Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Something to check out

Somewhere along the way I lost track of what day it is. I could swear today was Thursday or Friday of next week but I'm looking at the calendar and I think it's only Tuesday. It's always confusing when my internal clock gets thrown off like that. I start panicking that I didn't pay my bills on time, that I don't have much time left to plan how we're going to spend our time in NYC, that I've missed all the appointments I had scheduled, etc.

Today I made the mistake of going out to the northside of the city to pick up the Plain White T's tickets I didn't bother to get last week because a mini-blizzard struck the day I had planned to go. The club they are playing is a few blocks north of Addison and Clark, the corner Wrigley Field happens to be on and the corner I needed to get off the bus at. My mistake was that I didn't check to see if the Cubs were still in town before I left on my journey down there. Just my luck they were and I arrived at the corner as several thousands of people were jamming the area, waiting to get inside the ballpark.

After I'd gotten the tickets and was back at the corner waiting for the next bus to haul me away from the crowd, people were being rude as hell, running right into me on their way towards the entrance. It's not like I was standing in the middle of the sidewalk or anything so there was no excuse for it. They started to piss me off to the point I was so tempted to yell out that I'd bet my left tit the fucking Cubs were going to lose today. Fearing I'd start a riot and be beaten to death by over zealous fans, I kept my mouth shut. Though I later saw on tv that they actually did lose..ha!

Tomorrow I guess I need to get busy doing my homework. Figuring out which course of treatment to go with. I'm leaning towards finding ways to work around the defect because I honestly don't think it can be fixed. It's been there for too long and is too ingrained into who I think I might be as a person. I honestly think that if I underwent a functional MRI it would reveal that parts of my brain have rotted away and other parts just no longer function like a "normal" one.

In that vein of thought, I stumbled upon a blog that has me doing some serious thinking about the whole psychiatric community again. It's been awhile since I've woven my own theories on how dysfunctional I think it is, unsure if I'm just delusional or if there's any validity to my thinking. Beyond the Psychiatric Box is worth reading. It'll definitely kick your brain activity up a few notches. There's a particular article the blog owner, Patricia Lefave, references in her post "The Dialogue: Part One, Topic: The Psychiatrized/Psychiatrist Relationship" that really drew me in.

The article is called "Identifying and Overcoming Mentalism" by Coni Kalinowski, M.D. and Pat Risser. An overly simplified synopsis would be that it is about the discrimination we receive once we've been given a psychiatric label. It has quite a bit of depth to it, so that overview doesn't do the article justice. It ties into the something Patricia discusses in the dialogue in her post, something that I have mentioned myself, that once you're given a psych diagnosis you are no longer seen as a human like everyone else, you become your diagnosis and it's nearly impossible to escape it.

I'm not very good at articulating the thoughts running through my head because often times they get lost in a swirl of confusion and contradiction so I just end up sounding like a blathering idiot. Patricia is an excellent writer though and she is clearly able to convey many of the musings I wish I had the vocabulary to clearly express. Go check her out.

3 Comments:

Blogger Handsome B. Wonderful said...

I couldn't agree more that people cease to see you as human anymore. A lot of people's eyes glass over or looked freaked out when I tell them what I "have."

Sounds like a interesting blog. I'll have to go check it out.

2:11 PM, April 18, 2007  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just so you know, it does not come across as though you have a difficult time putting your thoughts into words.

Your description of the crowd made me laugh. I totally hate crowds & would've been tempted to bet body parts myself!

7:04 PM, April 18, 2007  
Blogger Eclipse said...

I thought the part about describing what is actually happening rather than labelling it as "decompensating" (or whatever) was interesting ... but I'm not sure that there's ways to get around the short-hand labels or the impact of being labelled in some psych category, as I think that prejudices will always be there and that it's the same for anything that's alien to ppl's experiences, whether that's to do with mental health, cultural differences, sexual preferences, class differences or whatever else divides ppl's experiences etc.

In some respects, the proceeding with caution factor that might sound for a lot of ppl when presented with somebody who has MH problems isn't a bad thing, even tho obviously not everyone w MH issues is going to be dangerous or whatever. Just as you're more likely to have situations arise with someone who might be stoned, drunk or whatever, you're probably more likely to have something crop up w someone who may not be entirely in control mentally or emotionally, for whatever reason. And I think there's no escaping that take on things, however unfair it is that ppl might recoil from someone who has MH probs.

8:42 PM, April 19, 2007  

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