rigorousintuition.ca

Random thread I started back in the day about the RFK murder that deserves a bump upon further review. Well, the opening post of it anyway, I didn't check to see if I started some boring/annoying pissing contest later in the thread, as I was sometimes prone to do. So my apologies if I did, in this thread or any other:

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/v ... 0208#20208

Anyway...

How are y'all doing? I'm doing pretty good. Funny story: Within days of that totally-needless (my bad!) slapfight over the utility of certain psychiatric medication for certain diagnoses and whatnot...I got pink-slipped! LOL. Wound up being locked up for three weeks (despite only being, like, 10-15% insane, justifiably so I might add!) (And oh, what great fun it was! An amusing hayride through Blatantly-Unconstitutional Land, the thrilling roller-coaster of Ironically-Psychotic-Psychiatrist Mountain, and the unexpected gift of Being-Around-People-More-or-Less-Just-Like-You Cafeteria. I'd like to visit again someday...with a entire fucking team of personally-affected-by-wrongful-Section-12-orders-and-therefore-VERY-angry lawyers, and an order to cease and desist...so, yeah, I'd like to visit again someday, but I think my sister has lost the nerve to blindside me with that dirty trick again, once she heard where she had actually sent her brother whom she was only pink-slipping because she, uhhhh, cares so much about me and only wants the best for me blahblahblah". Ugh. Anyway.) but it could have been worse. Like recently! But still, it could be worse. And a funny thing is, things seem to be falling favorably my way the last few days. Serendipity too frequent and perfectly suited for my immediate needs. It's either the cosmic principle of seriality; or some commonplace guardian angel concept; or some change of heart in whatever PTB (is that acronym still in use?) that might exist, regarding my usefulness to them (i.e., if a dude is trying his fucking heart out to have it so that everyone -- good, average, and evil alike! -- wins simultaneously...how can that possibly be a threat?); or some divine Kit-Kat cbar from whatever God is, if God exists; or maybe it's just stupid blind luck. Anyway (again)...remember that time I said I was going to find a way to make it on TV via a pointed question at a CSpan book reading or whatever? Well, there are now up my sleeve a countless number of better, smarter, and hopefully less confrontational ways of getting on TV somehow, and most of them (screenplays, music, patents, amateur sleuthing, semi-autobiographical non-fiction, political campaigning, political science, still being the only person in the world to understand core elements of Infinite Jest, coaching sports, and so on and so on and so on) if successful (huge IF) could lead to fame and fortune if the universe is willing -- therefore placing me in a position of decent power for an ungroomed outsider-with-heart, or at least in possession of some kind of insurance policy against the easiest ways of eliminating me, if I ever wind up unintentionally being perceived as a mortal threat to the PTB, which, and I can explain it further, I will try my best not to be. So, I'll ask again: Who wants to be my Facebook friend? I hope people aren't still scared of that boogieman. Jesus, it's as if people think it's some especially insidious way of exposing oneself to the Alphabets, as if there aren't 500 other more invasive methods of tracking every single thing you say, do, buy, feel, and so on, whenever the vicious bastards feel like it. If you won't go on Facebook, then I hope you're also not going outside, where satellites can photograph the pores on your skin. You'd also better find a way to not be inside either, since those same satellites might be equipped with infrared technology. But...where are you when you can't let yourself go outside or let yourself stay inside? You're in a level of hell-on-earth known as Paralyzing Paranoia. It's okay to be paranoid. Reality dictates it! But for the love of god, live your life, do the stupid little shit that makes a day slightly more interesting and enjoyable. For me, that involves my occasional presence on Facebook. If any others here (people I know and have had consistently good relations with here) do the Facebook thing, for fun, hit me up with a private message. I won't be spending much time here, on the board. Maybe no time. I am, for somebody whose family classifies as a total fuck-up loser, quite a busy bee these days! Need to be, in order to stay sane and alive. But I'll be able to relax and have more fun one of these days, I hope. Not that I don't have fun, regardless of the circumstances. Loony Bin for an inexplicable three weeks? Fun! E.R. for an inexplicable leg rash (it stumped the dermatologists, so I told the Jewish ones to consider diagnosing me with a tzaraath, lol.)? Fun! Crisis unit for suicidal junkies and schizophrenic crackheads, where I was told that I obviously didn't need the psychotherapy I was asking for that much, that I should just leave, lol? Fun! Homeless shelter for a week, where my chore was cleaning the men's bathroom? Fun! No, but really. All this shit has been actually fun. As was my time here years ago, as will be however much more time I spend on here in the future. Ciao!

Hell, great thing you didn't end up in the psych "hospital" system for good...
Welcome back.

I'm very happy to see you 4thB!

Sunny and Penguin, yay!

Hell, great thing you didn't end up in the psych "hospital" system for good...

Well that's what is so horrifying about being section-12-ed/involuntarily-committed. If you are arrested for robbery, rape, murder, etc...you will be able to hire (unless you can only afford a free public defender, and even some of those are good) a more or less competent lawyer to represent your interests in a fair and speedy trial and to uphold all those other wonderful constitutional rights we have. Well, not if you are involuntarily committed. Here in Massachusetts anyway, and I bet it's the same elsewhere, all that needs to happen for you to face perpetual confinement with virtually zero recourse, is a family member or two needs to report you as (magic words) "an imminent threat to oneself or others", and then very quickly (quicker than you think!) you will be visited by a couple of whitecoats with a couple of easygoing police officers tagging along, then you will be carted off in an ambulance to a locked mental ward, then you will be evaluated after three days to see if you really belong there. Now, personally, I can understand the practical necessity of that minimal constitutional violation. Yes, every so often a not-insane-enough person gets pink-slipped, and having to wait three days to prove one's sanity is a tiny little rape (if any rape can be tiny) of one's rights, but necessary if society has any interest in protecting the rest of us from the occasional truly violent lunatic roaming the streets. However, if for whatever reason, at the end of the three days...if you happen to be bamboozled, and a psychiatrist you saw once in the previous month lies (and I have actual physical proof, lol) for some reason to the head shrink of the team evaluating you, in order to make your indisputable unadulterated non-craziness (by that point my sanity was rapidly back to 100%, a crisis that depends on you to be completely rational can sober you the fuck up from the booze of manic energy, and FAST, lol) seem like the ploy of a clever madman...well then the head doctor, who might remind you of Chairman Mao, can refuse to let you go. And at that point you are then only half-owned by the system, because they still can't force any medication on you (like, say, hardcore lifelong anti-psychotics that have been known to induce undesired suicidal thoughts, when all you might have ever suffered from is a susceptibility to the occasional HYPO-manic or depressive episode). No, because you see, you will be entitled to a hearing in a week where you can demonstrate your sanity and convince a judge that you need to be set free immediately. Oh, but now, remember that in the meantime Doctor Mao will be fucking with your head to try to convince you to voluntarily commit yourself (because well, if you lose the hearing you could be facing a very daunting situation, more on that later), to voluntarily take the mind-destroying drugs he thinks you need (after only an hour of knowing me, the man must be a genius), and if that doesn't work he'll make sure to get under your (given the circumstances) very vulnerable skin by maybe having a nurse or two fuck up in a way that will test your patience (you who vehemently protests over the smallest injustice), and before the hearing he might even have the temperature in your room turned down to "WAY TOO FUCKING COLD" and you might wake up that day uncontrollably shivering, which, besides pissing you off royally, will make you look quite weird if you can't get a grip on yourself before the hearing starts. Your family might come to visit you that day, and you might give them the thousand mile stare, and say something as emotionlessly as possible to your mother like, "Just because I popped out of your vagina it doesn't make you my mother, not with the way you are treating me, which is worse than a total stranger", and that will make her cry, and her crying will cheer you up in a small way. Meanwhile your attorney, who seems to be some neurotic well-meaning chick fresh out of some law school like Northeastern or NESL or Suffolk (definitely not Harvard or BC or BU material), is proving herself to be as incompetent a free lawyer as you have ever seen. She has done exactly jack shit for you, except tell you in one of your brief pay phone calls how weird it is that Doctor Mao is fighting so hard to keep you in, despite you being saner than most of the staff. At the hearing, she is a total failure. [Okay, fuck the second person, lol] I fight the absolutely-justified-and-rational urge to fire her immediately and represent myself, because I fear that kind of move will only make things worse for me in the presence of the judge. So I sit there, and cringe, as my sister and mother tearfully tell their loaded-with-horseshit half-truths about the arguments that supposedly warranted my being pink-slipped, as I listen to them and stare unblinkingly in the general direction of their eyes, trying as hard as possible to telepathically communicate the thought "You stupid fucking cunt...you stupid fucking cunt". Then Doctor Mao and the bitchiest cratchetiest nurse spin their lies and totally baseless "professional" opinions of me, all the while paraphrasing whatever disease-paradigm manual they use when they need to know the appropriate way to misinterpret a patient's behavior. I am writing and passing over to my attorney next to me, as calmly as possible, little notes containing pointed questions for Doctor Mao -- some of which she asks him, and none of which he can satisfactorily answer. Two of the least answerable ones she doesn't ask, and I again fight down the urge to fire her on the spot. Mind you, at this point, this being my first Section 12 hearing, I still have a tiny bit of hope that the truth would win. That flicker of hope is extinguished when the judge makes her ruling, that I am to stay confined, under the management of Doctor Mao, under strict orders to take whatever medication he prescribes. For how long? For up to several months. When is the next hearing for me to plead my case and try to correct this misunderstanding and win my freedom back? A long while. And if the doctors here decide for whatever reason every 6 months or so when my hearing rolls around again, that I am still not "safe to release" or whatever, then: I could hypothetically, theoretically, but really actually face the possibility of being confined indefinitely with only this rinky-dink kangaroo court of a hearing every half a year to set things right, and those hearings would be just like this one, wherein the odds are so stacked against the patient and in favor of the doctors and accusers (they like it that way, I bet, for insurance reasons!), that the hearing might as well never happen, because re-commitment is a virtual inevitability? Is that what the situation was? And in not so many words, that last question was the only thing I said myself at the hearing, and it was the last thing anyone said at the hearing before the legally-mandated-to-be-there cassette recorder was hurriedly stopped. The crushing weight of having my liberty raped potentially for years, for a lifetime, with zero recourse, had finally sunk in. The next day in occupational therapy (which was a godsend, save the ceaseless condescension -- coloring pencils and aromatherapy helped save my life!) I remarked how it would have been hard for Mao or Stalin to come up with a neater non-lethal method of silencing/eliminating dissidents and destroying their credibility in most of polite and "normal" society, as a side bonus! Ellen the occupational therapist didn't like that remark much, but I think she just didn't like me saying it in front of the other less fortunate in-patients -- lol, "LESS FORTUNATE THAN ME", in that circumstance...am I for real? Yes. There were people there who'd recently tried to murder themselves, who were having electro-shock daily, who were mercilessly chastised and treated like sub-human garbage by the staff, who were plagued with the kind of schizophrenia that makes everything on TV seem like a personal message to you. I'm lucky. Very fucking lucky. But then, whenever they want to take me back, whenever they want to kidnap me and take me hostage and deprive me of my most basic constitutional rights...I know now how easy it can be for them to get away with it. And so, I eagerly await the day I testify under oath for the plaintiffs, in the case of Wrongfully Committed v. Insane Hypocrites, Inc.

Woah 4B. I wondered what you were up to.

Wow.

Welcome back and may you remain safe and free as a bird.

Hey Joe! Yeah, the hilariously frustrating thing about the whole situation was: My family and the doctors weren't even locking me up and then keeping me there because of the shit I was actually 10-15% crazy about! They locked me up for totally ordinary shit, like getting angry at them for never listening to a fucking word I said, which they did because -- it's an irony feedback loop -- they had already determined that I was "unstable" or "delusional" or "disconnected". Shit, lol: They didn't even give me any grief when halfway through my "stay" I conveyed to them the same instance of reality-deconditioning I described years ago here. They probably didn't flinch about that because it probably didn't even register in their ears because, since that dimestore Matrix moment always needs to be paired with my revelation about the abominable ghoulishness of meat, their retarded appetites probably blocked my words from reaching their brains. If they had heard me, I surely would have been misprescribed something heavier than just being misprescribed Zyprexa or Abilify. Doctor Mao and his minions always seemed on the prowl for any opportunity to catch me doing/saying something crazy, and always seemed so frustrated that I was so persistently sane. It was a fucking naked power struggle between the Chairman and me whenever they made their daily rounds down the hall, with him executing one unsubtle power trip after another. And this was in front of an audience of junior doctors, trailing him from one room to another. Mao had zero shame. And those other younger doctors who stood behind him...they were so nonchalant, so confident in Mao's credulity-busting gamesmanship, so untroubled by the institution's small/medium/large injustices...they are either figuratively brainwashed by an outrageously-dated and hopelessly-biased disease paradigm combined with an adult lifetime spent being programmed by one meme-installation factory after another, or...they might even be literally brainwashed by Doctor Mao himself, lol! No, but really, when visualizing this rotten piece of shit, think of the evil brainwashing supervisor in the original Manchurian Candidate. And he really has no conscience. During one of the rare and at least somewhat dignifying sit-down team meetings they have with patients for a grand total of 15 minutes twice a week, I busted him on his seeming willingness to classify basic human emotions as symptoms of a mental disorder. I was so fucking eloquent, as I can be, and I was at my oratorical finest: Every female in the room, sitting semi-circle around me and Mao, was welling up with tears visible from 10 feet away -- and a few of the guys even, if I remember right -- and even so the tearless were visibly moved, too! Professionals, doctors, therapists who routinely look at the patients they're supposed to bring back to health as little more than burdensome vermin, and I was able to reach inside and pull something out of their emotional archives. But not that soulless animal. A face of pitiless stone. A face of a remorseless sadist!!! Yet another fucking retard with wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much power!

Good fucking god 4thBase! Not to the degree as you, but I totally know what you are talking about! Some asshat wanted to throw me on Abilify a couple years ago. I spent thousands in my confusion as to what to do about my sadness and anxiety. I couldn't get any answers from anyone. Abilify?!?!?! Wtf. Some fuck wanted to put me on that? For what?

My therapist told me I needed to trust the doctor, as he was an "Anxiety Management EXPERT" -- as my shrink put it. I said, I ain't taking no fucking antipsychotic. Then they'd all berate me because I like to drink beer and hang out with others and shoot the shit with people. So the therapist had me come down on a special Saturday session where he would hypnotize me, ostensibly to calm me down enough to ingest my first Abilify tab. He tried his best, but in the end, I said fuck no! Then the psychiatrist prescribed me lorazepam in order to calm down enough to take this Abilify. Lorazepam was awful, it made me even more nervous. Then he sent me to some other guy who prescribed me citalopram and again had to berate me about drinking beer. I offer up the fact that I drink beer to these docs voluntarily, then they latch onto it and use it as their way in. I've never met a mental health practitioner that I trust, ever. And I am done with them.

And then one must deal with family and friends who believe the doctor always knows best and that it is you who's judgment is clouded. Everybody wants the best for you, they say. No, what they want is for the problem you have to go away, so they get on with their problems. They don't understand hyper-sensitive people. They don't like us. Having a sensitivity to others, nature, the nature of the universe is a DISEASE! Time to become more productive! More responsible!

They don't hear you when you say that you think your symptoms are probably due to how much the world makes you sad, that you don't want war, that you believe in unconditional love etc. All of it, a disease that can be treated.

82_28 wrote:Good fucking god 4thBase! Not to the degree as you, but I totally know what you are talking about! Some asshat wanted to throw me on Abilify a couple years ago. I spent thousands in my confusion as to what to do about my sadness and anxiety. I couldn't get any answers from anyone. Abilify?!?!?! Wtf. Some fuck wanted to put me on that? For what?

My therapist told me I needed to trust the doctor, as he was an "Anxiety Management EXPERT" -- as my shrink put it. I said, I ain't taking no fucking antipsychotic. Then they'd all berate me because I like to drink beer and hang out with others and shoot the shit with people. So the therapist had me come down on a special Saturday session where he would hypnotize me, ostensibly to calm me down enough to ingest my first Abilify tab. He tried his best, but in the end, I said fuck no! Then the psychiatrist prescribed me lorazepam in order to calm down enough to take this Abilify. Lorazepam was awful, it made me even more nervous. Then he sent me to some other guy who prescribed me citalopram and again had to berate me about drinking beer. I offer up the fact that I drink beer to these docs voluntarily, then they latch onto it and use it as their way in. I've never met a mental health practitioner that I trust, ever. And I am done with them.

And then one must deal with family and friends who believe the doctor always knows best and that it is you who's judgment is clouded. Everybody wants the best for you, they say. No, what they want is for the problem you have to go away, so they get on with their problems. They don't understand hyper-sensitive people. They don't like us. Having a sensitivity to others, nature, the nature of the universe is a DISEASE! Time to become more productive! More responsible!

They don't hear you when you say that you think your symptoms are probably due to how much the world makes you sad, that you don't want war, that you believe in unconditional love etc. All of it, a disease that can be treated.

Well, my friend, you certainly do know what it's like, more or less. Tu sabe que pasa.

Abilify is a hell of a drug. I was prescribed -- correction: I was LEGALLY COERCED to take a cocktail of Lamictil and Abilify, and near the end of my "stay" I asked Mao if I could go without one drug or the other, and he told me absolutely, all I needed was to stay on the Abilify, and it'll kill two birds with one pill. Ha. More like nearly kill THIS ONE BIRD [points thumbs at self]. One of the truly breathtaking ironies of the whole experience was that I was misdiagnosed with delusions of grandeur, regarding for example my "claim" (and I'd LOVE to be proven wrong about this) that I am quite possibly the world's premier interpreter of Infinite Jest, the undisputed intercontinental heavyweight champion of Infinite Jest understanding -- but, lol, only undisputed because I'm also utterly unacknowledged by anyone else as such. I don't mind. But now: Who was it that told me I was grandiosely deluded? A man who thinks of himself so highly, like he's a demi-god, that he raped my freedom and forced on me seriously mind-and-personality-altering drugs after listening to me (or rather, making dead-souled eye contact with me and paying just enough attention to my words to mentally flip through the DSM, looking for whatever disease it is that I surely have, because, well, why else would I be there?) for a grand total of 15 minutes. So now, whose delusion of grandeur is more disturbing, and more dangerous to other humans? Trick question, because I wasn't suffering from delusions of grandeur -- well, at least not the ones THEY had identified, lol. I was suffering from grandeur, is more like it. Again though, what is more grandiose: Thinking you're the only person in the world who understands key parts of one of the greatest novels ever written? Or telling that person that he cannot possibly be what he thinks he might be, despite having never read a single fucking page of the book or consulting anyone else who had? I'm going to go with the latter, especially since it ultimately led to that person being misprescribed a heavy-fucking-duty anti-psychotic, which he did (for the record!) give a full month to run its course, just in case it was a good idea to try cleansing the mind of toxoplasma, which anti-psychotics are believed to do (LOL...but for real, that's the only reason why I stuck with it that long, long enough to let it kick in -- I wasn't, like, court-ordered to remain on it, it was a choice), and after the one month that person found himself crouching on the floor of his 3rd floor apartment porch whenever he had a cigarette, because out of nowhere he started getting the feeling that he might -- not the desire to, however, NEVER that, EVER -- jump over the fucking railing at any moment. Uncontrollable and unwanted flashes of suicidal ideation is one of those nasty little side effects in the fine print on Abilify literature. Basically, whether they knew it or not, these fucks -- especially that motherfucker Mao -- tried to kill me. It got to the point where -- and people who know my history on this site will really, really enjoy this -- I called up the Church of Scientology for legal counsel. I didn't know any other organization that had a grudge against psychiatry! (But then I got a voice mail from their "legal department", and the dude who left the message was seriously like totally fucking insane, like he'd just stepped out of one of those "detoxifying" saunas where they overdose you with niacin or whatever.) Anyway: Good times! Amor fati!

You were gone? I remember you saying something about leaving but I didn't think you actually did. And I recommend Lenny Lapon's Mass Murderers in White Coats, he's from the psychiatric patients liberation movement.

FourthBase, I'm so glad you're free again. And so appalled at what was done to you that it's taken me a little while to be able to respond to your post. When I was very young, an abuser (not sure who) used the threat of my being locked up in Torrance Mental Hospital in Blairsville PA to keep me silent and compliant. It worked for over 50 years.

And FWIW, I agree with you about social networking sites being relatively harmless in the greater scheme of things. I'm here to tell ya that the Really Bad Guys can find you in so many, many other ways if they've a mind to...So if you fall victim to that nasty Paralyzing Paranoia and your new fall wardrobe is tending toward tin foil, well, you're going to miss out on some of the very things that make Life bearable for folks like us. Like connecting with neat new people and reconnecting with folks you've known but with whom you've lost touch.

Welcome back.

LilyPat

Thank you LilyPat! Amen, to everything you said.

And thank you to anyone else who has sludged their way or will sludge their way through the unbroken blocks of ceaseless communication above. For what it's worth, I write like that mostly because I think like that. (I don't know any other way to think, actually.) I take almost zero time to revise and re-format my thoughts because 1. lately I haven't had the time, and also 2. because as a secondary bonus to me, the potential difficulty of reading my run-on paragraphs and parathetical (edit: on second thought, I like that misspelling...parathetical...like, para + thesis, or something) asides forces people to more slowly (and hence, carefully) read me and hopefully therefore to better understand me. That's a little trick I learned from Dave Wallace, but it's also just how I am and how I need to be right now.

...psychiatrists are deeply scary people....even if they have moved on from the old ice-pick inserted behind the eye-ball routine...