A Few Changes

I'm supposed to be writing an essay, so instead I am going back and forth between this blog and facebook. Very useful of me.*

Moving and meeting up with old school friends (how is that the people I first met at fourteen have now known me more than half of my life?) has pushed me into thinking a bit more carefully about what I'm doing with my life. That's not quite accurate - I am quite happy about what I am doing this year and most of next. It's more that I have been confronted with my own and, what's stranger, other people's memories of what used to be my priorities. I'm now asking myself, and asking rather urgently, why I gave up so much that I loved.

I don't yet know whether this is just the common or garden variety of nearly thirty-ish angst that will slide back in to general content without much fuss or whether this is a prompting into a more genuine inquiry as to what exactly has happened in the past six years.

I have been worried about talking about myself too much on this blog and I have been attempting to write about what happens in my life in a generalised and universalisable manner. How well I have succeeded in that is questionable. That is really neither here nor there; my point is that I am going to stop doing it as a general rule because it feels false. I'm tired of falseness. I don't want to force myself into omission and elision. I'm not sure whether I want to continue with a pseudonym. I would never have done that in the past. I've been infected with fear of consequences and a desire for what will only ever be a rather spurious kind of respectability. After all, how respectable can one really be if one is periodically mad?

All this inner turmoil has prompted me to change things around a little here. I was planning to wait until the one year anniversary of this blog came around to make changes but I've done it now because I wanted to. I've changed my picture so that I'm now identifiable to anyone who knows me. That's as close as I'm going to come to getting rid of the pseudonym for the moment - that's as close as is comfortable right now.

I had to get rid of the green. It is my favourite colour but it needed to go. There was so much green in my old apartment and it made sense there but there is nothing green in my new one. I decided to do something different and go modern or, as I have dubbed it, 'plebian moderne'.** I had the cheap but older and pretty arts and crafts period furniture that one can so easily find down south. Here I've gone a little closer to derivative Bauhaus. This is not to imply that my blog ought to match my flat: I'm just tired of looking at green things and have been purging them.

So, yes. I am just going to go ahead and write and not be so paranoid about rogue identifying details. I'm not going to worry about being egocentric because the way I have been writing about things has come to feel very stilted and I can't keep it up. If I sound self-involved, so be it. It would be better than the didactic, sing-song tone that leaks in so often. As I tell myself frequently, there is no point in doing things other than the way in which I would do them. I've hated myself for so long that I still don't believe that doing things the way that I would do them will ever be anything but a disaster, however trivial the act in question. I still don't believe that it's ever right to do what I actually want to do. I've been trying to trick myself into thinking otherwise for more than a year now with notably uneven results. I haven't given up.***

The idea of being honest and not pretending that I have greater equanimity than I actually do and that I am not as much of a mess as I actually am scares me. Nonetheless, here I go.
____________________________

*I do have a draft and two more days to finish it - I'm not always as useless as I make out.

**Yes, I am the kind of person who would come up with a name like that - unbelievable, isn't it? I am very prone to that slangy manner of talking about art, clothes and furniture. It's like a game for me. Scoring points with obscure references and that.+ Rather obnoxious, isn't it? Especially when one hasn't been drinking.

***And in writing about myself I may yet, like Charlotte Bartlett, reveal 'depths of strangeness, if not of meaning'. It is strange to worry about whether one is being selfish if one is the only person wanting to get off at one's home bus stop and to be daily relieved when somebody else rings the bell first. That's something I do, every single day.
____________________________

+Speaking of which, nota bene the quotation in footnote three.

Eyargh! : Or, the Demented Battle Cry of a Lunatick Philosopher

I came home early today, nominally because this is the third week in a row when I've had some sort of a virus or other and I am very tired.

Why am I so tired? Because I stayed out far too late on Saturday night. The night bus let me off in front of my door at 3.07am. Where did I go? A rather insipid student night not at my own university but at the rival one across the road. Why would I go to such a place, I who firmly dislike not only loud music but also nights out that involve dancing? Because I have an idiotic crush on a girl that isn't even a proper crush because she's not someone I would date in real life, though I'm not tremendously sure of what real life, my real life, is at the moment because everything seems to have been upended and I've had a cold for three weeks which does not make for clarity of mind and I really thought I had broken my habit of getting crushes on younger women but I guess not and I don't know whether to be distressed, indifferent or amused about it, not that she's that young but still.

Last Wednesday night I didn't sleep but a couple of hours and yet had no trouble being awake and alert on Thursday and I have been talking back to the newspaper, out loud, while on the train in the morning and distractedly twitching at noises from the street while reading in the common room and forgetting to eat and having alternating flashes of panic and rage in the morning while trying to find the right books to take with me for the day and trying to weave through the people who meander dazedly down the tube platform in the morning when really they should be trying to get away from the crowded part and get down to the very end where there are only five or six people standing and 8.00am is really not so early as to make dazed meandering really necessary. I have been staring at people generally which I have largely explained to myself as being the result of moving to a place where there are more than 1,000 times as many people as the last place I lived, to a city whose population is almost as large as that of the entire state of North Carolina, which is almost as large in area as the entirety of England and Wales put together so that, as you can see, the people were a great deal more spread out and therefore not as easily stared at but then that falls apart when one considers the subset of all that staring which is a new-found involuntary tendency to gawk - let's not mince words - at other women, which is not very polite and has the added detraction of making me feel like I've turned into an adolescent boy: I've had 'staring issues' before but not like this.

And the real reason I came home early is that I was worried I would do something weird and aggressive because I am having the harsh tail end of a hypomanic blip and I am extremely uncomfortable and I don't quite know what to do with myself and and and...

And too many things are happening on top of one another and sometimes simultaneously in the wrong order and I can't calm down and writing this has helped some and I thought it would but (eyargh!) why have I had colds for three weeks and why do I have to choke on the dregs of mania?

The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project

The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project is something I have had in mind for a while. At the moment of starting, I am stuck in omphaloskepsitis (navel-gazing-itis) and I am glad to have thought of something to offer up that's more in tune with the original purpose of this blog.

I am asking all of you who read to save up and share any and all references you come across in literature, journalism, blogs, television, magazines, movies, day to day conversation, scholarly articles, academically dubious articles and sources: in short, anything that reflects a popular conception of the nature of mental illness and especially the perceived nature or character of those who are mentally interesting, negative or positive. I would also welcome more selective contributions from older (pre-1970) psychiatric and psychological texts.

My aim is to build up a database of popular references to mental illness so that, in true pragmatist philosophy mode, I can gain a fuller idea of what exists in the minds of the living, the influences that shapes these perceptions and the historical discursive context of current understandings of mental illness in the popular social dialectic. With this understanding, I hope to be better able to address mentalisms philosophically in a more relevant way.

If you're not sure whether a reference you have come across is relevant to this project, just go ahead and stick it up anyway. I need your help and I welcome and appreciate any and all contributions.

When posting a reference, please try to give sufficient citation in whatever form. Sufficient citation for anything in print would consist of the date of publication, author, publisher, page number and title. For blogs, as much as can be gathered of the publication citation plus a link would be great. For conversational references, date, time, local and a brief description of the relationship between the participants (e.g. psychiatrist to patient, parent to child who is mentally interesting) would be appreciated. Names and personal details are not requested or necessary. If you do not have all of the information requested, don't worry, just give as much as you are able.

I am particularly interested in anything that strikes you as a recurring conception and particularly interested in anything that strikes you as unusual.

With your help, I hope to make a useful contribution to political philosophy and, eventually, public policy for the greater good of the mentally interesting and the benefit of greater understanding to the non-mentally interesting. Thank you in advance and know that I will faithfully give due credit to any aid you can afford me in this project.

This Is Not a Real Post

It is instead a Cretan paradox. (Ha ha...philosophy jokes are so deeply unfunny: classics jokes are much worse)

This is a link to one of the blogs I read: if you're looking for a patron saint of mentalisms besides St. Dymphna, have a look.

Look for a real post on Monday or Tuesday!

Epistemic Injustice

I have taken to listening to a podcast called Philosophy Bites. It took me a while to get around to it, though many people had recommended it to me. However, it is quite enjoyable.

One of the ones I have listened to so far was given by Miranda Fricker, who is a professor at Birkbeck, which has made me all the more excited about applying there. She talked about epistemic injustice and credibility deficits. Epistemic injustice is also called testimonial injustice and it refers to a situation in which a speaker is not accorded the appropriate authority as a giver of knowledge. This might sound a little frivolous on the face of it but when one considers its instantiations in the real world, the dangers become obvious.

Take, for instance, a situation which she uses as an example and which has happened to me in my real life. Let us suppose that there is a meeting and a woman participant offers a suggestion that is overlooked. Subsequently, the same suggestion is offered by a male participant and greeted with enthusiasm. Each of the two has offered the same information and yet only one was taken seriously.

Another example of testimonial injustice that I can think of is the psychiatrist's office. As a patient, no matter what one says, one's credibility is only granted at the whim or opinion of the psychiatrist or any other mental health practitioner. Because one has the label of being insane (or whatever designation you might prefer) and because one is in an environment that reinforces that label, the psychiatrist or similar as the audience is the sole determiner of credibility because they have the label and position that accords them superior epistemic authority. Depending on the practitioner, this can be more or less of an issue. However, I would be willing to wager that anyone who has ever received treatment for mental health has experienced the frustration of being awarded a credibility deficit in the doctor's office because of the very fact of having a diagnosis. I myself find it unbelievably obnoxious, the more so because the doctors, when confronted about it, claim that such an imbalance does not exist. You can see where it will go from there.

Anyhow, I heartily recommend listening to the podcast itself. Dr. Fricker does a much better job of explaining this than I do. I found that it was a great relief to get a nice new descriptive term for the phenomenon; such terms help me think more clearly about things.

And I Shall Sing as I Push the Rock Back Up the Hill

One thing that I had forgotten about feeling well is that one doesn't always feel well. I feel rather rotten most of the time, being stuck, as I am, in a corner of the world for which I am not suited among friends whom I love but with whom there is so much I cannot share.

This sounds like pretentious weltschmerz from the mouth of an ingrate but it isn't meant that way.

What I do mean is that I often feel almost as bad as I do when I'm depressed but the trick of it is that now I only feel that way for an hour or five minutes and not two months. I'll feel unbearably anxious but whenever the reason for the anxiety is removed, it fades away, quickly. It's amazing.

I have worried, as I know that others do, that the medication could only ever take away from me; that I would either be artificially happy and well or still miserable and sick with side effects. I thought that it could only be a compromise between how much depression I could stand and how much medication I could stand. There was, indeed, no reason for me to think otherwise. I had learnt from experience that medication would make me not-depressed, which is not at all the same as well. As it turns out, that's not what has happened this time.

I've not turned into a smiling shell of myself. I'm not a morose lump either. I seem to have as complete a range of human emotion as I ever have had. I think that this is what it's like when the medication works.

Good job it finally did.

It only took twelve years, two hospitalizations, three depressive episodes so bad that I had to drop out of school, two so bad that I had to stop work, three pronounced periods of hypomania, years of insomnia, years of horrendous anxiety, and more than a decade of seeing various psychiatrists, psychologists and so on. It's only taken up the past seventeen years of my life.

I'm laughing though, it's absurd, but I'm laughing like Sisyphus. I'm glad something finally worked.

Three for a Girl and Four for a Boy

The semester is almost half-way over and we are not yet suicidal.

Occasionally, the old flock of magpies swoops down and squawks, reminding me of "the sixteen things I have left undone that must be done this very minute or the world will end" or "the eighty-seven unforgivable things you did before the age of six that mean you ought to lie down and eat dirt". They were so thick and fast when they came, at last, and more and more and more, but now they come mostly in two's.

There are so many Very Important for the Future tasks I must complete this month and I don't know why I'm not lying in bed, unwashed and fearful. Bizarrely, I am getting more exercise than I have in years, sleeping and keeping up or almost up with everything I'm supposed to do. I keep taking showers and getting dressed in the morning in clothes that are starting to be a little big for me.

It is unutterably strange.
It feels vaguely immoral.
It feels fantastic.

Time for My Pills

Yesterday I did something I probably should not have done.

In the late afternoon all the anxiety that had been building came to the point of being unbearable. So, I took a klonopin. Half an hour later, no difference. I thought, well, take another and I did. Still nothing. So I took another.

Finally, everything began to ebb away and I could at least sit still and stop picking on myself. I finished up a few things and headed off to bed where I fell blissfully asleep.

I was more than a little hungover today, bumping into things and walking from one end of the apartment to another for reasons I couldn't remember. I made myself walk to church because I though that it wouldn't be a good idea to drive. I dropped my music at least six or seven times this morning; I'm glad none of it went sailing down from the choir loft onto unsuspecting parishoners' heads. I've been fatigued and wobbly all day but quite relaxed. I sang much better this morning than I usually do - less worried about accidentally squeaking on the high notes, I suppose.

Then, too, I've had the less fun side effects. They don't always pop up when I take klonopin but they did this time. I kept getting tearful over all manner of things in the afternoon. I felt leaden and a little depressed for a few hours. I don't know why that will sometimes happen with klonopin and sometimes not. Most times not, really, now that I've been taking it a while.

When I was first out of the hospital I took 2.5 mgs a day, spread out. I could hardly walk but for the first time in years I wasn't eaten up by anxiety and self-loathing. Since then I've weaned off to the point of taking a half milligram every now and again. I take it in bursts, usually. I took one every day for the first week and a half of school to stop myself building up place-associated anxiety. Now that school is familiar again and not full of fearful recent impressions, I've stopped taking it.

When I took three of them yesterday (ssh. . .don't tell my psychiatrist I did that) I reasoned to myself that I used to take more than that on a daily basis and that therefore it was unlikely to have too much of an effect. I was so wrong. My tolerance did slip away; very, very far away. I will not be doing that again in a hurry. I suppose I might if I really enjoyed the 'stoned' feeling of it, but then, if I did enjoy such feelings I would probably have continued to take seroquel or geodon!

Was it worth it? I don't know. I did run through most of my first response anti-anxiety activities: bath, mint or other herbal tea, walk, pleasant errand, and the usual cure-all of distraction by dvd or NPR. However, I was too distracted to be distracted and I let the kettle boil over. I also tried the phone a friend option but it being Saturday night, I hadn't much luck with that.

It was worth it in that I didn't get to the point of a full blown, banging on the walls, decorating my legs with insults in ink kind of panic attack. It was too much hangover/side effect-wise.

Now I just wish I could figure out where that one came from.

16 Things

There's a "16 Random Facts About Me" thing floating around on facebook these days and I feel inspired in my fretful sleepless on a school night state to make my own version, which I shall call:
16 Random Things About My Madness

1. Medication-induced acne on previously unblemished skin will eventually go away if you use heavy-duty Clearisil face scrub long enough; in my case, three months.
2. Baking is very relaxing provided you remember to set the timer.
3. Any spending urge caused by the hypomania (or proper mania, if you have it) can easily be satisfied by the constant need to buy larger clothes as the medication continues to help pile on the pounds.
4. You don't have to do anything but smile prettily at looks of confusion when you tell someone you have a chronic illness and they try to puzzle out how that can be true when you look so young and physically healthy.
5. The standard of care with Nurse Practioners is highly variable.
6. Sometimes klonopin is the best choice.
7. I like having a psychiatrist who is younger than I am (only by a year but I find it tremendously amusing for some inscrutable reason.)
8. Most books on coping with bipolar disorder are enormously depressing.
9. There can be a fantastic rush when going out at four in the morning for a cigarette while very hungry and looking up at the stars.
10. Pretending that you are someone else who had a mental illness can take the strain off and provide mild entertainment on depressive days: sometimes I like to sit in my armchair and pretend I'm Virginia Woolf; sometimes I like to lie in bed and pretend to be Anais Nin; sometimes I walk to the next neighborhood over and pretend I'm Zelda Fitzgerald. That's actually a bit strange, isn't it?
11. Ancient Greek and hypomania are a great match for each other.
12. Chasing pills with mint tea soothes the nausea.
13. If you are depressed long enough, at some point you will realize that you have memorized all the lines of at least three of your favorite movies.
14. Much to my annoyance, my father turns out to have been correct in his assertion that if I would just keep the house tidier I'd feel better.
15. It is worth calling as many people as you can when you have happy news.
16. It is easy to cause a landslide in the minds of state-mental health services personnel when making your next appointment if you take out your day planner and have your own pen. They will look at you in awe, as though you are a creature from another planet.

So that's my 16. What are yours?

Someday Soon I Shall Have a Disproportionate Number of Cats

I feel that I have become an official nutter. On Thursday, I was standing at the bus stop, thinking about how happy I am that I'm going to graduate, and all of the sudden I realised that I was singing - out loud.

Fortunately, no one else was there. I do have a habit of talking to the cat (that is, speaking out loud when there is no one else in the room and pretending that what I said was addressed to the cat.) I do sing around the house quite a bit and I hold a running commentary when I'm doing schoolwork, especially translating. However, I had never yet caught myself singing without realising it before.

Now I wonder whether I've ever done it before. Maybe I'm not imagining all of those weird looks. . .


If you're wondering, I was singing 'Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion' from Handel's Messiah. I was not singing it very well. I can't quite do all the sixteenth notes. Or the highest ones.

Healing Dialogue

This is a very close rewrite of the conversation I had this afternoon with my new caseworker. It was the second time I'd seen him. I'm just going to let the dialogue, which is foreshortened but remains representative and is in many parts verbatim, speak for itself, as it were.

I have changed the names.

Scene: a rabbit's warren like office building containing dark, narrow corridors set at illogical angles, dark amber glass, industrial carpet. Inside are three different mental health agencies, a pharmacy service and the office of the local congressional representative. Enter a young woman (that is, me) tired and a bit harassed looking.

Receptionist slides open glass panel
Me: Hi, I’m here to see Owen.
Receptionist slides closed the glass panel and nods dismissively
The young woman sits down on the plastic covered lobby couch and picks up one of the medication leaflets and starts reading it. Five minutes goes by.

A man in his approximate forties opens the door to the sanctum sanctorum of mental healing, revealing employees indulging in what can only be described as loud yakking and ferrying reams of paper from one closet-like room to another.

Owen: Hi, there. Not late this time!
Me: No. Hello.
thinks: wasn’t late last time, either

They walk around the corridors for a minute trying to find an unoccupied office. One is located and several foot high stacks of papers are rearranged to make enough room for two people to sit down.

Owen: How are you today? [shuffles papers]
Me: Doing well, doing well. A little stressed out. A little tired.
Owen: Well what’s up that you’re tired and stressed?
Me: It’s been a long week. The semester started last week. . .
Owen: Semester? But I thought Local County Tech started this week?
Me: They may have. I’m up at the state university, though, and we started last Wednesday. We talked about this last Friday.
Owen: Ah, that’s right. Philosophy. I took a philosophy class in college. That was when I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. You don’t need to know what you’re doing with your life yet when you’re still in college, as you know. My professor, oh man, he was a character. You know those people who always answer all the questions, with their little hands up in the air?
Me: Yes. I am one of those people. But I try to have a sense of humor about it.
Owen: Oh.
Me: It’s okay. Don’t worry, it’s not like I don’t know what . . .
Owen: Well one day the professor said “Whoever answers this next question will get a jawbreaker.” Like a candy, you know. So this guy raises his hand and answers the question and the professor like, you know, just slugs this piece of candy at him and it hits the wall, and oh man, it just like breaks into a bunch of pieces and I mean just like this huge thwack, BAM! Yeah, I still don’t know what that was about.
Me: Hmm. Neither do I.
Owen: So let’s see. [shuffles papers] And you’re graduating when?
Me: Well, that’s part of why I’m so exhausted this week. I’ll be graduating…
Owen: It’s not a race, you know. You’ll get there when you get there.
Me: I know. But I’m going to graduate this spring. I just got the registration worked out yesterday morning. And I think that having borne with all the stress of it this week and still sleeping and going to class and getting my work done, I really think that I’m going to be able to get through the semester.
Owen: That’s great. And you’ve been doing the mantras like we talked about last week?
Me: Well, no, because like I told you last week, that doesn’t really help me very much. But I have been doing other things to relax.
Owen: The great thing about mantras is that they center your breathing which is at the core of the way you feel. You have to say them breathing in and breathing out and it just takes you out of yourself. In fact, I spent about ten minutes doing that this morning and it was amazing. I was kinda still half asleep, kinda drifting in and out of being awake, you know, and it was like I just left myself, I really got outside of myself. And that’s all related to what this guy I know’s brother in law who was in a monastery in Vermont, real religious guy but he died real young, like fifty-two or something. Anyhow, he said in a poem that I can’t really remember how it goes, but it’s about how the core of everything is love. That that’s the real truth about everything. With your philosophy, I guess, you’d call that the meaning of life, right?
Me: Well, the idea that love is at the center of everything is certainly a very religious idea about the essential nature of the world.
Owen: Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s why the mantras are so important because they take you out of yourself. And this guy, this monk guy, said that hell is full of all the boring people, the people who never get outside of themselves and what they’re thinking and that’s why they go to hell.
Me: Hmm.
Owen: But you don’t use the mantras. What do you do?
Me: Taking baths, reading. . .walking, when it’s a bit warmer, or sitting in the sun. Sometimes I… Owen: And you take [peering down at file] klonopin?
Me: Yes.
Owen: How often do you take that?
Me: [sighing internally] Not very often.
Owen: Once a week, or?
Me: Well, it depends on the week. This last week, I’ve taken it pretty often. But when things are less stressful, maybe once a month or something.
Owen: You have to be careful with that. Those pills can be addictive. But you’re only taking half a milligram?
Me: That’s right. And I really don’t take it often enough to get dependent on it, though I realize, believe me, that that’s something to worry about.
Owen: I was talking to my officemate, you met her, Rachel, and we’re not sure that you need to be on CST. In fact, another of my colleagues overheard us talking last week and asked me whether you really needed to be on CST. Do you think about stepping down to med management?
Me: I have been, but with school starting and having had to change agencies, I thought it would be best to get to know things here before stepping down to med management.
Owen: I can see that. But what with all the restructuring we’re doing, I’m not sure that we’ll be able to keep you as a CST client. And they’re talking about doing away with the med management program because we can’t get any money from the state for it.
Me: What?
Owen: Yeah, well, I guess they expect you to get your own doctor.
Me: Well…I can’t afford that. That’s why I’m here. Psychiatrists are expensive. I have no health insurance. What am I supposed to do if that happens.
Owen: Oh, don’t get stressed about this. I didn’t mean to stress you out.
Me: Well, it’s a little late now.
Owen: Nah, they’ll never do away with it. I’m going to go ask Beth. [stands up, sticks head out of the door and shouts] Hey Beth? They’re not going to stop the med management program are they?
Beth: [offstage] No. I mean, they want to and they’re going to review it in February but we’ve got 112 clients in it and I don’t think they’ll be able to get rid of it.
Owen: [to Beth] Thanks! [to me] See, they’re not going to do away with it. So don’t stress.
Me: Well, with all due respect, I have heard that before. It was the same at the last agency and then they went out of business and gave us only two weeks’ notice and then it took me eight weeks to get in over here after they told me that they would take care of the transition work for me. It was eight weeks of people not returning my phone calls or saying that they will call me and then not calling me and being given misleading information. Even if you’re going to find a private doctor it can take a couple of months and for me to find someone I could afford to go to would take at least that long. So if they’re even thinking about stopping that, I have to wonder whether I should go ahead and start looking around now.
Owen: Well, that might not be a bad idea. But they’re not going to stop the program. But people do go through a lot to find a doctor. When I was first out of college, a friend of mine got me a job in a mental institution and, I was telling you about this last week, about how everyone was being involuntarily committed and I got to see all kinds of crazy diagnosisses [sic], man it was crazy out there. [laughs ruefully] Well, there was this pregnant girl, pregnant and fourteen, fifteen and psychotic and they had her on all kinds, just all kinds of different drugs – thorazine and neurontin and all that – and none of it was working so her parents just took her out and said they were going to take her to the root doctor. You know what a root doctor is? Like, there was a band called the Root Doctors? You must have heard of them.
Me: No, I haven’t, I don’t really know all that…
Owen: Man, why am I even telling you about this? This is your time, you should be doing most of the talking. But you don’t know what one is?
Me: No.
Owen: Never heard of a root doctor? It’s funny who does and who doesn’t. Well, they’re like witch doctors, like voodoo doctors. And they put these things in like cheesecloth, well I don’t know if they really use cheesecloth, but they put these things in and her parents took her out and said that if it worked, they’d bring her back and if it didn’t work, they’d bring her back. So after a like long weekend, they brought her back and she was fine. No problems anymore. I’m not saying it worked but it did have an effect and I guess you with your philosophy would say that it was about belief.
Me: Well, the placebo effect has been very well-documented in a number of well run drug studies over the past century, so yes, I suppose that could have been about…
Owen: Now when are you seeing Dr. Perry?
Me: I think it’s the 16th.
Owen: I have, let’s see, the 19th.
Me: I’m willing to bet you’re right. I have it in my planner but I don’t know it off the top of my head.
Owen: I’ll just look it up. [taps at the computer] The 19th. Well, that philosophy’s great stuff. One of the most interesting classes I took, although I thought it was a whole lot of bull at the time you know. See you next week. Good to talk to you.
Me: Yes. Next week, then.

Why Intermittently Rational?

Why Intermittently Rational?

I’m a philosophy student and I’m bipolar. I found out about the latter in the middle of being the former. I had been through three and a half semesters and nearly completed my major when I lost my mind. I had to drop out of school, I had to navigate the state mental health care system, I had to go to the hospital and I had to face the fact that something was seriously wrong with me: that something was wrong with my mind.

In those semesters studying philosophy I had learned about the school of thought that underpins our democratic governments and our theories of rights. Much of what we see as innate and intransigent about the world was born in the Enlightenment Era, the Age of Reason. We have our rights because we are possessed of reason. We can be citizens and are fit to elect our government because we are possessed of reason. We are human because we are possessed of reason. We can write geometrical proofs of God’s existence because we are human and we are reason.

So what happens when someone loses her reason and then gets it back? What happens if she has a chronic disorder that means she will someday lose her reason again? What happens if you can identify someone who will always be only intermittently rational?

We don’t make too much use of this in our political system unless there’s a crime involved. We’ve all heard of people being incompetent to stand trial by reason of insanity, a designation that has a very specific meaning in jurisprudence. But what does it mean to be insane and not criminal; what does it mean to be insane in ordinary life? There is no formal response but there is much confusion and fear and loathing. There is so much conflict about how to treat those with mental illness, either medically or socially. How dangerous are they? Are they lepers or just sissies? Is it okay to exclude them from schools and universities? Is it okay to give them health insurance? When they’re in the hospital, should you call or just assume that they’re as embarrassed as you are and won’t want to talk? Are they immoral? What did they or their parents do that they are that way? Why don’t they pull themselves out of it? Have they tried fish oil? Vitamins? Aromatherapy? Aren’t anti-depressants for the weak and hysterical? Is she going to come into the office one day and kill us all?

And then there’s me, asking myself all the same questions: wondering whether I would be giving in if I took medication, thinking that I was weak for being unable to carry on. Into every life a little rain must fall, and so on. Things will be better tomorrow. If I would just face up to my responsibilities I wouldn’t have all these problems. If this isn’t my fault and it’s never going to go away, how am I ever going to keep a job? What if I become homeless? What if I don’t need this medication and all its fun fun side effects? Maybe I could just take St. John’s wort instead.

What if I’m faking?

If you have the misfortune to be a philosophy student the wondering will not stop there. It will spread, invading all corners of your life. The Declaration of Independence will never sound the same.

I’ve become hyper-aware, during the past two years, of the dialectic of madness in predominantly English-speaking societies. My neck prickles at every passing mention of someone being crazy, at every prescription drug ad, and all the news stories about mentally ill graduate students and their firearms. It seems to me that we are all dead set on hiding mental illness and pretending it doesn’t exist while denouncing anything we don’t agree with as crazy. What are we talking about? Who are we talking to? Where is all the madness in its raging glory and suffering viscera?

What does it mean to be intermittently rational? I did get to vote for Barak Obama, so my political concerns are not at the forefront although I did glance up at the psych ward in the local hospital on November 4 and wondered whether they got to vote. I can’t buy firearms but I never wanted to in the first place. I want to spend my life writing about social and political philosophy: am I allowed to do this, considering its origins?

Let’s find out.

All right, gentle readers, bring it on. I want all your words for crazy. Give me the words, give me the context if you can, tell why you like them and hate them and love them. Tell me what you call yourself and what you call your relatives behind their backs. Let’s see what’s out there.