Three Trees

Well everyone, I am posting this post on my mental health blog, because I think the thing I want to talk about has to do with a mental illness symptom that I have decided to give in to on purpose.  It is kind of an OCD symptom, and the resulting effect puts me in a certain category that I usually try to avoid, which is “eccentricity.”  Basically, as I feel sad to take down my awesome Christmas tree and another smaller Christmas tree, I have decided to replace those decorations with three fake Christmas trees from K-mart.  One of them is already up and decorated, and tomorrow I am hoping to pick up another one that I ordered a few days ago.  I will just move all the lights and ornaments from my other tree, and it will be in my room year round.  I love my apartment, but it is kind of small, and I do think that having three Christmas trees as the main light sources is something unusual in the way that would cause many normal people to have their sanity questioned.  Well my mental illness is usually very much over all the lines into mental hospital territory, and I personally try not to be in a zone that seems more like a “just a plain old weirdo” category.  I’ve just never wanted to be a “crazy cat lady,” or one of those people who might be kind of gifted, or might just put too much stock in New Age crystals and the occult.  Well of course a few Christmas trees here and there is not the same as that, but I have to say that to me, this allowance for OCD to have its way does in fact knock me either down a few notches or up a few notches to be a classic, undeniable oddball, much like certain Christmas ornaments that can be purchased at the 99 cent store in my neighborhood if anyone else wants to celebrate Christmas in a possibly excessive way.

A Chocolate Fix

     Hi everyone, I thought I would share something interesting and kind of funny about something good that happened because of some chocolate desserts.  Dessert is already pretty good as it is, and chocolate actually does help with depression. But yesterday, I was looking at just a picture of chocolate desserts, and my whole outlook changed in a way that I think could be very lasting.  I have had religion problems for a long time, and felt an excessive sense of responsibility for people’s spiritual wellbeing and safety, and several years ago became more fretful about other problems in the world and poverty and suffering in our country. I have felt a sense of hopelessness sometimes, thinking that there are too many people who do not have a clue about how to help everyone out there who needs help. 

     But yesterday on facebook, I found a New York Times page featuring their best chocolate desserts, and something about it made me realize and actually believe that there are millions of great people out there who are making the world a better place. That seems kind of stupid, but that is the reason I am writing about it. It is just kind of comical. With all the heroism and miracle medical care interventions I know about, something about the chocolate desserts actually convinced me that there are enough good people to overcome all the world’s evil and problems after all. I just imagined the kind of people who would make those perfect chocolate puddings and cakes and pies, and I thought they must be awesome people, and it made me have a sense that maybe we do have enough good people out there.

    I am writing about it on this mental health blog instead of my regular blog because I think there might be some mental health principles mixed in with why that worked on me like that. My despair has reached delusional proportions at times, but the sight of chocolate pie somehow reached me, and I am now thinking about all the nice school teachers and all the good kids who don’t pick on other kids, and all the medical places and emergency rooms and people in other countries, too, and feeling more hopeful.

     Something about the common-ness of chocolate desserts, and the fact that the people making desserts that good aren’t usually seen as heroes, necessarily, and yet are providing one of the best things you can think of for people, made me feel like the scale must literally be tipped towards happiness.  It is so funny, because I really did look at all the pies and puddings and thought, everyone is going to be okay.

the chocolate dessert link: https://cooking.nytimes.com/68861692-nyt-cooking/408832-our-99-best-chocolate-recipes?fbclid=IwAR3KJDMgpPTV3cSUc-SJXQCJPtyc_cpeGg6N536vJhCe-en4pxnlxFei8V4&dclid=CJuRl6vJuOYCFZ2BgwgdJL0LsA

Retail Store PTSD

     I have recently been remembering sad times from my early years of mental illness.  I did great when I first became mentally ill, and was able to finish college.  But then, when I got home, I had to go work in a bookstore and was on the wrong psychiatric medicine.  It was the worst thing that has ever happened to me.  I stayed at the bookstore for twelve years, and during the last two years, for some reason, people started being mean to me and humiliating me with all the embarrassing material that I already had been abused by for years. I think about it all the time and people are probably tired of me always trying to think and talk about it and try to find some kind of mastery over the experience. 

    I actually did achieve some happiness after all by writing poetry, being blessed with awesome friends, and doing things like making cookies and volunteering.  So I am okay, but I think that looking back, it is kind of interesting to see the bookends of torture that were part of my bookstore life. It was about two years on either side, and my experience during the first part was essentially a condition of something like a captivity PTSD, and the condition from my last years is more like a combat PTSD.  I of course don’t mean to compare the experience itself with what people go through as crime victims and soldiers, but I think that it is very interesting to see the nature of the conditions.  For the first problems, I was essentially trapped and drugged.  There is no way to describe how bad the medicine hurt me and how much people were okay with that for various reasons.  And what is left to do but try to escape in some way.  That is the correct goal during captivity.  And then, with the last part, when people start tearing me to shreds and threatening a life and literary contribution that I worked on for years after losing everything, the nature of the destruction is kind of a shredding and tearing of my life and self.  The symptoms are very different and aren’t as much about escape, but the results from facing everything and managing emotions and mental life that were torn up on purpose.

    I don’t really need to try to label it necessarily, but I do like labels and naming things, and have always appreciated my mental health diagnosis as an explanation for a whole life that doesn’t match a lot of the world. I think to look back now with some sense of recovery but also a sense of loss, it is kind of interesting to interpret the extra disorders that got added to my illness, and see a very clear pattern that can’t be denied.  In some ways, for a while, it did seem deniable and even absurd.  I still can see it as being comical to end up with trauma like that from working in a bookstore.  But obviously there was more to it than that.  There was bad medicine, depression itself, the threat of mania and psychosis, family problems, four hundred thousand customers who I had no control over, a concentration of the most destructive media problems in history, and then the oddest component of all, which is bad people deliberately making it worse for some reason.  Soon I will try to move on from these recent blog topics, but it has been on my mind a lot lately, partially because of legal intimidation and health problems. In the end, I have to note the interesting absurdity and find some happiness because of what a never-ending comedy resource it is likely to be for several thousand or million years.

comedy link: https://refriedbeanblog11.blogspot.com/2019/05/blog-post_5.html

a prophetic word from on high

Sometimes I am a little bit proud of myself in a bad way for being mentally ill, and I talk about normal people in a way that does not give them credit for some of the burdens they bear.  But I still think I will share a theory about people who have delusions of grandeur during manic episodes and especially more chronically in situations like schizophrenia.  The thing I want to say is that no matter how grandiose people's delusions are, most people really are that great.  People with and without mental illness are probably infinite and eternal, or at least could be if they wanted to. In that way, their wildest dreams are not a lie. When people say they are Jesus Christ, it is not the worst theology, and I think that a calling so extreme as mental suffering for a whole lifetime might make some people's most ridiculous claims of royalty actually still be an underestimation of not just their potential but the nobility of being here at all.

By my Estimation

Sorry to not have posted on this blog for a while, but honestly I haven’t thought of that many mental health topics lately. I did think of something interesting the other day, which is related to autism.  I have mentioned before that I have some kind of developmental disability, which affects me in extreme ways, even though I function normally on many levels. Like a lot of other people with autism, I have major mental gifts and deficits. There is a range of very inspired poetry versus not being able to clean a room. And I think aside from mental illness and trauma, I mostly don’t reach highest levels of genius or severe disability.  But I did some testing a while back, and I thought about it again recently, and I think I might have an extreme “estimation” ability.  What is estimation?  I do not really know, except I saw it listed on a blog, and I think it was measured in a test I took. I think it can involve an awareness of time passing, numbers, predictions, and other kinds of assessment.  And I think it is possible that I am almost a savant in that area. That is weird and random isn’t it? I really think there is something to it, but I think it comes out in how I manage money, how I am able to maintain a schedule, and how I am aware of the passage of time.  I also think that because of my Christianity, I have used this gift socially as a form of deliberate appreciation for people.  I am calling it appreciation instead of love, because I think there are different definitions of love. Even though I have used my estimation skills to try to love people well, I think that a lot of it might really amount to estimation.  I basically have esteemed people thoroughly and have thousands of friends from looking for good qualities in people and easily finding things to like about just about everyone.  Something interesting about it is that I think some people still feel judged by it, even by my positive reaction to them.  Like they still might feel judged even though they got a good score.  A lot of people prefer more direct feelings from people, and that is probably part of the social challenge of autism. But I think people should not take us for granted, and if one of my friends literally handed me a report card based on their perception of me, I would feel thankful that they cared at all.  I am still going to keep appreciating everyone, and love my neighbor as myself even though I am so different.  People who like parties more than school can still be my friends, and if my gifts are not appreciated in this world, I will still try to help everyone if I am able to achieve my goal of eventually being a trial lawyer for Judgement Day.

Trauma from Depression

    Ok everyone, I am writing this post unexpectedly because the next post has a photo and I am trying to make that photo move down on the screen so there aren't two photos of myself right next to each other.

   This post is about something that I have not ever thought about until today and it might be something that is either common knowledge in most mental health settings or something that there is at least a lot of research about, but I don't think I have ever heard anyone talk about it before.

   The thing I am wondering is if people ever get PTSD from depression.  Well that seems messed up like by definition PTSD happens from life threatening situations, but okay, there we have it.  Depression is very life threatening and is also a threat to all kinds of other stuff, which I don't think always get taken into account when assessing trauma.  Like other stuff matters in life besides life itself, and those things can be at risk in ways that cause all kinds of hypervigilance and other symptoms.

   I think my personal experience with depression a long time ago is that it was something that traumatized me but did not give me PTSD.  That is another interesting topic, because there can be trauma that people resiliently recover from without any PTSD, and trauma can also hurt people in extreme ways other than PTSD. But anyway I just mention it because I think depression is more commonly expected to set in after PTSD and not the other way around, but it is also likely that people are traumatized by the confusing and terrifying experience of having your mind make you feel bad no matter what you do that is good. And especially for beginners at depression, even one suicidal thought can feel like such a permanent moral crisis.

Using a crutch as a crutch

Hi everyone, I have a few mental health blog posts to write, and I am aware that I only occasionally write on this blog.  A lot of people write about mental health so I might only share my most extreme thoughts.  Something I was thinking about that I think is a common topic is about the way the severity of emotional pain from depression or other mental illness is often impossible for other people to understand.  In fact, during the times I feel okay, I almost even can't remember or have any concept of how bad I have felt before.  So I know that it might not be reasonable to expect people who have never had depression to understand when someone is right in front of them with a disorder.  But I have an idea that I think could help all of us, which is for people with depression to consider wearing an arm sling or using a cane or crutches when they are depressed, as kind of a visual representation of the medical nature of the problem.  In a way, it could still add to the underestimation of the pain, but I think it would at least make the existence of the issue be less invisible.  It seems like I am joking, but if people wore a sling and then people asked them about their injury and they said "I can't talk about it," I think people's reaction might be closer to matching the level of sympathy that is warranted and the compassion that is hard to convey when the amount of pain literally is unimaginable.

A theory about Autism and humor

  There is still a lot to learn about developmental disabilities, and people who actually have Autism or similar conditions are often very different from each other and have a lot more aspects of their life and personality mixed in with whatever has made their brain work differently. I want to minimize it and say "made their brain work a little differently," but for some people it is much more extreme than that.

    But some people are mildly autistic, or have some kind of "high functioning autism," which allows them to function almost like everyone else, so they end up with all the usual life stressors but aren't quite able to adapt to everything, which can actually result in chronic suffering that is anything but mild.

    I am saying all that to acknowledge that there is a wide variety of experience, but I wanted to share a theory that I think has some truth for a lot of us who have some kind of developmental difference and have an uneven profile of gifts and weaknesses.  It is common, I think, for people with Autism or Aspergers to have some gift mixed in with their disorder, whether it is a full-fledged savant skill or simply some abilities that are really strong. And I think that many autistic people seem to have some kind of special humor ability or deficit, or both, and I wanted to share my simple theory about what might contribute to the gift, which I think can be common among both girls and guys with autism.  The fact is that some people with Autism are really funny, and I have thought about it and wondered if it might have to do with the uneven intelligence profile that people have.  Many people with Aspergers especially have some extra reading abilities or similar verbal skills, but have major impairment with social ability or other competencies.  And my theory is that as we think of stuff that isn't smart, we have a smarter side to us that sees it for what it is, and turns it into a joke.  Like we are able to genuinely think of both stupid and smart things, and our prevailing mastery and self awareness can turn it into jokes under the right conditions.  I mention the right conditions because I think that this exact situation where we are simultaneously smart and not smart might also make us more hurtable.  We can see our weaknesses for what they are when people hurt us, and we crumple when our awareness makes us have an extra appreciation for the insults people bully us with.

   But a lot of people don't bully suffering people, and with encouragement and love, a lot of us think of funny stuff and crack some funny jokes about all kinds of things that we think of but have learned intellectually are absurd.  When you add that to the playfulness that comes from the youthful heart that is itself the core of a developmental delay, and the obsessive faithfulness that also characterizes autism, it means that a lot of us can pretty perpetually be counted on for joke after joke. It's just a theory, but the fact that people with autism have a lot to share when they aren't mistreated is not a theory, and I don't know why anyone would decide to provoke a group of such sharp-witted people.

The Worst Diagnosis: Depakote

   I have taken Risperdal for 20 years now, and I am very thankful for it.  Trileptal is the other medicine that I think helped me be safe and functioning as a mentally ill person.  I take minimal amounts and still have a lot of symptoms to manage, but I can sit in a room and think all kinds of thoughts and feel peaceful and happy, which is something that for several years I thought I would never do again, even after dying someday.  In fact, for a while I felt so awful that I thought it was too much to even expect having one restful nap before my eternal damnation.  Part of why I felt that way was because I was on the wrong medicine at the time, and I was unable to get even a fraction of adequate sleep on any night at all for about four years.

   I am saying all that just as background information to share the idea for this post which is that I think it could be a good idea for people to see two tragedies when someone is diagnosed with mental illness, and for a lifetime of psychiatric medicine to carry the same weight of grief as the mental illness itself.  Some people are completely opposed to the whole psychiatry field because of all the suffering, which for some has included bad experiences in hospitals.  For me personally, I love going to hospitals and I also have had a lot of safety because of medicine that I did in fact need and did help me in some ways.  But I do want to say that my bad experiences with medicine, my dependence on it that requires responsibility and vigilance, and especially the horrible side effects that always overlap with the benefits, have made me certain that the medicine is in fact as much a part of the life suffering as the illness itself.  This isn't a groundbreaking opinion, and everyone knows that many people refuse medicine for all kinds of reasons.  But I really think that for me it is something new to look back and think, okay, I should see my experience as two illnesses: Schizoaffective Disorder, and medication for Schizoaffective Disorder.  And when I tell people what has happened, I should say, yeah, I have Schizoaffective Disorder, and I have to take medicine for Schizoaffective Disorder.

   I can anticipate people saying that is ungrateful of me, and asking if I would rather be one of the people in a country that locks its mentally ill people in cages and lets hyenas attack them, and I think that I would say yes, that might not have been as bad, and this exact scenario is one of the intellectual limitations of the privilege concept that people these days like to use to spread the guilt and shame that probably causes half these problems anyway.

Mean Dopes and Dopamine

     Well everyone, this blog post is going to be about one of my priorities in life, which has to do with meaning. I just called my Dad to see how he was doing because he started having some dementia after an aneurysm.  He was doing okay and I asked him a question about rental car insurance, which is kind of a dad question to ask, and I felt good about the conversation, even though I still am hoping for the right time to make sure he has a true concept of how great a dad he has always been.  But anyway, as I was sitting peacefully on my couch after the phone call, my mom texted me to let me know that she was fretting about me driving a rental car after not driving for a few years.  Well for my last trip, she fretted about me not renting a car.  So I think that what is really happening is that she is finding reasons to fret.  And though I have always attributed that problem of hers to anxiety, I think it might be a little different.  I think that really she knew I just had some peace of mind and she wanted to take it away, so she sent me a text about worrying.  And her goal very frequently and possibly with every interaction is to take away my happy feelings as soon as I get them, whether it is from reaching long term goals, maintaining friendships, having some kind of stability, or literally any other kind of circumstance or mental work that can result in a positive feeling. I have known this before and thought it was getting better, but I think that the recent relief and break from it was just so I could accumulate enough happiness for her to take bigger chunks away at one time.  Is it bad to share a family problem like that?  I am going to share it, because something I value in life for me and everyone is meaning, and I think people need to understand how all of the meaning thieves out there get away with making people's lives lose all joy and purpose.  It might seem like this whole emotional abuse dynamic, which is mild compared to some people's experiences, might really have to do with happiness and not meaning.  But I do think it is things like this that can erode people's sense of meaning, because basically everything you work for becomes irrelevant in at least one realm, which is your own emotional experience, which is both subjective and objective.

     There are a lot of articles now about dopamine, and some people make it sound like everything in life basically translates into a bunch of meaningless dopamine transactions in the brain.  Well people had this same discussion about serotonin twenty years ago before the doctors and drug dealers teamed up to rape our country with prescription painkillers and heroin, and it can be an interesting topic.  Because if eating a taco can make you as happy as buying a new car, then maybe it is smart to go for the taco.  And if taking an antidepressant can keep you from bar-hopping your life away, then maybe some intervention directly with the brain chemicals is a good option.

     But I think that at some point, some of the complex aspects of reality, human goals, and actual blessings from God have to be seen as something real that has meaningful impact on not just our lives but our hearts and minds.

     I personally think that a lot of Christian teachers also threaten to make things meaningless, too, by saying that all of our joy should come from God, or what they really mean, which is our imagination of God based on their teaching so they can get credit for our heroic stoicism.  It is really sick, and I think it is just as bad as what my mom does to take away my happy feelings. What these teachers do is say you are not allowed to have some happiness from things like hamburgers or safety, so you prevent the feelings yourself ahead of time either through excessive self denial or by controlling your mind to reject the psychological rewards from good living.  But I think that those teachers are wrong, and that calling all enjoyment and responsibility "idolatry" is a rather ungrateful way to live. Hopefully it is just a phase for most people, and they aren't completely robbed of all blessings in life like friends and jobs and good food and books, but I do think a lot of people are swindled pretty thoroughly before they figure out that the preachers are sustaining their own dopamine levels by controlling everyone.

     To me it is not just about feelings, but about meaning, truth, and reality that gets blocked, with the greatest part of reality being God himself and his great love.  All these dopamine robbers I am talking about are basically forms of abuse, and all can originate with people who might have seemed trustworthy at one time.  The preachers will say they have taken nothing, the bad doctors will say they just took a few drops of brain chemicals, and the emotionally abusive family members will say they were actually giving you something, but to me there is a loss that is too great to be measured. To me, the loss is more than just brain chemicals or a life that wasn't worth experiencing anyway.  The cruelest people of all have figured out that you can block out so much more of the world by torturing people at close range.

Honestly I just want to recommend the spinach dip

This could go on any of my blogs, but I have decided to put it on my mental health blog.  It has to do with how I just ate some of the yummiest food I have ever had but also just read some news that reminded me of people suffering, and not just suffering, but suffering because of evil and lack of service and wisdom.  And it makes me feel a little bit bad about eating some yummy spinach dip right now.  But I think that I am going to have some peace about it because basically one of the things I am sad about is how thirteen medical centers got bombed by Russia and Assad's bad people, and I am going to say to myself in my happy food moments after cleaning my safe but messy apartment all day, that Russia is not going to take me down with those people.  Sometimes I do think it is good to share people's sorrow, even down to actual on-site sacrificial living that makes people experience literally the same plight of anyone with certain pain or hardship.  But I think that today I will be one less targeted soul that Russia gets away with hurting, and I will be happy about having such a yummy meal.

A Revolutionary Therapy called "Sanity"

You know how they have therapies called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and other mental health strategies like "mindfulness?" And things like "psychodynamic" schools of thought or very specific concepts like "radical acceptance?"  Well I have an idea for a new therapy called "sanity." It is where you just decide not to be mentally ill.  People say I should not joke about that and people are hurt all the time by authorities who do no believe in mental illness or people who think you can will your way out of depression, or even some mental health people whose therapies actually boil down to just telling people to stop being crazy.  But I do think it is funny to just invent a therapy like that, which actually could help a little bit if it is combined with other treatments like medicine, or counseling, or teaching a cruel society to stop hurting everyone and driving everyone to the brink of madness.

Hypermoral, hyper-religious

One of my mental illness symptoms is hyper-religiosity, which I have truly managed as well as I could, no matter how much people might still point out that I am annoying and uptight sometimes.  I know I am, and I know that my scrupulosity is a fault as much as it is a burden and source of pain. But I was thinking today that some of my excessive moralizing might have served a practical purpose, and as much as I have had to fight it, I have also had to use it.  I have a theory that it isn't just part of my brain on overdrive, but it might be something I have had to do to try to counteract other weaknesses that seem like character issues.   Both my mental illness and the medicine I take cause lethargy and reduced motivation and alertness, so I really have to convince myself that chores are important in order to exert any energy whatsoever.  I mean I practically have to view everything as some integral part of the whole world's salvation or at least my own survival and behavior record to even get up from a chair and fix some cereal.  And I am actually wondering if this might be a theory about schizophrenia, which sometimes includes extreme negative symptoms of apathy and inertia, as well as grandiose delusions for some people.  I mean maybe the herculean effort that it takes to get out of bed does make people think they must be some kind of important hero.  I do not know if that is how the delusions form, but I just today started wondering if some of my hyper moralism and excessive religious thought is from building too much strength as I have had to continually tap into my moral reasoning and religious faith in order to do any basic chore at work or at home. The fact is that there might be a reason why people like me imagine ourselves getting a reward on Judgement Day for merely considering doing a load of laundry, or find ourselves quoting the band of brothers speech on the way to the coffee shop.