It’s Fucking Raw!

I’m about 300% done.

With what, you ask?

With the internet. Not the trolls (South park is taking care of that for me), not the idiots who start rants on social media about things they don’t understand, and certainly not the eleven year olds posting sexy pictures of themselves captioned “ftw, keep it 100, stfu biatches, snort weed hoe”.

She’s not 12, calm the fuck down.

I’m simply done with internet connections.

It took about twenty minutes for me to load this page. I paid seven dollars for this day of wifi connectivity and this is the result I get?

“Just sign up with an internet company.”

Easy for you to say, you probably have enough money to pay an internet company. I’m about to get fifty frappe’s from Starbucks and start my ass on some Nikola Tesla shit. Resurrect Wardenclyffe for some free Wifi and energy.

I mean, does anyone ever think about this? How can they claim dibs on wifi if it’s everywhere? How can you claim dibs on energy when it is literally everywhere? It can’t be created or destroyed, only transformed. Don’t tell me PG&E is the only way you can power a fucking light bulb because I’ll slap you so hard with some science you’ll be dropping chemistry test tubes out your ass for a month.

There has to be a way you can create something that receives a signal without you having to saw off your leg and fuck the manager of Comcast while pretending he’s “Daddy” and you’re his “little girl”.

Fuck Comcast with a capital F.

Could this rant be a result of my nerves over my psychiatrist appointment on Monday or the mountain of math homework I’ve been staring at but not touching, or the frustration I feel over my tendency to avoid every single thing that overwhelms me (which turns out to be everything)? You tell me, smart guy.

Oh God, I just assumed your gender, oh fuck me, send out the killer clowns and put on your metal chastity belts before Donald Trump grabs your cooch and Clinton breaks into your house and deletes your entire gmail history.

2016 in one sentence.

Fuck off.

My goal in life is to be the Gordon Ramsay of the psychiatric world. Picture this:

[Enter]: three residents, two with goofy grins on their faces and one with a patented “I’m going to be a doctor next year” flat-line face. They all have their clipboards clutched to their chest like it’s the first day of class and they don’t want anyone to see how much they suck at math. I am wheeled in on a throne made of previous resident’s broken dreams and souls with four angels with wings of solid gold pushing me along. The wheels of the throne are translucent and easily visible is the bubbling blood of my enemies; my source of energy. I puff generously on a Cuban cigar  I made a resident crawl through Cuban jungles to get.

Me: Repeat my motto!

Them: People not products.

Me: Again!

Them: People not products

Me: WITH ENTHUSIASM!

Them (visibly shaken): People not products!

Me: Good. Better than yesterday; yesterday you were shit.

Resident 1: That’s a little harsh.

Me: What? What did you say? Hey–hey! Listen you fucking donkey, don’t tell me I’m harsh when you’re shit!

Resident 2 (under breath): a compliment would be nice once in a while

Me: You want a fucking compliment? I haven’t had to take your clipboard and shove it up your ass sideways yet! There’s your compliment. Hey–hey, did that hurt? Fucking sue me!

I’m sorry, I had to pause and ask myself what the fuck do I write about these days?  This is my personality, people. I should be on T.V making millions of dollars for insulting people. Think about how self-fulfilling that would be to know you are the one person with such great comebacks about dry camel asses and raw food that people hate you so much that they tune in and watch you every week. What a wonderful source of fuel for my shattered ego and what a wonderful cure for my crippling depression.

My nerves are running rampant about this appointment. Meeting new people is one thing: meeting a new psychologist is another; meeting a new psychiatrist is ten times worse than both of the above. I’ve been fighting with myself over whether I would ever, ever, ever again in my life consider medication and although the dominant screech in my head is “what the fuck are you thinking you fucking psychopath, No!”, there’s a tiny voice somewhere hidden in the crevices of my brain matter saying “let’s get legally high”.

No, really it’s saying “do it.”

My problem is getting stuck in a cycle. My problem is 1) finding the words to explain myself and 2) explaining myself so well I went up getting thrown down the rabbit hole.

I have special names for things in psychology. Hospitals are called the Lions den because once you’re in there, you go by their rules.

The rabbit hole is the cycle of treatment people get stuck in, that I almost got stuck in once. The “take this medication, but it causes this so take this medication, but those side effects suck so take this one but now you can’t get off of them without horrible withdrawal or a psychotic break so I’ll just tell you that you might as well stay on them for the rest of your life” cycle.

I’m acutely aware that taking medication would mean my brain is forced to fight itself . Doctors call it “adjusting”. I don’t. Because it’s not your brain “adjusting”, it’s your brain constantly sending out more neurotransmitters to keep itself in homeostasis against the synthetic chemicals; that’s why you develop a tolerance–your brain finally reaches homeostasis once again and you don’t feel the effects of the medication anymore.

Until you quit it and suddenly your brain, which has started sending out huge amounts of transmitters to compensate and balance the other transmitters, sends out more than it needs because the chemical is now gone. That’s why you get withdrawal. That’s why alcoholics have seizures. That’s why many people who stop their medications have bad mental side effects.

I don’t have health insurance so what does any of this matter? Even if I wanted medication I wouldn’t get it. So, I guess . . .

Internet is working now.

Ten Quadrillion Ways To Be Fucked Up

Sometimes you just want to wake up, go online, and not get bombarded with stupidity. All the time you should realize this as an improbable feat.

You try to read a serious article about someone in a car accident and all you see is the ad for “Precious lost weight, now she’s a hottie!” or some fatsist, sexist bull.

Then you make the mistake of clicking on the “I hear voices mumbling, am I going crazy?” question on Yahoo Answers and find an extended, wanna-be-intellectual answer of “that sounds like schizophrenia and here are my dumb reasons to why I think I have the right to make that comment”.

Now some fifteen year old female is running around thinking she has schizophrenia because some loon on the internet told her so.

A reminder for us all: We’ve got to be careful what words we release into the ether of the internet. I shall repeat something I feel I repeat much too often to people: hearing voices is not indicative of schizophrenia. There are many different types of auditory and visual hallucinations, and only a very small fraction of them can be categorized and attributed to a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Did you know you can hallucinate merely from being stressed out?

Shocker!

There is this overwhelming belief in our society that something “abnormal” must be disordered or a sign of a “broken brain”. I don’t know where it’s coming from. Seriously, someone find the answer for me and link it to my blog in the comments below.

But for God’s sake, don’t get the answer off Yahoo. If you link me to yahoo, I will personally hack your Facebook and post graphic Hentai gifs to all your family members.

It really all comes down to this idea that we’ve got it all figured out, that how the majority of the population perceives things in the world is the only way to perceive the world, and if your perceptions are different, if your brain integrates information with a twist to it, than you and your wacko brain are in the wrong and we will make sure you’re aware of how wrong you are. And we’ll drill it into your head until you know you’re wrong and we’ll make sure you know how not acceptable you are. So along with your weird perceptions of what we label as reality, you also have to deal with being disrespected.

And we’ll make sure none of us get on your level to try and relate because, well, fuck you, you’re below us.

That attitude isn’t everywhere, but it is in many places, and I’m sure those of us who struggle with our mental health could pinpoint it somewhere at least once in in our lives, whether it be from family, doctors, psychologists, neurologists, whoever.

I gave up on the internet today. I closed all the tabs, put my computer to sleep, and sat wondering how people with such strong beliefs of “mental disorders make you insane” aren’t also labeled as delusional. 1) it’s an irrational thought 2) you can’t talk them out of it and 3) when asked, they have no real evidence to support their claim other than the media and their unintelligible link of mental illness to violent crime and since when is the media a credible source?

Then I got bored of trying to catch all the thoughts whizzing past my eyes, so I turned the computer back on. The internet Gods have been merciful on me and presented me with two wonderful articles from Scientific American and a website called “Medium.com” that kind of rips off flipboard but I’ll ignore that.

Links to both articles can be found here and here.

Both are in relation to the idea of consciousness and theoretical physics and I promise I will quickly link all of these ideas back to the reason why I say there is no one true reality or one true/right way of perceiving said reality. One article believes the concept and action of our consciousness may never be solved, but perhaps it could be merged with computers and bionics–as soon as neuroscientists can crack the “neural code”.

Now, I’m no neuroscientist, nor am I a particle/theoretical physicist, but the idea that a neural code (meaning a comprehensive pattern the brain/mind follows that results in an algorithm describing the function of consciousness and every single neural network in the brain) would be reduced to something as simple as a couple action potential spikes with specific milivolts as they’re suggesting sounds kind of . . . well, dumb.

That’s like saying  “specific sounds have specific frequencies, and those frequencies are are the reason for the pitch of the sound” . . . without taking into account the particles that allow all of that to happen.

If you’re studying sound and how it syncs to the entirety of the universe, wouldn’t you need to dig a little deeper than that? Kind of how, you know, consciousness is everything to us?

But a good point they made is the amount of neural synaptic connections in the brain: A quadrillion. If it averages ten action potentials per second, that’s ten quadrillion operations a second. Can you fathom that without making your brain hurt?

Oh, the irony.

At ten quadrillion action potentials per second, don’t you think there’s going to be some several million of us who perceive things different than the other several million? If each brain is like a finger print, don’t you think we’re all going to see things through our own eyes and we have no right to think that our vision is the only kind of vision?

Does it seem a little silly yet to think that ONE “imbalance” of serotonin is what has ruined your life without other factors playing into it all? Does it make sense why they find some people with the same differences in serotonin as you that are not depressed or not anxious? Does it make sense that everything you’ve read about imbalances are basically just loosely educated guesses?

Does it make sense that hearing voices isn’t indicative of schizophrenia yet?

There’s no such thing as a perfect brain. There’s no such thing as a broken brain. There are just brains. Love your brain. It does so much for you.

Next time you and your brain quarrel, just remember there’s a little mass of squishy tissue with billions of neurons scrunched together just above your brain stem that gives you the freedom to never have to remind yourself to breathe. It lets you enjoy the portions of your life that you’ve enjoyed. Don’t piss it off. 

Mental Illness . . . err, sickness . . . err, Disorders.

An interesting conversation on some forums came up yesterday about those of us who struggle mentally possibly making ourselves ill. They had the support of people until they questioned:

Now the doctor should say “try to imagine that your not mentally ill, don’t tell yourself that it’s the case, and go about your daily activities as if you aren’t ill.”, would that get many people over the depression? Physical problems are obvious, but with mental illness it’s always subjective, one may answer that I have these traits, but those could be grey areas.

After using their logic to defend their belief that if you took a lot of tests everyone would have some kind of disorder, so they wouldn’t be disorders they would be normal, they came up with the above question.

I think it’s why the person who responded to them was not on their side. Their response was:

No, it wouldn’t. Depression is epic to deal with. If a person responded to that kind of “treatment.” Then they probably didn’t have depression in the first place. And yes, there are grey areas. Where something could be depression or another issue. But that’s the same with physical illnesses. There’s often not a firm single diagnosis. The doctor will treat the most likely cause. If the treatment doesn’t fix it, they try the next most likely. And so on. Any physical illness forum will have “horror” stories. About doctors who refused to believe the actual diagnosis. And tried all the wrong treatments first. That doesn’t mean that people don’t have a genuine issue. Or that whatever it is is something they should “just get on with.”

I gave them both the benefit of the doubt.

Let’s discuss it anyway, shall we? Because one of the reasons I started this blog was to talk about stigma and self-stigma and how we as the people being stigmatized can address it in a productive way. Although that concept has gotten a little lost in my aggressive, generally satirical rants. 

I’m sure we can all agree here that telling someone “you don’t have depression” will not solve their depression.

However, can we all agree that when we were first diagnosed, or when we’re labeled by a professional, you almost immediately get that sense of something being wrong with you? Of being clinically different than others? Of having a “chemical imbalance”?

Can we all agree that so many mental disorders listed in the DSM-V have overlapping features, and can we please agree that many of them have symptoms that could easily be misdiagnosed by a professional or exaggerated by a patient caught up in themselves after searching on the internet?

This is what the original poster mentioned about labels:

[Labeling] people with a disorder is a more polite way of saying “your a pussy”, “or your lazy”, “or pull your head out of your ass”, maybe they can’t do that, but until they test whether it is an illness and not the latter, then you can’t know.

Because they defined everyone as having some portion of mental disorder, and therefore rendering mental disorders normal behavior, they can come to this conclusion, it follows their logic.

A response to that line of text was that labels are a way for people to “Deal with a collection of symptoms” in which a method is suggested to resolve or manage said collection of symptoms.

I agree with neither of them. I don’t think a label is a way to deal with a collection of symptoms, nor do I think the doctor is calling me a pussy whether or not he’s actually thinking that, I think a label is a way to list a collection of symptoms for clinical purposes and nothing more. And yet, over the years, we’ve placed stereotypes on those symptoms, labeling them “abnormal” and “weird” or “freaky”.

Then we want to start changing the name of the label as if that would change the way people see the symptoms. Because the label is the problem here, right?

Wrong.

Stigma isn’t just people calling us lazy and unorganized and this and that. Stigma is us calling ourselves that and honestly, as an advocate for all of us, I’ve always pushed more for a transformation of how we see ourselves, rather than a transformation of how other people see us.

We can always change how we think. We can’t change how they think That’s their job. 

That doesn’t mean we stop educating the public, it just means we focus the majority of our energy on ourselves, on how we feel about ourselves, on realizing that we’re not defective, genetically mutated, chemically imbalanced, or “Abnormal”, no matter what kind of professional documents say so.

As much as I love psychiatry and psychology, it is not in any way, shape, or form an exact science. We need to stop treating it as such.

That being said, I believe that poster had an underlying point the person responding didn’t catch: seeing ourselves as ill is a problem. Our illness isn’t a problem, obsessing over it as an “illness”, is.

I have depression. And anxiety. It’s been severe, more severe than I let people on about. But even as a child, even when I knew there was something about me that didn’t quite match with the other children, there was only a brief period in time (a few months maybe) where I thought I was defective.

That doesn’t stop me from being depressed. However, it does stop me from worsening my depression, my anxiety, my obsessions, on my own. It stops me from worrying that my ideas of reality and death, the way I relate seeing a sign on the road to my destiny or seeing someone flash their lights as a message to me, or reading a really inspirational quote and feeling it was meant for me because I’m here for a special reason, my derealization and such, are the beginnings of something “psychotic”.

I think people in general get worried when they take a test online that tells them they’re suffering from traits of a disorder, a mental health problem, an illness.

So I took the liberty of taking a few personality tests, things I feel people go online for the majority of the time. 

Paranoid:	High (Not surprising)	more info | forum
Schizoid:	Moderate (Also not surprising)	more info | forum
Schizotypal:	High (still not surprised)	more info | forum
Antisocial:	Moderate (fucking hilarious if you know what Antisocial means)	more info | forum
Borderline:	Very High (hysterical)	more info | forum
Histrionic:	Low (honestly truthful)	more info | forum
Narcissistic:	High (fuck you)	more info | forum
Avoidant:	High (Not as ‘high’ as you think)	more info | forum
Dependent:	Very High (LOL)	more info | forum
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Very High (Yep. Totally.)

Paranoid	||||||||||||	41%	50%
Schizoid	||||||||||||||	53%	40%
Schizotypal	||||||||||||	45%	56%
Antisocial	||||||||||||	45%	46%
Borderline	||||||||||	36%	45%
Histrionic	||||||	21%	52%
Narcissistic	||||||	30%	40%
Avoidant	||||||||||||	45%	48%
Dependent	||||||||||	40%	44%
Obsessive-Compulsive	||||||||||||	44%	45%

I feel these are pretty common tests people take on the internet, I see it all the time, people self-diagnosing based on traits generalized from an automated system. And when someone sees: “Jeez, I scored 53% on Schizoid, that’s 13 percentage points above the average score!”, they google the term, find the symptoms, and two things happen:

1. They feel they’ve finally got answers
2. Subconsciously, they embody those criteria, they embody those symptoms. They may have legitimate struggles, but making themselves (by no real regard of their own) fit a label, they’ve essentially made themselves “sicker”.

I took a mental health assessment. Scores out of 100, animated with the following gifs of my exact reactions:

Substance Abuse: 0

MDD: 92

Manic Episodes: 43 (keep in mind, I answered ‘sometimes’ to the ONE question that spoke about “feeling elated” and I answered never on the ONE  question about impulsive behaviors, spending, gambling, sexual encounters.)

Bipolar Disorder: 99

GAD: 100

Panic Disorder: 58

Panic attacks: 53

I took several more. Psych Central thinks I have Borderline Personality Disorder and so does “Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified”. Healthyplace also thinks I have BPD, but they also think I have schizophrenia so go figure. Psych Central disagrees and says I do not have schizophrenia.

What do I gather from all of this?

Because what people don’t understand about these things are how bullshit the questions are. If someone truly has magical thinking, do you think they’re going to know what that entails? They’ll most likely mark “never”. Most of the questions are generalized, provide no concrete examples, and would be better at rating the consistency level of a healthy dog’s bowel movement than anything about my personality or mental health.

My advice?

Use personality tests for fun. Don’t even use them to “see if you have traits” of a disorder. It’s just not accurate enough for that.

If you’re struggling with your mental health, avoid the internet, it bullies you into believing it. If you’re struggling with your mental health, see a few professionals and get some different opinions.

Don’t take their diagnosis as a life sentence. Don’t take what they say as words from a religious text. You really are as sick as you think you are.

You could struggle with the worst disorder known to man, and as long as you don’t limit yourself, no one else can limit you.

I’m not saying what people experience on a daily basis is a lie. What I’m saying is that it exists, but not in the terms the medical business puts it in. It exists, it’s manageable, and the better we feel about who we are, the easier it is to live with ourselves.

I figure that’s pretty solid common sense.

I’m going to sleep. It’s 5:18 a.m

The Power Of The Internet

Heart Healthy Tip: Don’t over exercise you guys, it actually causes scar tissue to form around the heart. Moderation is important.

Anywhooooooo . . .

Challenges are healthy.

 

And when that boss crashed into the pavement and lavender vapor in the form of his own diseased, decrepit soul spewed from his body and evaporated against the blood soaked bricks, when those block letters forming the words I’ve been waiting for days to see: [PREY SLAUGHTERED] finally faded into the screen I jumped out of my seat with every muscle in my body tensed and hissed “fuck yes! Fuck yes! Finally! Fuck you! Fuck you fuck you fuck you, YES!” as loud as I could at 12:00 am.

There’s never been a video game in my life where I’ve had to use the breathing technique I use for Panic Attacks to calm my heart rate down.

My limbs were shaking. My hearing was muffled. My heart throbbed behind my eyes and my legs were weak.

And all the anxiety I’d been feeling for the last couple days melted into oblivion along with the beast I just SLAUGHTERED.

That’s my new favorite word: SLAUGHTERED. 

I do have a video game addiction. If I’m not playing video games, I’m watching someone else play them, whether that be in real life or on YouTube. It’s coupled with my technology obsession and internet addiction.

 

But I use them for a reason. Videos and Video games numb my mind. Technology provides me with a type of company I feel people can’t. The internet–well, it’s good to keep me busy and not thinking. It’s also the main catalyst behind my health anxiety addiction.

Yes, I’m the type of person who, when they wake up with a sore left arm (even if they spent the following night propped up on that left arm for hours, even if they know their old ass mattress causes a lot of body pains in their hips, back, and legs) they immediately assume a heart attack.

That is not an exaggeration. Until that pain in my left arm is gone, I will assume my body is about to break down at any second.

So because that type of throbbing anxiety has been in my head for a few days, because I’ve been a little stressed and pushed out of my comfort zone this last week, it’s all been building. I know when stress builds up, I can feel it.

It’s as if I have a slow leak.

Stay with me here.

Picture my body and brain as a kitchen sink. Picture the kitchen sink with one of those drain plugs. But the plug is a little loose and a thin stream of water makes it between the cracks and down the drain. Imagine the water is my stress.

Someone turns the faucet on full and the sink backs up and backs up and it puts pressure on the walls of the sink and you decide to practice your math and you use calculus shit to find out there’s no way in fucking hell that little stream of water is going to leak fast enough to beat the rate the water is filling up the sink. You don’t care to go much farther with that because, eh, math isn’t your thing.

Whatever. Don’t be a hater. It can be fun if you give it a chance.

Eventually the water reaches that crucial level where the only thing holding it from over flowing are the very chemical bonds which give it the properties of water. Luck runs out at some point and hydrogen bonds spill all over the counter and leak over the edge of the sink onto the floor.

It doesn’t take much for me to get to that stress level. Put me outside for a few days in a row and it’s already accelerated the process.

So I’ve been very irritated and snapping at my parents and feeling inconsolable. I go from happy to pissed off to deeply depressed and back to happy within a matter of minutes. The anxiety added to that. In fact, it was the catalyst.

So I decided to sit down and play a game I rage at. Because releasing unwarranted hell and being homicidal against fantasy characters is totally okay.

It gives me something to focus on, something I have a right to be angry at and shout at. It won’t argue with me, it will just send me all the way back to the stupid hunter’s dream lantern and laugh at me in it’s own technological way. But that’s alright, because I laughed at it when I beat that boss level.

Some people think I probably get way too into it. When was the last time you were shaking out of your shoes and leaping out of your chair and almost slamming your controller into the desk (this PlayStation 4 was a gift from my boyfriend if you all remember, I couldn’t break it and I remember that the split second before I took out my rage-happiness on it) and breathing like a pregnant woman in labor and crouching on the floor almost in happy tears because of a video game?

When you play this game you learn the meaning of hard work and the joy of accomplishment. When you’re fighting that boss you know what’s at stake: all of your blood echos. Your life. All the work you put into going through sewers and stabbing giant hogs in the ass and giant rats in the sewers and other freakish hunters jumping out at you from dark corners. You know if you die, you have to go through all of that fucking bullshit again. It makes you push harder than you’ve ever pushed in a video game before.

I’m telling you; these games teach you life lessons in their own subtle ways.

In between episodes of Bloodborne, I was surfing the web for job openings. I applied for a few. But I’m still wary. I know I can force myself to handle what I apply for, but I wonder what amount of stress that will put on my psyche. I know some stress management techniques and anxiety management techniques, and often they work.

To an extent.

I have no tolerance for stress, however. I can do one thing at a time, lest I’m on the computer. Then I can handle listening to a video in the background while I type a blog.

But mostly I like to keep my focus in one place. It helps routine, you know? And having a job and going to school is two things. Two. Two places in which I have to interact and wear that mask. You know how sweaty it gets behind that thing? My pores start clogging up and it gets hard to breathe . . . it’s just a mess man.

I’m just trying to accept the fact that I can’t handle a lot of things at once like most people. I have to take things slower and do things my way or else I’m putting my mental health at serious jeopardy.

A job playing video games. Now  . . . now that would save my mental health. Just putting it out there.

YouTube here I come.

Future Generations:

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Jimmy?”

“I want to be a YouTuber!”

“Get the fuck out of my classroom Jimmy”.

*Ten years later Jimmy has 10 million subscribers and is making 4 million dollars a year. His teacher hides herself from the public in shame, for she should have known to never, ever underestimate the power of the internet.*