I don’t think humanity is going to continue to agree to what is government approved torturing of people who have already undergone trauma. I don’t think humanity wants to be inhumane. So eventually those people who have altered states of consciousness and unusual sensory experiences won’t be subjected to a forced psychiatric regime, by the fearful public, who if they were better would never approve of such things as ECT and forced drugging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
