Thursday 30 June 2011

The right mistake

The successful failure.

The spiritiobiopsychosocial model

I've been missing one important thing out.

The biopsychosocial model of how a person becomes is the paradigm used by psychiatry to suppress the existence of certain types of people.

But in Keith Tudor's great book on mental health (mental health promotion: paradigms and practice, first chapter) he introduced me to a more unifying idea.

The spirituobiopsychosocial model is probably the next one. Spirituo will be a catchall phrase for stuff which doesn't make sense. For me spirituo- is like the wireless connection on a computer. If all you could see was the screen of this phone I'm writing on and you were trying to reverse engineer a black box but didn't know about wireless internet then then you'd think of the biopsychosocial model. But one day perhaps we'll truly understand what spirituo- means and in the mean time it will remain the great unanswered scientific truth.

In the book Contact by Carl Sagan (well worth reading. The film doesn't do it justice) he writes a fictional story of first contact with an alien race. They're far in advance of the human race. But they're seeking their god. He talks about how the maths symbol pi, a transcendental number, may be a message from the maker of the universe. Because the alien intelligence didn't make the universe. The aliens pursuit of science is to try and understand the message from whoever invented the universe and they think the message is incoded in numbers like pi or e or plancks constant. If these numbers were different then our universe and reality would be totally different.

This is useful if anyone is interested in know how we become. It is perhaps the final frontier but I think every time a person thinks they've come to the final frontier then they're giving themselves a reason to stop thinking. Then again too much thinking can drive a person crazy.

Education is a right, not a privilege

Build a society for all people or try to make machines out of people with psychiatry

Did Foucault get it spot on?

The invention of psychiatry caused the illness in society. Actually its probably not as simple as all that. Perhaps it was the type of human being desired for the machine of the Industrial Revolution, the second age of humanity, which created the need for psychiatry.

Alvin Toffler wrote a book called The Third Wave. I read a little bit about it on the internet. What I guess he said is the next revolution is either information or perhaps ideas.

Technology has allowed humans to be replaced by machines. Rather than scribes manually copying books books are now electronic and exist as ones and zeros until they are printed or read on a display device. Rather than factory workers bashing a metal panel the same way every day of their life there are robots to make cars for Ford.

Psychiatry was the technology which turned people into machines. But the human machines - these automotons - would be disadvantaged in the next great age.

The greatest human power will be the power of ideas. Creativity. The stuff of madness and the stuff psychiatrists have been repressing in the human race for far too long. After The Great Confinement, the period where the mad were put away in asylums, redoubled the illness in society. Then antipsychotics made it even cheaper to suppress creativity and perpetuate the greatest failure in human civilisation.

The greatest failure is not realising that we are all human and we need a society built for all of us. There should never have been a "ship of fools" but they were seen as valueless. The real ship of fools were those in the early prototypes of modern factory life. Because we're all fools and we're all human.

In the Third Wave where ideas are valued psychiatrists would prescribe enthogens or things which enhance the creation of ideas. Drugs I mean. The fun ones. The ones which are currently illegal for their effect on current measures of mental health.

In the future the schizophrenic will be advantaged over the automoton type. Psychiatry would try to give people schizophrenia (the bullshit concept, I.e. the excuse to use antipsychotics) with cannabis.

But I think that would be a shitty future. I think people should be able to be who they are and live how they want to live. All of us.

We need to build a society for all people. We need to heal the illness in society. Dump the disability model and all the science. Listen to your heart. See the value in all of us.

If a good pint of guinness is as good as a bottle of champagne

Then is that happiness or depression?

Learn to be imperfect?

Correcting short sightedness

There are 4 ways I can think of. Glasses. Laser eye surgery. Contacts. Another method used in russia where small cuts are made across the lens of the eye. Don't know what the last one is called.

I've worn glasses for ages. The medical profession do what people want. They invented new medical technologies which are riskier than either glasses or contact lenses. Society developed to expect normality or sameness as attractive. Another problem which came about as a result of the illness in society.

I could wear contact lenses to make me look prettier but glasses will do. I'm not sure I could live without any technology to correct my short sightedness but then I never had to learn. I learned to get used to being less attractive because I wore glasses. I got used to being different.

Wednesday 29 June 2011

Did I kill my older sister?

My grandmother once told me I had an older sister. But the thought about this came to me because I was worried I had killed someone and I didn't remember.

I'm not sure if it was a miscarriage or anything like that. It's just something my grandmother told me once. My parents never told me about this but if I remember right she was trying to explain my mother's unhappiness.

How the fuck can sham ect be the best treatment for mental illness

Based on the bentall and read 2010 ect review, the one which picks the high quality placebo controlled trials and shows real ect works a little bit when used and not on followup, this ridiculous statement or question is not only true...it is a very important research and evidence based medicine question.

Is sham ect so effective at treating treatment resistant conditions because of the placebo effect or is their a fundamental problem with the pseudoscience of psychiatry.

I've been going mad

The last few days have been very tough. I have a high degree of internal madness at the moment. All sorts of paranoia I guess. Is my life an experiment? Are my friends police officers or special intelligence staff. Are they psychiatrists. Stuff like that.

It's something I'm somewhat resilient to showing. The problem is it can make interpreting signs very difficult. I mean...I don't know what I mean any more I guess.

I'm wandering around like a mad lunatic in my head. Thoughts racing. For some reason I've been thinking of the women I loved. And my mistakes in life. Well...the ones over the last few years.

I've been getting more drunk than I usually do and more stoned too. The problem is the usual routine is helping me eat. This has become a real concern for me. Even though I am going to take my life in 4 years I don't particularly want a slow, painful death. I'm exhausted. My brain is probably burning neurons for energy because there's nothing left. The alcohol provides the bulk of my calorie intake plus the sugar and milk in my tea.

Not eating, drinking and smoking skunk should drive anyone mad. I have an appointment to make an appointment to see a psychiatrist soon but I don't think they'll have any other answer than drugs.

Tuesday 28 June 2011

My old piano

This tune is a house tune I thought of just now. Its a remix of something older. I don't know why I'm telling you this.

I'm off to the park now. Well. In a little bit.

I am thinking about the lines of one of Winston Churchill's speeches

We shall fight them on the beeches
We shall fight them on the landing grounds
We shall fight them on the hills and on the dales

We shall never surrender till this island is free.

I don't know what free means nor what island I'm thinking of. There's a Chinese concept called Our Land. I got the idea from a kung fu movie. It is where some guy stands before the emperor of china and tries to kill him in ten paces but when the time comes he uses the technique, gets to kill the emporer but never does.

If I remember right all he says is Our Land. So if the island is our land then I reckon our land is the planet.

"We shall never surrender until our planet is free."

See that doesn't make sense as a last line. Churchill said it so much better.

1 in 4 humans every year are human

This is a piss take of the common statistic used to humanise mental illness. It has been changed to mental distress either for accuracy or to as part of an outside the model of psychiatry (specifically medical doctors) way of explaining a different continuum of the concept of mental illness.

The point of the piss take is to align concepts with what we really need to do to start understanding mental health.

We are all human. 1 in 6 at any one time is human. 1 in 4 in a year are human. Over half the population of America will be human at some point their lifetime.

5 in 6, 3 in 4 or the other roughly 50%. They're human too. There is currently no system which is properly exploring them.

Perhaps this is what all population mental health is all about.

Or perhaps this is the stuff that's often found in religious stories and mythology.

The first label a person sound think about when labelling another is probably "like me." Human is a proxy term because fuck knows how else in practice we can make a society which is truly equal.

Yes...I'm still talking about what would utopia be like. 8 years ago during my first psychiatric hospitalisation this was one of the mad questions I was thinking about.

This idea is probably wrong because people seem to spend their lives categorising people and putting them in boxes. The labels allow things to be done to them.

What if the founding principle is as close to the absolute truth as I can work out. The first diagnosis or label is human being. Homo sapiens to the academics and doctors but human to the rest of us.

There is no way to teach current labelling or diagnostic systems when the label is human but the meaning of the title of this note is to remind people that we are all human.

The rest is just food for thought.

For the people by the people

This is an idea about ideas and credit.

Where do ideas come from? Every idea is the result of many things and influences, just like we.

When I learned programming I found out something called the open source movement. It is free software but most importantly it is the code which makes the software which is also free.

This is a fundamentally left movement in software. Giving the code away free means anyone can take the ideas, even those who get paid for their ideas.

The open source movement comes from many roots too. But those people, the people who write the operating system I use on this smartphone I blog off, are only paid by donations. Their ideas are free. Their work is free to anyone who wants it, even corporations would would make or lose millions fighting court cases about the rights to their ideas.

Monday 27 June 2011

What if people who couldn't get into medical school but cared about people...

...could be psychiatrists for the illness is society. It's all fucking god's fault. Its our turn to fix it.

What's more important?

The right to be free or the right to be fed. The right not to be sectioned or the right to have a home.

Homelessness exists across europe even though there's a human rights act to guarantee liberty to everyone but vagrants, the mad...well generally its just the mad (as in anything in dsm or whatever else lawyers think is acceptable to allow to happen to another human being).

But is the guarantee of maslov's basic hierachy of needs a human right?

Yes. If not then it should be. Never to be taken from a person.

Red heads, billionaires and mental health antistigma funding

Someone once told me there are no natural red heads married to the world's top richest people. The top 500.

I can't remember where I read it. That doesn't matter any more. This is a long thought. But I'm sober. Well...just stoned. I'm in my bed. In my dad's house. My life pretty much sucks on all my old measures. Trust me. I know a bit about the real reason behind pathologisation. I live it every day of my fucking life.

Anyway. The person I told was a red head. I don't know if she was mentally ill or not but she worked in mental health.

I could think in many other directions. What I'm thinking about is the question.

I suppose its easy enough to see the photos of the wives of billionaires in the shots in the press but I think no billionaire would allow public knowledge of their wife's madness.

This would be an interesting piece of research for a campaign point on antistigma. My ginger friend was saddened to hear that there were no red headed wives of billionaires. She worked on the uk antistigma campaign so whether she was mentally ill or not perhaps she understood the point.

But this isn't the point I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about how posing a question can change society. This is based on one study. The idea I mean. It's the one done in Fiji on TV and the effect on body related eating habits or something. Tv was introduced to a tv naive population and the results were recorded by the anthropologists.

If I remember right the research showed tv did change the eating behaviours related to body image.

What does this have to do with to do with anything? The researchers didn't understand that by asking the question and the manner of the research they may have infected the polynesian island with the illness of body image caused not by tv, perhaps, but asking the question itself.

To start the research they asked questions to kids. The richer families would be the ones who had tvs so the...ugh. just read the paper. I can't be arsed to look for it on my computer now. It was published in the british journal of psychiatry.

So does asking research questions cause mental illness?

No. That's not it. Could the research be used to get more funding for mental health from corporations?

It's sort of a curve ball there. Don't really...perhaps I need to take more time over my mad notes. I wasn't going to write today. This idea just came to me as I try to sleep on my stinking bed. At least I showered a couple of days ago.

Sunday 26 June 2011

Do posh boys and girls become doctors so part of the problem is the fact the profession is fucked at the seed

There's is no one primary requirement for becoming a medical student. There is a massive barrier though.

Its called being poor or different. Poor people often can't afford the education. What I mean is my schooling before the age of 18 at least £50k. Perhaps more.

I went to a posh public school in the uk. A few. Lots of problems. I'm a bad person at heart. I'm always running away from the bad person I was.

Anyway, so did my sister and my close cousins. Their education costs were similar. I was the eldeest and a boy so favoured in the family and gifted with three generations living in the same household. My maternal grandparents lived with my family. At one point my close cousins lived the next road over.

I squandered my education but the rest didn't. They're doctors now. All three of them. They may not be typical but I've learned a lot of their profession and what it takes to be a truly good doctor.

So do a survey of how posh doctors parents are. They usually come from upper middle class or above. At a guess. The requirements of the medical profession as a minimum are top exam grades. This is true of a lot of professions. People whose parents can afford to send them to posh schools have a massive advantage. The poor are significantly disadvantaged in the path to becoming a doctor.

I'm going to tip my hat to Maudsley when I say psychiatrists should be the best doctors. I think he had a white mans idea of what a good doctor is. Sorry. I should say Western post-modern ideology. Of what a good doctor is and was.

I have a different idea. They shouldn't be a bunch of posh wankers. There should be some good ones. Ones from the ghetto of wherever and whatever. Black ones. White ones too. Brown ones and other skin colours.

Because if you're trying to understand mental health then you have to understand people. Most people are poor. Doctors often don't know poverty. The immigrants like my parents might. You should see the bullet holes in the house where I was raised as a baby.

But we need to make sure poor people can be doctors. Otherwise the profession won't understand people.

The uk has an ideal. Free and world class healthcare for all. The nation is a melting pot of diversity. It is why the nation no longer leads the world in anything but art and music and other creative stuff.

The problem is the path or the journey of life and the problems of the system. The poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled....those born without a silver spoon in their mouth....they should have equal opportunities as posh cunts like me.

The right stuff

I've been getting through depression by drinking wine and smoking skunk while blogging in the park.

I'm going out with a very sexy sex pot who is beautiful as a person and I wank over but I have too much anxiety when it comes to sex and being naked with her. There are multiple self-esteem issues on my part but put it this way...if there's a clear sign of depression for me then this is probably it. I'm not taking photos. I rarely go to the pub or see this mad sex pot I am in love with. She's the only person I see apart from my dealer.

Initially I went to a doctor to get antidepressants but they weren't the right drug. I'm also suffering from some sort of eating disorder where I barely eat. The nausea plus other side effects made two weeks of a low dose intolerable though I've been on higher doses. I didn't even finish the 2 week course I had.

Instead all my days have been spent here in a country park. I'm now on 2 bottles of red wine a day. That's a lot for me as a regular amount. It has escalated over the last two or three weeks. So has my cannabis consumption but I smoke low doses regularly rather than high doses less frequently. I make spliffarettes. It is because I interpret the two studies of injection of delta 9 thc as showing a dose response. Only one person in all of the subjects in these trials developed schizophrenia after the experiment. They were on the higher dose, a dose not used in the uk study. The other study I know was done in the us and the uk one was a replication study. I also know that 40-80 compounds are involved in the psychoactive high. This figure is from the three most recent large or systematic reviews published in peer reviewed psychiatric or medical journals in the uk circa 2009. There are two other isomers I'm aware of from over 15 years of reading about drugs and taking them. Delta 6 and delta 4. Think that's right. There may be others.

I also know that ssynthetic delta 9 thc is licensed in america as an apettite stimulant. I don't know any other drugs that do this but I'm not a doctor. I just know my drugs. It is effective at starting the munchies.

Whether I'm psychotic or not...well I've been about 5 spliffarettes today (I use a lot of tobacco and this is important too because the combination may be a more pleasant effect). A few gulps of wine too. And 4 or 5 cups of tea.

I'm feeling better. This is the stuff about individuality and solutions for psychological distress and/or depression.

Drugs, like talking, work for some people. The science shows this already.

Or perhaps I've had something no system of mental healthcare other than religion is able to prescribe. The love of a beautiful woman. No modern system is allowed to prescribe love.

A ramble about stuff to do with my life and the treatment of psychiatric illness

This is sort of what my grandparents taught me. My maternal grandparents were both teachers in the town I was born in the north of sri lanka.

I think they used the metaphor of a knife. A blade needs to be sharpened. Any person can become more intelligent through doing things which train the brain.

I suppose its obvious in a way. I think the big word for it might be neuroplasticity. Not sure. It's the ability of the systems of the brain - to me this means the software - to overcome differences or changes in the hardware. Not sure.

I saw a tv program about the first guy to recover from a stroke. This was in the mid 20th century. The standard treatment was to give up. But one guy's carer wouldn't. He forced his dad back to health. Daily training forced the software in his brain to adapt to the changes in the hardware. This guys dad recovered a high level of function. If I remember right he eventually died of a heart attack climbing up a mountain. When they autopsied him they found he'd lost over 90% of the organic connections between his body and brain. Perhaps more.

For victims of a stroke this one carer's dedication in the spite of medical nihilism meant treatment changed.

I think the lives of children with schizophrenia could be better by making them more intelligent. This is a shit idea. It does nothing to solve the root of the problem. It means that it a shit world where their difference is a disability then making schizophrenics advantaged in later life (because intelligence helps) could work.

When I was much younger I was thrown into a children's home. This was a result of the deterioration of my behaviour to the point where my family could no longer handle me. I was 15 and this was shortly before my gcse exams. There had been an ongoing deterioration of my behaviour.

If I remember right I saw a psychiatrist at some point. I didn't get a diagnosis and I didn't end up in a psychiatric ward even though this is when I first started cutting myself and I had a clear history of errant behaviour and mood problems. Fuck knows how I wasn't labelled or incarcerated.

Instead I ended up in a home. Thankfully I wasn't homeless. Thankfully I never went through the trauma of psychiatry either.

Within a few months I returned to living with my parents then was sent to a local boarding school for two years. I come from a privileged background where education is prized. My parents sacrficed a lot to pay the high fees.

When I finished school i'd secured a place at a top 5 university but took a gap year. I worked as an assistant systems engineer at a small company working on a european space agency project. The pay was rubbish but I was 18 years old and programming for a european space agency project. There were other aspects to the gap year. I did accelerated courses in business and other things.

In those 3 years my life changed drastically from what outcomes I might have had had I been hospitalised and my life choices governed by psychiatric labels.

Those 3 formative years are reason enough for me to keep tearing the medical profession a new arsehole at any given opportunity.

My idea for sticking schizophrenic kids - or potentially schizophrenic kids - in really good schools, on really good gap year programs and then sending them to really good universities is a dumb idea. It would work but I think too many parents would want this for their children. Though this alternative would be the best on any idea of mental health outcomes and potentially save lives it is probably poor health economics and is hard to sell to the public who are the ultimate powerholders, or should be at least.

But perhaps there's an alternative within this dumb idea. What I'm doing is trying to explore non drug treatments for psychosis and schizophrenia. Bipolar and all the rest too actually. It's just that I know the most about schizophrenia because...well, that's another story.

I don't really know what neuroplasticity is but I know what my grandparents taught me about intelligence or whatever else is valued by modern society and employment structures. If the objective is to heal the disability rather than fix a fucked up society then psychiatric mental healthcare and national clinical guidelines need to understand that to fix the disability bit people can be trained.

This could be an alternative to creating drug addictions in children which cause real illnesses and harm, which is what current best practice seems to be about.

At the very least those few years of my life could be considered similar to the Soteria paradigm in a way. Sort of. Mosher and his crew have been working on an alternative for ages. John bola"s review in 2009 or 2010 highlights other international programs which offer alternatives to the current cosh and incarceration of children.

The uk doesn't. Not that I've come across since I discovered there is progress in psychiatry. Just not in the uk.

Labels for we if you chose to give a shit about labels rather than concepts.

Fuck. Already had another thought. Sorry. I get side tracked. Some shit ain't that challenging.

Big hole in the fucking evidence right? Antipsychotics. Or chemical cosh. Language. Concepts. Consumption of salted confectionary products.

Read on. Keep reading. Never, ever tell anyone this is my life. This is we.

Am I happier being a man walking in the footsteps of giants or with really big shoes that don't fit my feet

I am glad to be devoting my time to the mad.

What is a good way to help a fucked up child?

NICE say drugs. I'm sure they have lots of evidence to support their position but we all know drugs are bad and people who push drugs on kids are bad, no matter how much pseudoscience is involved.

The FDA in America also approve drugs for kids. They too use research funded by drug dealers. At least my biased shit is free and comes from unrestricted funding.

I don't approve of drugs for children. I don't agree about drug use without user information and true informed consent.

I repeat my question which started this short conversation.

Saturday 25 June 2011

What is crazy?

There are some really, really smart people working on this question.

My question to you. What would you allow to be done to a crazy?

My next question would be what would you allow with willing consent? I mean if a homosexual was homosexual but they wanted to change then what would you do?

Sexual identity disorder. A label. A judgement. People who are gay but want to be straight.

Two score years of psychiatry. Sexual identity disorder. Now it is a mental illness to be mentally ill but want to be normal.

(Ps - drunk. Sexual identity disorder might not be the right term but there's a dsm definition for people who are gay who want to be treated to be not gay.)

Subjugation because of madness

Madness is a nebulous concept. That's the excuse. The same one as mental health is art as much as science.

That's not true. Mental health isn't art when it fails to be a science. Madness is not a nebulous concept because pseudoscience is applied.

But that's all bollocks. That's all irrelevant. The subjugation is premised on pseudoscientific grounds. Lots of it.

Science is used to subjugate. The science of psychiatry allows treatment outside the boundaries of law. Doctors are the new priests. They use the new dogma, science, but they misuse it.

Prof mary boyle wrote a book I dipped into ages ago. Schizophrenia the scientific delusion. Or something like that. The book is not read by psychiatrists or the power holders in mental health campaigning in the uk. She's bothered to write a proper argument challenging the science. These rants are purely rants. Neither science nor art.

I don't know what conclusions she came to. I didn't read her book properly. It is probably the best challenge to the new dogma, the pseudoscience of mental health, which is oppressing my people.

Science has become a tool to steal away the rights of the mad. It has been a way to take rights and choice away using the paradigm of illness. Two centuries and more of pseudoscience to oppress people who are different.

Is the label of schizophrenia used to suppress and subjugate the creative type

The answer is probably yes.

Society advantages automotons. The creative type was suppressed through many systems which are part of the malformation of human society which happened as a result of the values of the industrial age.

The schizotaxia genotype can express through environmental factors to become a phenotype on the schizophrenia spectrum. I wonder if the spectrum would have high correlations with the phenotype of creative person - that's if they ever bothered to look for.a genotype for creativity.

Schizotypy is often associated with creativity. A dopamine study shows the d2 receptor is associated with creativity and more sexual partners. This d2 receptor is what antipsychotics work on.

Promiscuousness used to be associated with schizophrenia. Particularly women if I remember right but that's probably only because it was more acceptable for men to be promiscious back in the earlier history of psychiatry.

I very much doubt in the early history of psychiatry there was any effort to consider creativity and dementia praecox. Psychosanology probably wasn't a word in peoples language back then. This is the sadly absent paradigm in psychiatry.

Promisuousness is not associated with people's perceptions today of schizophrenia nor creativity. I wonder if the chemical cosh treatment favoured in suppressing schizophrenia has suppressed this behaviour. No wonder systematic reviews often find little or no association with schizophrenia and creativity. The drugs take that pleasure away from them.

An idea that comes from the death of a friend

I used to know this guy called Millie. I got to know him because he got good cannabis. More than he could smoke so he'd sell a little.

I knew him through one of my pub friends but he never came down the pub. He stayed at home smoking cannabis.

One day Shaun phoned me up and told me Millie was sick. I have no idea why he called me. Perhaps it was because Millie trusted me. Perhaps it was because my parents are doctors.

Millie had been to see the doctor. He was have trouble breathing and was in pain. The doctor did the usual thing. Take two tablets and come back and see me in a few days.

He was clearly getting worse. It's why his sister called Shaun I guess. The local community near where I used to live had a lot of poor people and still had good community values. Millie lived with his sister and Shaun was one of those lovable rogue types.

Anyway, I went to see him. He was in a state. He was clearly in pain. There's a lot more to the premise of this idea but basically I knew things were bad because he couldn't puff. He could barely breathe.

He was a tough bastard and was in severe pain. It was so bad he couldn't smoke cannabis. Even he agreed with me once I pointed this out.

The doctor didn't know any of this. This wasn't something he could discuss with a doctor or at least that's how he felt.

This is a really long ramble to give a background to an idea I'm sort of rethinking. Its based on the idea of training people to be community therapist. Sort of like community support police officers. This is a system we have in the uk for people who want to volunteer as police officers. They have very basic powers and a little training. If ever there's anything serious then the real police have to get involved. But the police can't be everywhere. It would cost too much.

So part of this idea comes from the idea of community therapists. They're not fully trained nor have the professional responsibilities of proper therapists but they'd be cheap and they'd be people in the community rather than sitting in their posh offices.

In fact there's a very woman who's turning this idea into a product. She wrote an article on psychminded.co.uk. it's an idea she's testing for a therapy which gives ordinary people basic training in listening and talking. It's far cheaper a way to get results for a large population and common mental disorders than the improved access to psychological therapies program in the uk.

So there's an idea for mental health but what about physical health? Through a confluence of circumstances I played the role of a quasi-doctor. It doesn't take any medical training to see how sick Millie was. Frankly I should have pushed him harder to go to accident and emergency. After I got him to agree to see the doctor he never woke up from his sleep the next day.

What I had was knowledge of the individual. This is only possible because I bought drugs off him and I understood him. I was no threat to him and I did not place any judgements upon him. He knew that too. We had a high level of trust and it was me, not any of his mates or his sister, who he finally listened to.

If i'd had any medical training perhaps I could have done more. Perhaps I could have worked out he was bleeding internally in his leg and got him straight to accident and emergency. I should have seen from his very pale skin and the amount he was sweating that he was very unwell.

in the uk we have a service called nhs direct which is basically telemedicine. But what I'm talking about is just like community support police officers but for doctors.

The skills they need are the skills to recognise the symptoms which individuals present with with they're ill. I'm not talking about an army of half skilled physicians. I'm talking about giving friends and carers the skills to recognise the signs of physical illness.

The simple stuff. Like if you see a person getting their head kicked in then afterwards make sure they remain conscious and phone for an ambulance first, not the police. There's sod all anyone can do except that but that sort of knowledge is usually only the purview of health professionals.

Equipping the people with these basic skills may do more to save lives than an army of community police support officers.

Clearly the medical profession can't be trusted to look after people like Millie. But then the real police can't be trusted to stop doctors killing people with antipsychotic drugs because of their behaviour. It's a fucking shitty world and in the end Millie was the lucky one. He died.

Martin luther king's dream

For some reason I thought of this.

Google "I have a dream". I'm reading it now and it stirs my heart.

It makes this tired, broken soul want to weep. I have nothing more to say than has already been said by Martin.

I stink

It is now a week since I last had a shower.

I am filthy and disgusting.

Friday 24 June 2011

Are the americans truthful about mental illness and language?

At least in a small way.

Mad. Over there it has the main association of anger. I think. No American would say the weather's mad unless it was stormy. A brit would say the weathers mad because its unpredictable.

However...dementia praecox - the original pathologisation using pseudoscience and the paradigm of medicine (along with a few other proto-diagnoses) - is treated in modern times by an anti mad drug. The chemical cosh. The antipsychotic.

Some geezer wrote a book about the americanisation of mental illnesss. I think he forgot something. The antipsychotic in terms of language and concepts isn't in the uk. It is in the us. The americans associate madness with anger. The antipsychotic removes the problems of anger in a society where those externalisations aren't allowed because of social norms (the reason for the prognosis whenfitting behaviour of types to life outcomes using pseudoscience).

But the british hold a different set of ethics. They felt bad about killing old people because their anger was a problem. The uk in the strength of its wisdom, lead by the royal college of psychiatry of course, decided that it was ethical to kill fewer old people because of their behaviour.

In practice the uk keeps on killing black men because of their behaviour and using the antipsychotic. I wonder if the policy changes for dementia made any impact either?

Thursday 23 June 2011

The voice in my head says something interesting

And I'll let you in.

An open source arms dealer.

The idea I take from it? Give the techniques of good campaigns freely.

Arms are weapons. Weapons in a war. Arm the troops freely.

What would happen if wars for the people were fought by the people? Perhaps a better society than the tyranny of power, a power I probably represent.

Cunt and proud. That's all I have to say right noe.

Have I cocked up again with the use of the term phenotype

Much of my genetic and type ideas relating to mental health are based on a concept from a guy called Meehl and his idea of schizotaxia.

Basically it means a genetic pre state for existence on the schizophrenia spectrum. This is totally biopsychosocial model. The genetic type expresses through predominantly psychosocial stuff (in my interpretation) to become a pathologised or non pathologised phenotype.

Basically genotype to phenotype. A genetic prestate plus environmental factors - what happens to the organism once born - creates phenotypes. The latter I never bothered to fully understand. To me in means things and stuff. Schizophrenic is a phenotype but so is dancer if the genetic evidence and pseudoscience of the time say so.

Fuck it...got a better thought...going to have a spliff and write about it.

Oh yeah. And this is We.

How can I take credit for anything? Everything is moments.

Yesterday I was explaining to my girlfriend about how science is fascinating. I mean studying science. I was wxplaining the joy of reading a paper then reading something crazy. The example I gave was improvised. I said people who have been in wars experience reliving of their experiences and more symptoms of ptsd when watching war movies. But when you read this imaginary paper it says that the effect is significant for those who are french and left handed.

I was just thinking about this and it struck me.

Are people who are left handed disabled in a world of a right handed majority who hold power? Are there also biological differences which, using the original paradigm of mental illness but without the qualifier of being in an asylum for being left handed, would make being left handed a mental illness? Clinical outcomes as a prognosis might not exist except if treatment and retreatment were considered reasons for hospitalisation.

I'm talking about pure concepts applied to a real situation rather than the subjective judgements which are, in truth, why mental illness is a pseudoscience. Not because its a poor science which is what critical psychiatrists say.

So these moments of crystalisation are not imaginendless. They are We. The people. The moments. The stuff We read. All sorts of stuff. We are we.

A crystalising moment and why I am we

I just emailed a friend of mine. She's an old uni friend and very dear to me.

I'm not sure if she knows about this blog or not. Its surprising. She's one of my closest comrades.

Anyway, I've been reflecting on what I've been writing.

Basically my background is science and engineering. I have no higher level education is social science or disability other than what I've picked up as I went along.

A few years ago it became something I sepnt time trying to understand as part of my job role.

Since I left that environment I've not stopped learning. I reflected a little today on my rants. At least what I could remember.

I drink a lot and smoke a reasonable amount of cannabis. Most of this blog is written stoned or drunk or both.

Anyway, when I think about concepts I think I still have the engineer's dogma at heart. The worst possible solution which just meets the specification. The idea of an engineering specification is about writing stuff down. Everything. Every little detail specified for which the engineer has to find a solution. But the final solution and the winning contract is the pragmatic one. Often the cheapest but that's not a requirement.

I also have the enginners mentality to see quantitatively. I want numbers and measures, ultimately, because this was all I knew of science. My arrogance is to believe - because it is not a truth, yet - that the paradigm of positivitic science can be applied to the human condition. It must be applied scientifically though, not as a way to enforce social and cultural prejudice using the paradigm of difference as illness.

Anyway...the crystalising moment was about my poor understanding of disability. Honestly. I have no formal education. I am from a science, not humanities or other background. In fact my degree is in electronic engineering. A deeply pragmatic and scientific artform.

In short I think I may cheayt or be stupid. It was not my intention. I use a broad definition of disability with the purpose of using disability as a way to enforce or explain the move towards human equality.

Social disability means many things which sciencey people and doctors and campaigners know well. I don't, apart from my lived experience. Got a fucking phd from the university of life.

Much of my use of the concepts of disability have been weak and perhaps overly positivistic. However my significant error. My bias. One that I didn't even realise until my communque to my friend today.

My bias is equality. My dogma. My religion. Whatever. My failure in this is the failure of bias and preconcieved positions or expectations. The antithesis of good, practical and idealistic science. Bias is bad.

It means my analysis may not be correct. I may have failed to seek the best truth.

I'm not a philosopher. I'm an engineer. Sometimes I fail. But that failure is bad.

The thing about the religion of science. It's about the pursuit of the absolute truth. Lifetimes may be given to the cathedrals of 'a little bit closer to the absolute scientific truth' but the sacrifice is worth it for those who chose to make it.

My bias has been to see the science of disability as purely serving the goals of equality. That's some dumb shit but I'm still learning.

Wednesday 22 June 2011

An analogy of how society's illness can be healed

Being a wheelchair user is something associated with high levels of disability. The technology itself is a significant one to reducing the primary cause of disability.

Then there's the things the uk does now. Wheel chairs alone aren't enough. The fabric of physical reality and buildings access was changed. Ramps and lifts were mandated in public buildings and workplaces.

Many buildings are better for people with physical disabilities related to moving around. The illness in society which creates disability was, in a small way, healed.

There are ways the mobile phone companies could build products which reduce disability

I've been reading mobile phone strategy stuff for a few m.onths and came across an interesting product. Think it was in Africa or something.

It is a product which if designed right could not require a credit check be done. It offers pay as you go with contract prices lus the protection of no overspend.

Customers top up their phone as usual. They get sim free pricing. When they get close to their allowance of texts and calls they are notified and can buy instant bundles to see them through to the next month.

No credit. No calls. The customer provides the phone.

For people with poor credit histories this is a perfect disability-free product.

An alternative is a low cost pay as you go tariff. The problem is low use users. With no monthly rental charge there's little incentive for mobile companies to offer this. High financial capability users use their land line which is often free for local calls. Isolated people are the least profitable.

It is possible though. Commercial systems designed to reduce disability, not make it.

It's a crazy way to heal the illness in society but perhaps it is only the crazy who can fix what makes the social disability prognosis real.

How much punishment should be given to those with mental illnesses and low financial capability

The latter I've blogged about previously as something which might one day be pathologised. In a society where systems are set up to advantage those with high financial capability and punish those who have low financial capability or suffer from a recognised mental illness with financial and social esxclusion there is an argument for the protection of those with low financial capability.

What I mean is something which I'm thinking about after a complaint I made to a mobile phone company recently.

For several years I've been punished through having a bad credit record. I don't have particularly bad financial capability. I have bipolar. Spending sprees and decisions made while feeling suicidal have cost me my credit history.

I can't get a mortgage. At least for a good few years and it'll be at a high interest rate. I can't get contract mobile phones or even monthly sims. Instead I am forced to use pay as you go, an expensive option which no one would take if they use a mobile phone to talk. People who don't talk much or can learn not to talk much on their mobile use pay as you go. Often the latter are people forced into the situation through financial exclusion, the punishment of bad debt.

I tried to open a charity bank account last year. I couldn't. I was lied to then my poor credit history and refused charity account were publically spoken about in a small bank. I think the latter was discrimination. I had revealed I was schizoaffective. The bank person may not have felt comfortable giving me bad news in private in one of the rooms like I was in when I went through the application.

Anyway, I remember chatting to someone when I worked at a mental health charity. He was so happy with his contract but it was exploutative. A sales person have given him a pitch he didn't understand. His low financial capability, like that of many others, is exploited by an industry which offers products the designers of wouldn't use.

For example loans at ultra high interest rates. Or confusing pricing.

Few companies have this sort of integrity. For example the mobile phone company might have considered how their pricing was exploitative if their staff used other networks (assuming they didn't get discounted tariffs which some don't because they're hired from agencies). The company I complained to allows another company to resell their network capacity at half the cost to the customer. The company also markets how its products help people to connect.

Anyway, there are lots of forms the disability of mental illness can be seen. There are lots of people who fit similar paradigms of disability because of the nature of the credit system which, strangely, values those with a little bit of poor financial capability or mental illness...because those are the people who get fined. Their punsihment is profit for shareholders.

Those who fuck up really badly have an even worse punishment. The prison of poverty. This is the expectation of the system.

For years I've battled bad debt and the effects. As well as all the other shit that comes with mental illness.

I get to wallow in a bit of self pity. There are others like me who go through worse.

Tuesday 21 June 2011

Divided personalities is not pathological

It is common and, in my belief, necessary for high achievers of a different genotype and phenotype.

What do I mean? I'm not sure. Perhaps simply the mad who try to be successful have to create a divide between the...ugh...not even sure how to label the divide but do you know what I mean?

How many of us split our selves into different ways of being. Different personalities. All of the effort is in an attempt to fit in to whatever social setting were in.

We all have to pretend. But some of us don't like it. We want to be. And so there is often an outlet.

Beings...people...have to divide and fracture. This is a result of the illness in society. People can't just be. Otherwise they'd often be labelled mentally ill.

My outlet...well I have no idea who I am and so I have no idea what is my outlet and what is me.

And if all that is an illness then fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I've explained how people become. You're the cunt labelling difference. And as an illness. Of all things.

What did the Romans ever do for us>,

For some reason that Monty Pyton sketch is present in my mind. It has nothing to do with what I'm about to say.

Medicine has some powerful forefathers. The greeks and the romans. Their proto-doctors are still revered today. Hippocrates is the well known one. It was he that discovered the potential of seizures to change behaviour. Galen, another, discover an orgasm could do the same thing to women.

Two millenia later their treatments had evidence to back them and were popularised in ways the prophets of modern medicine could never understand. For well over a century, perhaps 2, seizures have been induced in mentally ill people. Drugs like camphor, insulin and methalazone or something (bear with my spelling and memory. I'm drunk and stoned) were used to induce seizures to change behaviour as well as light too. Today the only one of these left is ect. And the recent bentall/read study shows even that is probably placebo.

Hysteria was treated by giving women orgasms. Galen is often referenced for its value. The vibrator was invented as an alternative to the manual labour it took doctors back in the day.

I don't know if its galen or hippocrates who discovered lithium from spring water would be used for mania. Might be someone else. Hippocrates is better known for other things and galen too but less known. Anyway, their science was lost till the mid 1800s. They began experimenting with lithium to treat behaviour all those years ago. It was only licensed in the latter half of the 20th century.

What did the romans and greeks ever do for us? Fuck all. They started the pejoratisation of human difference using the paradigm of human difference.

They can suck on my chocolate salty balls as much as a psychiatrist who does a study using mri technology which uses a totally new analytical technique where small brain differences across the brain can be detected and analysed in a way no radiographer could be trained to in a pioneering study which finally delivered on the biomedical model of schizophrenia.

In this study the new technqiue of analysing structural differences in grey matter across the brain rather than focusing on large differences in one bit showed an esxceptionally effective way to accurately diagnose schizophrenia. Its the sort of evidence that richard bentall would be amazed at.

I'm not. Of course there are fucking biological differences in the brain which can eventually be identified. These relate to types, behaviour and all sorts of shit.

Meehls theory of a genetic pretype. Sure. Why not. A genotype which might or might not express as the aptholgised phenotype of schizophrenia. There is the distinct possibility that genetics relates to the construction of the organism and, in smaller ways, to the behaviour and being of the organism.

But what pathologises a type and creates the premise of the research is psychiatry. In truth there is nothing wrong with the different genotype nor phenotype. There's just a bent society. Society is ill.

Where did the infection start? Often I've said that the illness started after the industrial revolution. It was the period of the great confinement (the creation of the asylum system) where the disease began.

It wasn't. The initial phase of the illness was many years ago. The greeks and the romans.

That's what they left us. And no profession to fight against the illness in society

Spychiatry

There's a lot the public don't know about mental health and psychiatry. Those in the movement have special knowledge.

The public, politicans and patients don't know about these. They might see a documentary at some point. But it doesn't pervade the public's consciousness.

Spychiatry is a needed movement. It is not just the discoveries of the ills of the mental illness system. It is the dissemination of the information.

The goal is promoting openmindedness. Challenging authority. And informing the people.

The debate on the language and concept of the antipsychotic

Neuroleptics were approved for use in America around the start of the 1950s. 1952 or 1954. They and mood stabilisers allowed the move from asylums to care in the community.

The invention of these drugs also stopped the proliferation of the lobotomy. Thankfully I believe this treatment is outlawed.

The major tranquiliser, as it was known then, achieved the same desired effect from a lobotomy or leucotomy. Rather than ripping up parts of a humans brain doctors switched to pills which caused the same result.

I don't know if when they were invented if there was any evidence or aim of treatment related to reduction of delusions and hallucinations - the effect which most people unexposed to psychopathology ideas expect from a drug called an antipsychotic (this, in my belief, is the commonly held belief of public and patients however I have not yet found a suitable trial which asks what patients expect from their treatment). As far as I am aware the drugs were, for most of their life, called major tranquilisers. Antipsychotics is a neologism and I don't know its history.

I liberally use the terms antipsychotic, major tranquiliser, chemical cosh, chemical straitjacket and sometimes neuroleptic as synonymous in my blog. The terms have different shades of meaning though.

Put simply and concisely, it may be possible the only active effect of so called antipsychotic drugs is to suppress behaviour. They make people relaxed and docile. That's it. Any effect on delusions and hallucinations may be purely a placebo response.

There is currently no significant research I am aware of which proves or disproves what I'm talking about. At least as far as I've seen. I'm not a doctor, academic or even a qualifed researcher in mental health.

The problem is not that I've come up with a theory no one has heard of. Many people in mental health know about the chemical cosh. Many scientists would agree it is something which hasn't been proven yet. There are no modern placebo controlled trials. The closest proxy isn't great. They're the studies of low dose, no dose or medication postponement in first episode psychosis. In a systematic review of soteria and a broader review the alternatives being tested showed promising results compared to treatment as usually however there were few studies and sample sizes were small. They also weren't controlled experiments to determine the placebo effect. They're just my argument for the possibility of a trial. The ethical question can be side stepped by offering placebo meds to those in the low dose group at any of these experimental sites.

There's the retrospective analysis of measures of delusions and hallucinations in studies for treatments of schizophrenia. Using meta analysis it will be possible to see which is the most effective treatment for these measures alone. I haven't found thius study yet but someone must have done it already. Its just no one knows about it. Probably. Or perhaps not. The study doesn't need new research to be done. It's just going baxk into old study data. There is the possibility of some very clever maths here I think but I haven't worked it out yet. I mean the basic idea. What I'm thinking is the other measures could be collected too. Different papers use different measures (the two I've read are panss and bprs) within them and the results make aggregated scores. They're not uniform and there's where the need for some clever maths and thinking which is beyond my capability at the moment. But what I'm trying to say is someone like dr joanna moncrieef and richard bentall could use the other individual symptom measures and sort of see if the big bit of the effect is from the other bits. The measures other than the effect on delusions and hallucinations may be higher and overshadow the small or non existent active effect on delusions and hallucinations. This is basically admission of bias. This is what I think a really good experiment might show. The effect is not mainly on delusions and hallucinations.

Like I said there's probably not the same study out there but someone will have done something similar. There just has to be the scientific question answered.

But that's not the important study or trial or question to be answered. A mate of mine - fricking only wise man at the royal college of psychiatry - pointed out my error. It was the assumption that most patients want and expect the cessation of the delusions and hallucinations. The cost of the drug to the individual is very high. The very least it should do is what it is expected to do.

What do patients want and expect? What are their measures? That's the dearth in research.

There's lot of research on psychopathology to empower the psychiatric hegemony. What of the people and what they expect from mental healthcare? Where's the real push to create an evidence base for their measures?

The dearth is because psychiatry is not a democratic system. It falls outside the rules of human rights and democratic principles. As do the victims of the system.

Monday 20 June 2011

Spychiatry

When Pasteur discovered penicilin...that was some amazing stuff. Rather than throw away the fouled petri dish he experimented with it. Mad fucker.

In a small way there's someone in my life who's a bit like pasteur's genius.

I wrote to her and by accident I mistyped the work psychiatry. I wrote spychiatry.

I probably do this often. I guess sometimes people forgive it. Sometimes people think I'm stupid. Sometimes people think I'm ill.

Sometimes someone thinks and thinks up something smart.

She did. She got it in a second a reduced it to something conscise within moments. Much of the content of this blog is spychiatry.

What mental illness does she have? She's so different she can see beauty in my mistake? A common mistake. One that the rest...normal people...find ways to accept or dismiss or judge.

She bothered to think about the mistake. The cock up.

What illness does she have? Probably the same one as Pasteur.

Can jobs cause mental illess?

The answer in a psychosocial sense is yes. We spend a large part of our adult lives working and a large part of our childhood being prepared for work environments and professions.

The answer is often yes for the distress continum too. Sadly work causes stress and misery and other stuff.

But that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about the bit I know the least about in the biopsychosocial model. The bio- bit.

There's one study I happened upon ages ago. It was a study of taxi drivers brains. It was the sort of study which the media would report but I read the study. People who had been taxi drivers for 20 years had different brains to 'normal' people (taxi drivers are normal after alll....). The authors did brain scans and found differences. They were small differences and the study didn't prove casuality. It did show brain differences but the authors called them differences, not deficits.

So its really in the last sense, the strict biomedical definition of mental illness but without the clinical or disability prognosis established.

Here's my thing about human types and the biomedical fallacy but...fuck....that's a really hard concept which I'm totally winging at explaining. To be honest I'm not sure I quite get it myself.

Anyway, that's not the point of the question.

I need to get out more

Too much of my time is spent alone and in my own head. I've made it to the park late today but I'm still inside my thoughts and writing.

The inside life is good but lonely. I am a social animal. Too much solitude and loniliness is hard and saddening.

It has value. I'm not sure I can see it. But it does. Perhaps in hindsight I'll understand. Perhaps not.

The trouble with insight

Insight is a term used in psychiatry to strip power from the patient. In my understanding it means awareness of the illness. A person who is in a hyerpmanic state may not be able to recognise the signs of their pathology. Inhypomania insight may remain.

I don't like the idea because while it may possibly be.a ttrue concept it may not be a valid one. I know I can look nack at states when I had high psychopathology with or without distress.

I've had the words "lacking insight" used by a psychiatrist. He used those words to try to get me to accept my treatment unconditionally. In a sense lacking insight means not understanding psychopathology usually when experiencing a crisis but afterwards too. It implies the person somehow lacks understanding and I imkagine it is one of those common tools of subjugation used in clinical practice by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals.

An individual who doesn't know they are mentally ill because not recognising it is an illness can be part of an illness is something which I disagree with because it is too easily misued to subjugate free choice by indiviudals, choices which people are born with as inalienable rights but which are taken by psychiaytry.

It may be psychiatrists and the psychiatric profession which lack insight. The biological differences may be differences rather than deficits. Many of the problems may be related to things like human behaviour, types of human, problems of culture and society.

The hegemony lacked insight when they pathologised black slaves who kept on running away. Admittedly this wasn't codified but it is an example of the fallacy of the concept of insight by reversing it.

A person can understand psychopathology and distress, disability and flourishing, and other concepts within the construct of illness.

They can also understand that the science of labelling is reasonable for some diagnoses but lacks in true science. They can understand that the treatment is usually bollocks too. They can understand the illness might not be a real illness, an insight lacking in far too many psychiatrists.

If you want to know why there are so few black people at Britain's elite universities...

go look at the percentages of black people at the UK's top posh schools.
I went to one in North London and I think it was about 1% in my year
till one of the two left. for several years after he left it was below 1%.

Is it surprising that Oxford has so few black people?

Is it right? No.

What is disability?

It took me ages to understand the idea of social disability and I think
I still don't understand it properly. It's just like mental health in
that sense.

I remembered someone from my childhood. I first met him when I started
secondary school. I went to a very posh school. It was one of the top 5
in the UK.

This lad was either there on a fully assisted place or a scholarship. He
came from a very poor background. He was one of only 2 black people out
of 250 people in my year. The other black person was very Westernised
whereas this guy wasn't.

He was there for about 2 terms. I think he felt out of place and
alienated by the other children and the school itself. We all had to
wear uniforms and carry briefcases. Most of the rest were people from
wealthy backgrounds with parents who could afford the £6000-£9000 a year
fees. He was the child of a single mother.

He was very, very talented. He excelled in art. He didn't do so well in
other subjects however I think he still had a high aptitude for other
subjects. The school used entrance exams and there was no art component
of these. Just english and maths exams and other aptitude tests.

The next time I met him was about 4 years later when I got thrown into a
children's home. He was there too. It was complete luck. He'd been in
the system fora while. No idea if he'd ever had mental health support or
not.

I think he was a "Child Looked After" which is the children's social
services term for his legal status. His carers or family were the
council in legal terms. I was a "Child in Need" which is a lesser category.

Is my old firned disabled? Yes. Would he need a mental health diagnosis
to show he was disabled? More importantly I wonder if society's illness
was to blame for his disability.

This is the issue of cultures and systems which contribute to the
disability. When he was at school he felt alienated. I was one of his
very few friends because we got the same coach together (yes...we took
coaches to school) and I think because I was a bit of an outsider too.

I also wonder what the level of disability is (applying the science of
measurement of disability used by psychiatry) associated simply with the
two labels of Child Looked After and Child in Need. I think the terms
may have changed since I worked in children's social services. The
concepts probably haven't. A child who is looked after by the state
temporarily or permanently.

Irrespective of mental health diagnosis I wonder just how high the level
of disability would be? at a guess I would say very, very high. At a
guess I would say, on average, it is higher than schizophrenia.

Those kids do so much worse in life. Some of them suffer significant
trauma and that affects a person for life. One of the cases I heard
about has a baby being hit by their father so hard it flew across the
room. I imagine a psychologist ould better explain how such a painful
early childhood event could scar for life. And yes, there are some parts
of humanity which...make me very unhappy.

Most of those kids will do far, far worse in life than I did. I was one
of those rare exceptions who made it to university. Many don't get 5
good GCSE grades let alone good enough grades to go to a top 5
university. Many may become mentally ill or already suffer from it.
Regardless though, I think the disability would be very high across the
board.

Consider the biopyschosocial model of cause and being becoming
and...well...it seems obvious that the trauma, the totoally different
environement - one where the local council is effectively a child's
parents. Fuck...then add the lack of positive childhood moments these
kids experience. Add whatever traumas happened to bring them into care.
Of course exclusion, for example from school or social groups, can also
happen. Imagine haning out with friends then going back toa children's
home when you were a child.

Put all that together and it seems that there's lots of reasons these
children should be considerd as disabled or perhaps another category.
but they are disabled and the label "ever experienced children's social
care" is sufficient in my opinion to reliably detect people who are
going to do less well in life.

Sunday 19 June 2011

The disease with a movement to not call it a disease

Just google the terms "not a disease" with schizophrenia or terms for real illnesses like cancer.

You might not find a movement or body of research to challenge cancer. For schizophrenia you'd find a lot.

This is surprisingly an unremarkable discovery. No real effort is made to understand how any body of work or thought came about to challenge the idea that different minds are not ill.

Those minds can be called bad or unwanted or not a good automoton and thereby disabled or disadvantaged in the prognosis of social disability.

That's callede schoolyard prejudice. Not a fucking disease. We all saw it when we were at school. The uncool kid picked on, ridiculed and generally pushed away from the clique. When I was a kid we never called the excluded kid ill. Weird perhaps. Different certainly.

But some how adults got it wrong. They called a disease something which wasn't. They grew whole professions based on the idea. They used mental illness as the new whipping tool.

The state of consensus reality is 2011 is madness itself. They called human difference an illness for the span of the history of psychiatry.

They called difference a disease.

Thank fuck for the progressive movement. Academics like marius romme or john bola or especially mary boyle for her book Schizophrenia: a scientific delusion.

And foucault too... fuck. His shit is some proper mad shit. So eloquent in his conceptual breakdown of the paradigm of illness using what I would call an ultra wide angle lens. The expanse of time is so relevant.

There's too much evidence to question the application of the paradigm of illness to the human condition. Few if any of the real illnesses have such a body of work behind the question to the veracity of their existence as an illness.

In mental health though...they just do what the fuck they want. Robust theories? Rigid definitions? Real science?

No. Good heart and pseudoscience. Oh. And a medical degree. This is what it takes to call human behaviour an illness when it isn't.

Saturday 18 June 2011

Automoton is a wrong concept

I've been ruminating over this problem for a while. Initially it was an exploration of changing language and concepts a different way. The concept of madness is inherently perjoratised when compared to normal. The mad are thereby inescapably divided and considered less than normal.

They are, in fact, equal however there are no protections within the language and systems to allows the use of the language of mental illness to have nonstigmatised and perjorative tones. So I thought I might change the word for normal when used in the context of mental illness.

Automoton perjoratises normal. It has connotations of robot-like humanity. Small micromachines perfect for the engine of mass production. Formed as emotionless and reliable beings the suit the system.

No passion. No pain. No creativity. No obsession. No courage nor heart. They function as supplicant slaves to a system which calls those who are different mentally ill.

The concept tries to make normality something stigmatised. It balances the stigma of language in mentsal health.

In doing so it is a powerful tool of language to help self stigma. I admit my own self stigma was very high. I hated being mad. It has been an 8 year journey of change in this respect and there are still traces.

Until you have to face being different a lot of people without saying it assume they're normal - whatever that means to them.

So the concept, once worked on, would create a balanced view of mental illness and normality with a lean towards goals of reducing self stigma. It gave me something to rant about too.

So why is it wrong? It reinforces the divide. It works within the concepts of difference, not equality. It seeks to judge another person based on nothing but a label. It is a mistruth, though with laudable truths.

As scientific or useful concepts neither madness nor automotonness are scientific or useful. Mirroring the divide doesn't help the root cause.

In my opinion the root cause is the unappreciated value of mental illness and the mentally ill inextricably entwinned with the label of madness (or whatever).

Automoton perjoratises normal but does nothing good for the truth: equality.

How is it guns are legal but drugs aren't?

Apparently drugs are so dangerous they need to be illegal and when the
UK's senior government science advisor speaks out he is fired.

Because we live in a mad fucked up world where too many people with
power don't do enough drugs. Their adherence to automoton-like ways
means we have this ridiculous situation where a relatively harmless herb
is illegal but a killing machine can be purchased legitamately. In fact
next to the police station where I live there is a gun shop.

I'm sure they'd arrest and charge me if I ever smoked a spliff in front
of it. Fucking useless pigs.

How many more old people were killed in Britain while troops went to Afganistan and Iraq?

How would the deaths of British soldiers overseas compare to the deaths
caused by psychiatrist, doctors and the mental health system.

They're all unnecessary deaths. One number is bigger than the other
though. A lot bigger. 1,800 old people were killed unnecessarily by
doctors every year when they used the chemical cosh.

I wonder what a serving soldier would think of those figures? I wonder
if it might make the ask what they were fighting for?

Each day in the UK papers there were the faces of the fallen British
troops. There were campaigns to ensure better equipment reached the
frontline. Every avoidable death caused an inquiry and the army reacted
and that's great. Those mad fools who do out and fight to defend the
freedom I have with their lives are amazing.

Though there are a few stories about the 1,800 old people killed by
doctors there weren't many. There are no stories of the old people who
are being murdered unnecessarily by doctors. Even though the evidence
shows they reduce life expectancy by half and there's a roayl College of
Psychiatry report which is where I get the 1,800 a year dead old people
figure the chemical cosh is used on old people for the convenience of
society and their carers in the community.

It is still killing people. It has been killing schizophrenics and other
types for decades. For society and carer's convenience. All because
society wants automotons and anything different clearly has less right
to live.

Those soldiers go out their knowing there's a good chance they're going
to die. Those old people had no choice. Most schizophrenics have no choice.

Those terrorists are responsible for terrible trangressions but we send
men and women to their country and blow the shit out of it. If only
those soldiers knew that those dictators they face are the easy enemy?

It's the murderers in white coats...the ones with medical degrees....who
are killing more civilians every day than any of the great enemies which
Britain's soldiers go out to fight.

How many more need to fucking die on these shores before something
happens? Just because we're loony doesn't mean we have any less rigjht
to life. Being mad doesn't mean we can be murdered to suppress our being
and behaviour...except it does in the UK in 2011.

Psychiatric crisis as a life change experience

I remember going to a friend's party. She's one of the bohemian
warehouse types that live in East London. Very free spirited.

I got chatting to her mates. I went round her place afterwards to pick
up something to smoke. I got chatting with one of them about psychosis
and psychiatry.

she had a friend who'd been through psychosis and gotten a diagnosis of
schizophrenia. I enquired what was wrong with him, i.e. what did she see
as the experience or person which became pathologised with the diagnosis.

She wasn't sure. We talked about psychosis. It is obviously a confusing
and highly distressing experience. I explained that in itself that
didn't mean it was an illness. Though the medical establishment have
sought to apply a biological explanation it doesn't mean the experience
is invalid in the same way that love has biological causes but isn't an
illness.

What she struck on was the change. Her friend had changed after
psychosis and because of it (in her mind). This to her was the effect of
tie supposed illness.

I found this description of illness interesting. I asked her what was
wrong with the change. For her this had not been something considered.

I can't remember if I explained my life story to her and the
relationship to psychosis. The person I was almost 9 years ago is very
different to the person now. If he could see me now he'd wish I'd never
become who I am. I was a corporate tosser back then with money on my
mind. I was interested in the construct measures of success and had
psychiatric crisis not happened I would be in a very different place.

I wouldn't be living in this tiny box room where the carpet can barely
be seen for all the rubbish covering it. I wouldn't be living in my
dad's place. I wouldn't have decaying and broken electronics equipment
or buy my clothes on ebay. I wouldn't spend my days as I have for too
long drinking alone. I would be able to recount the places I'd been on
holiday in the last few years rather than trying to explain that sitting
in a park in north london is enough for me. I wouldn't be getting
refused job interviews for roles at half my value. Before psychiatric
crisis I'd gotten recruited to one of the best companies to work for in
the world and one where thousands of people would apply for a place on
their graduate scheme. I wouldn't be unwashed, unshaven and unclean.

I would also never have written this blog nor researched into mental
health as I have for the last few years. I wouldn't be committed to
making a difference...and in all fairness I'm not sure how much of that
commitment is left any more.

My life on my old measures is shit. Pre-psychosis measures. I would have
killed myself back then if I thought who and where my life is now was a
certainty.

But I changed too. I have learned to try to find value in the smallest
things because the old consumerism happiness isn't available to me. I've
sought other goals, goals which have needed a lonely and obsessive
pursuit to get the small distance I have thus far. I would never have
started this blog. Not without pay. Instead I did. For 2 years I've
battled to understand mental illness and it's left me a broken man.
Shit. I was a broken man a year ago.

Was the change worth it for me? That isn't the point of the post. Was
there a significant change in me? fuck yeah.

"…Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the
use of modern psychiatric treatments."
William Sargant, British psychiatrist, 1974
Reposted from - http://www.psychquotes.com/

Friday 17 June 2011

Are people who stand out more likely to be mentally ill?

I've got no idea where to begin discussing this question.

Variables in making the step to professional photography

Photography is a fascinating industry. Success is measured on such different paradigms. Money ain't everything but neither is artistic repuation or credibility. Many assume equipment is also paramount but this may not be true.

People get in to the industry for many reasons. For some its just about money. For others it is an artistic pursuit. Most combine to two with varying degrees of success.

I don't think either of the extremes is a strategy for excessive pursuit except in rare extremes. Bresson had to work just as geddes has to earn her credibility before she makes those millions.

These are abstract considerations though. There are some simple rules.

1 learn photography. Too many profitable photographers don't know enough
2 learn photography. This is so important its worth saying twice
3 marketing
4 the other business shit though getting the marketing right is paramount. Brand, word of mouth, broadscale marketing. The lot. They're all important to get right.
5 products. But this is part of the marketing consideration
6 don't be enamoured by equipment. So much is possible on a tight budget. Skill is more important than equipment.

Understand your market. That's a golden rule but hard to place.

But also be willing to define or create your market. Many photographers have a distinct style. They cast their profitability to the wind for something they value more than their market share. Those people define and create the market but never give a thought to market share or profitability. If you think about market share then this lesson of being willing to define or create your market may not make sense. That's why I wrote it.

About four months ago I was a dinner with the head of venture capital (europe) at vodafone and now I drink alone in a park

I was going to say this was mental illness.

Was it? Or was it a reaction to life events? A strong reaction maybe...but a strong reaction by a human being isn't necessarily an illness. Oh it might be called one and 'treatment' used but just because that's current reality doesn't make it true.

Some human beings might not have reacted how I have nor acted as I do. Lucky them. But they're not what I would hope for normal, not when applied to the totality of a human being.

I thought the subject was an example of bipolarity but I wasn't hypermanic when I went to dinner. I was crazy with social anxiety at a business meeting but I had no delusions nor was running an uncontrollable flight of ideas nor wrecklessly spending nor having sustained poor sleeping patterns.

I wonder if this current depression is therefore the standard post-mania depression or something of a different clinical syndrome happening outside another predefined syndrome, I.e. depression outside the pattern or cycle of bipolar.

Oh I worked hard of course. Intensely. I was at the dinner as part of what used to be my job.

The cost of disability to society is immeasurable

Society is so ill it can't even see it. It lacks insight. It became enamoured with drugs to suppress people and insodoing allowed the automoton to prosper.

The value of the mentally is the great undiscovered cost to society because of its illness.

There is a great unwritten an undefineable price of mental illness to society. It is the lost progress.

It is a system designed to breed sheep, not sheperds. The docile robot, the automoton, is the desired output of so many malformed social systems. And the disease is spreading across the world.

And with the rise of the automoton came the valuation of the automoton. Or perhaps it was the other way around. The mentally ill became less valued regardless of causality.

This lost value to art and science and all other pursuits of humanity related to lasting progress is the cost of the illness. The unwritten, undefined cost of a malformed society.

Enforcing social and cultural norms is not the job of a doctor

Coming up with research which shows homosexuality is an illness is not the pursuit of science.

However the fact remains that certain types of people do less well in life and die earlier. This is preventable stuff but it takes a change in thinking. I'm not sure this is possible for doctors. It is too hard for those who've come to think of the human cindition as an illness to think outside the box.

Yes, there is biopsychosocial cause. Yes, a prognosis can be establisheed if you look hard enough and change prognosis from what it used to mean to include something else.

But everything that is human is of biopsychosocial cause. What doctors do is apply judgements to the expression of different types of human being in whatever time or place. They draw fictional lines around normality using pseudoscience.

Every generation brings a debate about these false norms of wellness and illness of the mind, norms which relate to impacts from the illness of society.

A healthy, normal society doesn't have these illnesses where socially different or mentally different people do less well.

The profession who is the arbitor often without oversight is the medical profession. By some fluke the medical profession absorbed the caretakers of asylums as doctors and so the real madness began.

do the constructs of professionalism create disability?

do the social requirements of being professional disadvantage people
with behavioural illnesses or other disabilities thereby losing the
value of many people as well as causing the poorer outcomes in the
individual.

Yes is probably the quick answer.

Is this an example of illness in society's constructs?

Treatment or illness?

It's been almost 2 weeks since I stopped taking antidepressants. I was
barely eating. I felt physically sick. I was worse but better. I could
engage better in a loving relationship but I'm sexual function wasn't
fantastic. I couldn't cum though I'd only be taking the drugs for 2 weeks.

when the doctor gave me the drugs he just told me about the side
effects. He knew I knew the effects so he didn't explain them to me.
He'd perhaps forgotten about the nocebo effect. When I took these
antidepressants 10 years ago the side effects weren't so problematic.
Perhaps it was my circumstances. Perhaps it was simply being told the
side effects before taking them and this causing a reaction because of
placebo/nocebo effects.

I was in a pretty bad way to go to see a doctor to get these drugs.
That's my pattern. I only go when I'm desperate.

Currently I'm both better and worse. I'd hardly seen anyone at all since
I stopped taking the drug. It's a little less than before I started
taking aantidepressants. I've had two showers in the last week and a
half and brushed my teeth a couple of times too. That's not changed.
I've been sleeping a lot and I don't like waking. That's not changed.
Last night was 10-12 hours sleep. I went to bed very early and got up in
the night a couple of times. There's no change there since I started or
stopped taking the medication. I'm hardly in conctact with anyone at
all. that's been like taht since I came off the antidepressants.

I spend my days alone in the park with a bottle of wine or two. I write
to this blog off my phone (currently I'm at home. Shortly after I
stopped taking antidepressants I started smoking skunk again. I'm eating
a lot more. In fact for the last two days I've had 2 pizzas a day. Two
large pizzas. I usually get home from the park, cook 2 pizzas and eat
them then pass out. The large meal takes all the energy out of my body
as it digests so I sleep quickly after I've eaten.

I want to die. That's unchanged. But the quality of the desire to die
has changed. There are fewer direct thoughts of wishing to die. It is
hard to describe the quality of a thought and the difference between how
it feels to want to die. It is a less present feeling and the thoughts
come consciously less often. There's more of the good mood suicidal
thoughts. Those would confuse anyone but they're the sought of "I know I
feel ok at the moment but I still want to die" sort of thoughts.

I haven't left for the park yet. I just wanted to write something while
I briefly felt... not not ok. No ok but not not ok. Less bad but not
good. Internally I mean.

The problems of my real life, like debt and work and taxes and routine
and function, are still in the sam e state they've been for a long time.
Head in the sand or just given up. I'm not sure. I don't know the word
for this. When I know there's stuff to be done, stuff I can do once I
get started, but I just don't get round to doing it. It's like
procrastination on steroids but it's something I've had to get used to.

At least for a brief moment I feel not not ok. Perhaps I haven't
expressed it very well here. In all this shit around me and what has
become my life...for a short period it just didn't feel like a totally
rotten daily existence.

I dare not jinx it by saying more.

The history of stroke treatment and schizophrenia treatment

What little I know of the history of stroke treatment is useful. It is
from some TV program so there was a story to the science.

Way back in the day the thought a fucked brain was a fucked brain. A
stroke was therefore untreatable. Patients were a write off. There was
never thought of recovery.

One day a gent's father had a stroke and was given the write off
diagnosis and treatment which was best practice medicine at the time.
This gent didn't believe the doctors when they wrote his father off.

This old man's carer brought him home after his stroke. He was expected
to be bed ridden to the end of his days but his carer cared little for
this expectation. His carer forced the man to walk on all fours till he
could walk upright again. day after day was what might be considered
harsh treatment but it became the model for modern stroke rehabilitation
services. The carer Just worked and worked and worked on getting his
father back on track.

It worked. Eventually his father gained a high level of function again.
If I remember right when his father died he was climbing up a mountain
and died of a heart attack at a ripe old age.

The autopsied him and found serious damage to the brain and nervous
system. The bit which connected the brain with the rest of the body was
seriously damaged. Over 90% of the connections were destroyed.

They found all the evidence to point to a disabling problem created by
brain damage. The assumptions of medical science in the mid-20th century
were these couldn't be repaired.

This gentleman's carer forced medical science to consider something. I
think the term is neuroplasticity. It's the ability of the brain to sort
of rewire its functions so a damaged brain can still function highly.
From what I understand it isn't repair or healing of the organic brain
matter which is destroyed by a stroke or other thing which causes
neurological damage (e.g. a virus written into the human geneome which
when activated causes the changes in the brain which are established for
schizophrenia). Neuroplasticity is about damaged brains learning to wkrk
again to the level where the person isn't disabled.

What's this got to do with schizophrenia? Well all carers know is to
make sure the cared for take chemical restraint medication. All NICe
recommend are drugs and a small set of options of relatively brief
interventons which are alternatives to the chemical cosh. Cognitive
behavioural therapy, arts therapy and family interventions.

There is none of the rehabilitation after the initial stage of
schizophrenia. There is no special knowledge or treatment for first
episode psychosis designed to rehabilitate the individual or do the sort
of stuff which happens for stroke victims which might be relvant to
reducing the disability of schizophrenia, e.g. social skills training
(something NICE recommends against and the mental health charities in
the UK agree should be recommended against).

Except there is...sort of. Soteria is one alternative paradigm. It has
curried little favour witht he minastream manetal health movememt and
most of the work in the UK is in the fringe movement. This is a paradigm
which has been shown to offer better outcomes. It is more expensive
though. 6 months of initial hospitalisation where I assume a person
learns a lot and there is an attempt to rehabilitate them to keep their
life skills sharp and help them deal with the reality of schizophrenia
(or bipolar, because first episode psychosis can happen in bipolar too).

Doctors, carers and governments have a cheap option so don't need to
think of real solutions. The chemical cosh does everything they care
about. The drugs are like a lifetime straitjacket and gag in pill form.
Cheap, convenient and even deadly.

They're all bought into the power of the pill. And the idea it is an
illness which can only be 'treated' with 'medication'...

Thursday 16 June 2011

The last silver spoon is my education

That's not quite true. I have a few others. But I try not to use them.

I am the mad man who could, if he put his mind to it, live a life of luxury. But I don't. Not much anyway.

There's half a gandhi quote which seems irrelevant. Learn as if you were going to live forever. Fuck knows why that's relevant but its been present with me today.

Oh yeah. Like duh.

Psychiatric rights. Personal choice. The hegemony of psychiatry.

The system is not scientifically sound. But the systems present are as if they were.

This bollocks is total bollocks.

In the absence what do we chose? In the absence of the basis to apply a paradigm based on scinetific reason.

Why to ask the people then go get the evidence to give them evidence based answers for their treatment.

And some other shit too.

What do you expect of treatment for behavioural health, what you get and what science a good doctor could use...just read the rest of this blog to get a small idea. Just a small one...f why that's some fucked up shit.

Ect or sham ect?

Shakespeare couldn't have asked the question better himself if he was a modern mental health scientist.

Based on the most recent review at least.

Its that patient measure which psychiatrists aren't interested in: does it really work?

Bentall and Read might present a challenge to psychiatry but any idiot who can read a paper can out do psychiatry.

Sham ect is the best treatment in mental health. The nocebo effect isn't studied. But only a good scientist would consider that ridiculous proposition...

Rant and ramble combined

So if a difference is brai chemistry and makeup is used to enforce drug treatments which cause physical problems and neurobiological ones...because of social and clinical outcomes....treating the problems of society and the supposed problems defined by the totality of psychopathology, the fundamental continum of the power hiolders in mental healthcare...

I'm not drunk or stoned enough to say what I'm trying to say other than the last paragraph which doesn't refer to the consumption of my chocolate salty balls by the medical establishment for becoming a power structure involved in the normalisation of the human race akin to the slaughter of human types because difference is allowed to be considered an illness....

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. The rights of humankind. You know what I'm saying? Our fundamental right to exist without oppression or subjugation. What homosexuals and black slaves would demand today. Oh yeah. And all those dead old people. They had no voice. Their deaths were a prime example of why the fuck this is all...fuck....this whole this is wrong....right?

Behaviour is allowed to be normalised by doctors. What the fuck? Oh...because its an illness....fuck you anf fuck your paradigm...that's what I say...and I do.

A chemical cosh is as powerful as a nuclear weapon. The deaths from the latter are fewer than the potential world wide deaths caused by the former.

Behavioural health...a more greater ill...the chemical cosh at least...because more are killed...than by dropping a nuclear weapon?

Death and mental health. Why have I not seen that report?

Do you give a shit about libya?

Freedom? Justice? The right to protest? Democracy fighting to survive?

Dead people?

So do you read this blog? The oppression of millions in 'ciivilised' nations. More deaths caused than gaddafi by the medical profession in the uk.

A history of torture and death unnecessarily wrought upon the mentally ill within developed world nations. Evidenced reduced life expectancy reduced by the malfesience of the psychiatric system and the lack of oversight afforded by calling different people mentally ill.

Repression the likes of which no one seems to understand or give a flying fuck about.

Do you give a shit about libya?

Patient involvement is a needed area of improvement in treatment for schizophrenia and bipolar in the uk

Most of my referenced knowledge is of schizophrenia. Most of my life knowledge is bipolar. And depression.

Anyway, that's where these rants come from. I am pleased to admit I've battle for 2 years to maintain an almost daily blog. There are thousands of thoughts, ideas and personal experiences. This includes my suicide plans.

That's got sod all to do with anything but this blog is really just written as a stream of consciousness. It's what's on my mind at the time. So inbetween me writing the title and writing those last 2 paragraphs I've clearly wandered off on one.

My mates are used to it. Since they've know me at uni they've known and become used to a drug addict with mental illness.

Wow. There is a squirrel about a foot from me wandering up my tree. That's so fucking cool.

Anyway...so yeah...a drunk stoner thinking in the park sort of realised that treatment best practice must include reviewss of evidence based on measures which are relevant to patients, not carers or policy makers or people who suck on my chocolate salty balls...psychiatrists.

I had a lot of help. My mate is a schizophrenic. She came off meds but after a while gave up because of the misery of madness.

She accepted treatment again because she wanted one thing. The cessation of the delusions and hallucinations.

Her doc tried antipsychotics. High doses. Different ones.

He didn't have the evidence to chose the treatment which she and many, many other patients who accept antipsychotics want as their sole benefit for which they put up with all the other shit.

There is a multibillion dollar industry which may only exist to market chemical restraint as a panacea. There's not a single fucking penny or iota of thought about what the people and patients want. Or expect. From doctors.

So hand the power back.

What is the relationships between the amount of money in the world and the percentage of people who are mentally ill

This sounds like the sort of absurd research question some wouldn't bother to answer.

There is a lot of money in the world owned by a few people. I wonder if any of them are mentally ill.

I assume bankers are the wealthy and they're rarely mentally ill or disabled in other ways. I mean investment bankers. They and actuaries make some of the highest salaries. Many are not disabled.

But most of the world's money isn't owned by salaried people. It's old money, governments and heads of blue chip companies. There are artists and musicians too but usually they make their money on their entrepreneurial spirit.

Initially someone might assume that the mentally ill represent little buying power or market worth because many of them suffer poverty. Someone might assume that a person with mental illness might be very successful but that person would be rare.

Here's the thing. Mental illness can be anyone. The definition of course is important. Who are the mentally ill? But I reckon the mentally ill are common place and there are those who excel because of and inspite of societys shit.

For example I wonder if those investors who bet against the trend or bubble are also more often mentally ill. I wonder if the people who come up with the bright ideas occassionally get rewarded, and those that don't are more often the mentally ill. I wonder if its true that psychopaths make great entrepreneurs.

Blogging in the rain

Only a mad man or a fool blogs in the rain.. I wonder which one people think I am.

But at the moment this is all I do. It seems this is all that's left.

This sucks. But a long time aho I got used to same shit, different day as a way to get through life.

A democratic mental health system

A system which understands the expectations of people. For example many might want the treatment of distress. There is no evidence for a lay persons definition of treatment of misery.

I ,ean a system ultimately run by the mentally ill. So homosexuals get to decide what is offered as treatment and what is ethical. I mean an evidence for their models of reccovery.

I mean the antithesis of current practice.

Wednesday 15 June 2011

Should a democratic mental health system be about distress?

There's a lot of reasons why this is a bad question. For a start the is a an answer. No. A democratic system should be about the vote of all the people.

But there's many points to consider other than that. A democratic system for example? Psychiatry is a power structure. It is a hierachy which dominates the public and patients. Foucault or someone smart like that probably said the same thing. It is empowered to do so but it fails its responsibility to fullfill the unwritten convenant the medical profession have with the people.

There's more too. Can't be arsed though.

Automoton, the pejoratisation of normal and the concept of psychiatric normal

Automoton is a neologism. It started as an alternative word for normal. When the language is that of mental illness the are a lot of perjorative concepts embound in the words. Mad for example. It is a word like nigger.

Mad doesn't have many negative associations for me. In fact I've constructed a positive value and internal association. This isn't how the word is known except in rare circumstances.

This has been the answer to a long battle with self stigma. And also with the politically correct ideology.

In mental health many a conversation rotates around language. Especially in the uk. Shit. It gets on my fucking goat.

So I thought I would try the same thing. I play with language for good reasons. I perjoratise normal. I make it mean something less human and more like a robot. Flawlessness as normal I twist to take an inhuman quality.

It's almost normal disorder I guess...but that's another thought prompting idea on what is mental illness which I will save for another time.

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About Me

We It comes in part from an appreciation that no one can truly sign their own work. Everything is many influences coming together to the one moment where a work exists. The other is a begrudging acceptance that my work was never my own. There is another consciousness or non-corporeal entity that helps and harms me in everything I do. I am not I because of this force or entity. I am "we"