2.17.2011
People Power
Headed to Madison atm to protest Scott Walker's assault on public workers. Quick point though -- the right's assault is on the concept of publicality itself -- their idea, utopia even, is one in which corporations hand down the terms always already. Egypt was a setback, Bahrain, Tunisia, Libya, can be blamed on brown people. Individuals asserting their rights is not okay. Revolutions must be monitored and controlled -- the people might fuck up and assert their own rights. And if that, god help us.
2.11.2011
Short point on Egypt and the Need for Independent Media in the USA
I'll keep this brief, since I think most of the wonderful individuals active in this community are well aware of the desperate need in the United States for non-corporate media. But having been glued to the amazing coverage by Al-Jazeera English and Democracy Now! pretty much for the last two weeks, it's a point that I can't emphasize enough.
Al-Jazeera English, currently available in Ohio, Burlington, VT, and Washington, DC is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand the Middle East on its own terms -- something which cannot be stressed enough, given the Islamophobia that currently permeates our political culture, and, by extension, the stenographers of that culture which get their paychecks from the mainstream media. As brilliant as Richard Engel's reportage has been from that region, and as cogent and incisive (as always) Rachel's commentary has been on the last two weeks in Egypt, nothing can top reportage and commentary that come from individuals steeped in the history and culture of that region. Frankly, the only reason Al-Jazeera English isn't more widely available in the U.S. is due to direct and unabashed Islamophobia among our more listened-to "pundits."
It's no secret that Americans are, in general, woefully underinformed of the histories, cultures, and mores of the rest of the world. Empire has its privileges, after all, and the prism through which the rest of the world is reflected to us on our terms is one of them, I guess. But the world is changing -- it always has been, and to keep our heads in a hole is no longer acceptable. Keith Olbermann's move to Current TV is exciting and most welcome -- Current is an independent channel that simply goes places and reports events in ways no mainstream channel does. I distinctly remember watching their report on the anti-gay bill in Uganda, and learning more in that hour than I had from any other mainstream media source, TV, radio, or print.
And finally, the members of this community really should support the heroic work that Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, and Anjali Kamat have done covering this crisis for Democracy Now! Democracy Now! presents what's best and most important about independent media in this country -- listener-supported, fact-based news that does not fear the powerful or those with vested interests -- a courage that corporate media, by definition, cannot display. Their coverage of the events in Egypt has been thorough, fair, and frankly, riveting. Kouddous is an Egyptian, and was on the ground on January 26th, one day after the protests began against the Mubarak regime. Not a corporate media transplant trying to catch up on facts and flavors particular to those events, but someone who, though he left Egypt when he was three, knows that country and that region inside out. Goodman is simply the best journalist out there -- listen to her every day, and the amount of information you will learn about the world is just staggering.
In all -- and again, this isn't a surprise to DailyKos members -- the best information available comes from independent media. Support them, follow them, because journalism is in danger, and its continued relevance is no less evident than it was in Addison's England.
Request Al-Jazeera English in your town here.
Support Democracy Now! here.
The Christian Taliban
Digby is right on so many things, it feels criminal to link just to this post, but her point that extremist Christianity in this nation has as its primary goals well, quite a bit similar to other authoritarian religious extremists around the globe. The term "Christian Taliban," while hyperbolic, is out of bounds if and only if the extreme wing of evangelical Christianity shares nothing or very little in common with Islamists in Afghanistan. That test is not met.
2.04.2011
This Will Not Save Them
Via the New York Times, this will not save publishers. What matters isn't the "accessibilty"or the "convenience" of the e-reader. What matters is the compelling nature of the story. The entire e-reader business remains a scam designed to prop up the top-down nature of corporate rights when it comes to creative licenses. Narnia is enchanting at 10 regardless of the format -- it's the story, not the licensing format.
1.28.2011
The Shell Economy and Crisis Theory
Came across this excellent essay by Benjamin Kunkel of n+1 on the London Review of Books blog, reviewing Marxist scholar David Harvey's two most recent books, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism and A Companion to Marx's 'Capital.' I haven't read any Harvey, though I'm certainly going to check him out after reading this essay. Harvey, formally trained in geography, has become a leading scholar of "crisis theory," which examines turbulence, instability, and ultimately, well, crisis in the global economy through the prism of Marx's critique of capitalism as laid out in Das Kapital and the Grundrisse.
My familiarity with Das Kapital is basic, but Kunkel's main point -- that mainstream and even "progressive" accounts of the economic crisis of the last three years rarely cross the left boundary demarcated by economic Keynesianism and political left liberalism -- is trenchant and telling. Now it seems to me that there are any number of reasons for this -- in the American media, at least, the rightward shift of media and politics in general occasioned by corporate monopoly over the main media channels -- but the question is relevant. We hear the crisis framed in technocratic terms, according to which regulations were lax, oversight dysfunctional when present, individual incentives misaligned with corporate/social incentives, etc. But we rarely hear any question of whether or not the crisis was not a dysfunction of capitalism, but rather a feature. I'm skeptical as to whether that conversation can take place in the United States outside of explicitly socialist channels on the fringe, but perhaps it's time to ask those questions again.
My familiarity with Das Kapital is basic, but Kunkel's main point -- that mainstream and even "progressive" accounts of the economic crisis of the last three years rarely cross the left boundary demarcated by economic Keynesianism and political left liberalism -- is trenchant and telling. Now it seems to me that there are any number of reasons for this -- in the American media, at least, the rightward shift of media and politics in general occasioned by corporate monopoly over the main media channels -- but the question is relevant. We hear the crisis framed in technocratic terms, according to which regulations were lax, oversight dysfunctional when present, individual incentives misaligned with corporate/social incentives, etc. But we rarely hear any question of whether or not the crisis was not a dysfunction of capitalism, but rather a feature. I'm skeptical as to whether that conversation can take place in the United States outside of explicitly socialist channels on the fringe, but perhaps it's time to ask those questions again.
1.27.2011
Nabokov right after all
This is pretty rad -- Nabokov is one of my favorite writers in any language, and his passion for butterflies is well-documented... but who knew that he developed a theory to explain the evolution of an entire class of butterfly species, and that more than 30 years after his death, contemporary genetics has vindicated him? Nazdarovya, Vladimir.
1.25.2011
SOTU
And... whiff. On the whole, Obama's rhetoric is good as always. He's invariably eloquent, but this entire frame of "winning" and "losing" misses the point. It's not a matter of beating a 22-year-old Beijing University with the hammer of a 22-year-old Columbia University student. When he talks about bringing electricity to rural areas and creating jobs that didn't exist before... those were active government programs. Anything like the TVA that would be proposed today would give the entire right a collective heart attack... not that it didn't then, but at least FDR had the cojones to point out that the collective good benefits by the arbiter of the collective good -- yeah, the G-word.
The broader point though, is that you can't talk up high-speed rail in terms of "competitiveness" when you have governors in major states responding to extremists to veto such projects. You can't credibly discuss lowering corporate tax rates when you've kept the top rate solid and whine about the deficit. It's just not credible.
Then again, that would require rationality in these here United States, and we know that's not happening any time soon.
The broader point though, is that you can't talk up high-speed rail in terms of "competitiveness" when you have governors in major states responding to extremists to veto such projects. You can't credibly discuss lowering corporate tax rates when you've kept the top rate solid and whine about the deficit. It's just not credible.
Then again, that would require rationality in these here United States, and we know that's not happening any time soon.
SOTU
here comes the immigration thang, good shot for a relevant, non-centrist, non-boilerplate point. just say it, barack -- building a fence is stupid and a waste of money. just say it, pleeeeease.
K Hill's
who doesn't love a dictator in his 80s? go ahead and legitimate that regime. http://bit.ly/ihObtX
New Green Revolution?
Mobarak going down to dispossessed Egyptians would be the world's headline. This is worth watching.
And now Egypt
Holy shit, this might just be a transformational moment in the Middle East -- not one engineered by Condi, mind you, but based on genuine populist outrage. I tweeted this earlier, but that's at least 3 regimes that have been threatened/brought to their knees by new technology. Not to fellate social media -- it is and remains a matter of profit -- but wow. This would not have happened 15 years ago in a different era.
Great Interview with Feingold
Plenty of folks more eloquent than I have discussed the fact -- and frankly, it's a fact -- that we're living in the second Gilded Age. This great interview from ThinkProgress highlights an interview with former Wisconsin Senator and progressive hero Russ Feingold. Check it out.
11.08.2010
Your Moment of Zen
Erie, PA; on a billboard advertising a fireworks store:
"Pepper spray & stun guns
Sugar-free fudge."
"Pepper spray & stun guns
Sugar-free fudge."
10.29.2010
So
It goes without saying that my most recent post (since deleted) was beyond the pale. Your dear blogger is in an interesting bind at the moment; updates will at some point ensue.
10.13.2010
So...
At what point do people find things to enjoy? Like, is there a switch to turn on where you wake up and look forward to anything? If so, please let me know.
10.06.2010
Notes from Inside III
The second thing you notice on the psych ward is the alteration in the passage of time. This is hardly my insight -- Thomas Mann explored the strange slipping of time in an institution to perfection in The Magic Mountain (which I definitely will need to read again in light of recent circumstances). The hours drag on, and every time you check the clock you find that only half the minutes you thought had passed actually did. Your life breaks down into hour-long increments, punctuated by mealtimes and medication. Breakfast is served at 7:30, and you wake up and stagger groggily toward the common room. You grab your tray from the metal box on wheels and try to find a seat near the people you know are somewhat sane. You fill your menu out at breakfast for the next day, and while the food isn't as bad as you might have expected, it's hardly fantastic. You learn quickly that you can add items and change quantities, so that my tray each morning comes laden with three covered plastic cups of extraordinarily weak coffee.
It's pretty much a given that there will be an incident at breakfast. It's more or less inevitable, mealtime being the only times during the day when the entire population is gathered in one space. This morning, it was Stephanie, she of the suspected wet brain, who set off this sweet elderly African-American woman who rightfully had had enough of poorly-coded racism. See, one of the schizophrenics had an outburst yesterday in which she repeatedly yelled "nigger" at the staff, which is about 70% African-American. I believe she also called them "gorillas," at least before the sedation hit in. In any case, Cassandra -- the elderly woman -- was really on edge wrt overt racism, and so when Stephanie started ranting about "the blacks" and how you can't trust them, a deeply-buried rage in Cassandra roared to life, and she threw her fully-laden breakfast tray at Stephanie, and when she missed, she picked up the tray and tried again. Naturally, both parties were separated and ushered in to different rooms, yet the incident was fairly typical of the increased pressure and tension that accompany a full house. More typically Carolyn (about whom more later) will start on a rant and at some point her scattershot will touch someone's exposed nerve, and then shit goes down. You learn to tune most of this out.
Carolyn is pretty much the queen crazy, bipolar with psychosis and delusions. She's by far the least-liked person on the ward, and this holds true for patients and staff. Carolyn is 38, and has spent most of her adult life in and out of psych wards, mental hospitals, and group homes. In many cases, such a life trajectory owes in large part to poverty and the appalling fraying of the American social safety net. Individuals who express mental illness at a young age often are victims of inadequate living situations, abusive parents, parents who abuse drugs and alcohol, neglect, and left to the mercy of Departments of Mental Health that are woefully underfunded, inadequately staffed, and a part of no politician's stump speech. The mentally ill remain largely invisible in America.
Carolyn, on the other hand, comes from a well-off family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Her father is a well-respected psychiatrist (ironically enough) in New Jersey, and she was raised in suburban comfort, educated at good schools, has a college degree. Not that her relative luck in the family lottery makes her case any more tragic than the hundreds of thousands of less fortunate individuals who fall into the black hole of the mental health system, but it does add an interesting wrinkle. From what I could gather, Carolyn grew up in suburban New Jersey before moving to Boston in her late adolescence. She graduated from Lesley University with a degree in human services, and apparently that's when things began to fall apart.
Before getting into her story -- or at least what of it I could piece together -- it's really important to explain the sort of psychosocial milieu in which Carolyn spends her days, and will in all likelihood spend the remainder of her days. It's important to preface all of this with the fact that Carolyn is an extremely kind person, and has an extremely kind heart; the circumstances of her illness conspire to mask that kindness and to isolate her when she craves human contact. It requires, first of all, a staggering amount of patience to hold a conversation with her. She sits forward in her chair when she speaks and gesticulates wildly, all while emitting a garbled logorrheic stream of consciousness. It doesn't take more than a minute or so to realize the obvious paranoid and delusional ideation underpinning most of what she says. She'll tell you that she's putting together an operation, and that the nurses and counselors are bad people who need to be taken down. She's going to send in the black belts and they'll bleed so, but the FBI and CIA are watching her every move, and have put her in here to prevent her from carrying out her global mission. When I came back here for my second stint, she was certain that I was FBI because I was back. They've assaulted her with chemical weapons, so she won't take her medication, because the nurses work for Dick Cheney, who is the real president and who has been offended highly by her protestation against his regime in Harvard Square, and by her calling George Bush "George Tush." Similarly the chemical weapons have invaded her group home, and her face and lips burned and the skin on her feet rotted. She has access to special software, which, if you choose not to be on her team, will monitor your every move and can immolate you instantaneously should you act unethically. She's in love with a man named Dan Crowley, who, as far as I can tell, doesn't exist, but apparently is the most gorgeous man in the world as well as a legendary musician who can change his face to look like anyone. He's secretly written every hit pop song of the last 20 years, and is the shadowy figure behind the entire operation. But she also refers to pretty much every male under 40 (yours truly included) as "gorgeous" and makes vaguely sexual overtures that become quickly uncomfortable. She wouldn't believe that I'm gay because "someone so gorgeous just couldn't be. It's not fair" (lawlz). She suffers from tremendous delusions of grandeur. She believes herself to be a virtuoso piano player and composer, but when she sits down at the piano, the sound that results is best described as aleatory. She believes that she is a gifted designer, even though her "designs" amount to random blotches of paint on t-shirts under a thick coat of glitter. The other day her room had to be steam cleaned because she had managed to cover half the floor in paint and glitter. Similiarly she thinks of herself as a fashionista and model, though her style amounts to one of her paint-splattered t-shirts over zebra print leggings with flip flops, and her body type is best described as spherical. If she gets agitated, she'll tell you that you're headed to an internment camp where you'll eat carcasses until your carcass is eaten, and that they'll test new chemical weapons on you and zap you. But there are flying cars and flying houses ready for you if you play, and it's all about playing. She at times mouths bits and pieces of Christianity, but one doubts that faith plays much of a role in her life, or that she has the cognitive equipment to understand faith. Which is not to say that she's dumb, because that's very much not the case -- she has an impressive vocabulary and a wide body of knowledge. I imagine she was once a very intelligent person with a bright future.
And that's part of what makes Carolyn's story so tragic in an almost Shakespearean way -- there's a great deal there beneath the surface that her illness, the drugs used to treat it, and other drugs more recreational in nature have so mangled and garbled that only this manically paranoid word salad remains. From what I could gather, her illness began to present in her adolescence. She received treatment, which was apparently inadequate, and was medicated through her early 20s and college. I guess her condition seemed to worsen in her mid-20s, because she was incapable of providing any semblance of chronology for the last decade or so. She's used crystal meth on and off. She's been a prostitute and has slept in Harvard Square for weeks at a time. She's been in and out of psych wards like this one, has amassed over $30,000 in credit card debt, and lived in section VIII housing on disability payments, because her illness precluded the possibility of working. She has worked, however -- in a kitchen remodeling store, in a shoe store, as a waitress. One gets the sense that her Dan Crowley was a boyfriend sometime in her early-mid-20s, maybe the first time she fell in love. Maybe it was a brief and tumultuous affair, maybe the one stable long-term relationship she's had, but the impression is that his memory has winnowed its way so deeply into her psyche as to color many aspects of her psychoses. Her group home situation is terrifying to her -- the housemaster is cruel and uncaring, several of her other housemates sociopathic. Her parents have cut her off entirely. They won't return her calls or help her financially, and she can't get her own apartment. If she can't recover here and return to her group home, she'll be headed to one of the state mental hospitals to be institutionalized. During our conversation, she repeated over and over that she just wants to have a life, she wants to fall in love, she wants a life like anyone else.
It's pretty much a given that there will be an incident at breakfast. It's more or less inevitable, mealtime being the only times during the day when the entire population is gathered in one space. This morning, it was Stephanie, she of the suspected wet brain, who set off this sweet elderly African-American woman who rightfully had had enough of poorly-coded racism. See, one of the schizophrenics had an outburst yesterday in which she repeatedly yelled "nigger" at the staff, which is about 70% African-American. I believe she also called them "gorillas," at least before the sedation hit in. In any case, Cassandra -- the elderly woman -- was really on edge wrt overt racism, and so when Stephanie started ranting about "the blacks" and how you can't trust them, a deeply-buried rage in Cassandra roared to life, and she threw her fully-laden breakfast tray at Stephanie, and when she missed, she picked up the tray and tried again. Naturally, both parties were separated and ushered in to different rooms, yet the incident was fairly typical of the increased pressure and tension that accompany a full house. More typically Carolyn (about whom more later) will start on a rant and at some point her scattershot will touch someone's exposed nerve, and then shit goes down. You learn to tune most of this out.
Carolyn is pretty much the queen crazy, bipolar with psychosis and delusions. She's by far the least-liked person on the ward, and this holds true for patients and staff. Carolyn is 38, and has spent most of her adult life in and out of psych wards, mental hospitals, and group homes. In many cases, such a life trajectory owes in large part to poverty and the appalling fraying of the American social safety net. Individuals who express mental illness at a young age often are victims of inadequate living situations, abusive parents, parents who abuse drugs and alcohol, neglect, and left to the mercy of Departments of Mental Health that are woefully underfunded, inadequately staffed, and a part of no politician's stump speech. The mentally ill remain largely invisible in America.
Carolyn, on the other hand, comes from a well-off family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Her father is a well-respected psychiatrist (ironically enough) in New Jersey, and she was raised in suburban comfort, educated at good schools, has a college degree. Not that her relative luck in the family lottery makes her case any more tragic than the hundreds of thousands of less fortunate individuals who fall into the black hole of the mental health system, but it does add an interesting wrinkle. From what I could gather, Carolyn grew up in suburban New Jersey before moving to Boston in her late adolescence. She graduated from Lesley University with a degree in human services, and apparently that's when things began to fall apart.
Before getting into her story -- or at least what of it I could piece together -- it's really important to explain the sort of psychosocial milieu in which Carolyn spends her days, and will in all likelihood spend the remainder of her days. It's important to preface all of this with the fact that Carolyn is an extremely kind person, and has an extremely kind heart; the circumstances of her illness conspire to mask that kindness and to isolate her when she craves human contact. It requires, first of all, a staggering amount of patience to hold a conversation with her. She sits forward in her chair when she speaks and gesticulates wildly, all while emitting a garbled logorrheic stream of consciousness. It doesn't take more than a minute or so to realize the obvious paranoid and delusional ideation underpinning most of what she says. She'll tell you that she's putting together an operation, and that the nurses and counselors are bad people who need to be taken down. She's going to send in the black belts and they'll bleed so, but the FBI and CIA are watching her every move, and have put her in here to prevent her from carrying out her global mission. When I came back here for my second stint, she was certain that I was FBI because I was back. They've assaulted her with chemical weapons, so she won't take her medication, because the nurses work for Dick Cheney, who is the real president and who has been offended highly by her protestation against his regime in Harvard Square, and by her calling George Bush "George Tush." Similarly the chemical weapons have invaded her group home, and her face and lips burned and the skin on her feet rotted. She has access to special software, which, if you choose not to be on her team, will monitor your every move and can immolate you instantaneously should you act unethically. She's in love with a man named Dan Crowley, who, as far as I can tell, doesn't exist, but apparently is the most gorgeous man in the world as well as a legendary musician who can change his face to look like anyone. He's secretly written every hit pop song of the last 20 years, and is the shadowy figure behind the entire operation. But she also refers to pretty much every male under 40 (yours truly included) as "gorgeous" and makes vaguely sexual overtures that become quickly uncomfortable. She wouldn't believe that I'm gay because "someone so gorgeous just couldn't be. It's not fair" (lawlz). She suffers from tremendous delusions of grandeur. She believes herself to be a virtuoso piano player and composer, but when she sits down at the piano, the sound that results is best described as aleatory. She believes that she is a gifted designer, even though her "designs" amount to random blotches of paint on t-shirts under a thick coat of glitter. The other day her room had to be steam cleaned because she had managed to cover half the floor in paint and glitter. Similiarly she thinks of herself as a fashionista and model, though her style amounts to one of her paint-splattered t-shirts over zebra print leggings with flip flops, and her body type is best described as spherical. If she gets agitated, she'll tell you that you're headed to an internment camp where you'll eat carcasses until your carcass is eaten, and that they'll test new chemical weapons on you and zap you. But there are flying cars and flying houses ready for you if you play, and it's all about playing. She at times mouths bits and pieces of Christianity, but one doubts that faith plays much of a role in her life, or that she has the cognitive equipment to understand faith. Which is not to say that she's dumb, because that's very much not the case -- she has an impressive vocabulary and a wide body of knowledge. I imagine she was once a very intelligent person with a bright future.
And that's part of what makes Carolyn's story so tragic in an almost Shakespearean way -- there's a great deal there beneath the surface that her illness, the drugs used to treat it, and other drugs more recreational in nature have so mangled and garbled that only this manically paranoid word salad remains. From what I could gather, her illness began to present in her adolescence. She received treatment, which was apparently inadequate, and was medicated through her early 20s and college. I guess her condition seemed to worsen in her mid-20s, because she was incapable of providing any semblance of chronology for the last decade or so. She's used crystal meth on and off. She's been a prostitute and has slept in Harvard Square for weeks at a time. She's been in and out of psych wards like this one, has amassed over $30,000 in credit card debt, and lived in section VIII housing on disability payments, because her illness precluded the possibility of working. She has worked, however -- in a kitchen remodeling store, in a shoe store, as a waitress. One gets the sense that her Dan Crowley was a boyfriend sometime in her early-mid-20s, maybe the first time she fell in love. Maybe it was a brief and tumultuous affair, maybe the one stable long-term relationship she's had, but the impression is that his memory has winnowed its way so deeply into her psyche as to color many aspects of her psychoses. Her group home situation is terrifying to her -- the housemaster is cruel and uncaring, several of her other housemates sociopathic. Her parents have cut her off entirely. They won't return her calls or help her financially, and she can't get her own apartment. If she can't recover here and return to her group home, she'll be headed to one of the state mental hospitals to be institutionalized. During our conversation, she repeated over and over that she just wants to have a life, she wants to fall in love, she wants a life like anyone else.
10.05.2010
Freedom!
I will be discharged tomorrow! Headed into an outpatient program tailored to LGBTs and looking forward to an excellent weekend.
10.04.2010
Notes from Inside, II
So a very important thing with the bipolar/schizophrenic/drug-addled crowd is that they are mostly harmless. This could be because their meds render their bodies sluggish and oils their brains with glue. It could also be because, despite even their most violent-sounding outbursts, the Pavlovian reflex to four-point restraints and additional sedation keeps them one step shy of actual violence. The outbursts, however, can be quite disturbing, frightening even if you're new to the ward. Once you've encountered a few psychotic rants, you begin to pick up the general rhythms and frayed webs of association that can lead from doctors to the CIA to chemical weapons to omnipresent software. Yep. A schizophrenic outburst from R. would be typical -- a situation in which he staggers into the common room and announces to anyone who will listen that the voice of God speaks through him and that the world is ending soon. Eschatology seems a major theme in many such outbursts. As are conspiracies involving various covert agencies and operatives, not to mention violence, often horrific, often involving necrophagy and other unsavory practices.
An example (which may be disturbing to some) from a particularly troubled woman in her early 30s (this from earlier today; sedation with haloperidol was required to shut her up): "I fuck children in the river of blood. Because I'm a pedophile? Because I like having sex with children? Stay away from me! Stay away from me!" Granted, I have no idea whether or not the above is true, and I highly doubt it, but it's a pretty good example of the sort of utterance to which one quickly becomes accustomed here.
But a little research will turn up countless examples of the particular phobias, obsessions, and stomach-turning imagery that turn up in schizophrenic thinking and verbalization. Elyn Saks' memoir The Center Cannot Hold is a powerful look at the manner in which schizophrenia tears and twists even the most brilliant minds into menacing and unfamiliar shapes, and I highly recommend it. John Wray's recent novel Lowboy, though fictional, is an arresting detective story centered around a schizophrenic 16-year old who's escaped from his hospital in New York City.
I had intended to write more on this subject, but the day went by more quickly than I had expected. I'm in much higher spirits; the new medication is helping immensely, and I've been fortunate enough to spend time with some really wonderful individuals here, some of whom I will definitely be seeing on the outside.
An example (which may be disturbing to some) from a particularly troubled woman in her early 30s (this from earlier today; sedation with haloperidol was required to shut her up): "I fuck children in the river of blood. Because I'm a pedophile? Because I like having sex with children? Stay away from me! Stay away from me!" Granted, I have no idea whether or not the above is true, and I highly doubt it, but it's a pretty good example of the sort of utterance to which one quickly becomes accustomed here.
But a little research will turn up countless examples of the particular phobias, obsessions, and stomach-turning imagery that turn up in schizophrenic thinking and verbalization. Elyn Saks' memoir The Center Cannot Hold is a powerful look at the manner in which schizophrenia tears and twists even the most brilliant minds into menacing and unfamiliar shapes, and I highly recommend it. John Wray's recent novel Lowboy, though fictional, is an arresting detective story centered around a schizophrenic 16-year old who's escaped from his hospital in New York City.
I had intended to write more on this subject, but the day went by more quickly than I had expected. I'm in much higher spirits; the new medication is helping immensely, and I've been fortunate enough to spend time with some really wonderful individuals here, some of whom I will definitely be seeing on the outside.
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