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.

Comment on "An Unquiet Mind" by Kay Redfield Jamison

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the amazing Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, I'll catch you up to speed. She went through medical school and became a successful psychiatrist and researcher.

Despite her long list of outstanding achievements, she was hiding an ailment not too far out of her field of research. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a colleague, she, like many of us disordered patients, went through the stages of denial, fear, and secrecy. For the first time, a doctor came out to the medical field as being a patient as well as a healer. Rather than sink into an oblivion of despair, she penned an autobiographical account of her trials, titled "An Unquiet Mind."

Written in lucid, bubbling prose, with plenty of references to various manic poets, Dr. Jamison captivates the reader with her tale. One part that stands out in my mind is the page where she describes experiencing mania after work. She begins to run loops around the parking lot, a rather perplexed colleague watching as she sprints to and fro.

I can relate to this energy, to this temporary high-spirited state. Though outsiders might consider me first and foremost a paranoid schizophrenic, I mostly experience mania, then after several months of mania, I spiral into psychosis, the paranoid schizophrenic type. I rarely experience cognitive misperceptions such as thought insertion, paranoid delusions, and visual hallucinations without the accompanying mania that precedes it and I am convinced I am a psychotic variety of bipolarity, and not a pure schizophrenic. But now I'm having flight of thought...heh heh. Back to the book....

I can relate to the author's experience of being resistant to treatment. For years, I went on and off medications. I believed if I could make the dean's list, how could I possibly be disabled? Disability and hospitals were for people with one leg, or a heart condition. Psych wards were for people who talked to themselves on the street corner and didn't shower. It was hard for me to fit myself into this category of disability, but like Dr. Jamison, I eventually came around to long-term treatment.

Though I haven't earned my B.A. yet (I'm graduating in May, 2012 with a B.A. in interdisciplinary linguistics), I feel that I have done fairly well with myself, considering my past as a pothead, party girl with no money and little ambition.

Reading "An Unquiet Mind" allows me to feel hope for the future. It taught me that even a doctor can have bipolar disorder and still maintain her position within the field...and more than that, she can change the way society perceives mental illness and the potential of people with a diagnosis to go on with productive lives. She taught me hope. Thank you.

Weight Loss: 25 pounds in 6 months

My martial arts instructor commented last week about how I had lost 5 pounds since the start of the semester back in August. I laughed because he had hit my number right on the mark! What he doesn't know is that I've actually lost a good 25 pounds since the Spring semester. Fad diet? Jenny Craig? Gym membership? None of the above.

I started weighing myself this April. 184 pounds, tipping the scale into the obese range, and lugging around a lot of extra flesh. I decided the weight had to go. As a senior in college, it always bothered me that I was the heavy girl in class. I wanted to be fit, not the svelte, model-thin bodies that stroll around campus with chips on their shoulders, but active and healthy. Despite how I feel about fat prejudice, I understood that I was doing harm to my body and that I should take steps to improve my blood pressure, nutrition, and activity level---not for vanity's sake but for my internal health. So I started a improvised system of weight loss---it's not weight loss, it's weight control.

The key is to see life events as obstacles to control. If you have a bad day you feel like you're not in control. If you buy a fast food meal, then it's really out of control. You haven't just lost temporary control, you've set yourself back a week! I decided that I wanted control over my life. I wanted control over my urges. Maybe I couldn't squeeze back into the size 5 pants from 5 years ago, but I could work hard and lose a dress size, and I did.

I started writing down everything I ate and drank. Yes, drinks too. I realized those super market flavored drinks were around 160-200 calories each! That's not even something that would make me feel full! I saw that my spreadsheet of meals included lots of meat. I read up on meat. It turns out Americans consume way over the recommended allotment for protein by our meat-eating habits. I have always been fond of microwavable chicken patties. It took some time, but I finally acknowledged that the calories, the salt, and the excess protein was bad. So I quit meat cold turkey (pun!). Then, I started to count calories. I read the ingredient list if I was eating a microwavable dinner. I searched for calorie counts of different items like white rice versus brown rice (if you're going to eat rice, get BROWN! White rice is luxurious but man, will it cost you in terms of calories!) I even read the caloric count on the bottle of healthy olive oil I was using to saute my vegetables (count: 120 per tablespoon).

Slowly, things started to get easier. My blood pressure became healthy. I started to lose weight, slowly but surely. I stayed under 2000 calories and above 1300 calories most days. How much I ate depended on how active I'd been that day. If I'd just done homework, cleaned my room, took an hour walk, I'd have less calories. If I exercised for at least 20 minutes, I allowed myself to eat an after-dinner bowl of cereal (I have an odd habit of craving Honey Bunches of Oats at night).

Then, when I had some income, I purchased a moderately inexpensive rowing machine. I found that it worked both the arms and thighs and was easy on the joints. I began to use it, first for only 10 minutes a day, a few days of the week, then 20 minutes most days of the week. I tried to jump into it at first, going an hour, but the next day I was too sore to do any exercises. I learned that with physical activity, it's better to start off in the shallow end of the pool and slowly move to the deep end. I now have the rowing machine, a stationary exercise bicycle, a pilates band, a 10 pound weight, and several belly-dancing exercise DVD's. Yes, I actually use them. When I started the Fall semester at the University I enrolled in a martial arts class. It was very hard at first, especially for somebody who was about 165 pounds (I'd lost 20 pounds by then, eating healthy veggies, counting calories, working out, walking, and reading up on binge eating and other eating disorders).

Now, about 3 months in, I finally broke that weight plateau of 165 pounds and lost another 5 pounds. I feel more energetic, my health is good, and I feel in control of my academic life and my personal life. I've been a vegetarian 90% of the time since this April. My main staple dish is sauteed zucchini with coriander, cumin, and turmeric. Boiled cauliflower comes in a close second. First, I boil the cauliflower, then I put a tablespoon of olive oil and some teaspoons of spices in a pan and saute the softened cauliflower. It tastes good. My craving for high-salt, high-butter, high-oil foods has decreased. Sure, I have my bad days, but I just concentrate on regaining my control the next day.

I intend on staying in control from now on. I intend on managing my mental diagnosis by taking my medicine daily and keeping all my doctor's appointments. I intend on managing my schoolwork by keeping up with my home-work and readings. Lastly, I intend on managing my weight by keeping up with a healthy life-style and another semester of aerobic exercise classes.

I look through the internet trying to find people's success stories but they usually come with a hyped-up product to sell with the promise of extreme weight loss. Even though I'm not at my goal weight of 145 pounds, I'm slowly getting there. I'm 25 pounds closer to this goal. I did it the healthy way, not the pill-popping, starvation diet, lock your self in a gym and don't eat anything that's not raw way. I feel pretty good writing this. Hopefully, in a few months, I can write about how I lost another 5 pounds and describe all the new methods I will have learned!

Thanks for reading!

Online Exhibitionism

My psychoanalyst wants to know if I'll ever merge all the various pieces of my life into one persona.

The Artist, the Writer, the Student, the Bisexual Lover, the Bipolar Schizophrenic....

Nope, I said. I can't imagine anybody in my city that would be comfortable around all the parts of me. Maybe I am naive, or ignorant, or both, but is there a special soul out there who would be okay with me the way I am?

I have always felt the need to compartmentalize my life into socially acceptable little boxes since I first realized I was different, around the age of 13. Sure, there were moments when I stopped caring, like when I started smoking pot, but even then I wouldn't mention a certain part of myself to close friends.

The best friend I had in my teens and early twenties knew I was bipolar and bisexual, but she had no idea I was a good student, an artist, and a writer.

The boyfriend I had for a year didn't know I was bisexual.

The art teacher I had for nearly two years had no clue that I was missing class because I was in a psychiatric hospital....rather than save my grade by admitting I had a cognitive disability, I just took a mediocre grade.

Now I am even more split....

The best friend I have, who is an excellent student with the same major as myself, has no idea I'm part of United Student Pride, the Gay, Lesbian, Transgendered, Transsexual, Bisexual alliance group on campus. Furthermore, she has no idea I'm schizo-affective and a disabled student who gets accommodations if I request them.

The only person who really knows me, the real me, is my psychoanalyst. Isn't that lame? I think I need to get out more.

This blog is my way of anonymously piecing myself back together. It's my little exhibitionist practice that allows me to vent in front of people without suffering major repercussions in my personal life.

So thank you, anonymous reader from whatever country you're from: I need you. I need you more than you need to read my soap opera life. I am willing to take any harsh comments you may have just for the satisfaction of knowing that, even though you don't like me, you still read about my insignificant life. You know me better than most people! So thanks, from the sincere part of my heart: thanks!

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.

Confessions of a Closet Schizophrenic

I'm a returning University student, a senior with just 1 and a half semesters left to achieve a B.A. I made the dean's list last semester and I also got straight A's taking 13 units during the summer. I'm well-dressed, well-groomed, well-read, and well, crazy.

I'm a decent person with a clean legal record. Unless you count my 5150's where the police came to the house to capture the girl who was cowering in a corner, afraid of assassins barging in at 3 in the morning. Even then, in the midst of my mental illness, I wasn't a threat to other people. Myself, perhaps, but not you, not my family, not anybody else. Like a parasite, the schizophrenia preys on its host until its host is but a shell of her former self.

But that was 2 years ago. I've been in recovery through medication and cognitive behavioral therapy for about that long and I haven't had an episode since. I have a long-term care provider, a counselor at a state disability program, and good grades despite recent deaths in the family. I'm what a professional would call "stable."

But in the long run, what chances do I have of living a successful life? Can I expect real employment after I graduate, or will my future be an endless series of single job interviews with unsympathetic employers wearily eying their health insurance packets? This problem isn't mine, it's yours. If I can't find work I'll go seek state disability. That's tax payer money. I'd RATHER work. I CAN work. I CAN critically think. I CAN be productive. I CAN maintain high levels of stress with appropriate coping skills. Does this really matter as soon as I drop the S-word (schizo-affective disorder) with somebody?

According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, I am guaranteed equality under the federal government and in all aspects of employment, education, and social treatment. But this area is an area where a lot of people break the law and get away with it. Many people discriminate against persons with a mental diagnosis. They fear them. They hate them. They mock them. They ostracize them. I'm not talking about the thug at the end of the block. I'm talking about people in high positions. Employers, CEO's, supervisors, professors, publishers, agents, and many, many corporations.

To a corporation the mental diagnosed are just unnecessary burdens. We "drain" their health care resources. We "slow down" their productivity. We "can't get along" with other coworkers.

They apparently never got the news that Pulitzer Prize winner Sylvia Plath was mad, or that Nobel Prize winner John Nash was a schizophrenic. Indeed, many talented people can have a diagnosis while being productive.

But back to the title of this post: I'm a closet schizophrenic. I tried one semester of partially disclosing my medical needs to my professors. I am under the Students with Disabilities Services program and as part of it, we may choose to hand out letters requesting specific accommodations. Mine was infrequent absences due to doctor's appointments. I got 2 letters out to 2 different professors. They were both kind. However, when it came to handing the letters out to my major's professors, I chickened out. I couldn't face them knowing they knew there was something behind my shy demeanor.

I had turned in a scholarship application and applied as a disabled student. I submitted physician's proof of this. I wrote honestly about having an average GPA because a lot of my college time coincided with periods where I couldn't get treatment, be it because the county refused to treat me or because I was in denial of my illness. I was clear, honest, sincere. I was then soundly rejected. I didn't even receive a hundred dollar scholarship. Nothing. I had a sufficient GPA to transfer to a major University despite being chronically disabled, but I wasn't deemed worthy of a hundred dollar scholarship. Maybe I'm being bitter, but why would they ask if you're disabled if they are not going to take that fact into consideration?

This time around, when I apply for grad school, I might not disclose that I'm mentally disabled. I might pretend to just be a lazy pothead who didn't take school seriously the first couple of years. Maybe they'd be more sympathetic if I just sugar-coated my entire existence.

When friends ask why I'm going to the doctor, even close friends I trust dearly, I still say, "check-up." Maybe I should start saying I have a chronic heart condition. Maybe then I'd be accepted as "an acceptable disabled person" and not a "risk" or an unwanted type of person.

I'm perfectly willing to work my ass off at a job with high stress. I'm willing to continue my treatment program. I'm willing to be open to criticism and new ideas. The question is: are the rest of you willing to accept me as a disabled worker?

Comment on the book "Appetite"

The book, "Appetites: Why Women Want," by Carolyn Knapp is an articulate, well-informed, deep analysis of why women starve themselves. Written in lucid prose, Knapp explains her own period of anorexia and expands on her views about why women put themselves through this. Genetics, environment, and personality all play crucial roles in the formation of anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and binge eating disorder, she writes.

Knapp discusses societal factors that plague women, pushing them from overachieving to under-eating and self-destruction. She discusses the role of feminism within the sphere of eating disorders, saying that women are now allowed in places and jobs they'd never obtained before, but with a catch: don't take up any space and don't complain.

I found this book to be interesting, well-written, deep, and a critical portrait of a society where women are still breaking through gender barriers, the most severe being in the way they present themselves in terms of appearance. It made me understand why anorexics push themselves to such dangerous levels of societal conformity.

One thing that stuck out to me was the author's admiration of a fat woman in her twenties who had stopped abusing herself via dieting and binge/purge cycles. She had decided she'd just be fat and accept that fact. The author relates this woman's plight to a friend of hers, who has a wildly different outlook: 'You admire her, I just see diabetes, heart problems, and hypertension.'

The funny thing is, why do we not look at anorexics and bulimics the same way? If you see diabetes and hypertension whenever you see a fat person, why don't you think, "irregular heartbeat, brittle bone disease, and dangerously low blood pressure" when you see an anorexic? Why the admiration for them?

Just a thought.