Monday, November 26, 2012

Memories of trauma are surfacing as symptoms


The things that are

Called surfacing symptoms

Are on my tongue to say again

And I am making peace

With them, this time.

I am recognising that

Yes it did occur and yes

It was bad enough to

Harm me, but now I’m healed.

The wounds in my psyche

Have had recognition enough

To realise they don’t need

To worry about the worry

That existed in the past.

I am past that danger zone…

I drop those thoughts in

To the part of my mind

That is on remote control,

Drop those thoughts in…

Like a person with stomach

Ulcers trying to relax

The stomach that dissolves

The food in it automatically,

I drop those thoughts in…

Like an asthmatic meditating

And singing to get the automatic

Breath back to where

It is most comfortable.

I drop those thoughts in…

I am making the memory

Muscle of my mind relax

And stop being a problem,

Because it isn’t really,

It’s just a memory of trauma

That needed more conscious

Recognition that those things

That happened over years

And years, then happened

Again in other ways

With different people,

Weren’t okay and I won’t

Allow myself to be

Controlled that way again.

I know that love isn’t

An ambivalent thing,

It never should be

Extracted via fear, and if it is,

Then that is not okay

And should be acknowledged

For the wrong that it is.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Suicide prevention


I just don’t want to call the CAT team


I can’t apply what I learnt as a child

As a way to help another out of suicide.

I cannot cry those tears of desperation

To show my love, that prevented my mother

From taking her life. But I can listen

Like I did back then, to the things,

That psychiatrists judge and diagnose.

I can give enough understanding that may mean

That suicidal feelings can be expressed

Without the need for the actual action of harm

Happening to the self, perhaps, yes perhaps…

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

I hear myself scream as I am hauled in socks

Across the road, I cry for help, I am lost,

When that is the policy and procedure

To help someone through suicidal ideation

And unusual states of consciousness.

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

My mother feared that enough to know,

Never to see a mental health professional.

I know it enough from my own experience,

To flee when it is mentioned as prevention.

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

I am looking for something else,

Not what I did as a child for my mother,

But something else, because I’m an adult,

Who knows policy and procedure, but,

Wants to prevent that from happening

As well as the potential suicide…

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

What is and isn’t responsible I feel is warped

In our society, to the point where

Aversion therapy is the legal way

And gentler methods are discarded alternatives.

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

I don’t want a person that’s hurting to become

Subjected to imprisonment and forced drugging,

Asked about their symptoms and not

Considered as a person with individuality.

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

I just don’t want to call the CAT team.

notachemicalimbalance protest T-shirts

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Psychiatry must die


I think aiming my anger at organised government supported crime, is much better than aiming it at actual people. I’ve never been good at getting angry with people, they’re too complex. They have their good points as well as their destructive points, some of them, so it’s hard to hate everything about a person, without realising there are some things that they do, that I like. Then there are some people I love completely, but that's a different story... I'm talking about what makes me angry.

            So what better thing to aim my anger at than psychiatry, a regime of government organised crime against humanity. I want the psychiatric regime to come to an end and I have legitimate reasons: I don’t want me or anyone else to be tortured by forced drugging, have their boundaries broken, forced to believe what their psychiatrists insist on, be traumatised… I think the techniques of coercive control are what’s used in domestic violence, the military and under other political regimes. It is totally unhealthy, making a former patient forever feel they have to look to someone to give them direction and tell them what to do.

            So, psychiatry must die. And when it does, I will not grieve its passing, I will dance on its grave!

            I suppose some people think they can make psychiatry change its ways, but I don’t think so. What’s the point? It has a bad reputation for torturing people. It needs to be wiped out. No one wants a Nazi or a KKK member; so, why would anyone want a practitioner of psychiatry? Get out of the industry quick if you’re in it.  Psychiatry has to end soon!

            I’m ‘going too far’ you say?

            You bloody holocaust denier, you ugly raciest, you homophobic twit… All these prejudices have one thing in common – psychiatry, if you look at the diagnostic labels that have existed over the years – the diagnosis of draptomania to enforce slavery, T4 whitecoat Nazis plying their trade as legitimate, and the classification of homosexuality as a ‘mental illness’ right into the 1970s. That’s psychiatry and if you think psychiatry is ever going to clean up its act, you’re deluded!

            So, psychiatry must die. Psychiatry must die. And, I wish society would hurry up and kill it off quickly, because it is taking too long to kark it. Stop dithering on whether torture should or should not be used on people who have already undergone traumatic life experiences and are suffering because of it. It quite obviously should NOT BE USED. Get with it! And if anyone thinks I exaggerate how painful neuroleptics are, read up about how Russian defectors described these psychiatric drugs, that are still prescribed, as the worst torture they were forced to undergo.Book: Mad in America

            You think I’m just some angry little blogger? No, I’m a completely outraged blogger who has been tortured by the regime of psychiatry and has every right to say and say again what is so suppressed by society it is silly.

            Plus, I’ve found when I vent about how much I hate psychiatry the Tourette’s tics, originally caused by neuroleptics, disappear. I think the Tourette’s, which feels like me whip-lashing myself, when directed into sensible thoughts like ending psychiatry, feels amicable and stops the nonsense lines like, ‘I want to kill myself’ I had repeating and hopping out my mouth while alone.

            Suppression causes malfunction. Venting the steam of outrage, means at least people might start to recognise it is not me, so much as the law, that needs to change. And when I start to feel more validated, then my mind has less reason to do things like Tourette’s tics.

Redbubble psychiatry must die ipad cases, t-shirts etc

Thursday, November 15, 2012

‘Plastic bitch’ clothes hoarding disease


People love to be able to diagnose to say things like, ‘I think there’s something very wrong with her – personality disorder or something.’ They want to diagnose rather than say, ‘That woman is a plastic bitch who cares about nothing but her wardrobe.’ Perhaps people think this is a way of disabling, while acting empathetic to the perceived problem, dismissing it as, ‘not her fault.’ But anyone can see that a diagnosis is derogatory and judgemental, rather than empathetic. It’s probably the harshest critic, because it says, ‘lock her up and drug her, her annoying personality is diseased.’

            Hoarding is now a registered mental illness in the DSM5 apparently, so a woman who collects too many clothes could, under the Mental Health Act of Victoria, be deemed to have a mental illness and be made an involuntary patient, and that always necessitates forced drugging. I do think, however, if this happened too often, there may be an outcry from the prosperous clothing industry against such incarcerations.

            Women and men who are fixated on body image would be angry over their rapid weight gain on psychiatric drugs and the dead-fish eyes that occur on high doses of these psychiatric drugs would upset photographers who like to photograph the image conscious.

            I’m not saying image conscious people aren’t already being made involuntary. Of course they are. They always have been. I’ve met many magazine model look-a -ikes on the inside of psychiatric hospitals, as well as porn stars. Trauma happens to many people. Getting along with everyone and appearing, ‘normal’ while under stress is difficult. Appearing ‘normal’ before a psychiatrist is even harder because they’ll say things like, ‘She’s very good at pretending to be well. I think she has suppressed anger.’

            No one is immune to the laws that can make you involuntary and subjected to forced drugging. You may think you are, then you witness your friend being stabbed to death, you are raped, your baby dies, your partner leaves you, you have a car accident, you lose your job, have your home burn down, or you decide to be a devil and try some toxic street drug… Your mind can do weird things under stress and then people worry that you’re unwell in the head; and then they think you need ‘care’ and ‘treatment’ from a psychiatrist, because, well, that’s what you do when someone starts thinking crazy things, isn’t it?

            No! You do not if you care about them in any way. If you hate them, for being ‘a plastic bitch who only care about her wardrobe,’ well, then, you obviously want to get even and see the ‘plastic bitch’ gets a good dose of torture that you know psychiatrists are entitled to deliver quite lawfully.

            Guess if you are a ‘plastic bitch’ with an exploding wardrobe disease, you’d better find similarly infected friends who can be equally as bitchy as you and equate with your plastic personality, that’ll back you up, rather than turn you in when you have a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ and become traumatised by it.

            No one is immune from diagnosis, forced drugging and imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital, even if you’re high and mighty, that’s ‘histrionic’ and ‘narcissistic’ to a psychiatrist. And if you tell them that you’re ‘a model’, then they’ll write down that you have, ‘delusions of grandeur’, even if that’s is how you earn part of your living.


Notachemicalimbalance protest Ts

In 2013 we must end the psychiatric regime


When an inhumane law needs to be changed you have to write the truth, rather than softening your life story into fiction. ‘Oversharing’ is necessary when people have literally been shut up and tortured for so long, all the while the public prejudice has continued to be so deeply ingrained by media propaganda.

Most Australian publishing houses still consider a first-hand experience of what psychiatrists term ‘mental illness’ to be a point of view that is unsellable. These publishers prefer the ‘authority’ of a medical practitioner over those with lived experience. And, they really don’t want to hear the truth, they want something that might get a little help from pharmaceutical sponsorship. It’s a horrible feed-back loop that is never ending in its destruction of people’s lives.

I’m sure the public doesn’t want to be inhumane, by allowing the continual torture of people who are in crisis, but they are because they do allow it. Some even condone it as necessary and back their arguments up with pseudo-science. They don’t even think about the many blogs that scream out how painful forced psychiatric treatments are to the person undergoing them. In the minds of people supporting psychiatry, they forget about the person who is made an involuntary patient and reduce them to something without sentience.

Think next time you nod your head and go along with what a psychiatrist is going to do to your unwilling relative, friend, or acquaintance, think about what actually makes sense. Listen if the person you are close to says, ‘I don’t want this.’ Understand why their reasons may be complicated into a parallel world of their psyche, which they may be expressing, more than the language of consensual reality. Don’t agree to the jargon of the psychiatrist more than the symbolic reasoning of the person you know. If you think about it, you should know who you’re with.

Most psychiatrists don’t help or heal, they police, by restraining and maiming. That’s what they’re taught to do. (Not that they’ll want deal with someone who is violent, no, that’s a police matter.) It’s only very odd psychiatrists that don’t order their staff to enforce retraining and maiming, drugging and disabling. Those psychiatrists who don’t, are not very well accepted by the psychiatric community.

The Mental Health Act, a part of Victorian law, backs up psychiatrists in my area. And all over the earth, there are similar government laws to allow psychiatrists to torture people who are having difficulties coping with traumatic events in their life. Why? Because the way these people are coping is outside the range of understood sense. But if, given time, and conversation, instead of drugs and other tortures, there are means through which seeming nonsense becomes obvious, as a symbolic parallel sense to the language of consensual reality.

Society understands that you have to learn gain a new understanding in order to  read writers such as Shakespeare, or learn subject matter such as physics. Even music and other art forms can be ‘acquired tastes’ and need to be understood through realisation and effort. People who have had a revolution inside themselves, need to be afforded the same respect.

So, why is it so difficult to understand that a person needs to be thought of as an individual that cannot fit the template of some other person? Yes, I know, friends think they ‘know’ their friends and when a friend goes into a ‘psychotic episode’ then the other friend freaks out because suddenly they don’t understand. They then accuse that there’s ‘something wrong’. Yes, miscommunication and suppression of traumatic events is what’s wrong.

So, what would be right? Allowing what’s been suppressed to be communicated in whatever medium it takes, that is non-violent. Make sense? I’d like to see health professionals do just that when a person is in crisis, rather than judge, accuse, drug and belittle. And the only way that is going to be the intervention for a crisis situation where a person has lost touch with consensual reality, is for the laws that say, ‘drug them’ and ‘ECT if they’re having a baby or not responsive to drugs’ to be changed.

‘What? She thinks she can change the law?’ I hear people say incredulously.

No, I don’t think I can change the law. I think the law must change, now, not sometime in the dim distant future.

‘What? But people who are mentally ill must be treated or they’ll be the death of us!’ I hear another in the crowd shout.

People must be treated with respect, given help and understanding as well as compassion, when they’ve drifted into a parallel sense. When people haven’t committed crimes, why on earth are they being accused like they have? Does the population think that all people diagnosed by psychiatrists are antisocial and dangerously so? They’re not, if you look at the stats on these things.

There’s more crowds of people that go on and pooh-pooh me, saying forced drugging is the ‘only viable means of combating these psychiatric diseases.’

Diseases? Yeah, psychiatrists are the disease. They attack the stressed, grieving and traumatised and make it almost impossible for these people to recover. They are an ugly blight on our society that needs to be cured. In 2013 we must end the psychiatric regime!

I think the best way of combating the disease of psychiatry is by recognising their treatment regime has no place in government law. I think, then, psychiatry won’t be such an aggressive disease and people can work out for themselves what is and isn’t healthy treatment.
notachemicalimbalance protest T-shirtts

Sunday, November 11, 2012

What does ‘mad’ mean?

I’m looking at a flyer for a theatrical production and I’m feeling just a little trepidation about it. It could just be because it is theatre. Theatre tends to have that detached over-the-top exaggeration that even stand-up comedy doesn’t have.

What I’m really concerned about is horrible clichés emerging during the performance and having to sit in the audience gritting my teeth with the want to shout things out, like hecklers would to comedians or poets in a pub.

I’m also feeling awkward about this production because I’ve got a piece of writing in it, so I’ll be partially to blame.

Just at a glance, I’m sure it looks like a MAD comic sort of thing to most people. You know, all those fun kooky mad women thinking weird stuff. Get into that giant cake and rub it all over your body like lube!

I'm all into the idea of the fun of madness. But the actors pictured are all in white, some in strait-jackets…  so they’re trying to say this is something about the psychiatric system as well… Something like, ‘Ain’t it fun being all tied up!’

The actors are open mouth smiling laughs… they seem to be having a right ripper of a time… Makes me want to ask… Does this show have any authenticity in its direction?

The poster replies: ‘Um… awefinticity ‘bout wat?’

Am I mad about this mad show? Um, depends what you mean by ‘mad’. I haven’t even seen it yet and I’m bagging it for the baggage it brings up about horror, prejudice, ignorance and cliché rubbish.

Still, if you’re in Melbourne, I’m urging you to go see it. Recognise what the individual writers think ‘mad’ is, what the costume designer thinks ‘mad’ is, what the director thinks ‘mad’ is, what the actors think ‘mad’ is and if the use of psychiatric torture equipment is fitting with the term ‘mad’. Some people think the term ‘mad’ is akin to crazily angry. Some people use it for selling mobile phones cheaply. Look I’m going to be open to this show and give it a watch and keep my mouth shut and learn exactly what people think. No need to assert my opinion by madly calling out things in the theatre. Maybe a cough or two will do, if utterly necessary.  Got to stick with the boundaries of what is okay, or you are mad.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Different sense of reality salad

It can get messy having too many different f***s at once!
 

I do realise that using too many f***s at once in a design using a basic program is not the best. It looks somehow wrong. But if it was what everyone did, would it become ‘fashion’? Maybe that fashion would be frowned on later… a mistake. Then revived later on…
 
Forts, I mean thoughts, I mean fonts, or do I mean all three at once? Perception. This is what psychiatrists will diagnose as ‘salad’. Not sure that they ever specify what kind of salad, but I doubt it if you could order it at a café, as it usually includes words and a different sense of reality.

This different sense of reality ‘salad’ involves ingredients such as:

  • Overturned time sense
  • Shift in emotional communication
  • image transformation
  • Perceptual warping
  • Changes in consequence or connotation

If you’re following this at all, what I’m trying to say is that people at crisis points of their life where things are ‘make or break’ can speed up in the face of time, putting all forces into monitoring, covering and building the idea that will be the break through. This means clashing symbolic sense, warping and stuff that really doesn’t communicate all that well until the construction is complete.

People can also take a more conservative approach and slowdown in order to build the neuro-connections needed. Slowing down can be more distressing to the person. Where as speeding up can be more distressing to the community outside that person. It is likely that the slowing down is caused by rejection of ideas by the community around the person, and the person takes this to heart, rather than striving to move through their transition with their own ideas intact.

I remember when I came to Melbourne after sixteen years of living in rural towns, I felt really slow. I had to adjust to the new sounds, smells, ideology, study, landscape and people. I felt really stupid, but I wanted to ‘fit in'. My ideas were rejected big time. So my brain stretched in attempt to incorporate what others thought was best, and over the years I adjusted. I didn’t start getting unusual sensory experiences though, as I wasn’t under huge pressure, I actually had a certain relief from the pressures I had had at home. I felt like an outsider, but I didn’t actually have an altered state of consciousness until I followed my peers and did what was highly encouraged: binge drinking. I didn’t bother thinking how stupid I was doing this, because everyone else did it, so it was not only okay, but considered good for communing.

The times in my life, I have speeded up in reaction to stressful ‘make or break’ situations, I have made discoveries and challenged myself in ways that normally would’ve taken a period of feeling stupid. However, these times meant all my energy was spent looking internally and failing to remember what was going on externally. Thus I lost touch with consensual reality, as my consciousness attempted to alter.

Now, just to take this concept a little further, think about how difficult it can become when people have too many f***s with different people. Connecting with too many different ideas at once, too intensely can end up causing huge confusion. I’m not saying it won’t work out, it can. But it can lead to a state of consciousness that really doesn’t fit with consensual reality, but it does all depend on the ‘fash’ of the times.

So, what am I saying? I think there are periods where the mind has to build, after damage, when there’s stress and pressure, and when a person is adjusting to circumstances. There isn’t really any way you can go wrong, except if you go against what backs you up. If you have people who will back up, you can belief in ghosts, gods, aliens and they can visit and talk to you. But you do need to have back up, or the f***s will getcha and make certain that you don’t build whatever thinking you’re planning on building in order to invent or discover whatever you can’t yet work out, that has created a symbolic way of getting there.
 
It is difficult to explain different sense of reality salad, but I just want to assert, that it exists and how it is treated depends on whether it is digested into the community or called, 'ill' by those who haven't even bothered to think about what is actually in it. If the salad isn't ethically wrong, this kind of ignorance is prejudice; and prejudice, well, it should be illegal for part of a country's law to hold back the expansion of human minds. And Illegal laws, should be part of the past, but you know, people have to go through uncomfortable periods of brain-expansion to get there and be for a while: mere salad to psychiatrists. Who are at the moment the law on what a mind can and can't do... according to the laws of Mental Health, which most parts of the community apparently agree to.



Friday, November 2, 2012

The Stables Studio: the end of a decade of rehabilitation


For around a decade I went to a place called The Stables Studio. This never received government funding, but Prahran Mission (Uniting Care) sponsored it.

It was a place where artists who had some kind of psychiatric diagnosis could do art. No religious pushing. It was amazing. A decade ago, I had only just found out about Prahran Mission’s Second Story program, that ran rehabilitation, via Job Supply (who the clinic had recommended). I said I could possibly work doing framing and they said Second Story did a program in that, which is not offered anymore. I was thinking it might help the metaphorical framing I wanted to do too. So I went there, found I was okay, but not accurate enough to work in the industry. Then The Stables Studio started and I was asked if I wanted to join. It was different from all these other programs, there was no structure, artists were free to create what they wanted and there was space to have an annual solo exhibition. But you had to be interviewed, have a folio and ability to work on your own and a huge love of visual art.

            The Stables Studio, gave me enough space to create a six-foot by eight-foot canvas and a life-sized papier-mâché crocodile and so much more. I was inspired and I really needed to get the visions in my mind outside myself.

Every year there, I thematically changed my approach to art. Highlights were my found objects exhibition that allowed me to express the way I linked things together in my mind and an abstract exhibition called, ‘But, what is it?’ I also got to do an intense recycling project called, ‘Containers’. For a whole year I threw nothing in the rubbish. All my paint water was put into papier-mâché and any dried left over paint was peeled and attached to some object I was making. My dead television got gutted and recycled into many things. Cunningham Dax bought one of these ‘Containers’ projects. Other things I made got bought as well, but I have many works still in storage.

            I was given a sketch pad at one stage when I first joined and I then began sketching all the time, relieving myself of unwanted emotions by putting them into spontaneous images. I dubbed this ‘The Automatic Hand’. It was a type of drawing where I had no idea what was going to happen on the page, but I trusted my intuition so much my hand tapped into my visual part of my mind and came up with the wild image conglomeration associated with the emotion.

            The people who worked in the office and organising things were fantastic, empathetic, but often over worked. They were all amazing artists, some of which had a history in creating iconic Australian sculptures and sold-out exhibitions.

            I got to do my first protest against psychiatric practices in an exhibition called, ‘Crowds and characters’.

And then there were life-drawing sessions…

But this year I felt I needed to move on. I hadn’t fully recovered my visual part of the brain from the bombardment of psychiatric chemicals, but my partner was encouraging me to paint landscapes with him and I was studying art therapy… I felt I didn’t need to be in rehabilitation anymore. And that urge that I had for ten years of going to a space daily to paint had dwindled.

Over the years the Stables Studio has moved three times. It was originally in an old dairy in one of Prahran’s side streets, that’s where it got its name, ‘The Stables’. Then it moved to a warehouse in South Yarra. This was the best place and individual spaces were built. But then due to costs of the warehouse, the studio moved again, to a church in Burke Road Malvern. It will continue to be there for the rest of this year, but after that, next year,  the whole project is being sized down to a small room at the back of Prahran Mission in Chapel Street.

I went to the Prahran Mission’s annual exhibition at Chapel Off Chapel this year, 2012, and all the Stables artists seemed really in shock. I know I would be if I was still in that stage of my life where I really needed the human contact of other artists, encouragement to create and space to do so, while at the same time the freedom of an unstructured program. But it just wasn’t financially viable apparently.

The Victorian government has put in changes to the way funds are allocated for mental health rehabilitation programs. The participant gets to choose where the funding goes. That sounds all good in theory. But I’m worried that there may be a tendency for psychiatrists, who are in control of things like CTOs, to point out what programs the psychiatrically diagnosed have to do in order to get off the CTO. Psychiatrists are very good at coercive control. They’re also very good at promoting their pockets. This may mean people never get access to programs that help people to express themselves, gain confidence, learn what is an isn’t okay for ‘friends’ to do, and, via their own explorations in things like visual art, writing and music, that they might not really have a disease causing a chemical imbalance and might not have to live as a zombie the rest of their life, that there is hope and ways of becoming what you love.
Here's the link to the Stables Studio (they even have a picture of my 2010 exhibition, 'Crowds and Characters' in their chapel gallery space.) http://www.prahranmission.org.au/stables-art-studio.htm Please visit, I'm sure there are some fantastic artists selling up for bottom dollar prices now they don't have any space to store their art.

Do pencils cure chemical prisons?


People don’t realise that forcing medication for months or years is repeated trauma. It felt like I was decaying from within when, in late 2010 and nearly all 2011, I was forcefully injected. I had no idea how long I would remain under this sentence, as psychiatrists could’ve kept me on this forever, for no crime.

I was told by psychiatrists that I had to be agreeable to their treatment. I also knew from lawyers that I had to let my psychiatrist know why they were legally obliged to change the drug I was on. Attempts to do this took over nine months. The long-acting neuroleptic lasted in my system another nine months or so. And the damage was well and truly done by then.

Part of the damage  is a symptom of this trauma, I’m still suffering from. It is a fairly mild form of Tourette’s Syndrome. The drug I was on, Zuclophenthixol, is known to cause this. I also believe the Tourette’s is a surface symptom, like a measles’ sore. Only I don’t have a biological illness, I have a psychological one. My system could not cope with the trauma the Zuclo caused. It freaked out. Although I suppressed suicidal thoughts, ruled out ever doing anything to hurt my family and friends, the Tourette’s continued to voice what it saw as the only way out of the chemical prison I was in.

Now what I have is kind of akin to PTSD. I had the repeated trauma of Zuclo last year, but this year I relive the feelings of hopelessness, deterioration and lack of life. I am, however, overcoming this. My life is good and I know it. I am building rather than breaking-down. It’s just sometimes the memory grabs me and surfaces into a detached thought, a muscle reflex that says, ‘I want to kill myself’, swears, or says in a little-girl voice, ‘Mummy’.

So I work through symbolism, what’s behind this image-wise, look at inner-critics, and do parts-of-self dialoguing… anything to shift this, have something change so that my mind doesn’t get the impulsive urge to say these seemingly irrational repeated lines.

There isn’t a chemical or surgical cure for Tourette’s Syndrome, because it’s trauma based. Well, what I have is. And from what I’ve researched this is generally said to be the cause.

Psychosurgeons try things and shit, then claim cures… Psychiatrists will prescribe a whole range of drugs that they normally give for epilepsy, Parkinson’s, psychosis, bipolar… They have no idea how to cure Tourette’s. This is admitted in Wikapedia.

I have a theory that my neurons were damaged by the Zuclo, so it was actually a physical trauma and the Tourette’s is a reaction to that. My mind is more or less saying, ‘I give up, I don’t know what to do!’ So, the lines I have are in a way a cry for help, hoping for some compassion and understanding. But, if spoke them in public, I wouldn’t get that too often.

If my body had continued being bombarded by the traumatic effects of the Zuclo prison, I would’ve probably ended up mouthing the Tourette’s lines in public. However, I am lucky that I have some mechanism that keeps my mouth shut while in public and only mouths the lines when I think I am alone. In public I will still get the lines in my head though and sometimes moving my tongue, but my mouth remains closed.

Tourette’s is very different from voice hearing (which psychiatrists term auditory hallucinations). Voice hearing isn’t something that happens to me anymore. But when I had that, for nearly 13 years, it wasn’t repeated lines, wasn’t accompanied by a twitch and it didn’t have the associated impulse to speak the words. And the voices were often located outside my head, never on the tip of my tongue. Tourette’s doesn’t lend itself to any conspiracies, further thoughts, delusions, self-criticism, or creativity like voices do. Tourette’s is more like a whip hitting me, a slap across the face, a momentary jolt, totally disconnected from my belief system and dreams/ nightmares that I have had while in psychosis and sleep.

I have days when the Tourette’s disappears. For instance I went to Venus Bay with my partner and it didn’t occur for the whole two days we were there. It was almost because I was accessing a part of my mind that had to do with neologistic experiences, my thoughts didn’t even touch on the part of my mind that still holds the unresolved Zuclo induced trauma.

I guess there is a certain amount of self-forgiveness I also have to go through because the weird things I said and odd accusations I made during what I consider my worst psychotic episode and my last. Worst, because I’d decided to stand up and protest against things, in the parallel world to the actual thing that was not being heard, recognised, or compensated by the public.

I made a video last year about attempting to gain momentary peace from the surfacing symptoms that made me worry and hate myself more. In this video I played a song I wrote about one of the Tourette’s lines.

Musical composition is one of the arts that I feel helps a person to transform their ‘problem’ into something that can be shared without seeming too much of a burden to the listener. Even if the composition is never shared with another, it is something that can be witnessed by the person who composed it, while they are performing it. And I think there is definite catharsis in this.

In the video I termed what I had as ‘post-psychotic-depression’, because there was an overwhelming emotion of sadness in me that I felt at the time, which I’d found some relief from by putting a pencil between my teeth. This worked the first time in giving me some happiness, really well, but the smile action of the muscle memory had less effect when I attempted to use the pencil more often.

I sat reading with the pencil in my mouth, drooling a bit and found even the tiny relief it gave was worth something. But it is only a memory trigger of some kind and the more I recognised that it was only a pencil in my mouth, not actual happiness, the less it worked. If you think of the Pavlov’s dogs experiment, the more often they weren’t given food after the bell rung, the less they would drool at the bell ringing, even when they’d been conditioned into it, by the reward of food. I smiled, remembered happier times, then recognised there was not much happening happily in my head because of the Zuclo prison and the happy effect didn’t last as long, or exist as strongly. My mind went, oh, it’s that pencil thing again is it? Well, don’t be so silly, I want you to get out of the rut you’re in and stop that chemical entering my system, get on with it! Don’t try and trick me in false feelings!

I wanted the feeling happiness, even if it was false, but my body is more sensible than that. I realised what I really wanted was to take all that stuff that was bothering me and make it humorous, then I could move on. I still haven’t got there, but I have so many beautiful, wonderful people in my life I believe I will get to the point of clearing my sore points.