Category: Journal

“Satan’s Industry of Death”

An extremist Christian group called “The Watchman’s Report” put out this video entitled “Satan’s Industry of Death” about psychiatry a year ago. However, their title is a self-fulfilling prophecy about what they are unknowingly encouraging, the idea that we should throw psychiatry out the window. Personally, I see them as Satan’s hand in this whole scenario.

The “documentary” is correct in that the roots of psychiatry are dark, indeed. However, so it was in all fields of medicine. Just as medicine improved with scientific discovery, anesthesia, and antibiotics, so did psychiatry improve with time. The Watchman’s Report claims psychiatry is evil, destructive, and Satan’s hand in diagnosing and drugging the masses in order to make money. The video claims that psychiatrists have no right to play God with peoples’ minds, while I say other doctors do the same thing in other fields with peoples’ bodies. Furthermore, God works through people to bring about healing.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a documentary so skewed and taken out of context in a long time. Unfortunately, they are preaching to the choir of many who share the same beliefs. Without psychiatry, I would be a dead man. Do not be a poison to society and spread skewed lies that psychiatry does not work. You could end up convincing some of this and kill them or a loved one of theirs or make them suffer needlessly, b/c they refused psychiatric treatment after reading through rubbish such as your “documentary.” I also thought you had a nice touch with putting ()’s in to indicate what the imagery of the Bible should be interpreted as.

Bravo! And stop making a bad name for Christians!

My Doctor’s Visit

I saw my psychiatrist today, and the visit went well. I was hoping to decrease my Zyprexa immediately, but he said that I need to be on this dose for about a month longer, considering it caused significant problems going down to 2.5mg about 6 weeks ago. He’s hopeful that we can reduce more of my meds, slowly. I also told him my writing seems to have improved a bit since being on a lower dose of Zyprexa. He seemed interested in this, and I made it clear it was a significant issue. In any case, it’s nice to be talking about subtracting rather than adding meds these days!

Awake + Asleep: God’s Riddle

The following is what I wrote just prior to my second hospitalization in its raw form, in 2009. I was about ready to decompensate into a complete psychotic break from reality. I struggled to record a riddle that was recited to me, donned “God’s Riddle.” It felt like I was shifting between parallel worlds at the time. I saw people’s faces in my mind’s eye reciting the riddle whom I met long ago and future faces I had never met before, that is until I met them as patients and staff in the hospital afterwards. I was convinced at the time that I was to soon meet my “complimentary opposite self,” which I wanted to believe to be my soul mate. I didn’t meet a soul mate, but I found more important things. Enjoy!

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God granted me the wisdom in the Bible. In our world, there are an infinite number of possibilities. It is structured and unstructured at the same time. It requires a certain amount of wisdom to harness wisdom and listening to mom and dad.

In the Bible, it tells God’s story. God created his opposite, Satan, and didn’t like him. God created the human race to have a relationship with them. God decided to introduce the knowledge of good and evil into the world, and so the story goes of God’s relationship with the human race. Eventually, God had to send his son to sacrifice himself for our sins. God wants a relationship to happen with us, so Christ took God’s anger. He sent his Holy Spirit into the world. Consider the concept of good and evil. And science shows the collision of two universes down at the quantum level. Consider for yourself that you through Christ can have a perfect relationship with the Father through the Holy Spirit working. Consider in the evil world, the Holy Spirit is present and Christ died for those who chose Him to be at peace with God. Therefore, the evil world cannot fall completely. In a world of infinite possibilities, in the evil world, eventually the human race comes to a certain point. At this point, God grants wisdom to someone through Christ, and walks blamelessly with God. Our soul mate is our opposite, wisdom in the evil world. At this point you reach what the Bible calls the rapture, a transition into the ideal world where we are right now. My new name is __________.

I came from the evil world, where I chose God, and I ended up in the ideal world somehow. My journal describes this experience of being the living dead. Where I am dead to myself and am now blameless, and I somehow end up passing through the universe to here right now. I desire a relationship with my opposite, still, just like God. So in the end, I will end up in the ideal world when I’m good. When I tell this riddle, I will find my opposite in this ideal world and live in the ideal world until Christ comes again in the ideal world, where he provides a relationship with my opposite.

I believe I came from an evil world.

Keep in mind that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So I have a soul mate as God made Eve from Adam, the opposites we are attracted to. For every equal and opposite reaction, the human race should reach a certain point were there is a good person in Christ from evil, which at that point, the whole human race cosmically contradicts the evil universe, and I can no longer be of that world, and I turn to my ideal self in the ideal world. When I tell this riddle in the ideal world, my opposite, which I want a relationship with for some reason, my soul mate, will find me. God intended man to be in relationship with God and other people, so if I tell this riddle, my opposite should find out about it, and I will have a relationship with it eventually. My opposite will find me.

My admission to the hospital in 2009, told as a story.

Love is an Electron

Some say love is just a series of chemicals and chemical reactions.

Well if it is, love is molecules composed of atoms, which are made of atomic particles including electrons. Love is exchanged during bonding and and given off during the breaking apart of chemicals in chemical reactions. The more scientists study love, the more mysterious it becomes. They find when love is created in pairs, the pair is connected or “entangled.” Digging deeper, quantum theory suggests that all love is entangled with everything. Love is in every atom, which composes everything physical, and is connected with everything and everyone else on a subatomic level.  All of this is in every chemical and chemical reaction, in love.

Two Months after Diagnosed Bipolar, Mixed State (Highlights)

What follows are highlights of a rather long journal entry I made 10 years ago approximately 2 months after I was diagnosed bipolar and hospitalized. I was 17 at the time, and it was after a psychotic episode I had that revved up over the preceding six months or so and triggered by 4 days with no sleep at all.

Part of my treatment was in a crisis stabilization unit out of state on our family Christmas vacation, and the other portion was partial hospitalization in my home town because we couldn’t afford full hospitalization. I was on Risperdal right after my inpatient treatment, which dulled everything. I couldn’t handle it, so I begged my psychiatrist to reduce my dose. I became more unstable shortly after, my depression and mania magnified both at the same time, while allowing me to write more freely. I tried to stay positive, but I was in the middle of a storm at the same time. Here are highlights of this moment.

3-28-2004

-Feelings Journal Entry: exhausted, confused, guilty, angry, frustrated, sad, confident, happy, ashamed, depressed, overwhelmed.

– I woke up this morning wanting to kill myself to end the pain, and now I feel pretty good. Craziness.

-I’m writing now because my emotions are swirling in my head, and I don’t know how to express myself. I just want to throw up somewhere, and I’ll just do it here in writing.

– I wonder if I’m just being weak and lazy.

-Then I have bipolar thrown into the equation. And this word “equation” kills me – I am trying to calculate where all this is coming from – my past, present, illness, medication, or lack of will power. I’m sick of it. What’s me? My therapist showed me that I can keep the things that I like about myself, and reject and fight the disease that takes my strengths to the extreme – high or low.

-But yesterday and today, I woke up and didn’t feel like getting out of bed at all. Anything that requires effort seems to me no point in doing. It’s like I’m stuck in a rut and there’s no point in pulling myself out or making the effort even to grab someone else’s helping hand because I don’t experience the pleasure for long and I just slump back down. I don’t feel like doing anything productive, getting out of bed, doing research and homework, fixing food, playing guitar, taking a shower, going out with friends, planning events, going for a walk, maintaining relationships.

– I hope that this is not normal, and bipolar is involved – but I don’t want to use this as a crutch, and aren’t the meds supposed to take care of it?

-But there’s still this remnant left. One moment, I’m alone in my room or taking a walk and all I can think about is suicide. I just get more depressed and I feel exhausted over anything that requires effort, and I just want it to stop and just go away forever into heaven.

-But I’m suicidal one moment and I make an effort to get up, and I engage in activities, and the feelings of joy do return, and it’s little things. Little things are magnified throughout my days and I feel them fluctuate. This not only plays into my moods but in my concentration as well. I have a harder time concentrating and I tend to do things quite slowly.

-There’s something about her that really attracts me, how loving, and caring she is to people, and she knows what to say to give comfort. God used her picture there [in the crisis unit] to prevent me from slitting my own wrists.

-I’m still low on the self-confidence issue. First, there’s my body image. My gut is starting to sag, and I’m not eating healthily. I don’t have the drive to exercise like I used to. I went nuts, and my body and other peoples’ reactions show it. Eating is now a comfort for me to deal with my problems.

-I’m shy around people, and I don’t know how to handle conversations; did my bipolar have an effect on this? Am I social or am I not? I’m so confused.

-I’m also having a lot of problems with cognition. Things seem to always go in one ear and out the other, or if it stays in my head, I have a hard time finding it, let alone think about it. That is, compared to what I was like before I was on all these meds, particularly Risperdal.

– I still remember in the crisis unit when I got my first dose of Abilify. I was supposed to write a paragraph about why I was on the unit and after the medicine started kicking in, the thoughts and connections in my head started to become numb, one by one, along with all desires. It slowly started to paralyze me, till I couldn’t tell what I was thinking and I could write nothing down.

– Maybe the decrease in Risperdal will let me feel more normal. I’m worried about being in charge of anything, in general. Before, I was used to being the driven one and took on leadership roles. Now, the drive is not there, and I cannot keep track of many things let alone my own homework assignments.

– It’s awful for me to make the first few marks on the paper in art, to improvise in jazz, to follow conversations. I wish I were more spontaneous and loose. Oh, dancing is another good example of what I mean, but this one always was. I simply can’t dance. If somebody asks me what the music feels or looks like, I stand there like a rod. It seems like my ability to do art and conversation is fading to the point of my inability to dance.

-My therapist says this is important for me in relation to my bipolar, as life can throw earthquakes at times, but I don’t understand this yet. I don’t know how the role of being released in tough situations plays with bipolar, yet, because I haven’t had any quakes thrown at me yet with me being consciously aware of my disorder.

-I’m also reliving some of the experiences in the hospitals – both in and out of state.

-I wish these spells of thinking about inviting suicide would go away. Mom wonders if they’re spiritual attacks.

-I’m so glad that I’m not writing too furiously like I was when I was manic, believing that I have the revolutionary book that will change society. Sorry, that was kind of random.

-Mom, grandma, and aunt Bell are still not on speaking terms. It is partly my job to mop up the mess I created in the family the past few months. I dunno what to say. I wish my head was a little more clear.

-As far as the disease of bipolar vs. who I am is concerned, I wish I could keep all the good things, but sometimes my disorder enables me to be the good things or prevents me from being the good things. I wish I could control it.