Secret Eavesdropping is Not News to a Paranoid

This controversy over Edward Snowden has many panicking. As for me, the data is old hat. I am a paranoid schizoaffective who has believed that domestic spying has been around since, actually, 1950, but most certainly it has increased since 2001.

I found the uproar to have some comedic properties. It just makes me chuckle that people are like, "You listen to me? ME?" Of course they do. And yes, there is a THEY. Over the years, I have adjusted to this 'delusional' belief system to the point where I can just go about my daily routine, graduate school, relationships, and so on, without voicing any of my so-called delusions. That train of thought runs in the background like a little desk fan, its little motor whirring away as I write, a little noise I barely perceive now and whose gentle wind is mildly soothing in times of heat. Well, welcome, friend. Welcome to my bizarre delusional world of government eavesdropping. They will not harm you so long as you do not get all riled up and start demanding that things change. It is their job to oversee and oversee they shall.

One last remark, I once had a psychiatrist tell me not to drive a car because I would get paranoid and think people were tailing me.

"I don't understand? Follow me, like, in a car? What is this, 1950? They have much better technology now. If they want to follow me, they can monitor me from space with a satellite. That works much better, I cannot out run it, and it can even pick up my vital signs," I replied, a little offended. Some things one cannot outrun and should not even bother to outrun. Like I said, their job is to oversee and oversee they shall.

Here is a link to an online article about how this secret spying program affects those with pre-existing paranoia, or rather, how it really does not affect them very much at all. Enjoy and thanks for reading!

http://news.yahoo.com/secret-spying-programs-affect-clinically-paranoid-182400238.html

PANOPTICON

Last semester I took a political science course with a self-proclaimed Marxist professor. He was handsome, charming, brilliant, and vehemently against the exploitation of the masses. One day he lectured on what is known as the "panopticon" model of surveillance.

Panopticon refers to an architectural structure of a building that is so high that it can see into the houses below. The houses below are all built with a see-through roof, like a glass ceiling. Every see-through house is placed so that 100% of what goes on inside the house is visible to those in the great tower.

According to my professor, prisons and mental asylums were built on this principle. Though I've never been in prison or committed any felonies which warrant imprisoning, I have served time in psychiatric facilities.

The triage room in the Emergency Room is built Panopticon-style. They place you in a room with no door and no light switch so that you are bathed in light, rendering sleep an impossibility. Over head, a camera captures every second you spend in the room, and you are never allowed outside the room except to use the bathroom. If you use the bathroom for too long a security guard bangs on the door, taser and baton on his belt, and orders you to come outside.

To make matters worse, they force you and the other mental patients into a common blue hospital shirt and pants. This seems to be part of the process of stripping your personality down to its barest bits. I remember taking my hospital issued socks off because I hated what the padded soles represented: institutionalization. A guard, having watched me remove my hospital-issued socks, entered my space and ordered me to put them back on. It seemed like such a trivial detail: socks. However, we both understood the socks to be compliance, to be a part of my shaming costume of the mentally unfit. The socks weren't just socks, they were fuzzy shackles I had to wear, as a ward of the state. I put them back on. Later I removed them again, frustrated and unable to think straight in my manic-induced psychotic state. Again, the guard entered and ordered my socks back on.

After 48 hours of constant, bright fluorescent lights, cameras and security guards watching my every move, and a cocky doctor casually signing my life away on my medical chart, I was restrained on a stretcher and moved to a long-term psych ward. There, patients were allowed to get in my face and threaten me without reproach and the staff were cold, manipulative, and contemptuous. Sometimes, I hated the outside of my room so much that I refused to leave my bed. A doctor told me I was just making it worse for myself, why wouldn't I comply with the program. I insisted I was on strike. He upped my dose of anti-psychotics and anti-depressants. Eventually, spurred on by artificial chemicals, I got out of bed and grudgingly showed up for group and lunch.

This pattern happened more than once, more than thrice, even. Being a poor person who can't afford health insurance, I wound up being hospitalized quite a number of times before the State realized it would be cheaper just to pay for outpatient services than to have to warehouse me in another panopticon institution for the rest of my life.

What's my point? Panopticons exist. They are a form of thought control, of behavioral modification. Yes, I am better for being so humiliated, stripped down, and drugged, but I wonder if there is not a better way to help mental invalids?

If you're in the mental health field, please consider alternatives to this opticon method of treatment. While I am obedient with my mother, the University, and society, a part of me remains that mental patient that rolls of the gray, padded sock and tosses it on the ground. Maybe you should, too. Not all panopticons are as obvious as psychiatric hospitals. Some panopticons exist in the mind.