By now, most have heard about the video of U.S. marine throwing puppy off a cliff in Iraq. This sort of behaviour isn't new to war. There was a Vietnam veteran in Cahill 3 with me. He told me a story that seems now eerily similar to this.

The guys in his unit called the orangutans "rock apes", because they would catch rocks you threw at them and then throw the rocks back. They had fun playing catch with the orangutans until one day one of the guys in the unit decided to pull a pin out of a grenade and throw it at an orangutan . Of course the orangutan caught the grenade and was blown to pieces. That ended the fun they had with the orangutans. The difference is that they didn't have camera phones then.

Should we be surprised by this sort of behaviour? These soldiers have been sent to kill people. Most humans view other animals as less than human. If they're killing people left and right, what's the odd puppy or orangutan ? Who is more evil then: the marine that killed the puppy or the politicians sent him over there to kill?

Today marks 2 years since I was released from Cahill 3, the last time I was on a locked psych unit.

For years, I was constantly in and out of hospitals. Throughout that time I was put on various medications: prozac, geodon, seroquel, zyprexa, depakote, lithium, ativan, klonopin, celexa, zoloft, and too many others to list here.

At times, the medications seemed like it was helping, but what it was really dong was preventing me from getting better. It wasn't until I stopped taking the medications that I started truly improving. It wasn't until I stopped taking the medication that I was able to stay out of the hospital.

Mental problems need a mental solution. Mental "illness" is not like diabetes or cancer. The speculation that mental "diseases" are biologically based is just that — speculation. There is no evidence to back it up, but the idea is treated as gospel. It is more religion than science.

Without the medications obscuring my real issues or slowing my brain down to the point that thinking was a labourious activity, I was able to directly address my problems and I was able to make myself better. I've been out of the hospital for 2 years and I'm sure that if I had continued to take their drugs, I wouldn't be able to say that.

I met with the psychiatrist from cambridge hospital today. It was nice to have a even-keeled dialog with a psychiatrist. I wasn't a patient, i was just discussing the system. And it felt like he was actually listening. Not just about transgendered topics and my experiences on Cahill 3, but to a wide variety of my criticisms of the psych system. I know that I've been fairly anti-psychiatry in my writings, and I haven't changed my views. I still oppose psychiatry as it is generally practiced today, however I have always thought that psychiatry could be a good thing. This sort of open dialog between consumers and providers is exactly what is needed to make psychiatry a better thing. More of it needs to happen. However, the biggest problem is that open dialog can only happen in a non-coercive environment — and when dealing with the mental health system, those environments are exceedingly rare. I'm lucky enough to have had the opportunity.

I've been invited to talk to a psychiatrist at Cambridge Hospital regarding appropriate treatment of transgendered persons in inpatient units. I hope that I responded to the message in time, they called me last week but my cell phone does an extremely poor job at telling me I have voice mail (remember that if you leave me voice mail and I don't respond). They suggested that after my experiences in 2005, I'd surely have some input, and I definitely do. I will say this though, even with all the problems I had and witnessed on Cahill 3 a couple years ago, I'd still rate the Cambridge Hospital impatient units as the best of the many that I've locked up in. I hope I can be of assistance in making improvements.

Three days with no caffeine. I've managed to stay relatively wakeful today, even with the oppressive heat. I see that I felt like I need caffeine a lot more than I actually needed caffeine. I don't think I've gone this long without caffeine since high school. Even in the madhouse they'd let us have real coffee in the morning. I doubted if I could do it, but the only real hurdle was that doubt. Yeah, I've had a bit of a headache the last few days, but I've gone through Geodon withdrawal - compared to that, this is a piece of cake.

The recent horrific massacres of 32 students at Virgina Tech by Cho Seung-Hui has sparked a lot of political discussion. Here is my opinion...

Psychiatry

The pro-psychiatry people were quick to make some points about the need for coercing people into treatment. Even the revelation that Cho Seung-Hui was receiving treatment and was on psychiatric medication has not silence the "control the crazies" crowd. I cannot see how he could have been controlled any further without permanently locking up anyone displaying moderate mental illness - and that comes with it's own problems, principle people hiding problematic thoughts and feelings at all, and processing them internally with no outside checks or influence.

Gun Control

The anti-gun lobby sees events like these as political gold. Obviously guns are evil and vile and nasty and wrong. But I firmly believe if just two of the people at Norris Hall beside the shooter had guns, a lot less people would have been killed. The problem isn't a surplus of guns, the problem is a lack of guns. If more citizens had the ability to defend themselves against this kind of massacre, this scale of massacre by a lone gunman couldn't happen.

Westboro Baptist Church

Fred Phelps and his gang have been protesting at funerals of queer people and queer supporters for over a decade. Most of America didn't care one lick. A couple years ago he started protesting military funerals. That really pissed people off, because unlike (known) gay people, those people mattered. Avoiding the political pitfalls of banning protests at the funerals of the filthy gays, congress passed a law banning political protests at military funerals only.

Last year, the Westboro Baptist Church announced plans to protest at the funerals for the victims of the Amish school house massacre in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. These people were definitely not loathsome queers. FOX News gave a couple representatives from the Westboro Baptist Church an hour of uninterrupted air time on their news radio station in exchange for WBC cancelling the protest.

What will come of their planned protests of these victims funerals, I do not know. Will FOX News give them more air time? Will the law banning protests at military funerals be extended? Who knows?

Gov. Eliot Spitzer and legislative leaders Thursday announced agreement on a bill that allows for convicted sex offenders to be confined after they complete their prison sentences -- a measure that could affect hundreds of inmates and cost the state more than $80 million a year to carry out, officials said. The still-to-be-introduced legislation -- which must be approved by both houses and signed by the governor -- will create a new system by which mental-health experts would decide at the end of a sexual predator's sentence if an offender is fit to return to the community or should be held in a psychiatric center. full article

What better place to house violent sex offender than with heavily drugged mentally ill folk who are undoubtedly aware that no pays attention anything they say. Wouldn't a better plan be to actually keep violent sex offenders in prison? They claim these sex offenders are a risk to the public, but apparently putting at risk mental patients (who've often committed no crime) is not a concern because "crazies" aren't people.

Under this new law, in New York you will be drugged and locked up with a mass of outgoing convicted sex offenders if you say the wrong thing to a therapist or psychiatrist. The safest option if you live in the State of New York: never under any circumstance say anything to a therapist or psychiatrist.

From a post by jeywolf in without_meds:

People don't like to discuss who was killed in the holocaust. People don't like to discuss the fact that a higher percentage of European Roma were killed than of Jews. So thorough was the extermination of the Roma people of Bohemia that the Bohemian Romani dialect went extinct. People don't like to discuss that the gas chambers were originally designed for and operated in mental hospitals as a way of getting rid of the most undesirable undesirables: the mentally ill. People don't like to discuss that gays, "social deviants", Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, Freemasons, and the disabled were all sent to the death camps.

When you include Soviet POWs, political dissidents, various Slavic peoples, and members of "non-Aryan" races and you include the Serbs kill by the Nazi-puppet regime in Croatia – Jewish deaths, while still numbering higher than any one other group, account for a third or less of the holocaust victims. 6 million is the most cited number of holocaust deaths and it is an horrific number on its own, but it only represents the number of Jews killed. The total number of holocaust victims will never be exactly known, detailed records simply don't exist. But when taking into account all the victims, that number is in the neighborhood of 18 to 20 million.

The crimes of the Nazis against the Jews should not be forgotten, nor should they be downplayed. However, the crimes of the Nazis were not only against Jews — they were crimes against humanity.

The holocaust did not begin with the Jews or gays or the Roma peoples or even the political dissidents. The holocaust began in the psychiatric institutions. The first gas chambers installed by the Nazis were in the "hospitals". The skills that would in later years be used against other groups were developed in those institutions. It was under the auspices of psychiatry that it began.

The politics of psychiatry are dangerous, and recent history shows the appetite for forced psychiatry has not abated. Mental patients are one of the most vulnerable groups. "Normal" people fear the mad. They feel they need to be protected from us. We need to be controlled. And of course - they always know best for us.

I've heard people who would cringe at the oppression of any other group casually declare "Why would I care about a bunch of crazy people?". When people take the attitude that something needs to be done to "help" the mentally ill, they usually take the NAMI/TAC approach of forced drugging/electroconvulsive therapy/imprisonment. These approaches are not really about helping the mad, only about shutting us up. The website of the NAMI affiliated Treatment Advocacy Center , which purports to be about helping mental patients, instead relies almost entirely on fearmongering — the evil crazy people are coming to kill your cops and throw you under a train. They must be controlled.

In my more optimistic moments I hope that "sane" people figure out that what is now done to us may effect them also. The realm of psychiatry is expanding, more and more of who were once considered "sane" are being given the label "insane". The expansion of who is insane is aimed at anyone who isn't happy and productive and non-questioning of the standard paradigm. No one is "safe" from being redefined, and if you find yourself in mourning for longer than two weeks when you most dear loved one dies, you may be joining the rest of crazies who may have at one time been called human.

While not without it's tribulations, 2006 was a year of milestones and reunions for me. This was the first year in half a decade that I have spent completely out of psych hospitals. Although I took a couple of my old Ativans to get to sleep at a couple of points, I spent the year pretty much without any psych med prescriptions. I've become closer with certain members of my family than I have been in a long time. I've reconnected with friends long past. I've grown spiritually and even found God. It's been quite a year.

ganked from many:

On the twelfth day of Christmas, neitherday sent to me...

Twelve squirrels suffering

Eleven strings writing

Ten crows a-kissing

Nine cats birdwatching

Eight trees a-scrying

Seven cigars a-walking

Six politics a-nothing

Five ci-i-i-ivil liberties

Four zebra finches

Three haunted houses

Two psych wards

...and a luna in an astronomy.

Get your own Twelve Days:

I saw my therapist yesterday. I think I am going to start seeing her regularly again, at least for a little while. My head is clogged up and I need to let a lot of things out.

There was a time I used to let things out more here on LiveJournal than in my therapists office. I tell her things I tell no one else. This is a sign of my trust of my therapist, even while I have a extremely low opinion of the mental health system in general.

I'm very lucky that I have access to a therapist that I don't have to worry about overreacting and having me locked up. She has professional standards that she must adhere to – but if I say something that might potentially get me trouble, I always have a chance to backtrack and "clarify". Without this, I doubt I could be as open with her as I am.

My therapist is the only mental health professional I trust at this point. I will not see a psychiatrist and I will not live on psych meds. My therapist knows this and has accepted it. She may not agree with the decision, but she will not force her opinion on me and she knows better than to badger me about it. That I have found such respect a rarity in the mental health field.

Perhaps in time I will return to writing more here. Unlike in therapy, these days I am more cautious how I put things online. Perhaps I should begin writing poetry again. Perhaps deeper into metaphor is the way to go. Or, perhaps edited stream of consciousness. Or something else, perhaps. We shall see.

Today marks 1 year of being out of the mad house!

Now that I've made it a whole year, I just have forever to go.

A 50-year-old woman filed a federal lawsuit against Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center yesterday, saying she was forcibly undressed by five male security guards there last year after she refused a nurse's order to take off her clothes. The incident, which hospital officials have defended as necessary to make sure the woman was not hiding drugs or weapons, triggered flashbacks to childhood sexual abuse, according to the woman, Cassandra Sampson. She alleged in the suit that her civil rights were violated under the Americans with Disabilities Act, because hospital officials made no effort to protect her from psychological damage. Sampson said she went to the hospital for treatment of a severe migraine headache, but was moved to a psychiatric unit when she admitted struggling with self-destructive impulses. She said she pleaded to be allowed to keep at least her pants on before the strip search, but the nurse refused. ``Go ahead and rape me; everybody else has," Sampson said she cried out as the guards unbuckled her pants and removed them. ``They left me there with my underwear showing and my johnny up to my chest . . . I was crying, and [the nurse] said, `That's what you get for not listening to me.' " In a letter to Sampson, hospital officials said they were sorry she had such a terrible experience, but stood by their strict policy of searching psychiatric patients for their own benefit. ... A spokeswoman at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester said the hospital never asks psychiatric patients to undress on arrival. If they suspect the patient may be dangerous, security guards perform a clothed pat-down search. Dr. Maggie Bennington-Davis led a successful effort to stop strip searches of psychiatric patients at Salem Hospital in Oregon in 2003. ``We can't be hauling people in here and be doing more harm to them," she said. ``It's very clear that a strip search retraumatizes them." ... Sampson hadn't intended to go to Beth Israel's emergency room on March 25, 2005, according to the lawsuit. But it was a weekend, and her primary care physician said the ER would be the best place to get help for severe migraine headaches that had persisted for three days. However, as soon as Sampson told a nurse that she took psychiatric medications and that she had been battling impulses to hurt herself that week, the nurse said she would need a psychiatric evaluation. Nurse Heather A. Richter then told Sampson that she would need to completely undress, according to the lawsuit. full article

This is absolutely disgusting. How in the world could Beth Israel's staff think it was in any way appropriate to have 5 male security guards rip off a woman's clothing? This story not only illustrates the dangers of being admitted into psych hospital for victims of sexual assault or abuse, it also illustrates the dangers of telling the wrong person about your feelings and thoughts. Note that Sampson only had thoughts of self harm, not suicide. Her life was NOT at risk. Psych wards are at most about safety nowadays. She did not need the babysitting of a hospital and she definitely did not need to be further traumatized. It was only a panicky nurse that caused her to end up there, this did not need to happen at all.

My therapist asked to see my LiveJournal today. There was a computer in the room, so I showed it to her. This took place near the end of our session, so she only got to look at it briefly. Nonetheless she found it helpful to understanding what's going on with me, and wants to look at it again in the future. She said that she'd only be looking at it with me, and never when I wasn't there.

I know many of you are probably thinking something along the lines of "WTF? You're batshit crazy showing your therapist your LiveJournal!". Well, I am batshit crazy, but showing my LiveJournal to my therapist wasn't.

First: While I distrust the mental health system as a whole, I do trust my therapist.

Second: I live in a free state. Even if I am mistaken in trusting my therapist the worst she can do to me based on my journal is have me locked up for a couple weeks. I can do that time standing on my head.

Third, my journal isn't really that much of a secret. It is the second hit when you google up Cahill 3 and the first hit when you google up Cahill 4, which are psych wards in the same health alliance that my therapist is part of. If she wanted to find my journal on her own, it would not have been difficult.

I brought in printouts of journal entries to past therapists, but I've never let any look directly at it. Now we'll see how well this experiment works.

I've been in a sour mood lately
I'm fighting the demon eyes.
The demon eyes are too easy to retreat into into and so hard to take off.
I do not like the demon eyes
I do not like myself when I wear them.
I must work on not
I must find my center again.

the days are long now
i still drift among the lost
wander still

if i trusted psych people at this point
i might consider checking myself in to a psych ward
i'm doing that badly in my head lately
it is time for me to refocus
to work on bringing myself back to balance
i've lost touch with the big picture
and when that happens i am lost
mindfulness is hard to keep
and i need to go back to that mindspace

I had a terrible time getting off antipsychotics, the withdrawals were so nasty it would have been helpful to be in a rehab clinic for them except rehab clinics don't take patients addicted to antipsychotics.

Sedatives like Ativan or Klonopin can very tempting when experiencing antipsychotic withdrawals, and patients prescribed antipsychotics are often prescribed sedatives as well. However, I found that more often than not sedatives led to a state where I was so tired I was barely able to move but still could not sleep because of the withdrawals. This state was much worse than going through the withdrawals without the sedatives.

I've seen far too many people fall into this sedative trap while withdrawing from antipsychotics and what often ends up happening is they take more and more sedatives until they actually do fall asleep. But by that time they've taken a lot more sedatives than they should have and someone ends up finding them and calling an ambulance. In the emergency room labeled an "attempted suicide", given charcoal, and sent off to a psych hospital where they are readministered antipsychotics. While they attempt to explain to the staff that suicide was not the motivation in taking the sedatives, their explanations are inevitably dismissed. Sometimes they are actually manipulated into thinking they must have meant to kill themselves even though they don't remember wanting to.

My particular battle was with Geodon, but this scenario can play out with users of virtually any antipsychotic drugs including Abilify, Risperdal, Zyprexa, and Seroquel. Breaking antipsychotic addiction is not easy, but being armed with knowledge can help tremendously.