Will this lead me out of the valley of the shadow?

This is one of those times when I want to write my way out of a maze that I can barely comprehend. Having scraped through a near-death experience a year  and a half ago, and still learning to deal with compromised energy and diminished physical ability, I find that my mind is jumping back in time in a way I don't want or need, but somehow can't stop. My way out or through every difficulty I've ever had (and I have had some doozies) is to write about it. Though I was able to exorcise a couple of dire spirits that would not leave me alone, I am still left with Glen Allen, a man I never met and never knew, and whose writings about alcoholism and mental illness enthralled me then - but they disturb me now, and I can't leave it alone - or it won't leave ME alone.

I see in now. I see deeper. I am not fooled. Being one myself, I know all the writer's tricks: writing that calls attention to itself, writing that postures, and - most of all - reporting (for isn't all writing actually just reporting, especially the kind of bittersweet poetry Glen could produce at will?). I have read and re-read Glen's harrowing report on his own life and struggles with what we so delicately call, nowadays, his "mental health". In our long correspondence, we spoke mainly of alcohol addiction and bipolar disorder, but when I re-read much of what he wrote, all those self-revealing pieces from a man who seemed almost insanely private, I can see or feel conflicting threads: the need to tell the story, the need to put a good face on it, the need to open a vein in front of everyone while still  hiding out behind that facade of almost pathological shyness and introversion.

I keep thinking of this piece he wrote that appeared in a newspaper in 1999, then was reprinted when he committed suicide in 2005. At the time I felt shock - and  compassion - and I still do - but also considerable horror. I realize now that what he suffered  from could not have been bipolar disorder alone. The symptoms he speaks of, the hallucinations, the delusions, the paranoia and the voices in his head - these are the province of schizophrenia, the disease that killed my brother Arthur when he was only 30 years old. 

I used to think I could "see" schizophrenia, not just in a person but in a photograph, that "look", removed, remote, a person dwelling in an inner world that has little or nothing to do with what we roughly agree on as "reality". When I look at early photos of Glen, I see it, that look, and I realize that he didn't  stand a chance - it was going to get him in the end.

And it did. But here I sit more than twenty years after his death - not exactly in a psychiatric crisis (for once), but in a different kind of existential turn, a place of stopping, of saying, "Am I going to survive?" Will my body make the decision for me?

So I have thought of a way to try to exorcise this haunting, this obsession (call it what it is!) that I don't even want to be experiencing. Can I do this? I want to be ruthless here, I want to be a reporter, and see if I can get at this thing by offering my running commentary. It's one of the most bizarre writing projects I've ever undertaken, but why am I still here after my own sometimes monstrous experiences, except for that voracious need to FIND OUT?

I need to lay this man to rest, and as with poor Bohdan and Gabor Mate, I may need to do a sort of psychic surgery. Will it work? Can I even begin to find out  unless I go ahead and do  it?

So here is his harrowing memoir of mental illness and the equally harrowing treatments he endured to try to regain his health and his sanity, a war he ultimately lost. I don't want to be cruel here, but I have to get AT this at last, and tryto get to the truth of how I really feel. 

I decided to include the original images from my initial post on Glen's travails, partly as illustrations, but mostly to break up the text and make it easier to read.

The anesthetist, head swathed in a surgeon's fez, plunges the needle in a ready vein and leans over and says, "You'll smell the smell of garlic and then you'll be out."

And out I am in this fourth of a series of eight shock treatments on the psychiatric wing of the Saint John Regional Hospital. While I'm unconscious, a nurse places two electrodes on my skull and the attending psychiatrist flips a switch, sending a powerful current of electricity into the addled spheres of my brain.

OK then - this is Frankenstein territory! A ready vein? Electrodes on my skull?Flips a switch? Even the "out I am" is macabre in some way - "I'm dead now", it seems to say. Electrodes, currents of electricity - all that's missing is that howling cry, "It's alive! It's ALIVE!"

Odd as it may seem - odd because no one really knows why it works - I awake feeling refreshed in the recovery room where I am asked my name, the date, where I am. I not only answer the questions in rapid order but I note the clarity of the vivid colours all around, the pleasant ticking of a clock hung on the wall, the murmur of friendly voices. 

Note from someone who has been there: a sudden boost out of a very deep depression is dangerous as hell, which is why I approach the subject of ECT with a degree of horror. Suddenly from the depths, colors spring to life, birds are twittering, and everything is beautiful again. Not so fast - the same thing happened to me, when I was ascending the most harrowing part of my worst manic episode - all the world was beautiful, it was all like a Disney cartoon surrounding me, birds were twittering and the sun was shining and colors looked unnaturally  bright - but those  supernatural sounds and colors were more dangerous than I ever realized.

I am climbing out of the pit of suicidal despair that sent me to the hospital - the fifth stay in hospital in three provinces in two years - in the first place. And for the first time in a long time, I feel healthy and I tell myself that this is how other people, untroubled by the mania or depression that has come out of the dark closet of my mind every decade for the last 40 years, must feel most of the time.

This is a common one. I've seen it again and again, even in that louse Gabor Mate, taking meds for his ADHD for the first time and swearing this is what everyone else feels like all the time. It's not true, we can't jump inside someone else's head, not even an artist with words who lays his soul bare in a way I now see is frankly dangerous. And this "every decade" thing is a misnomer - he's putting more space between episodes to try to make it palatable to his readers, or to himself.

Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), as it is properly known, is the treatment of last resort for some psychiatric afflictions, notably depression, and I haven't experienced it for 44 years. A frightened and deeply depressed boy of 15 - by far the worst time in my life - I was given a series of treatments without the benefit of anesthesia and while I don't remember much beyond that first rude shock I felt well for 10 years, I left home and enjoyed a successful career in the construction industry
from the far North to California until this strange and cruel malady caught up with me once again.

Some things stand out. More minimizing:  every ten years? When you continue to read this story, you realize he never had anything like this length of remission,  trying to frantically outrun himself as he literally moved all over the world and kept finding himself there, lethal wounds and all. His work history must have been appallling. That "worst time in my life" likely refers to the kind of schizophrenia that commonly manifests in young adulthood. I am all too  familiar with it, watching my brother diminish from a charming young man with a bizarre sense of humor to a shambling wreck barely able to keep his  shoelaces tied.

And that "successful career in the construction industry" was, to put it more bluntly, manual labor. He dug ditches for ten years, during which time even darker things happened to  him which I will comment on later.

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it is now called in these days of political correctness, touches the lives of one of every 100 New Brunswickers. It is an often devastating malaise that can strike without warning, rendering its victims subject, initially, to inexplicable "highs" that can spin out of control. First comes "hypomania" - a time of great busyness and well-being and then follows full-blown mania when the afflicted persons will make great plans, sleep not at all, feel a sense
of grandiosity, spend wildly and travel widely.

OK Glen, we know you're a reporter and there's no doubt that  this is an example of good reporting. But it's your own entrails you're reporting on here. It's  almost as if you've taken this out of a textbook. But what comes next is hardly by the book.

It can also be a time of delusion or even hallucination (hearing,
seeing or smelling things that aren't there) marked by extreme irritation with family or friends who cannot share this experience. This condition leads the manic persons to believe that what they are doing is absolutely correct. They may, as I have done in the past, write floridly mad letters to everyone but the Queen simply because it seems necessary to alert the world to some clear and present danger, again the right thing to do.

I'd say yes, except no. Bipolar disorder almost never pushes the brain to these extremes. I'm not saying it wasn't present - but in spite of what almost everyone seems to think, it's NOT "either-or" with psychiatric diagnoses. Human beings are complicated, mental health ebbs and flows, and yes, you CAN have any number of overlapping conditions that can blend and separate. But I think I know what I am seeing here.

But mania can go well beyond this epistolary extravagance. Earlier this year, in the grip of mania and hospitalized in Montreal, I saw my father - dead, lo these 35 years - in elevators and there was a constant jabber of voices in my ear, one of them a basso profundo saying over and over again with astonishing clarity in Chilean Spanish, "Los pobres son
dijes" (The poor are good). Prior to this, I nurtured the idea - the same fevered idea I had had the year before - that I had to travel to Northern Alberta's Peace River country to complete a novel my father had written decades ago - one in which the heroine and her children seek tomake a new home there but never actually arrive. I had hitched a ride with a trucker headed for Calgary. He insisted I leave his company
somewhere south of North Bay, Ont., and get psychiatric help. ("You're out of it, man," I recall him saying as he reached over and opened the passenger door.)

This isn't a joke, but it's almost presented as a funny story,  the  kind of tale you hear at AA meetings and support groups for the mentally ill.  And that brings us to Glen's absolute obsession with his father, Ralph Allen, then a well-known magazine editor who has been largely forgotten, along with that other obsolete Canadian institution, Peter Gzowski. Glen kept referring to his father obsessively in his letters, though he hated the man or at least felt the man hated him. 

Complete a novel his father wrote? When, where? How do you "complete a novel" anyway? I've written five (well, five and a half), published three, and I cannot imagine trying to complete anyone else's unfinished thoughts. And I don't think his father wrote novels, none that was ever published anyway. Was he trying to correct that situation or what?

I made my way to Montreal where I ended up in St. Luc Hospital and later a halfway house where a barrage of drugs including lithium established a calmer state of mind. After two months of recuperation, I returned to Saint John where my truly enlightened employer gave me yet another chance to ply my trade as a reporter. But within weeks, mania had come
full circle: its sinister cousin, clinical depression had set in. I felt a blackness of mood, a sense of dread and despair and a longing to end my hopeless life I hadn't felt since an earlier suicide attempt and once more entered the hospital where, this time, ECT was the indicated treatment.

I have to say now, if ECT is still used at all, it should be an absolute last resort, and my feeling is that it is a dangerous practice which can briefly propel a depressed person straight upward - it can act as a sort of catapult, bringing all that Disney goodness back for a brief time. But the brain was never meant to receive those mysterious ("no one knows how this works") Frankensteinian shocks. If there is any benefit at all, the returns are ever-diminishing with repetition. Carrie Fisher is an example of  a celebrity whose brain was basically turned to jelly with multiple rounds of ECT, eventually leading to her death by drug overdose -  one of those cases where they  found 15 different drugs in her system at once.

Looking back on it all now, I might have known something was amiss when I was yet a small child. My father was off at war and my saintly mother, I was convinced in my five-year-old mind, was a German spy. When that war ended and the Cold War began, I was sure that the Soviet Union, our latest enemy, would invade the leafy precincts of my Toronto neighbourhood. I remember staring at the Disney decals on my bedroom wall and believing that taken together they were a bizarre scroll of destiny: the world would end in fire.

Shortly after that, my parents split up and I was seized with a sense of power - perhaps my first "manic" episode - when I became their go-between. Each would have me memorize messages for the other and when my father - a man deeply hurt by the war - came to pick me up for Sunday outings in his 1947 navy Pontiac, I would do my best to heal the breach, subtly altering their second-hand messages so as to ensure that each
knew the other was loved and deeply missed. In hindsight, it was the wrong course to take. They lived together in a stormy alcoholic marriage until both died of cancer in their mid-fifties.

I can't begin to wrap my head around the kind of child  abuse that was going on here, and I have other ideas about what happened to Glen when he was 15 years old and working with a crew of drunken men in their 30s on a remote Northern highway. He was, to put it bluntly, a sitting duck, and the sexual assault I am virtually certain he endured rendered his innate fragility into something that was eventually terminal. But somehow he took  this unmitigated horror and transformed it into a ten-year "successful career in the construction industry". And to think of an adolescent boy entertaining such terrifying thoughts and fears is harrowing, and far beyond any description of bipolar disorder I have ever seen.

But once this feat of wishful thinking was accomplished, I fell into the deepest of depressions, a malaise that was to last for years. Alone in my room for days at a time, I wept incessantly and wished for release. One desperate day, I cut across a wrist with a broken bottle and an alert doctor in a hospital emergency ward recognized the act for what itwas, a cry for help, and recommended to my bewildered mother that my
mental state be assessed. My parents shared society's distaste for anything that smacked of mental illness and had a deeply felt distrust of mental-health practitioners. They had already taken me out of school, read the angry and despairing poems I had fixed to my wall; they had watched as I refused food and the attentions of my friends, but they were reluctant to place me in the hands of the shrinks as if once there, there

would be no turning back. But there was no alternative: I was taken to see the good Dr. Grant who clapped me in hospital and after rest and conventional therapies of the day failed, suggested ECT.

And so it went. I would have eight or nine trouble-free years until the monster reappeared and I would be swept up in the rising and falling tide of mood. Indeed, in the sixties I spent time in a hospital in Chicago and 10 years later in Montreal, I jumped in front of a moving bus. In the mid-eighties, a full two years were blighted by bipolar illness. That was a time of sheer terror and misadventure. Among other things, I had concluded that the big banks were to blame for all of society's ills. I hired a video camera crew and forayed into one of the major bank's
headquarters in downtown Montreal, shooting footage of executives at their desks. I was also convinced at one point that the Mafia was after me.

Schizophrenia, friends. Not just bipolar. This was grave mental illness of the most intractible sort. And the "eight or nine trouble-free years" is, to put it bluntly, bullshit. It's the kind of minimizing we do when we need to convince ourselves it's not REALLY that bad. 

But it is. It's worse than that. It kills.

Then came last year and this - two botched trips out West, time in a hospital in Thunder Bay, then Montreal and three stays in the facility in Saint John, one of them in a coma following a suicide attempt.

This is hardly an illness that moves out of the way for a decade, then lands in again like a hurricane out of nowhere. This is a horror show, an ordeal that I can barely wrap my head around. 

And all that time, the tone, the even reporter's tone that seems oddly detached and unemotional, creeps me out in a way I can't even describe.

All this time, all through these years I had been told by professionals that I had to take medication - namely, lithium - to ward off the depredations of an illness that is of the brain, not of the mind, an illness that is largely due to faulty genes and biochemistry being grievously out of whack.

But for years, especially when I felt well, I denied to myself and to the world at large that I had bipolar disorder. I wanted badly to be like other people, even given the fact that members of my immediate family had been stricken in the same way resulting in hospitalizations and suicide.

Instead of taking my pills, I would attempt to cope in other ways. Sadly, until the bottom fell out of my world in 1984, I drank heavily, just as my father had done before me. I also moved constantly. I always felt better for a time when I changed location. I have lived and worked in England, Italy, Algeria, three American states and seven Canadian
provinces. After I married, I trucked my little family around, bag and baggage, as far afield as Chile and China.

Until I read this account, I had no idea just how "restless, irritable and discontented" Glen really was (to use AA parlance). This is extreme - incessant moving, ending in hospital here and there and everywhere. And in my experience, it's actually very hard to get yourself admitted to a psych ward. Usually, I was sent home to cope with my misery alone, with no support at all. But this kind of chaos seems to imply extremes, even the kinds of brushes with the law that Geoff Pevere wrote about, or at least being so deeply sunk that hospitalization is the only recourse.

.

But there were no cures, only palliatives. One of them - alcohol - was ruinous. As for travel...well, as someone wiser once said, when you get off the bus you're always there waiting for yourself. Depression, my lone outrider, would inevitably close in just as a ship spotted as a tiny smudge on the horizon inevitably comes to shore, looming larger than life itself.

Manic depression is a mood disorder as opposed to schizophrenia, which is a disorder of the thought process itself. In it, there is a disruption of a person's normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness. The moods of manic depression include at one end, utter melancholy, passivity and fatigue and thoughts of suicide and at the other, elation,
grandiosity, agitation and, when extreme, delusions and hallucinations. Delusions can include grandiose beliefs: a person may think she or he has special talents or is related to a special person. A manic might also believe that he or she is the subject of whispers of friends and strangers alike, or that Lloyd Robertson is sending special messages during
his newscast. Hallucinations are usually imagined sights or sounds. Auditory hallucinations are more common (although all senses may be affected) and may have a religious overtone, such as the voice of God or angels and may sound like commands.

OK then Glen, you're denying again, and you just finished telling us how  chaotic your thoughts were and how  extreme your delusions were. These were thoughts, not just  feelings, and you acted on them. The voice of God or angels? That's schizophrenia. I don't know if he was never diagnosed, or was just underdiagnosed, or if it was just too much for him to bear to face the possibility.

Most people go through many more bouts of depression than mania, thoug to be considered "bipolar" a person must have gone through at least one manic episode. For some, it is a chronic illness that becomes more pronounced with age but a manic depressive typically goes through long periods of remission in his or her life. A person may be relatively
symptom-free with only mild mood swings for years, then for any number of reasons (the primary one being discontinuing prescribed medication) the cycle returns.

There are manic depressives who experience only one cycle in their lives and others in whom the illness disappears at an early age. But complicating things is the fact that depression and mania can exist at the same time. As writers Diane and Lisa Berger state in their excellent primer on manic depression called We Heard the Angels of Madness, the term "bipolar disorder" deceives because the mania and depression "do not
occur in even opposition. It is not like the North Pole and the South Pole; instead, it more closely resembles two points on the equator. They're side by side, sharing a border and overlapping.

Researchers don't yet have a definitive cause of manic depression but they do know that it runs in families and that defective genes must, in part, be at fault.

Reporting, reporting. I don't  know how he does this, scribbling on a pad and then almost casually opening his guts. It's very strange, very disturbing to me. I see what he was doing here, but these kinds of raw and horrifying revelations seem in total opposition to how private the man was - actually, almost pathologically shy and introverted, finding it hard to even talk to another person. He often mentioned in his letters that he would literally go days without speaking to anyone at all.

But all that said, why tell this tawdry story at all? I have lost all
appetite for the confessional and take no pleasure in this exercise. But there are two points I would like to make in passing. One relates to stigma. The mentally ill, however much society has changed in recent years, are prey to an abundance of myth and misinformation that is, quite simply, astonishing.

Victims of major mental illness - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and clinical depression - are still often shunned and tucked away, even though their maladies, most experts would now agree, are physical in nature, just like diabetes or heart disease. And the most serious of these diseases, schizophrenia, has disabled many of the 300,000 Canadians affected by it, many of them young people in their prime. They are our sons
and daughters, wives and husbands, our neighbours and we have all too often tended to see them as a tribe apart, spoken of in whispers. They are no more "violent" than the population at large and their illnesses are, for the most part, episodic in nature. Most enjoy great islands - even archipelagos - of calm and productivity between short-lived bouts of illness. And they are much with us: one of five New Brunswickers, at some point in their lives will, like me, go beyond the brink and need
the attentions of the mental-health-care system.

The other point worth making is that there is help out there. Each of 13 regions in the province has a community mental-health-care centre staffed by a psychiatrist or two, nurses, social workers and psychologists. There are problems: there is a dire shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists and public money is short indeed for the chronically ill. But for the most part, the work of this corps of professionals is largely unsung. While they may be too few for the demands placed upon them,
in my experience - a view confirmed recently by an Ontario study - New Brunswick has one of the best mental health-care systems in the nation.

Meanwhile I have come through once again feel eminently sane. If the demons come calling again it won't be for many years hence. I have hope, I have met some interesting people along the way and am very glad to be alive.

Many years hence? Within five, he would be dead from all this. He simply could not endure the chaos any more, or the "treatments" that likely contributed to his eventual death, which was also, not coincidentally, very public. The police had to hunt for him until they found his frozen body beside the railroad tracks. Hospitalized in Toronto, he had taken an overdose and wandered off - and the amount of planning this must have taken while on suicide watch is headspinning. He meant business this time.

But his safe reporting tone begins to seem like a form of whistling in the dark, while the bare facts scream in the background.  Glad to be alive? I don't think his respite lasted long at all, and having jolts of electricity fired through your brain seems like an extreme way to get a little peace.

For these blessings I thank the God of my understanding. Without Him by my side would I have been here to tell this sometimes sorry tale? 

He refers to it as a "sorry tale" and even uses the word "tawdry", but this is at odds with his insistence that mental illness not be stigmatized and that he feels no shame in it. He did. I read it in his letters. I don't blame him, I felt the same way about my own disasters, but this stepping away from it is an eerie form of distancing that ultimately isn't helpful at all.

Was there help  for Glen? His own denial was one of the obstacles, though it's kind of understandable given how extreme his case was. One of his colleagues mentioned that it was remarkable "how long he was able to park that pain". True, it was heroic in a sense, but the denial that pushes reality away eventually comes around and bites you in the ass. 

He got sicker and sicker, the treatments more and more desperate, and they continued to damage the part of his  brain that might have ultimately saved him, had there been something - anything -  that would have actually helped him. He mentions a coma, but there was a near-drowning, a stroke, and losing his ability to write, the one thing that kept his personality (though fractured) in a semblance of one piece.We still throw drugs at mental illness, we still shock the brain like  those cattle prods used to humanely kill livestock. But does it actually help, or just shove the person back on their feet for another endless, meaningless trudge?

So what is the answer? There isn't one, and I want to put all this in the past. I have no idea if this is going to help  me or not. I have no idea if I have ten years left to live or ten months, and I don't  want any of that time blighted by depression or mania. But trying to put a good face on it, while it seems brave, ultimately works against you. 

I read about a very grotesque suicide once in a memoir written by a psychiatrist. Another doctor he knew committed suicide literally by doing surgery on himself - injecting local anaesthetic in his neck, making an incision in his own throat with a scalpel, and tying off the jugular vein with surgical skill. His last therapeutic act. Freezing to death by the railroad tracks is horrifying, and I can't and won't minimize the horror of it. No, I have to finally let Glen go, the way I had to let my dear brother go. 

Whatever the quality of it, I have more living to do. I am not finished yet, and I hope mental illness does not swallow me the way it did Glen. But it's beyond ironic that the coping devices we resort to (cool-headed reporting on horrifying situations) can work against real recovery. Black is black, and calling it white or even grey does not alter the reality of tbe total absence of light.

CODA. It's the next day, and I have more thoughts that are less charitable. Unfortunately, I left out the worst part. He told me in a letter that he lived with a woman for 18 months, fathered a child with her, then abandoned both of them in  the middle of the night, never to return. He sneaked out with his belongings in a garbage bag. The baby was six months old. This happened during one of his "well" periods. 

Much as I want to feel compassion here, I just don't. Abandoning a baby is unforgiveable, and I have no idea why I was willing to let it go by for so long. The so-called avuncular good guy Peter Gzowski also had a “secret son”, whom he paid off to keep his mouth shut. Glen’s daughter no doubt had “abandonment issues” – how could she not? – then had to endure his  very public suicide many years later. Due to his status as an "award-winning Canadian journalist", reporters even asked her how she felt about all this, as if they didn't know. But what a great start to your life. No matter how rough Glen's childhood was, his parents didn't walk out on him as if he never existed. 

But his version of events was all very public, veering between too much information and a dishonest rewrite of the truth.  That is the point. He kept doing this over and over again, true confessions that were sometimes extreme and unnecessary (do we really need to hear about the "ready vein", the needle plunging in, the electrodes on his skull?), even though he was supposedly this shy, sensitive soul who hated the “confessional”. The exact same phrase appeared in his Morningside followup, in which he admitted he wasn’t staying sober at all.  But why did he keep doing this? Was it really for the public good? It was a play for sympathy, even  pity, and a compulsive need to call attention to himself in the worst possible way.

But to me, the worst of it is the hypocrisy - saying one thing very publicly, but obviously not meaning it, or at least never able to face it. And I can tolerate just about anything in a person except this. Hypocrites do not and never have deserved my sympathy, no matter how much they spill their guts and beg for attention and forgiveness. Some things truly are beyond forgiveness -  and running out on a child you have fathered and pretending she never existed is far past the limits of my compassion.

Ryan is 20 years old (but doesn't look a day over 20 months!)

 

 

Violin

 

Falling into amber,

a buzzing blur of

honey and blonde,

 

strings as veins, a coursing, rush of taut

bliss, stretched across a

hollow core

of yearning:    Heart-bulb

                           lush

will vibrate as  /  hips of wood

shine like patient still eyes

 

and ochre sounds tease, tug

at hunger, reach, reach.

Fingers and strings kiss and

come apart, kiss and come apart,

The frail box eems in a subtle

pullulation, shy as a girl, lush as a

wild                           and

   /      whiff of mink:/all in a stillness

the bow sighs, sighs like a deep

diver, soughing the life in

this creature of tree, this female

fleshed of the organs of nature –

 

and all nature, all in a murmur

of intimate pain,

                           hewn

draws from this/heart of nothing

(this wood-held dusk, this

stirred scent of stored petals

this great warm handful of love)

a shining:  a chiming, a brining,

a pool of dark wine

spilled from the lustre of flowing eyes,

a seeing, a speaking, this songswept

woman of wood.

 

- Margaret Gunning

Why the past isn't such a great place to live

 

How can I justify, or even describe, the things that won’t leave my head, even though I fervently wish they would?

And people. Don’t let’s get started – people who died more than twenty years ago? Why do they come into my head now? Is it because I  brushed scarily close  to death myself, just over a year ago, and realize my time may be shorter than I ever expected? 

Can I even go there?

How many deaths, how many realizations? Bohdan, my beloved violin teacher, showed a side of himself to me that I was reluctant to see, but recognized nonetheless. He was what we would nowadays call “inappropriate”. At the end of our lessons (many years ago when the awareness wasn't there yet), he always hugged me, but his hugs were enveloping, almost suffocating, and they went on forever. I honestly wondered if his wife was going to burst through the door (she owned the music store where he was a teacher) and discover us. He talked endlessly about “opening chakras”, but it got especially problematic when he went on and on about “genital chakras” and how women needed to masturbate more. Orgasms would cure anything! This verges on cult talk, reminding me of the Maharishi groping women before the Beatles blew the whistle on him.

But looking back at the last time I saw him, a year before his death, I realize now he had fallen pretty far and was living inside himself. His wife had died, though he refused to admit it (he said there was no death, which I'm having a hard time believing, these days). Grief had worn him down, and he seemed to have lost his purpose, his  joie de vivre. 

But there was more - I couldn't look  away from things that I used to  try to ignore. I saw someone who casually stepped on women's boundaries, and it made me uncomfortable. I was kind of ashamed to admit to myself that he creeped me out, and I did not want to meet with him again. No  doubt I was able to cut him more slack all those years ago. But you can’t turn back insight – it’s yours forever, and it changes you on a molecular level.

Who else am I finally recognizing as "inappropriate"?  Do I HAVE to go into Gabor Mate again? I don’t, but for  some weird reason he won’t leave my head. I don’t even like the man, find him cold and dismissive, but it’s just possible that way back in 2005 (yes! THAT long ago), we “had” something, some sort of connection that mattered. A lot of it was through music. But didn’t  that end a long  time ago, decades? And what about the betrayal: not only stealing some of my ideas and repeating them uncredited in one of his books, but describing me in the same book (seriously, after our so-called friendship in which I shared a lot of sensitive stuff), as “a manic-depressive with a long history of alcoholism. who still attends AA meetings after 15 years.”  Obviously  describing an emotional cripple in the iron lung of a 12-step program. So much for mutual admiration. He not only pitied me, but shoved me into a category in which he felt comfortably distant (diagnosing and treating addicts on the notorious downtown eastside, even having affairs with several of them - yes, he did that, and got away with it).

 Jesus.

Then there is poor Glen, and why can’t I keep him buried? The way he died was so macabre and shocking that I can’t compare it to anything or anyone else. I understand his exit, I see why he couldn’t go on, he had careened in the extremes of bipolar illness for 65 years and was sucked dry. There was a police report filed after he escaped from  the psychiatric ward, took a bottle of pills and washed it down with beer, then waited to pass out and freeze to death beside the railroad tracks. The police report described him as 6’2’ and 150 pounds. Glen had always been a big guy, stocky and round-faced, but in the most recent photo of him he  looked like  someone's ghost, not even his own, with an eerie smile  and glazed eyes, and a front  tooth knocked out. 

No one should have to  die like this, but macabre as it was, there was a dark poetry in it. Glen had struggled so hard and had so  many suicide attempts that he had spent time in a coma and had brain damage, then had a stroke. His gift with words was diminishing, and that may have been the final straw.

But TWENTY years ago – what is this? I try to live in the now, I try to savor the moment, and most days I  manage at least a semblance of it. But meantime, there is all this other  stuff rattling around. Insanely, I have thought of contacting Gabor – I even tried to before that disastrous Prince Harry debacle, but if he ever saw it he never responded. Is it something to do with what was going on with me 20 years ago?

It was, mostly, horrible, but eventually did lead to a huge  change of direction, a massive shift, and more happiness than I had ever thought possible  through the birth of my grandchildren – one born a year for four years. I was in Grandma heaven, and young enough – only 50 – to get down on the floor with them, make glorious messes, take part in hilarious chasing games. I got to be a child  again, only I did it right this time. I was the happy child I never got to be.

Now they’re all grown up, and I’m left at another crossroads. So what does my brain do? Go backwards? Maybe that’s it - . I don't  seem to have a forwards right now, so I just live in the day. Not a bad deal, but how long can it go on? I wonder if there is another epiphany left in me. The things that fed me for so  long are becoming  frustrating and inadequate. What’s next?

My Gabor-rant: when Dr. Mate stole my stuff

I found this letter (written in 2008) deep in the files, and I doubt that I ever sent it to Gabor, but I needed to write it  at the time, and I do think there are some good insights in it. But it's a cautionary tale about guru-ism in general, and the fundamental dishonesty of these lofty figures in particular. I don't remember the specific quote he stole from me, but it's the theft that counts. And his disrespect of those people who are trying to recover frankly revolted me in someone who is supposed to be an addictions specialist (read: guru) and is often described as "world-famous". No thanks, Gabor - I'd rather be happy. 

Though you have made a joke out of stealing my “white gloves” phrase, it has turned out to be quite pivotal (has it not?) in differentiating your addictive behaviour from that of your patients. Seeing it in an unfinished manuscript was one thing, but seeing it in print in your book (i.e., on public display) gave me the unpleasant feeling that I had been ripped off.

This wasn’t just a couple of neutral words but a metaphor, and worlds have turned on metaphor. It gave me the feeling you thought you could harvest my remarks and incorporate them, that it was all fair game. If you were going to use it, you should have asked me directly or at least quoted me anonymously, and not taken credit for it yourself.  No writer should steal from another writer, ever, nor make light of it anywhere, especially not in such a public venue as the media.

 Hearing you talk about it on CBC didn’t fix the problem, nor did it make me any less uncomfortable as you announced, “this is who I shamelessly stole it from” (then giving my real name).  It’s as if you think it’s OK, as long as you’re contrite about it on national radio. But CBC isn’t the place for this sort of  admission.

 You could have avoided all this unpleasantness if you had written or phoned me and said, “Margaret, I’m sorry I ripped off your line” (that is, if you really were sorry).  The bizarre public way you went about it (which could be interpreted as “look who I made a fool of”, or as a public demonstration of your conscience) makes me wonder if you have any sense of boundaries, or any respect for me at all. 

 In the AA chapter of your book (and it also offended me, a 12-step veteran, that you felt entitled to paraphrase and interpret the 12 steps after only one meeting), you offered a description of me. At least, I think it was me, through some sort of distorting lens: “A manic-depressive with a long history of alcoholism, she’s been attending for fifteen years.”

 Nowhere in this rather depressing description do I see the words “sober” or “recovering”. In seventeen years, I have never had a relapse. I drank for twenty years, so my recovery will soon catch up: as of now, I have been sober nearly 1/3 of my life.  Yes, I do have a long history, but of what? Can you guess?

 But you wouldn’t know that from your description of me. You can “attend” meetings for decades and not experience a day of sobriety, but from the beginning I have worked extremely hard, both to maintain my sobriety and to understand and change the self-defeating thinking and behaviour that triggered my drinking. I don’t think I would have stayed sober this long if it hadn’t worked.

 But that’s not what it says in your book.

 Since the general public doesn’t have a clue about AA, they tend to think it’s attended only by practicing alcoholics (perhaps even the skid row type – believe me, I’ve heard a lot of comments) who are too weak to do it on their own.  If by some chance they do succeed, they are “former alcoholics”, as if the addiction has been “conquered” or overcome by sheer force of will.  Then they stop attending, because they are “cured”.

 Until I joined, I think I felt something like that myself.  Fifteen years of “attending” may look admirable to an AA member, but a civilian might think,  “She has attended meetings for fifteen years, and she’s still an alcoholic?”  If you look at your description carefully, it’s possible to conclude that I’ve been drinking for all that time, which is, to say the least, inaccurate.

 But there is so much more to it than that: attending meetings is just the surface level of a very deep process of revelation and profound personal change. The fourth and fifth steps take the recovering person to a new level of self-knowledge which is necessary for awareness of triggers, not just of drinking but of the behavioural “isms” that go with it. AA step meetings, usually held in a member’s home, go far deeper than open meetings in this sort of exploration, and can create profound bonds of connection and friendship that can last for years.

 And then there are the AA roundups (conferences with speakers from all over the world) and the retreats, such as the yearly Westminster Abbey retreat in Mission which I have “attended” (opened my soul to) for ten years.  These are intensive spiritual gatherings for those who are ready to do some serious work with an open heart. I cannot begin to describe the epiphanies I have experienced there.

 Did you know about all this stuff (or any of it) when you wrote about AA? At very least, I think attending more than one meeting was necessary and would have demonstrated a modicum of respect.  NO ONE, not even someone as brilliant as you seem to think you are, “gets” AA or any other soul-changing recovery group after only one meeting. I hated my first meeting, in fact I was completely closed until about my twelfth meeting. And not all meetings are created equal.  The mix is different wherever you go.  Too bad you aren’t an alcoholic, as there is a Doctors in AA group which is apparently very powerful, and no doubt better dressed.

 In other words, I think this was a pretty shallow and even disrespectful take on a profound process, but most people likely won’t realize it because they have nothing to compare it to. They will assume AA is just a bunch of lower-middle-class people getting together to slap each other on the back, smoke too much and hear someone say amusing things about the hell they went through.  You say you like these people, that you wish you were one of them, but I think you clearly differentiate yourself from them, as you quietly withdraw into your study to listen to classical CDs. Of all the addictions I’ve ever heard of, this one is pretty genteel, and about as far from the street as you can get. (White gloves, indeed.)

 The other issue (a big one) is this:  must I be identified by my psychiatric condition?  Don’t you think I am (much) more than “a manic-depressive with a long history of alcoholism”? Would you say, “a Parkinsonian with a long history of playing too much bingo. . .”, or “an ADD (note, he’s no longer a person but a disease) with a long history of buying too many CDs” (or, for a more exact comparison, “a schizophrenic with a long history of heroin addiction”? How would this person be perceived by the ignorant public? Would they assume he was clean; would they assume he was well?)

 I don’t give a shit how I am perceived, as I tossed that kind of judgement in the wastebasket a long time ago. But that’s not the point. It hurts me that my fellow sufferers (who often can’t defend themselves) must be cruelly misjudged and damaged by ignorance, insensitivity and stigma.  It galls me that mental illness is still such a defining trait. Just the term is problematic for me. We don’t say “diabetic illness” or “arthritic illness,” do we? And if you’re “ill”, as in “mentally ill”, how can you be well? Defeat is built right into the terminology. 

 And don’t get me started on being identified as “a manic-depressive” (or more accurately, “a bipolar”: don’t you realize the term was changed over 15 years ago?), instead of a person with a bipolar condition. Even “a manic-depressive woman” is a shade better, as it’s at least  a descriptive term, not an identity badge.  AIDS activists broke ground on this many years ago: and even at that, AIDS was labelled a “syndrome” rather than a “disorder”, a less stigmatizing term.  

 There are people (maybe you?) who would say this is just so much hairsplitting, quibbling over terminology that means the same thing. It is not. We don’t have accurate terms to describe the raging forest fire that rips through people’s brains, leaving blackened ruins. We don’t have the language to describe the nausea at having to tolerate other people’s ignorance, pity and disgust. Or the powerlessness and sense of being marginalized, shunted to the fringes of society.  We don’t have terms for the courage it takes (yes, the courage it takes!) to get up on your feet again, and start to take a few shaky, tentative steps.

 Years ago I used to say, “if you had to live inside my head for one day, you’d run screaming.” That may be true, but we can’t get inside each other’s heads. However, we can practice some empathy, choose our words with care instead of falling back on medical jargon, and be aware that a person’s individuality and humanity always comes ahead of their disease condition. 

 Most medical practitioners don’t know this difference, but what about you?  Your book is flying off the shelves due to your insight, compassion and medical knowledge (so they say).  But a great many people, not knowing anything about addiction, will believe pretty much everything that is in it. Yet you describe your “friend” (me) as a sort of case study, a chronically disabled person who drags the long chains of alcoholism behind her, still attached to meetings like a life support system after fifteen years.

 In the past few years I have learned so much I can’t even begin to paraphrase it here, but one thing I know for sure is that people like me must insist on dignity and stand up to prejudice and misinformation wherever we find it. This isn’t just for me, but for the countless others who are too powerless to do it. How we express ideas around addiction and mental illness matters because it affects people’s (especially readers’) thinking and behaviour towards sufferers. Whether it’s a metaphor or a description of a human being, every word counts, because it directly affects the self-esteem and thus the emotional and mental health of every person who has walked through the hell of addiction.

 To sum up, I believe your little jokes about stealing my phrase (a pivotal one that has been quoted several times by journalists) miss the mark. Are you admitting that you did wrong, or placating me so I won’t call you on it? Assuming you could incorporate my original metaphor was both arrogant and dishonest. Your little drama of confessing it on the air rather than apologizing to me was extremely rude, not to mention twisted. In addition, your inaccurate description of me painted me as a sad case, a mentally ill alcoholic who still needs propping up after 15 years.  Calling this disrespectful is an understatement.

 And how is this for a rewrite:

 “A woman I know, sober seventeen years and a faithful member of the program, has been able to ride out the violent rollercoaster of a bipolar condition that could have ended her sobriety and her life.  It didn’t, due to the power and grace she still finds in her regular AA meetings. It is more than fellowship: it’s powerful medicine.”

 For the sake of accuracy, I ask you to revise your description of me in subsequent printings.

 Margaret

 (Needless to say, that didn't happen. Since then, criticism of Mate's unsavory connections with various political factions have done damage to his reputation, which wasn't so hot to begin with.)

 

Guru of Gloom and Doom: Amazon Reviews of Gabor Mate's The Myth of Normal

My counselor suggested this book after hearing many reviews about it, and 1/3 of the way through or so, I had to put it down. It was very hard to read. You need to have a very extensive vocabulary to even begin to understand a lot of what he is saying, and I am an avid reader with a large vocabulary, and I was still having to constantly look up words or be left guessing if I had the right idea on something or not. It's also written in a way that you can't read in a nice flow. I had to keep rereading sentences because he worded things in such odd ways, in ways people never speak, as if he was purposefully trying to be impossible to understand to show how lofty and wise he is compared to his fellow humans. It was very braggy and cocky in feel. 

In the first 1/3 of the book, it was only doom and gloom. You've had trauma in your life, you are doomed to bad health, disease after disease, a shorter life span, etc, etc, etc. There was no hope of anything in the book up to this point. I tried to go further, but the writing was just so heavy, it was definitely doing the opposite of what my counselor hoped I would get out of the book. I would suggest you have a doctorate level vocabulary, and a huge understanding of psychology before reading this, because even with higher education and a vocabulary that surprises my friends, this book was way above me. This book should have been written for the every day man, with the author having compassion for those he was trying to reach, or promoted for more professional people.

My psychologist recommended this book to her patients. I am on a journey to heal childhood trauma and wanted to add this to my library. I couldn't get into it. I feel like he is trying to jam so much into this book that it didn't cover what I hoped it would. Granted, I didn't get far before I gave up. I just wasn't able to really follow his points and maybe that is because I kept trying to relate it to trauma and couldn't.

Just a bunch of statistics mainly. Yes we are all different so what’s normal for me is normal for me not anyone else. Waste of money.

I find Mate to be overrated. He's a black and white thinker who offers the idea that all addiction stems from a single cause without supplying any serious evidence for his dismissal of genetics and the like. Further, I'm not buying that his son was the co-author. I believe Daniel Mate did all the heavy work here, a mouthpiece for his father's radical views.

It took me nearly a year to finish. I had high hopes based on the reviews, but for me, it felt overhyped.

Geared towards women which I wish I'd have known ahead of time. Switched to skimming 20 pages in. There's little to be gleaned from thus book. Significant effort is required to navigate the authors not so subtle political opinions. Pass on this.

Extremly disappointed. Its so evident that he and his son picked a political side for a country they do not even reside in, and decided to make a certain party and politicians responsible for the mental decline of society, simply disgusting! I once highly respected this man and his research, but he lost me on this one.

Of course we have the usual victim narrative regarding women and minorities etc. As the author quotes from a famous movie, "It's not your fault! It's not your fault!" but he fails to recognise that very often it is our fault because we are nearly always the very authors of our own miseries.

Imagine this:  You take your car into the shop, and the mechanic, reputed to be a mechanical genius, tells you all about your car, how it works, and how it can stop working correctly. Turns out how the car was made is important. Influences and so forth. You nod to show interest. You're assured this guy knows his business. "My car had a rough childhood," you tell him, and he nods sagely.

But then this mechanic starts in about "globalization," "late-stage capitalism," and you start to look at your watch, thinking this was a mistake. "Yeah, both those parties are two legs in the same pair of pants. Corporations run America." Then he points to a leak coming from the undercarriage. "Got some nasty inflammation there, mate. You been driving some stressful roads lately?" He looks at you accusingly.

"Look," you tell him, "I just wanted you to fix my car..."
He's furious.
"Fix. Your. Car. Are you serious? In this world? Ha! Nothing can be fixed, the whole system is broken..."
As he breaks down sobbing, you quietly leave the repair shop. Luckily, all you lost was a few bucks for a book. Phew.

He brings in debunked social justice nonsense about minority stress as well as promoting drug trips from “enlightened” indigenous cultures who still have a lifespan decades shorter than western ones without grasping the irony of this, while performing a work out self flagellation.

His book made no sense at all it was very jumbled and I gained nothing from it , he was writing a lot about stuff we all know about when it comes to trauma, cancer stuff and childhood traumas , never mentioned happy families that still got cancer , the book is mostly gloom and doom , good luck reading it .

Way too many quote from celebrities. And I don’t think he gets close to explaining the title. I think the book will tell people a lot of what they want to hear (capitalism is “bad”, indigenous people have indigenous wisdom etc. etc.) But I struggle to see the book as more than a few Ted talks strung together.

I didn't finish the book as it just came across as a whingefest. The author just seemed to drone on about how everything has turned to manure.