Toll

Yes... it takes a toll for me to try to hang on to my limited cognitive capacity and spit all these things out... especially when specific part of it is dedicated to managing the inevitables.

I guess, why not do it if this is what I could do?

My wish is... hopefully there is something someone could use.

Meaning

There are many benefits to one's ability to work...


To begin with, the pay is much better than a disability check...

Second, it makes it so much easier to rationalize to oneself that there is some sense of meaning attached to one's own existence.

And, perhaps, this is why I am in such a state of existential vacuum... lol

Like what they say (or what I imagine them to have said lol), all else I do not have... I still have my blog... to share with you the phenomena I have observed in plain narration, or, to allow the recapitulation of phenomenology through the lens of narratology (a lot of big words but does the sentence make sense? At least, sounds very sophisticated... lol).

That is... if there are lessons learned, I will share them with you.

At the same time, shall I be not able to learn the lessons as well as I could, I hope some lessons could be learned through the collective cognition shared by the human kind and beyond.

All sounds right....

Except for, such is not sufficient to me...

Day and again, I look at my state of being... and I say.... there has to be more I could do.

There has to be more than merely posting items for a loss and to keep me busy on ebay....

That is... I have to start looking straight into my ebay experiences and regurgitate the lesson learned, or, force me to learn some lessons.

When all circumstances bring me down to face the bare reality of the meaninglessness of my existence, I have to try to learn to figure out, some way, somehow, the meaning of my presumed meaninglessness being...

(Gee, rereading this posting... it is sounding like I am blogging for the sake of blogging without having anything meaty to say... such shall I refrain since, all else I do not have, I have my mind set on not doing things for the sake of doing it... )

Model

Just got back from my friend’s place where I spent the evening at.

It was a good time out for we talked about a lot of things… from critiquing the ecologies of the higher education, to the sharing of ideas about work, to, simply, gossiping. lol

Then, at some point, the topic shifted to the symptoms I live with in my everyday life.

It was, one day last year, when her mother came to visit, did I share in person my experiences with people other than my psychiatrist, the therapist and this friend of mine.

My friend told me tonight that her mom remained to be so very amazed by the degree of lucidity in my narratives about the while nine yards.

She indicated that the informal discourse had also helped her gaining a better understanding about the things we called psychotic symptoms, including hallucinations and delusions.

The matter of the fact is that I could only speak for myself but not for the others.

Yet, through my limited understanding of the world, I have come to be a firm believer that people need to be educated about the nuts and balls about mental health problems. These include both the well-endowed ones to whom living with symptoms is a reality and those lucky ones whom could only live such experiences through vicarious learning. lol

The purpose of my blog, as I have indicated in my profile, is to show that I could live a life with or without of the symptoms.

Furthermore, I have attempted to use the sharing of my thoughts and experiences as a means to provide people an alternative perspective to view those with the problems.

This could be the healthy people’s view of those sick or the sick people’s view about themselves.

I hate to say this and this might just be my imagination or misunderstanding of the world surrounding me….

People have been taking a deficit view about the occurrence of mental health problems.

Regardless of the philosophical stands, I personally prefer to adapt the disease model because, in this case, symptoms as treatable and manageable.

If there should be cross-cultural differences among different cultures, so should there exist similarities.

I bet that people’s belief about mental health patients to be one of the similarities regardless of the culture even though there might be a gradient in the degree of acceptance across cultures.

Essentially, mental health patients are deficit by default and such deficit could result in incompetence.

Is it really true?

Granted, the lack of opportunities for substantial and continuous professional development might result in the inability for some of the patients to develop advanced skills.

At the same time, not all mentals are subjected to such constraints.

Other than the issue of opportunities, the most important factor in sustaining the facts and perception are the facts and perceptions themselves.

If I could categorize people into the normal and the abnormal, the deficit model we held about the mental health patients could be one of the core problems that perpetuate the performance gap in patients and those claimed to be normal.

Worse of all, it is not until the patients to start shifting away from viewing themselves with a deficit model could something be done in making a change to their own life.

I am by no means discounting the realness of the decapacitating, if not dementing, impacts of mental health problems.

I have been there, done that, and I am still living it.

However, I will no longer (when I am not depressed lol) allow myself to accept mental health problems as the cause of my failures. This is because, “what else could I accomplish if I can’t accept the responsibility of having failed for myself?”

I don’t make big money. I don’t even have a full time job.

However, one thing I have is my decision to live and the choice to take the disease model if it helps.

For those of you who are reading, what is your model?

For those of you who has been reading my posting and who might have forgotten me to be one of the psychos, how do you deal with the cognitive dissonance and would a shift in the model help?

Such as the plausible educational implications of my blogs—shall there be anything at all…

Also, you could either agree or disagree.

As long as you respond to my question, my words have been processed in your working memory and, chances are, some part of it might even have been encoded in your long term memory... lol
12:28 AM

Epiphany

Sunday, September 18, 2005

I had an epiphany late this afternoon…. which actually made me feel really dumb… :-O

The thing is… I never really woke up today even though I was supposed to be at work before 9:00.

I did manage to finish reviewing some proposals that have been submitted to a prestige conference in education. However, I was so not awake that, in order for me to finish reading these papers, I had to use the text to speech function of Dragon to let the computer read the proposals to me, rather than having to use my own eyes to read the text.

It is interesting that it seems to be so much easier to listen with my ears than to read with my eyes. This leads me to suspect that my extensive experiences with auditory hallucinations might have contributed to my bettered listening comprehension skills, rather than that of listening. lol

After I finally got back home, I had to take a nap before going out to see a play with my friend.

The idea of taking a nap had started forming while I was walking down Broadway on my way home.

I, all of a sudden, had this extremely dumb epiphany that it has to be the increase dosage of Seroquel that contributes to my tiredness and the need to take naps in order to keep me awake.

I felt so very dumb down by this epiphany because this should have been a common sense, rather than an epiphany.

While parts of me feel that it wouldn’t be bad for me to go into the hospital since everything would be taken cared of, another part of me do enjoy the freedom of living at large and not having to be kept on the gated 8th floor and be deprived of computing equipments.

I, then, tried to figure out whether there are things they do for me in the hospital that could not be done outside of the hospital.

The blog is equivalent to the journal we are encouraged to keep. The proposals I evaluated is equivalent to the discussion session about the daily news. My encounter with the new computer-related toys is equivalent to my beloved vocational therapy sessions. Furthermore, preparing donuts and coffee for students at my new job is equivalent to me volunteering to prepare the night time snack (i.e., sandwich) for my fellows in the coocoo’s nest.

The only difference is… I have the freedom of hopping on the train or subway. I also have the leisure of going to see a Friday night play rather than playing bingo, watching a video, and enjoying the Friday night party behind a locked door (This is the part that I have problem with).

I was not gonna drink alcoholic beverage since, in theory, one is not supposed to drink alcohol when taking medication.

However, after the play, I went with my friend to a bar for a quick drink.

I ordered Malibu with some kinds of juice.

It is not about the drink. It is about me having the ability to order a drink and drink it.

I have no intention is consuming more alcohol in the near future. However, I reserve my right to take a drink

What worse could it be?

I already have hallucinations and delusions. I am also already loaded with the highest dosage I could take.

Since the increase of the dosage, the hallucinations have been granted me with more breaks from them.

However, it would take a bit more time when I am so very drugged out by the controlled substance that I shall be too cognitively incapable to even dream about hallucinations and delusions.

Laugh all you could laugh and joke all you could joke. At least that would prove my mental condition to serve a purpose... lol

With or without a highly capable brain, I will still stand on my two feet and move on without hesitations.

Some days I might be not as quick and other days I might not be as competent to multitask. However, I will be functional either days (So am I trying to brainwash myself? Maybe. Yet, as long as it works and I shall see).

By the way, after my last posting, I turned around, not able to fall asleep.

All of a sudden, I had an insight. The posting was motivated by anger.. The anger that is associated with my inability to control the occurrences of the symptoms.

The anger is not even anything worse addressing. It is like the question, “who are they?” Non-sensical.

A Ratological Book

This morning, I missed half of my therapy session. Somehow, I had this smart idea that I would be able to wake up to attend a 9:00 session when I made the appointment. Also, I had this belief that my session was actually to take place at 10:00.

As a result, I woke up at around 9:30 only to find out that I slept through half of the session. I was late but I still made the effort to go in.

During the extremely brief session, I mentioned to my therapist about the flooding approach I have undertaken this round. Essentially, I am trying to flood the others with so much information that they wouldn’t want to pay attention to me. Yet, it is closed to impossible for people to get overwhelmed by my bloggings, given that, most people already have enough to read (thinking back at my never-ending effort to keep up with the back-issue magazines) and there is a very slim chance for anyone to be really paying attention to my writing.

The person that I truly want to overwhelm is myself.

You see, there is only so much reflection, interpretation and rationalization that I could perform. It is because my thinking is constrained by my prior knowledge as well as my creativity.

I knew that, at some point, the Goddess of language would take back its unlimited supply of spring water and my ratological discourse would eventually arrive at the state of depletion—like the IP addresses (lol).

It is irrelevant whether it is the medications that are asserting their influence or it’s the discourse that has gone dry. Why? Dasein or being-there is the answer.

The day of the graduation was a hallmark for me.

For the past few months, I have been juggling with the uncertainties about what is to happen after graduation, after my employment status expired, what I am supposed to do after I fall off the pay roll, and, what is to happen to my mental status. It is the expectation of my being a “official” lost soul in limbo that was killing me.

After the commencement, all those uncertainties are realities. I, thus, could happily live my life being there without having to worry about the expectations and speculations.

When expectation is not the focus of my concern, there is no pressure to push, to struggle, and to fight.

However, I do not mean that one should be lazy and use it as an excuse to not live one’s life to its fullest.

Rather, dasein allows me to set everything aside and take my time to process things step-by-step and one at a time--- sort of like, we slowly drove and he knew no haste. Now that I am there, all that I have to do is to be there and do whatever I could do there.

However, please don’t take me wrong by thinking that Dasein grant us a stress-free zone. There are still stressors, like in any other point in our lives—graduation is stressful, exams are stressful, and so are weddings.

At the same time, like what my therapist told me earlier in the year, the past few months has been proven to be a great learning opportunities. It allows me to look back at my own experiences and beat the horse to death (like what I did to my dissertation lol).

Sensing that my thoughts have gone dried, either due to the flooding effect or the influence of medication, I decide to have a paradigm shift in my writings.

It was yesterday when a professor of mine came into the office to look for my boss. I took a few courses in psychopathology with her before.

I was sort of difficult for me to bring up the topic.

I told her, “I want to write a book about mental health issues. I have done some writing so far. I wonder whether you could provide me with some feedback.”

My professor said, “Of course, any time.”

I sent the URL of my blog to her through email.

Yes, this is a paradigm shift. When creativities go dry, I will do some literature reviews to support my thesis. And, eventually, with adequate feedback from people I know, I will be able to publish a book—a book that will be instrumental in mental health education.

I had always wondered what I could amount to and I have always want to contribute to the common good. One major fear in my life is to live a useless life that does nothing more than wasting resources.

By sharing my experiences through blogging, I know I have made some positive contribution to 1 person or 2 (so I was told). However, by publishing my experiences as a textbook, I will be able to reach a greater population (isn’t that what textbook is for? Something students are forced to read lol).

Thereafter, I could tell myself, life has done me good by allowing me to make a little impact.

Since the expectation of my life has been met, I no longer need to dream about winning a Nobel Peace prize as an indicator of my contribution to the common good (lol). Finding a publisher might be something more realistic (lol).
  

IPO

Last Friday, for the first time, I officially showed someone my blogs. Today, I told my co-workers the URL to my blogs. In other words, I am making an effort to make the documentations public.

Sometime last week, the system analyst asked me when I will show her my blogs. I told her, “Give me one week.” Both she and another friend of mine asked for the URL again yesterday. However, I told them again that I was not ready.

What do I mean when I say that I am not ready?

First, I want my verbal diarrhea to be meatier. I am not discounting the importance of phenomenology. Most postings up to this weekend are more descriptive and have been analyzed based on my naïve theory. However, I felt such narratives would be insufficient without my two-cents that ties back to the theories I used for my dissertation.

Second, I want to make sure that I am stable enough to take the pressure. The increase of the dosage totally helps because now it feels like I am wearing a helmet. lol

The first time I went psychotic, I wanted to take on the world and to show them how strong I was. Two weeks ago, I started my blogs because I wanted to take on my positive symptoms. Along the way, I came to the realization that I was barking at the wrong tree. It should be me myself that I take on rather than anyone or anything else.

This is not the first time and, unfortunately, this will not be the last time that I feel the entire world is preying on details of my condition.

The issue is not when I could stop the fear of being identified or when people could stop viewing mental health conditions as a weakness in one’s character or a stigma.

Rather, the question to be addressed is when I could start accepting the variations in my own life. Anything else is irrelevant.

Being in a transitional state in my life does not make it easy for me to deal with such an issue. Ironically, this is the best time because I am done with my dissertation, will soon fall off the payroll, have not found a full time employment, and, have one more week to go before my graduation ceremony-- I have all the time in the world while running out of time. lol

So, I said to myself, “Bring it on and let it go.”

Let go of what? Let go the fear and train myself to get with it.

Will I be able to train myself this life skill successfully this time? Maybe.

One thing I know is that, even though some might suggest people to ignore the auditory hallucination, I have, to a certain degree, trained my auditory hallucination to start using first person narration.

Ya, you want to talk. That’s fine. Just say, “I do research on myself” but not “She does research on herself” anymore.

Will the outcome carry over to the next episode? I am not sure.

At least, I believe that practice makes perfect. There are always second chances.. :-O lol

Professional help

I went back to see my therapist today.

During the meeting, I mentioned to her about the blog that I have been posting and provided some insights about its usage.

Exactly one week ago, there were two reasons underlying my decision to start documenting my progress publicly. One of them was that I decided to go head to head with the symptom that my mental health problems were being publicized.

Yes, I decided to take the behaviorist approach of flooding. My thought was that, if it is inevitable for me to go through my auditory hallucinations and, consequentially, the aka radio broadcasting experiences, I might as well publish everything over the public domain. When all is out, what is left to be broadcasted? lol

However, that decision does have consequences because, now that everything is out, there is more reason for me to believe in the delusional perceptions and this surely imposes more stress on me. (Unless you are as headstrong as I am, or, even if you are even more headstrong, think twice before you proceed… lol)

My therapist suggested that, to reduce the amount of stress on me, maybe I should consider writing things done privately, rather than posting it publicly.

I stopped and pondered before offering her my response.

To was my realization that it doesn't really matter whether it is in my delusions or in my reality that people know me living with some problems. The issue to be dealt with is not how others might stigmatize a person with the propensity for psychosis, rather, it is about how I value myself.

So how is the result of my self valuation manifested in the positive symptoms?

Let's do some really simple analysis about the auditory hallucinations that I have been experiencing (the minor annoyances). I will not take into consideration the auditory hallucinations that are part of the referential ideologies since these experiences are associated with the interpretation of real stimuli that I picked up from the environment.

There are basically three types of contents for these auditory hallucinations. Guess what? Ya, positive, negative, and neutral. lol

An example of neutral comments would be something like “that’s the girl with a smoke”. “She is psychotic!” is an example of negative auditory hallucinations. The positive voices would say things such as, "I admire her", "she is strong", etc.

Sometimes these auditory hallucinations actually get me feel pretty defeated because they have been pretty similar for all these years. I actually complained to my therapist several times about how lack of creativity my auditory hallucinations have been. It might be scary but it would be nice to have a change. lol

That was a little side track, anyway, similar to the dialogues experienced by other people with auditory hallucination, these internal dialogues seem to manifest the extreme degree of egocentrism in me. They also signify my intensified degree of obsession about how my personal attributes might be perceived by the others (and I believe this is why the internal dialogues are presented as third person narrations).

So what do all these mean?

It struck me that, maybe, the real problem I need to face is my ability to truly value and appreciate myself. Also, despite of my BS about how I believe in the idea that “mental health problems are not a problem with characters,” I might be the person who really could not accept me as myself or, the packages that come with me.

As a result, I looked back at my therapist and replied, “Yes, I could stop posting my blogs in public and do it in private. Maybe that might reduce some of the stress. I can even take the entire thing down. However, I will not do it.”

Why?

Call me a war lord if you want to. However, after I took on my own symptoms days ago, I now realize that the symptoms are but the messengers. Like what they say, my best enemy is actually myself.

Don’t take me wrong and think that I am blaming myself for the mental health problems. I have to live with it just like anyone else with other chronic health problems, for instance, heart conditions. However, in this era, people are still lacking a solid understanding about mental health issues.

I am not only talking about the general public. I am also talking about those professionals whose job is to treat patients, to create treatments, and, to study about the etiology of mental health problems. However, most of the problems could only be dealt with but can not be cured. The significance of labeling is important to the selection medication. Yet, it is actually the symptoms that are more important than the labeling.

Back a while ago, I encountered a guy who does medical research. I asked him what he does, he replied, “I know everything about dopamine.” Well, maybe he was just trying to impress a girl that he met at the bar but he tried it on the wrong one. I looked at him and I said something like, “You don’t know jack about dopamine. Otherwise, I would have been cured and freed of auditory hallucinations.” To my amazement, his response was, “That’s schizophrenia.” If he were taking a quiz in my abnormal psychology class, he would have failed. However, I am the person without a job with benefits. lol

Also, to be honest, there hasn’t been much consensus about my diagnosis for the past few years. I have been diagnosed as having delusional disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder, in addition to depression. After I while, I just let them call me whatever they want to call me because, the bottom line is, give me the drug that I need to become stabilized, everything else is negotiable. lol

You see, if it might have been the lack of knowledge that contributed to witch hunt, the same could have contributed to people’s fear about individuals with mental health problems. And, believe me, I am one of them.

However, there is a difference between my fear and those who don’t struggle with it. My fear about mental health problem is about my inability to deal with it without causing major problem in my functioning as well as its revisit. On the other hand, sometimes, people’s fear for crazy people is due to their lack of understanding or due to how the media have portrayed people with mental health problems.

For me, we all are entitled to our fears regardless what the origins of our fear are.

However, it is inevitable for me to start finding myself a way to deal with these fears.

It is why I am setting up this life skill training sessions for myself in my everyday life. You see, I could stay at home and remain in private till I become a certified social phobic. Yet, that is what I will not do.

Rather, I will put myself to face whatever I have to face.

Essentially, there are only three possibilities for the reality. First, I might really have mild delusions which lead me to sort of believe that people I haven’t even encounter knows about me and my condition. Second, people might really know about my conditions. Third, nobody, except for those people whom I talked to and who love me, knows about it.

I have decided that it is of no significance whatever the real scenario might be because that is not the point.

In my last two episodes, I went on with my life and I was determined to fight it off.

This time, I am having a paradigm shift. I have come to the true realization that it is the art of ignoring that I need to master and it is myself that I have to fight.

Since self-defeating is the last thing I need now, I will keep a rain check on that engagement ;-)(lol). At the same time, believe it or not, ignoring is a task much harder to learn than training myself to write with my left hand; as a result, I will start from concentrating on the things I do in my life.

I should mention, though, I will not be me today without these people studying those neurotransmitters running around in our brain. Whenever I think about two of my uncles who suffered from Schizophrenia since their early adulthood and who never could have achieved their full potential, I realize that modern atypical psychotic medications have spared me with a life to live.

BTW, positive symptoms appearing as usual.
 

Cognitive constipation and Obsession

I ask myself this question, if no one else does, "Do I have nothing else to do other than generating all these blogs?"

Well, there are several reasons behind the blogging.

First, I want to share my experiences with those who go through similar struggle some time in their life or those who are lucky enough to never have to live through these experiences. If anyone every comes across my blogs, I hope you will learn something through them.

Second, I am more or less creating a documentary with text. I find it really interesting to share my everyday experiences with other people in real time. This feels more or less like a faceless reality show.

Of course, I am aware that there are so many blogs over the Internet and there is not much of a chance for anyone to really stop by and read my postings. However, so is life and it is similar to all productions.

I actually suggested to a friend of my who is a MRI specialist to document the progression of my brain through out the entire time-- from a state of semi-stabilization, to a state of psychosis, to a state of recovery, and, hopefully, to a state of partial remission, if not full remission. Well, he did not see any point of keeping track of how my brain might change through out the entire time because "n=1 and results are not generalizable." Well, good luck to him and his fellow researchers. I am not even sure whether they would ever to find a big enough n to successfully carry on the study.

Well, believe it or not, based on my clinical experiences, it is closed to impossible to find patients who could identify the entry point and all the points in-between for research purposes. It is essential to conduct research based on stringent methodology. However, if the purpose of research is all for publication but not for the sake of inquiry about the plausible truth, there is something fundamentally sad.

Third, via writings, I am attempting to find a channel for catharsis. I understand that, at a time when I am highly irritable, small things could turn into big issues. Since unresolved issues tend to have a detrimental effect on human psyche and, possibly, would resolve in maladjustment (lol), the least I could do is to help myself, on a daily basis, work through and think through the little things one at a time.

Fourth, the writing activities are a way of indulging myself in something I always want to do but never find the time to do.

Believe it or not, despite of my verbal diarrhea in blogging, I have gradually achieved the state of cognitive constipation.

What is cognitive constipation? It is the experiences of blocked thoughts. Sometimes, medications might block you thoughts so very well that you don't even feel the flow in your thinking. That could make you feel that you are becoming dumber and dumber. Sort of like the kind of experiences people encounter when they enter a new environment in which they need to communicate with a foreign language. This was what Zyprexa did to me.

With Seroquel, the experience of cognitive constipation is much different. I am completely capable of performing all analytical tasks and ordinary cognitive functioning. I could also form highly intelligent argument or bullshit (lol). However, I have difficulties with inductive reasoning.

The second time I encountered my full blown psychotic episode, I stayed away from Zyprexa and switched to Seroquel. It was because I was in the middle of running my experiment for my dissertation study and was about to begin analyzing my data. At that point, I felt that I could not withstand the block of cognitive flow.

I never really felt the total block in the flow of my thought after I started taking Seroquel (at least I do not recall). Moreover, after I got out from the hospital, I went directly back to work on my dissertation. I was able to analyze my data using all different kinds of higher level statistics methods and was totally capable of interpreting the results. Within one month after I was discharged from the hospital and while I was still in the dire of delusions, two of my papers were actually accepted to be presented in a conference. However, I eventually came to the realization much later that I was still cognitively constipated, just like how I feel now.

Under the treatment of the medication, I could do everything except for some specific type of inductive reasoning. In other words, I could not work on the discussion section. The dosage of Seroquel actually had to be reduced so that I could start working on the dicussion section (lol).

However, haven't I been providing all the discussions about all the events all these time? Yes, I have been. Yet, most of these discussions have originated from open topics. It appears to me that the difficulties I have are topics with constraints. For instance, given the results of the statistical analyses and provided the theories, what do we learn from the study? That I can't do.

Well, all these are good reasons for my blogging. However, I do see myself spending too much of my time lamenting about my experiences.

Since I am still relatively analytical and since I have a quiz next week in statistics, I am gonna switch now to do some other lower level cognitive tasks... preparing for the statistics exam!

By the way, I am forgetting the most important point of why I am keeping this line of blogs alive... It is a test for myself and a life experiment for my own case study. I am inching away conducting my own research about the impact of blogging as a vehicle of providing mental health intervention. lol