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 to
make 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 it
was, 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, though
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. That is unforgiveable, heinous, and I have no idea why I was willing to let it go by. 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 grotesque and very public suicide many years later. 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 sanitized versionof events was all very public. That is the point. He kept doing this over and over again, true confessions, 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 ploy for sympathy, even  pity, and a compulsive need to call attention to himself in the worst possible way.

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 is far past the limits of my compassion.

😳"TOTALLY INSANE!" World Mental Health Day and the Popular Culture

Well, the calendar tells me it's World Mental Health day.  Again. As   a card-carrying bipolar, can I say something here?

One day, quite recently, I decided to count the number of times I heard or read the word INSANE. Newspaper articles, titles of videos, podcasts, TV shows, you name it (even news broadcasts) - it was there, everywhere, all the time.  

In the popular culture, "totally insane" can mean "very, very bad", but it can also mean "very, very good" and/or "unbelievable", or even (in some cases) neutral. The term pops up everywhere, sometimes even used in a whimsical way. Science and medical videos and articles are not immune, making it seem a lot more respectable and "OK". Hey, it's just words, after all! Don't be so sensitive. Don't clutch your pearls like that!

But doesn't anyone stop to think about what this word might actually mean? And why is there an equal but opposite buzzword floating around that means even less than that?

You know the one I mean. It's "mental health". 

Usually it's couched in rather delicate terms like "mental health issues". It typically pertains to some popular celebrity or public figure "admitting" that he or she experienced some sort of mental health crisis, but always in the deep past, at a safe distance. And of course, need we say it, they're all better now - but  SO courageous to have confessed such a dark secret to the world!

One day I tried to count something even more distressing: the number of times I heard or read terms synonymous with "insane", and I stopped after about fifteen. It includes nut case, whack job, cracked, batshit crazy, psycho, and on and on (I don't even need to tell you, do I?), with facilities to house these undesirables called the nut house, the booby hatch, the funny farm, the whatever. 

Want to know what Merriam-Webster's dictionary has to say? I've copied and pasted all the synonyms, verbatim. Buckle in.

Insane

as in psychotic

having or showing a very abnormal or sick state of mind 

"only an insane person would intentionally jump off a skyscraper"

Synonyms & Similar Words

psychotic 

lunatic
mad
nuts
crazy
maniacal
maniac
mental
gaga
paranoid
crazed
psycho
paranoidal
deranged
looney
whacky
disturbed
demented
strange
irrational
unhinged
loony
whacko
nutty
unbalanced
cuckoo
wacko
screwy
eccentric
certifiable
wacky
ballistic
batty
bonkers
cracked
bedlam
daft
unreasonable
around the bend

haywire
kooky
foolish
odd
barmy
depressed
daffy
loony tunes
obsessed
crackbrained
bughouse
meshuga
out to lunch
moonstruck
loco
crackpot
unsound
scatty
non compos mentis
brainsick
kookie
hysteric
bats
meshuggah
frantic
looney tunes
distraught
meshugah
hysterical
distracted
schizophrenic
balmy
meshugge
delusional
fruity
off
wud
paranoic
neurotic
delirious
cranky
loopy
fey
sociopathic
schizoid
out of one's mind
off one's rocker
obsessive-compulsive
paranoiac
delusionary
off one's gourd
crackers
queer
disordered
off one's head
oddball

aberrant
tetched
out of one's head
nuclear
touched
dotty
berserk
witless
pixillated
pixilated
amuck
raving
senseless
monomaniacal
frenzied
potty
teched
ape
amok
wigged-out
monomaniac
fixated
bananas

These nasty epithets have only increased in the past couple of years, and I sense that public contempt for "crazies" has grown exponentially. At the same time, every day and in every way, we hear the term bandied about: 

mental health, mental health, mental health.

 

I suspect there is considerable schadenfreude involved, in that people love to watch other people's suffering. It's a great spectator sport. And it's almost (but not quite) a badge of honour now for a celebrity to take a little break from their multi-billion-dollar career to "work on their mental health".

But they don't know what they are talking about. 

These people who so delicately refer to "mental health" know nothing at all of the real deal, how it can be life-threatening, and how it can take every fibre of your being to put your life back together after an "episode". The confusion and the lurching moods, the baffled and frightened loved ones, the endless trials on medications that seem to make matters worse - but this is only part of the story.

I remember sitting in a women's group in which we were encouraged to "share" some particularly vulnerable experiences in our lives. I made the huge mistake of saying I had recently been in the hospital, and as I talked, I noticed the woman sitting next to me was acting as if she had suddenly developed an all-over body rash. Then she said, "I'm sorry", got up from the chair and moved to the far side of the table. She apologized profusely, saying "I'm so sorry, I just can't listen to stories about the psycho ward." No one objected, and the group went on talking, though the temperature of the room had dipped slightly.

I've heard people blow off "psychos" with such utter contempt that I have been tempted to grab them by the collar and say, "Look into my eyes. You are talking about ME." Not only that, it might be YOUR closest, dearest loved one, or even YOURSELF who may be next to bear that label of utter disgrace and contempt. 

Don't get me wrong here (and it's possible Facebook will force me to take this down for being "inappropriate"). There is no disgrace in a condition which has been part of humanity forever, and which is poorly-understood at best, even by professionals. Why people are now pretending so hard to understand it, or at least pretend to be more compassionate about it, is beyond me. I guess it's better than nothing - but not much. Maybe it's just an updated version of "thoughts and prayers". 

Before you parrot the term back the way everyone else does, stop and THINK about what you actually mean when you say "mental health". In most cases, it's a way to display how compassionate and enlightened YOU are. It's the thing to say, after all. But can you maybe pay attention to what else you say, and what it might mean to actual sufferers?

Just STOP referring to whack jobs and nut bars and psychos and try to see human beings as human beings. Is that such a tall order?

And while you're at it: can you drop the word "insane", just for a minute? Think hard. Isn't there a more accurate term for something that is really good, really bad, or really - nothing?

. . . AAAAAND, just for reference, here are the ANTONYMS of "insane" from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

sane

reasonable

sound

balanced

rational

clear

normal

wise

sensible

lucid

uncrazy

judicious

compos mentis

healthy

well-adjusted

unneurotic

Doesn't quite match up. Does it?

NOTE: This is an actual website where you  can order a "mental patient" costume,complete with clever accessories: straitjacket, grey zombie makeup, and even a ball and chain! This costume HAS to be played for laughs. Hey, it's just a joke!

POST-BLOG THOUGHTS. This is an edited version of a  post I wrote several years ago, and if anything, it's even more true now. You can still order "mental patient costumes" online for Halloween (see web pages, above), and in my very own neighborhood, I've seen lawn decorations that said things like "DANGER! ESCAPED MENTAL PATIENT" (or looney or whack job or whatever the epithet of the day is). "The Mentally Ill" (a separate species, apparently) are still the stuff of horror, violence, and dread. The more extreme depictions in pop culture are virtually indistinguishable from that other celebrated cultural icon, the zombie.

It's insane, isn't it? INSANE how often "mental health" comes up? INSANE how often we hear horrible synonyms for mental illness? 

Does anybody out there hear me?

Why you should NOT overshare on the internet. . .

Friends:
On the eve of my 62nd birthday, something of a re-birth announcement...
The mania I've been experiencing for the past few weeks continues. I am making every effort to recognize and do what I can to manage it, and with some success provided I stick to certain things. Among these: my online presence. It's become baldly obvious to me that I must reduce my internet activity considerably, and that's why I write to you all: if you're wondering how I'm doing, where I am, if I am, etc., it may take a day or two before you hear from me.
I'll spare you the thinking behind this -- god only knows, but makes sense to me -- but I also wanted to let everyone know that this is a struggle that I absolutely refuse to go through alone. And by that I mean going public. Once I am finally able to trust my thoughts again -- or even to corral them better -- I've got a plan.
I want to put this before everything. I want to re-emerge from this as a public activist. I've already got a semi-public profile, and it seems obvious and necessary that I try to harness this to my own recovery and public function. I know there's a book in this, but also a specialized website (under construction already), but possibly a documentary, podcast and as many public speaking opportunities as I can book.
I mean, who wouldn't want this: the world's first Bipolar standup addict terminally unfiltered movie critic?
See? This mania is K-razee.
Much love to y'all and more to come.

This quote from a Facebook page (going back a few years) haunts me and won't leave my head. It was written by a Canadian movie critic whose heyday was about ten or fifteen years ago, and who specialized in movies about mental illness. No, that's not an exaggeration, as there was an event called Rendevous with Madness (and how I HATE the term, worse than "demons") every year in Toronto, and he seemed to be everywhere, doing this and doing that and, I would imagine, analyzing every movie down to the last detail.

It's, I guess, ironic that this happened to him, and there was a lot more to the story (he mentioned in passing that he had been "kicked out of rehab" twice, though not specifying why). I don't even know how I got onto his posts, as he isn't a Facebook friend - though we do have contacts in the publishing industry in common. But I became fascinated, and for several months his posts got more and more bizarre. I remember something called the Bipolar Cartoon Character Hall of Fame, with pictures of Olive Oyl, Pepe le Pew, and various others I don't remember. 

He also mentioned being "taken in" by the police, escorted to a psychiatric ward which released him the next day. (Yes. The next day, with no support system, not even a reliable source of medication.) His recounting of the story had all the manic delight of Randall P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as if it was just one big jolly romp.  

It came out at one point that he was living with his elderly parents, not so he could take care of them but so that they could take care of him (or try to - but think of the burden on frail, elderly parents trying to deal with a 60-year-old man acting like a wild teenager). He did harrowing things like ask his Facebook buddies what meds he should take, and of course got a lot of terrible advice on milk thistle, turmeric, mountain goat horn extract, and other reliable treatments for major mental illness.

Then - it stopped. I think it stopped just as the pandemic hit, but for a long time there was nothing, and I did wonder what had happened to him. Then I noticed he was posting movie stills, several a day (though not the same ones over and over again, as he had done before). But these were strange, not the polished poses you'd see in a publicity still. These were screenshots taken nearly at random in the black-and-white films he seemed to focus on. Then, eventually, those stopped too.

With my Sherlock mind, I couldn't leave it  alone, and I did find a tweet (back when you could still read them without donating a few pints of your blood) which talked about how he was going to "recklessly" share his story of "multiple arrests", breaking sobriety, disturbing the peace, etc. etc. in an event called But That's Another Story. I didn't see this as an advocacy thing, but more of the "drunkalogue" syndrome you hear in AA - telling the same story endlessly, embellishing each time, and getting lots of laughs from the most painful experiences a human being can suffer. 

One of the things in the description was "undiagnosed sex addict", which made me feel he wasn't QUITE over the manic episode yet - not the so-called diagnosis, but the hypersexuality which is one of the most alarming (not to mention humiliationg) symptoms of bipolar mania. He did delete quite a number of his Facebook posts, including some which were actually pretty gross. Did someone take him aside and advise him on what was appropriate (or not) to share?

So why am I still so obsessed with this? His new save-the-world persona made me wonder, as perhaps he was unable to wonder, just what he actually planned to say. How could you get up there and talk for an hour about reckless oversharing, multiple arrests, and bizarre behaviour that baffled everyone who thought they knew him? It would probably be stream-of-consciousness rambling, but I also know it would be a kind of  standup stuff meant to elicit howls of laughter. Does this take away the horror of it? Is this stuff truly funny? You tell me.

Of course not, but in the moment it might have seemed like a good idea. Advocacy is a way for people to feel important, experts on the subject, which gives you a sense of power, as if you can and should advise people on what they are supposed to think about a subject. It can also involve trying to rescue people who are too helpless to help themselves. That doesn't happen either. And it cannot happen when the "help" is just as sick as they are. 

So now he has disappeared entirely. I do wonder what happened. The last Facebook comments consist of "friends" (in the Facebook sense, not real ones) wishing him a happy birthday, some time last year. I remember with dismay the way my dear friend David West was getting birthday greetings on Facebook two years after he died. Though I know he would have gotten a kick out of it, it points up everything that is wrong with social media, and the internet in general. I get "notices" every day about "friends" having a birthday, and I don't even need to go on the person's page to send them a generic message! How wonderful! No work at all, nor do you need to care - just pretend that you do, because it makes YOU look good.  Which is why so many people send automatic or automated birthday messages to a person, not even knowing or caring very much if they are alive or dead.

Well, I hope this manic guy isn't dead, but he seems to have retreated a long way. It would be nice, once the dust settled, to see some commentary on what he actually lived through, but just as you can't be a heart disease advocate while you are up on the stage collapsing from a heart attack, it is really not such a good idea to display the  extremes of mental illness to an audience too embarrassed or frightened to do anything but howl with laughter.

ADDENDA (sample Facebook posts): 

If anyone knows anybody in the Burlington police or psychiatric biz, please share.
The care and patience I received during my long night of gonzo batshit free fall was AMAZING. I regaled the cops who delivered me to psychiatric emergency — named, God love them, Scott and Geoff — with the dirtiest movie true life trivia I could — and boy did I. I was like the Groucho Marx of psychiatric emerg.
As I was escorting them out — until the psychiatric staff pulled me back inside — I tried to hug them, which they warmly refused. I offered a handshake, and Scott said “How about a fist bump, Geoff?”
And as for Jenn, the gorgeous and deeply empathetic psych muse, whom I fell deeply and obviously in love with inside of three seconds: thanks for the only memory of this whole shitshow that I cherish. That and Scott and Geoff’s fistbump.

. . . Sadly, I have been forced to accept that a raging libido is an indication I’m about to go off the reserve. On both recent flipout sessions, I was hornier than a cartoon goat. Not to put to fine a point, but I’d have happily even filled a doughnut.
So this is it, huh? Antidepressants smother my libido into perpetual remission, and if I get horny it means I’m about to smash my stall. How fucking fair is that?
Doughnuts. Now why didn’t I think of that when it might have helped?
Love and thanks.

(And this, the most disturbing of all):

Talk about a discussion starter. Veronica Liskova's affecting, disturbing and resolutely balanced portrait of a 'virtuous pedophile' cuts to the very heart of the idea of mental illness and social stigma. A documentary profile of a young man who maintains a clinically-assisted regimen of absolute sexual abstinence so as not to act on his desires, the movie not only ask us consider pedophilia as a form of treatable mental illness, but to consider what the real consequences of intolerance, ignorance and moral outrage are: that somebody like Daniel remains ashamed, in the shadows, and possibly poised to act out. 

Beware the Helping Hand (or: How to Make a Crazy Quilt)

 

I just had one of those godawful internet experiences of losing a few thousand words I labored over for the entire evening – because I forgot to hit “update”. I was adding it to a previously-published post, so it wouldn’t automatically save as a draft. So it didn’t. But I will make an attempt at piecing it back together. The gifs are random and just a way to break up the block of text.

Have you ever had a relative you tolerated, even tried to be nice to, strictly because they were kin and you didn’t feel you had a choice? I had one of those, but no more. I had to unload this person for the sake of my – excuse me – “mental health”.

And the whole thing is so ironic, in light of what went down, and why.

My sister-in-law, my husband’s brother’s wife, whom I will call Janie, is what used to be called a “ busybody” – happily probing into everyone else’s business, then passing along the most sensitive bleeding chunks of information with relish, especially if it would serve her in some way. And this did.

She would phone me. For the past 30+ years, at least three or four times a year, she’d phone me, and talk, and talk, and talk, in her rattling-on, self-involved way – which was irritating enough – but it was worse than that. I don’t know how some people do this, but she was adept at extracting information from people – me in particular. When I’d finally get off the phone with her, which always took a lot of effort, I’d always have the feeling that I never should have told her any of that stuff. But somehow it came out. Like a robin pulling a worm out of the ground, she somehow got things out of me, largely from asking questions so none-of-her-business that you somehow answered her because you couldn’t quite believe what she just said. 

Never once, ever, in my life, have I phoned Janie, because I didn’t want to phone Janie. I don’t like Janie, and I never did. I don’t want to talk to her. Ever. And yet, for reasons I have never understood, she phones and phones, tagging along after me like a particularly obnoxious dog you can’t shake off.

This has taken a turn just lately because she started to follow my Facebook posts, and leave likes and comments on the majority of them. Some of them were nice, but mostly they gave me that cloying feeling. She was fastening on. Coat-tailing, they used to call it. Even reading her comments made me feel drained. After she read my Facebook post on “Why I Hate Mental Health” (because it has become a shallow, meaningless buzzword), she phoned me (of course! She always phones me!), and began to talk. Oh yes, I was so right! Oh yes, the mental health care system is terrible! And as it turned out, she has taken it upon herself to become a Mental Health Crusader, and has joined some sort of board of directors and gets up at board meetings and tells Tales of Terror from the Crypt of Mental Illness. 

I should have been clued in when she said she told them all about her close friend, a woman with schizophrenia whose doctor changed her meds, leading her to attempt suicide so she had to be hospitalized. She told this in colorful detail, which I am sure must have really impressed her pals at the board meeting, but while she was rattling on, my guts began to squirm. 

Did Janie, um, like, ask permission to say these things? Did her close friend want those painful episode brought up and trotted out as an example of How the System Fails the Mentally Ill? I had no idea, but my stomach-squirm turned out to be prescient. 

To further prove what a selfless crusader she is for the lame, the halt and the blind, she then launched into the story of how I had to spend three nights in a hospital corridor because they had no room for me in the psych ward, and how I had then climbed out of bed, crawled down the hall on my hands and knees to a pay phone, and phoned the crisis line so I’d have someone to talk to.

That’s the thing, Janie remembers stuff. God, does she remember. This was the kind of thing I would tell her, oh, maybe 30 years ago, but she filed it all away.  But there it was again, dredged up, fresh as paint, raw and red and glistening. She then said she told this psychiatric horror story at her board meeting, in an attempt to raise funds for one of her pet projects, Feed the Criminally Insane or something. No kidding, she told my story to impress the board. 

But there was just one problem. More than one, really, but the main one is this: it never happened. She took several different stories I wish I had never told her and conflated them, stitched them together, “curated” them into the ultimate horror story, when in reality the hospital corridor thing (which was only one night) happened in 1982, and the crisis line thing happened in an entirely different setting (NOT a hospital) in 2004. And never did I ever crawl on my hands and knees. I walked, until some nurse shouted at me “GET BACK INTO BED!” (which was bad enough, but still not crawling). So the most RECENT story, told in very garbled form, happened 20 years ago. Out of these rags and tatters,  she stitched together a crazy quilt of horror that was much more colorful and impressive than anything that actually happened. 

She did mention that she "didn't use my whole name", which she seemed to think made it perfectly OK to profit from my "story". (Though she DID say it was her sister-in-law.) She also assumed that because I had told HER about it, I was completely fine with sharing it with anyone at all, up to and including a Society for the Prevention of Straitjackets (or whatever the hell).

But this time it was different. I had had it with Janie. Forever. I just couldn’t pretend to be nice to her any more and just told her to STOP dragging up stuff from the past that I’m trying to forget about! And I tell you, she was very upset. I was raining on her social worker/self-righteous-charity-lady parade, thwarting her shining quest to Speak for Those who Cannot Speak for Themselves, the  powerless, the stigmatized, the crawling dregs of society! 

I don’t remember yelling at her any time before in all those dozens or hundreds of annoying one-sided phone calls, but I did it this time, and she was not only astonished but actually quite offended. What?? I’m not grateful for her selfless service to The Cause? I didn’t want to help her save every  mental patient who ever crawled along the floor in a psych ward?  Well, no, Janie. I don't. She finally said, “QUIT SHOUTING AT ME! I heard you the first time, so you can just stop ranting at me!” 

At that point, I hung up. I immediately blocked her on Facebook, then deleted her furious email response unread, though the first line gave the impression of a tiny little person jumping up and down and screaming. The exclamation points were practically flying off the page. So that’s the end of Janie, and I now realize I never DID have to have any sort of relationship with her. I just felt like a captive audience. I never wanted to talk to her on the phone, yet for years and years I let it happen, and she went right on studying and extracting and collating her crystalline memories of fuckups that happened to me forty years ago. (Or maybe they didn't, but it sure sounded good that way.) I’m fascinating, you see. I’m a live one. Right there in the jar, on the end of the assembly line. So her scientific little busybody mind could poke, prod, and finally present the results of her laboratory experiment to the Board of Directors, with the final goal of getting a cash grant for all her psychiatric charity work. 

I guess this has gone on long enough, and if THIS one gets deleted I give up. I guess what I’ve learned is to pay a lot more attention to my discomfort and to trace it down to the source – and then, wherever possible, GET RID OF the source so I can live my life without emotional vampirism, from my own family or from anyone else.

I've left out a few bits and pieces, but because it's my blog and I'll rant if I want to, I'll add this. On the phone, Janie recounted how she was gathering funds for her Mental Health Event (bake sale, rodeo, nude swim), and someone dared to joke at her, saying "so are you crazy too?" or something equally devastating. Janie told him to FUCK OFF, turned on her heel and walked away. (This was in public.) She recounted this proudly, as if to elicit oohs and ahhs  from me, exclamations of how brave, how gutsy, oh my, you go girl, etc. Ohhhh, thank you so much for standing up for me, speaking for those incapable of speaking for themselves! (At the same time, do you notice anything here? ANY implication AT ALL that she herself has a mental health condition is outrageous and abusive and causes her to fly into a public fury.)

Janie has never been popular in my family. No one says it out loud, because we’re not that sort of family, but everyone has had a “story” at some point. Bill’s sister Judy once told me in a sort of muttering voice that she saw Janie in her kitchen, opening each kitchen cupboard and each kitchen drawer and snooping around in the contents. She said it was like an inspection. Mostly the muttered complaints were about the fact that they never saw her husband (was he being held hostage somewhere?), and her busy-body-ness and general obliviousness to other people’s feelings. Then I heard the incredible story from Bill’s brother that Janie had once been in a cult, complete with shaved head, mantras, sexually-abusive gurus, and whatever else they have in cults. It struck me as strange, as she doesn’t strike me as someone who would take orders from anyone – or was it a sort of School for Cult Leaders, and she was studying for a degree?