes to show that there is hope in life. No matter where you're at, there's always hope. The best thing about hope is that there's no charge! It's free for the taking!

My point for this blog is to capture a moment where I feel pure hope. Hopefully, my hope is contagious.