I want a dog/I want to die (I don't want to die really)

I WANT A DOGgie. Where I live you're only allowed one dog or one cat (not one of each). Really I wanted two dogs. One little and cute, the other large, scary and vicious-acting (ie a bodyguard-cum-guard-dog). The only type of dog that combines both characteristics is the Japanese akita breed. Fair enough, they're not little, (they're the size of a German shepherd) but they are thee cutest type of dog I have ever seen.

About nine months ago, late at night, somebody knocked on my front door and a rough-sounding street-gang-type character said to me, through the reinforced glass (I now know it is reinforced, because of what happened next) they said is somebody called J there because they're looking for a bag of weed.

The drug-reference from a person I had never met before at my own front door really put my back up so I said no there is no J here and went away.

Next thing I hear a loud banging and I can clearly see through the security glass that a whole mob of scum are trying to break into my flat. I was completely terrified and was in no doubt that if they had got in they would have smashed my head in. They would also have quickly discovered no such "J" lived in my flat, but would have tried to rob me nonetheless.

This is what happens, you see, at crackhouses. And I'm pretty sure that before I took it my flat was a drug-house of some type. I know this by the string of dodgy and rough people and bailiffs who turned up in succession in the first few weeks I was living there.

So anyway now, late in the night, I can't sleep because I'm terrified that somebody will try and axe their way in again. So I think I've got posttraumatic stress disorder (I'm joking, I don't really think that). But I am traumatized and I need a very cute and savage guard dog so only an akita will do

Apart from that I am OK. I'm not horribly depressed any more. (Famous last words, coming from me.)

Last summer two people started beating me up here saying I was a grandiose drug addict (for saying that I wanted to speak 20 langauges fluently), that drug addicts are grandiose. Oh and that I felt I was "terminally unique" and that my depression was somehow different from everybody else's.

First thing: drug addicts are NOT grandiose. At least I've never met a grandiose one. They usually have very poor self-esteem and are the very opposite of grandiose. I have only ever felt gradiose during periods of "elevated mood~" (as the drs called them). I have had dealings with many a professional during these periods and nobody has ever thought I was on drugs, not even when I was in psychotic mania and dragged into the mental hospital, clear drug-screen card in hand.

The reason drs can distinguish drug highs from manic ones is that basically, when addicts are so out of it on drugs that they lose the plot they do NOT behave the way I do when I've been "elevated" in mood. Ie they're not outgoing, not chatty, don't laugh a lot. They tend to be paranoid, irritable etc. I know it because I've seen it enough times. (I used to live in a crackhouse.) It came back to me the other day though, after some of the remarks posted here over the years ~ I was completely out of it in a psychotic state and yet the hospital staff seemed to know at a glance that I was not on any drugs at all. (And methadone doesn't really "count" in their eyes; all it does to heroin addicts is stop them launching into withdrawal. Methadone isn't a "high" of any kind ~ which is why the addicts hate it so much!) The only drugs they asked about me being on in hospital were lithium and antipsychotics. That's because I had very florid symptoms of the psychotic condition known as mania,  (the manic phase of bipolar illness).

I had suspected I'd been having bipolar symptoms for years, but discounted them on account of my simultaneous drug-taking. But the weird psychological symptoms that later got diagnosed as "schizoaffective disorder" do predate my heroin period by quite a few years. In fact I went about four years in my early 20s not taking any drugs at all. When I moved to London I didn't know any drug dealers here and wasn't interested in drugs. So how I became a heroin addict is... ukh. A ridiculous story that I don't want to go into now. Suffice it to say that in certain ways I am the very antithesis of the gutter junkie I subsequently became!

I don't know why I'm talking about this issue again... Oh yes I do. Because my friend Binky keeps laughing and telling me I'm mad. She says she thinks I've got schizophrenia. I say why do you say that? And she says because I say and do weird things. She has spent many years in mental asylums, so she knows the signs. Sometimes I think she's only saying these things to weird me out... Does she really think I'm schizo? But she says she does. She says I know I am... blah blah. But I don't know. Do I know that I know? I wish I could say I don't care either but I obviously do care, otherwise I wouldn't be posting on the issue yet again!

I get weird symptoms, they wax and wane, but they always come back again and I'm claiming benefits on the back of being "mentally ill" (you can't claim for being a drug addict!) My family don't want to think it's real, but everyone who knows me and sees me day-to-day does seem to think it's real (I don't know why though). When I really went mad a few years ago it was immediately apparent that people thought I was completely crazy. It was written all over their faces and I don't even know what I was doing. Far as I knew, I was acting completely normally! And yet they all thought I was raving mad! I only thought I was "mentally ill" because I found it so difficult doing practical things: eg getting self, money, keys, phone, etc all assembled together in order to go out. One day I had to wash my clothes in the laundrette on the corner and it took literally five hours to get myself ready to go out. Literally all day. That is why I thought I was "ill". Plus I knew that drs seemed to believe hearing voices was a sign of madness. I didn't think I was mad because I hear voices. But I certainly knew drs saw it that way! The only reason I admitted what was going on was that I was tired of seeing different professionals and different people, all of whom seemed to have entirely different viewpoints on what was going on with me, because they all saw me in different contexts. And the problems I was having with day-to-day life, dealing with practical things like paying bills, organizing paperwork etc, were getting ever-worse. Then I found out, after being given a horrible label I didn't want, that such difficulties are actually hallmark signs of that type of illness.

Ukh, it's so miserable thinking about this, but I have nobody to talk about it with ~ hence this post here. Binky knows all about mental illness, but her viewpoint is "you know you are mentally ill why don't you just accept it". But I don't walk around thinking "oh I feel really schizo-affective today". I only ever "feel" schizo-affective in the context of form-filling, when they ask about my difficulties and I know that, in doctorly eyes at least, schizoaffective disorder does explain them. (Drug addicion doesn't.) Bear in mind, I know loads of drug addicts. At some point a few years ago I looked around myself and thought "how come my life is in such a mess and nobody else's is?" The drug addicts I've known have always functioned pretty well. I mean, a lot of them functioned well enough to fund £80 a day ($133.60) heroin and crack habits. I gave up begging on the streets years ago, so my habit was much smaller than theirs.

The methadone clinic used to imply that if I would only stop using heroin and stick to the methadone my problems would magically disappear. Now they take an exact opposite tack, saying methadone isn't meant to cure mental problems, it's just a small step etc etc etc. In other words they lied through their teeth for years on end and now they wriggle out of it on the back of a psychiatric diagnosis If they'd ever listened to me ( or even asked me) they'd have known the reason I gravitated to heroin in the first place was that I wasn't feeling OK, wasn't doing OK was NOT OK. It never has just been a question of me just dropping the drug and things would magically be all right. They never were all right. I never had anything to go back to. Because I wasn't OK and wasn't well. I don't think I'll ever be truly well or OK, not in this lifetime. My resolution is that however messed up my life is going to be in the future, it can bloody well be like that without my being addicted to drugs into the bargain!

I was reading my Michael Jackson book, about him and Elizabeth Taylor being on drugs off drugs on again off again. Opiate painkillers we're talking here. Exactly the same drug-family of choice as my own. I thought ukh is that really what it's like? Will I never be free? I'd rather be dead than on drugs for ever. I'm the only person I know who really seems to want to come off heroin and methadone and be dependent on nothing for the rest of my life. I'm determined to do it. I just want to get OFF this methadone. Then if I do go back on heroin at least I can deliberately overdose and die. The way my tolerance lies at the moment I've not a snowball's chance in hell of accidentally overdosing and dying. I really wish I would die in my sleep because at least that means I wouldn't have to put the work in of learning to live life on life's terms, as they like to say at AA and NA).

My ambition always used to be to detox off the methadone and then kill myself so that I could be drug-free into eternity. The best means of suicide would be a deliberate heroin overdose, because a Muslim outside the library told me that if you commit suicide you will spend eternity in hell committing the same act over and over for ever and ever...  (Meaning I could then spend eternity shooting up heroin.) I really really do want to be drug-free, but I don't know how I can live like that. I have never lived like that before. What I had before wasn't a life, it was just an existence. I never was OK until heroin. The only thing that has ever made me feel OK, apart from heroin, was madness! Doesn't say much about life, does it.

Ukh how did I get on this self-indulgent negative current again. Well that's what I was thinking so that's what I'm posting. Sorry.

JOAN COLLINS IN BENIDORM
Benidorm is a vulgar area of Spain where only Northerners go



PET SHOP BOYS "I WANT A DOG"


OLD TRANCE ANTHEMS

Another New Sofa + 2 Armchairs + matching blind...

I'VE JUST PLUNKED £105 ($163.83) down on another (used) sofa + pair of matching armchairs. They are beautiful. The minute I saw them, nearly a month ago, I thought "I want!"... And OF COURSE a bloody great RESERVED sign lay right across my seating. It's an unusual metalic green-and-beige kind of colour. Not at all the type of furnishing you'd expect in a batchelor pad. On the phone to my folks I called it an "old lady's couch" ~ it's very padded and sumptuous and you can imagine a 67 year old putting her feet up on one of those armchairs whilst popping dihydrocodeine, in recovery from a quadruple heart bypass op. If you're wondering why the image is so specific, it's because it reminds me of my friend Tommy Tired's former landlady Marge whose gay son lives a half-hour wander from my old house. He's been off work for years, faking schizophrenia. He's one of the people who make me flip out internally when I think of what they've done. There was me, desperately needing some kind of help for years, and never getting it (I kind of knew I had some problem underlying this drug addiction and, in my heart, knew it wasn't just ordinary "depression"), whilst people like him play the system and get away with it. I couldn't grass him up even if I wanted to. It would just be my word against his and his longstanding doctors. (There is something "wrong" with this guy though, I mean, he's totally neurotic for starters... But he does not hear voices, see visions in the dark or get so paranoid he doesn't know who to turn to...) Anyway!:~

I came back to the shop today for a three-seater mud brown sofa with matching endpiece (making four seats) but Binky said it looked horrible and it was like sitting on soggy old cardboard boxes. Not good. The lady who runs the charity shop said she'd do it all in (inc. delivery) for £50 ($78) but even then, it was obviously only a temporary solution. Like the kind of furniture you found in early 90s style of student accommodation I used to reside in ~ no double glazing,1950s gas fires and mismatched 60s and 70s wallpaper.

So far I've spent £165 ($257.41) on a two-seater red sofa, film director's chair, large bookcase, small outdoors occasional table, plus three-seater viridescent beige sofa and the pair of matching chairs. O yeah and I got a blind matching the new furniture ~ that's another fiver ($7.81) making £170 ($265.54)

I went to see a rather militant locum dentist this morning who insisted I invest in an Oral B electric toothbrush. So I'm really glad I didn't waste £19.99 on a Vitality toothbrush because that would have left me too broke for the sofa. I told the dentist that back in the 80s, when I was at school and the adverts used to say "ask your dentist", my dentist used to say all toothpastes were the same and that I should use a soft ordinary toothbrush. Back in those days electric toothbrushes were considered a real extravagance, suitable only for persons too decrepit or disabled to brush manually. They were the sort of things we knew Americans probably used, alongside their garage door openers and electric can-openers.

Hmmm... anyway I've got to go. Must rush home to move my red 2-seater couch out of the way to make room for all this viridescent furniturial entertainment. Wish me luck with the delivery. The shop kept saying if their henchment couldn't weild it up my public stairway and/or into my flat then my money was down the drain. It was this type of talk that had put the fear of the devil into me regarding delivery of the last sofa: will it fit in my hallway...? will it get stuck in the public stairs...? Then my Mum talking about bulky items having to go in through the back door on the balcony via cherry-picker..! More than likely the entire lot will fit in the lift anyhow so I don't know what I was fretting about...

The illustration doesn't really do my new couch justice. I think it's the nicest second-hand sofa I've ever seen... Anyway have a wonderful day everyone ~~ I'm outta here!!

A Wonderful Day!

I FEEL BETTER TODAY... but only because I have "used" ~~ yet again. My feelings have been all over the place. And painfully so. On Monday afternoon I was wondering about crying. I'm doing a group therapy thing called Mentalization, which is really difficult to explain in a nutshell, but it's about not assuming what others think and mean but to ask them. That way, the world might be a More Understanding Place.

Anyway there's a girl with Borderline Personality Disorder (not Binky ~ she has it too) ~ who can talk coherently and cogently about her inner emotional incoherence. It seems she comes from a similar place I do. Where you cannot think, see, emote or feel from any fixed point but are so constantly in flux that you never know where you are (and others just assume they know where you are). I'm not at all sure I would ACTUALLY have Borderline Personality Disorder (which mostly affects females anyhow) but when I took the online personality disorders test (my biggest fascination in psychology is what makes us Individual and what makes us Different) I scored highest on "Schizotypal" (about 86%) and "Borderline" (about 82%). Each time. More than a year apart. ("Normal people" score about 35-40%) You can see my Personality Test result toward the bottom of my sidebar.

My GP has totally done my head in. Sitting there shuffling through a wodge of papers from the methadone clinic, he seemed to be saying, in effect, that I was just a scheming, manipulative junkie piece of shit who had probably just hoodwinked a shrink because both times he saw me, 3 weeks apart, I seemed "pretty OK". (First time my mood WAS as normal as it ever gets; second time I was definitely depressed and I'm NOT flattered when anyone, least of all a dr thinks that depressive person is somehow the "real" me. Come on! I think there's a bit more oomph and jizz to me than that!

My druggieworker, who says this GP "is a good doctor", doesn't want me to do it (which makes my paranoid side feel they're somehow in cahoots) but I'm writing this GP a letter. It's far FAR easier for me to explain the inexplicable in writing than by answering somebody else's questions which cast me adrift more than anything else!

But what really gets me is that that doctor, among all of them, is supposed to have a "special interest in mental health"! Well he doesn't seem too interested in me! Barely looked at me. Didn't seem to be listening either. What I got, was that he was trying to be a smart-arse, asking the same questions twice. If a person does try and catch someone like me out, who tends to get lost in a billion viewpoints from a trillion details at a quadrillion nanomoments then of course he's going to get different answers. Because I never feel the same way twice. And like I say, I cannot hold on to anything like a single, fixed position. Heroin really SEEMED to help sort out the chaos in my mind and emotions. But without it, I'm cast adrift. Even when I do take it these days, it doesn't seem to "help" the way it used to. (Yet another reason to stop... of course!)

On a much better note, we went shopping this afternoon and Binky was so lovely. She bought me new boots, new jeans, five new pairs of socks, two teeshirts and a new jacket! Jacket and jeans were second-hand. The rest were brand new. How kind of her is that! She wanted so say thank you for the way I looked after her when she was marooned in hospital...

OK it's getting late and I must dash. It's a bank holiday weekend so I hope you all have a good one, wherever you are in the world and even if you DON'T have a special Holiday Monday like we do! ("Bank holidays" are British public holidays.)

MOZART'S TRANCED-UP LACRIMOSA

This version is clearer

And this one (arguably) "funkier"...

The Racist Drunken Dustbins Affair

I, AND ABOUT A HUNDRED other people on my estate were rudely awoken the other morning by a group of druggies tripping on something or other, shouting, laughing etc. Then my doorbell rang and I just got heavy breathing through the intercom. Just as things sounded like they were dying down, a heavily drunken bald man appeared on the private grass just below my balcony. He was ranting away to himself in the most obscene racist language, which I could hear with exceeding clarity, as when the weather is warm I tend to sleep with my back door open (it opens to a 30ft drop, so not too much of a security risk... (I hope!))

Turns out he had been mugged and robbed of his mobile phone by some youths of Afro-Carribbean descent. But I'm not sure most of my neighbours were listening intently enough to discern this. They would just have picked up on his attitude and his fury, which, at 6:30am on a weekend sounded very threatening. Next thing I knew he had kicked over three giant recycling bins. I could hear my neighbours pottering around above me and to the side, so I really hoped someone was ringing the police. The police did duly turn up and the man was "nicked". And suddenly the streets were full of dog-walkers. All awoken at the same crazy hour. And then I fell asleep. And slept and slept. And slept and slept and slept. And slept a little bit more. Eventually rising at FIVE PM. How very louche of me! But then I am a "schizophrenic". Even Binky was saying I "obviously had schizophrenia". I don't know. I wasn't acting weirdly but no fewer than THREE separate people on her ward asked me if I was "just visiting" (ie they're saying "you look like a patient from another ward"). Also manic girl #3 (there are currently six of them) told me I was very hyper the other day. That was the day of the Bulgarian sing-along. The Bulgarian lady is the most manic of all.

Were am I going with this..? Well FINALLY I MET A GOOD GP. I had to check their website choice of more than a dozen doctors to find one with an express interest in mental health, as Dr Benderson, the evil Brothel-Madam-looking cow, obviously has no time for all things Mental (which does beg the question of WHY IS SHE IN GENERAL PRACTICE if she doesn't like nutters..?) Anyway really I came for him to look at my back. It was really playing up, so I could barely lift my feet to wash them in the shower that morning. I don't know what happened. I took some Gear, for the painkilling effect ~ and that seems to have cured me ever since. Either that or it just went away. I'm Really Trying Not To Use Heroin. That's from a life gone by and I really want a new life.

I had to ask the doctor for a letter that I can have passed on to a furniture charity as my flat is still totally bare and I'm sleeping on a cold concrete floor. The doctor said that is probably NOT helping my back. (I thought people slept on beds to be middle class. And because in hot countries snakes, scorpions and other creepies like to cavort across bedroom floors...?) Anyway my letter says I have "schizophrenic disorders". So I read this and thought AM I REALLY SCHIZOPHRENIC? I don't know... I'm in 2 minds about the matter (wah waah). Binky is no help. I think she is too suggestible. The poor girl has been in there coming up 2 months now. Nobody knows when they're letting her out... I made friends with five patients on her ward. One, who really is schizzy, in a particuarly ditzy way, invited me to her flat for dinner. But she says it's infested with red spiders, so I'm bringing a can of Raid with me (just in case). Someone told me she has schizoaffective mania, which would be what I got diagnosed with. Bloody hell if I really was like that then no wonder I kept getting odd looks when I went crazy.

Anyway I don't think about psychology these days, I'm more into foreign languages. I'm learning five at once: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese. German and French via Hotbird TV. Spanish and Italian via Linguaphone. Japanese via the NHK TV programme Meet and Speak. But the language there is so very basic I'm actually ahead of them. It's my goal to speak seven languages fluently: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Japanese (+ English makes 7). I'd also like to get at least A Level competence in 14 more: Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Thai, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Korean, Burmese, Hebrew and Greek and Welsh. This is a LIFETIME GOAL. I'm not planning to achieve it by next year. If you really put some welly into it, you can go from nought to A Level in 2 years, which means 14 languages would take me 28 years and I'd be 69 by the time I accomplished my goal.

By the way, if you're wondering how many I speak right now, I know something of eleven languages. English, German, French, Spanish, Welsh, Dutch, Esperanto, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Italian. I could write a basic letter in the first seven of these... You see why I feel in a sense that I'm a loser? Because if only I'd put in more concerted effort I might speak these eleven languages fluently by now!

The world is full of more cunning linguists than I. The world record for language acquisition belongs to Mr Ziad Fazah of Brazil, who apparently speaks some 59 tongues fluently. (But I saw him on Youtube and his English wasn't THAT amazing...)

They're saying he speaks and writes 58. So he's learnt one more in the time being...

Full Clip. (From Chilean TV)

ZIAD FAZAH ~ FLUENT IN 58 LANGUAGES

"HOW I BECAME FLUENT IN 11 LANGUAGES"

Alex from London.

Puts me to shame...

English, French, Greek, German, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Italian, Hebrew, Catalán, Spanish

Note how, apart from Greek and Hebrew, these fall into three groups

Germanic: English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans

Latin: French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan

Slavonic: Russian

His accent in Spanish and German is pretty good...

There!

OK: I'VE NOW OFFICIALLY MOVED HOUSE! 79 Pancake Towers, Walford, London E20 9LP. OK if I were an EastEnders character that would be my address, but they say you shouldn't give out too much personal info on your blog. Which means I'm pretty f*cked, what with my heroin confessions of yore and all... Well I'm TRYING not to use it. And not entirely succeeding. Hey and guess what? My mood, for the last several days has been almost entirely NORMAL. Not high as a kite, and not too depressed either.

I started keeping a mood diary, where I rate the highest and lowest I felt that day as well as various other factors such as manic feelings: racing thoughts, hyperkinesis, etc. It's something I'm supposed to fill in every day, though many days I don't. Takes about half a minute to scrawl out the answers, then every week or so, I plot my highs and lows on a graph. Very interesting. At the beginning of the year I was hypomanic and suicidally depressed on the same day for more than a week. A complete basket case. Then we see clear-cut euphoric hypomania with no depression. Then the hypomania declines and depression appears in a characteristic wedge shape. With me, the mania usually looks like a shark's fin (peaking very soon, then gradually declining, though you may see two or three sharks' fins in a row). The depression gets steadily worse day by day, hits an all-time low; then suddenly, the day after, I'm almost better. Interestingly the letter S for "suicidal" DISAPPEARS when the mood plummets past a certain point. Anyway the rest of these notebooks are full of the most drivellous rantings possible, usually composed while manic and to be honest I'd like to burn them. What I like the most about being hyper and high is that when I'm right up there, my old neurotic self almost entirely disappears. Also in depression beyond a certain extreme, I'm not neurotic either. But my normal boring personality is so insecure and neurotic I irritate the pants off myself, so what effect I have on other people I hesitate to guess at...

By the way, the whole point of the mood chart is to correspond one's state of mind with whatever shit life has thrown at you that week. Weirdly the news that I'd been offered permanent accommodation actually set off depression with suicidal ideation. I kept thinking of this flat and telling myself: Now I know where I'm going to die... (Which might well be true; because I ***should*** have lifetime tenure. And if I don't die in hospital, the odds are I WILL die at home. That's just statistics for ya. (But of course when I'm really desperate I fantasize about dying in other ways and places. Don't think I'd ever have the guts to put that into operation though...)

Binky is STILL CONFINED TO A MENTAL HOSPITAL for the FIFTH TIME IN LESS THAN A YEAR. I don't even know what is "wrong" with her. She seems completely "normal" to me... But! She was severely punished this morning for calling the doctor the C-word and isn't allowed outside. A 49-year old woman grounded for having borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia and being in a bad mood. Which has me running all over the place purchasing cigarettes, paying off her multiplicitous catalogue bills... etc. Being as my new place is two miles from the nuthouse I can't get there every day any more. Hey last Saturday we had an interesting ride in Manic Girl's car. Bloody hell. I had just remarked how "normal" Manic Girl appeared and why on earth were they keeping her in hospital for so long... Then we got in the car and I realized. I don't think I have ever whizzed through the sinuous streets of London at such extreme velocity. When we got to the post office, Manic Girl said "I used to work there but it was so boring I jacked it in and travelled the world for three months". I wish I could be that spontaneous, but I'm very cautious and boring at heart.

Of course I have heard back NOTHING in my great fight to get keys for all my doors and windows and non-Turkish satellite TV.

I'm living on cheese coleslaw sandwiches. It's that posh multigrain malted bread, so I feel most bourgeois nibbling on these whilst viewing Abu Dhabi TV (formerly sky 796 now you must tune to Astra 2 28.2 east 11662 or 11623MHz horizontal) or Horse and Country (Sky 280 not on Freesat) or The Peace Channel Urdu (Eurobird 1 28.5 east, transponder F1 upper, 12559.67 mHz horizontal (not on Freesat or Sky). Yeah I had a go at tuning my German TV box ~ the one that made me hit the roof when I tried to get Hotbird 13 east and was instead deluged with hundreds of irritating channels in BLOODY TURKISH ~ into the Sky/Freesat satellites at Astra 2 28.2 east. You get about 300 channels free-to-air, most of which aren't on Freesat, some of which aren't on Sky either. I do love my satellite television, hence this massive gripe with the council over negligently miswiring my Hotbird feed and giving me F*CKING TURKISH TELEVISION INSTEAD!! Don't get me wrong. I love most things Turkish: cheap under-the-counter tobacco, large lamb shish kebabs with all salad loads of garlic sauce bit of chili sauce for £5.50 and jewellery that is far nicer than anything else you'll find in the low-to-mid price range (though Indian jewellers are also good). But I DO NOT WANT TURKISH TELEVISION!!!

Ukh, all this ranting... am I going manic again? The mere fact that I think about mania, or remember what it's like at random points of the day, is often (weirdly enough) the first sign of its return. That and fantastic adrenaline rushes lasting hours on end, woven into the psychedelic fabric of life's rich tapestry...

" /> Bloody hell I'm hungry. I'm going to have to run to Iceland for something to shove in my sandwiches. Good job it's winter: because I have no fridge, I'm just stashing stuff out on the balcony. Where, by the way, a pair of pigeons keep mating. First thing in the morning and right in front of my face.

Righty-ho. Better leave it there. Hope y'all have a chirpy weekend...

(And if it can't be chirpy, then may it be chirrupy instead...)

Link: my right to satellite television under EU law http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-01-913_en.htm?locale=en

Illustrated: these apartment blocks are far too pretty to be anywhere in London ~ what you see is Neukölln in Western Berlin...

MUSIC: DOLLY PARTON ~ THERE

I used to listen to this when I was very little: it was on the album New Harvest First Gathering

Random things + reply to Anonymous

DOES THE LAST POST SOUND COMPLETELY miserable? I don't know. Maybe I should take the nut-nut pills again. I just don't like them, mainly because they are ADDICTIVE. They make me "better" in that my moods are within narrower parameters and I am less paranoid. It does not make me any more motivated to do certain things that seem complex. But then again sometimes I do some of those things anyway. Other times they go undone for months... That's why I'm fretting over moving house. I know what I'm like. Stuff will end up lying around and nothing will be fitted, installed, unpacked, nothing.

Yes anonymous like I said in my answer I agree with you, it is terrible to take state handouts. An American I know who lives here told me, long before I had a fancy label I could blare out as an excuse for my unmannered laziness that in America I would be living under a bridge. Only reason I'm not living under one here (or in a squat) is because the local council were kind enough to house me. The only problem was, by that time I had gone pretty ferral and found adapting back to normal living quite difficult. At one point my life involved a lot of sitting about on pavements asking for money, and using drugs in public toilets and abandoned buildings. One time I overdosed in a shopping centre and only woke up with the attendant banging on the door saying they were closing for the night.

Of course it would be "more civilized" (ok, maybe not more civilized: but cheaper) to shoot junkies and mental patients by firing squad. I'm sure if they made it voluntary, loads would volunteer when feeling low. If you arranged it so the guns went off within 5 minutes of signing the papers, you'd have an excellent clear-up rate.

My friend Binky thinks my going to live in a flat is the worst thing that can possibly happen "as you'll only render it unfit for human inhabitation". Well I'd like the chance to try (not to render it that way, I mean to actually succeed in becoming a human being again). Sometimes I am not sure I actually am human. Maybe I'm an alien impostor. From a sub-intelligent species. Who knows.

As for the drug (singular) I did go back to it. I was trying to cure suicidal depression. The kind of thing where you sit around for hours staring into space, but then perk up and manage to act normal, until the act falters about half an hour in and ... back to staring blankly into walls. (Often I angle myself towards a television in this state, but I'm rarely actually watching it.) This is what happened at Binks's on Saturday. But yesterday I started feeling better. You see, it's all cyclical. That's why I say the firing squad should have little time for mind-changing: if you catch benefits scroungers at the lowest point of the cycle, you'll save the country millions.

My old counsellor once said you can measure the civilization of a people by how they treat their sick. Well that makes Britain very civilized... America a bit less so (what with no NHS).

Methadone is still a drug. I really want to get off that. And I want to get back what I lost: my attention span (still nowhere near as good as it once was); my edge. I was already OFF 'eroin (hadn't taken it in weeks (early 2011)) when I LOST these things. I lost them to mania of the psychotic variety, which tears your thoughts to shreds then whirls them up in the air in a cognitive cyclone. I lost all my money. (OK, the government's money.) Could barely keep it together to look after house keys. (OK, the local council's keys.) Of course the nut doctor told me I should have been in hospital... AFTER the event. My support worker who keeps asking whether I'm into a part time degree doesn't reckon I'm up to looking after a pet! The kind of pets I go for are ones that essentially look after themselves, apart from feeding and drinking. The sort you let out, then they return from their rambles to live perfectly happily in their own little world. A degree on the other hand requires all manner of attention that I have given to nothing for years. I tried Teach Yourself Japanese CDs yet again... but just don't seem to learn anything. When I try reading books I sometimes do get to the end, but with only a hazy idea of what went on between the covers. Fact is actually easier than fiction, for me. So this is the problem. When I give answers on the kinds of forms that assess one's day to day living, my answers sound terrible. I know someone who repeatedly told me to lie and exaggerate. The sad truth is, I didn't need to.

I never claimed to be stupid. I just looked around at "ordinary people" (including ordinary crackheads and junkies) and they seemed to have skills I appeared to have lost. Wasn't my idea to call myself schizo. That one came from a doctor and I had no idea. Yes I heard voices saying "schizophrenia" but I just thought they were having a go. Never actually thought it could be true. [Hearing voices doesn't necessarily mean schizophrenia: clairaudient psychics hear voices; normal bipolar mania can make you hear voices. Crack can make you hear voices. Only mine never made themselves fully manifest until more than a year AFTER I had given it up.] I suppose I should say to Anonymous-type people: as for "schizophrenia" with bipolar, if I were making it up... bloody hell I would pick something a little less complicated. FOUR lists of symptoms to "satisfy". I have met people who said they faked psychosis, but it's always psychosis of the paranoid variety, where a person has some fable in their head that they believe. Mine was more like my mind and attention being shattered into a thousand pieces, seeing through each jointly and severally, all at the same time. Plus extreme swings of high manic energy to complete devastation. Sometimes both moods at once. That's how it felt.

And why the hell do the bastards who run this country make it so difficult to get hand-guns, poisons etc? That Dignitas euthanasia clinic in Switzerland uses 10,000mg of neat barbiturate in orange juice. But why can't I just by 10,000mg sodium amytal from Boots and do it myself? You see, Anonymous you should get on to the government. Make suicide easier. Then you'll get your wish. (The quicker a person can top themself before the impulse fades, the higher a success rate you will have.) I don't actually want to kill myself any more. Last week, some of the time, I did. I don't exactly know why.

O yes and I've been window shopping for furniture. Found quite a nice sofa. 3 seats. Brown. For £62 (about $100). Brown goes really nice against blue walls and I'm painting mine blue.

Have I answered every point here? Please somebody, give me an idea for a post, and I'll post it. Much easier that way. Staring into a white infinity, nothing but my own dolorous thoughts on screen ... I just end up ranting in a faintly ratty way... OK that it I'm off bye.


Illustrated: yellow-capped pygmy parrot; council housing for lovebirds...

Random Drunk Found In Cellar/Not Looking Forward to Tomorrow

I FELT LIKE I WAS GOING MAD yesterday. 5AM and the house resonating to the rumblings of somebody's coughing, wheezing, snorting, gurgling and so on ~ which seemed to be emanating from somewhere just outside my door.

So when, at 8AM, I eventually dared to open the said door to investigate ~ the hallway was empty. So I crept down to the "wine" cellar (never seen a bottle down there, except my own methadone which once dropped out of my pocket when I was trying to top up the electricity) ~ where I was confronted by the sight of a homeless looking bearded giant in a grey anorak, sprawled unconscious across the concrete floor, snoring for England.

Then I was idiot enough to lean slightly on the door. There was an ear-splitting squeak and I ran and hid behind my own door, which slammed loudly. I stood cowering like a panic-stricken roborovski as terrifying shuffling and shambling sounds stumbled up the cellar steps, into the hallway and up the main stairs where they seemed to disappear into somebody's room. I barely dared breathe, in case we had a homeless psychotic killer on the loose. (Well he seemed to vanish into Potishell's room, so he could well have been a psychotic burglar, if not a part-time murderer too.)

I had a much better day on Sunday than Saturday, when I only got up to collect methadone, then scurried back to bed, where I remained all day and all night until the Psychotic Intruder Snoring Scandal at 5AM. I get waves of depression and waves of excitement; nothing connected with nothing. All this crap from cognitive Therapy, implying that depressive mood is caused by negative cognition. Well my first sign of depression is nearly always massively increased sleep. At first the dysphoria comes in waves, seemingly unconnected to anything going on. For example: last night I was spooning coleslaw into a hot baguette when a heavy sinking feeling came over me. It happens like that a lot. I'm not thinking depressive thoughts at the time. Usually I'm not thinking anything. The negative thought process seems to arise in reaction to an already depressed mood ~ definitely not the other way round.

My hypomania improves my self-confidence massively, which remains high afterwards until depression eventually takes it down. So I think those CBT smart arses want to drastically rethink their theory. I'm sure that negative thought process ~ habitually telling yourself you're no good and that all you do will fail will perpetuate a depressive mood; but they most certainly do not cause it.

Surely I'm not the only person to experience things in this way. Please, some depressives get in touch and describe how it is for you.

I couldn't face the idea of xmas ~ not xmas dinner at Binky's house in mixed company where everyone except me and the duty care manager will have schizophrenia ~ without heroin. So I blew £35 on two miniscule bags, one for today, one for tomorrow. After that, I've promised myself NEVER AGAIN. O promises, promises...

{The bags truly are microscopic: less than you used to get for £10 in each and about a sixth of the potency. And this is the best stuff going!}
O and by the way it's not schizophrenia, or anyone from Binky's house that I cannot face:~~ IT'S BLOODY XMAS!

I do truly resent having to give money to Disorganized Crime (if drug dealers are gangsters then most are truly amateur ones) ~ wasting all that cash just to feel NORMAL. If methadone does give "normality" then it's a very unpleasant state to be in. I've told myself no matter how bad I feel for the rest of my life on methadone, that I'm just going to have to fight through it and make the best of the state of sickness methadone seems to induce in me.

The only time methadone has ever made me feel truly wonderful was when it brought out in me symptoms of full-blown psychotic mania (well I was taking no other drugs at the time so those of you who want to believe my mental problems are entirely drug-induced, even though they began in childhoood, will have to recognize that methadoen has turned me from a depressive into a full-blown manic-depressive.)

I am truly sick to death of relying on an illegal substance just to be able to cope with my day. I have lived without heroin before. Trouble is: before and after heroin I was mentally sick. But if I'm going to have to live my life clean, yet mentally deranged, then so be it. There are worse things in life than manic-depression ~  I can't think of all that many, but being on hard drugs is probably one of them.

I do apologize for all this self-pitying whingeing. At least self-pity is a sign of self-esteem. Far healthier than self-loathing (self-pity's opposite). I just want to be off heroin. Surely "I'm worth it", as the shampoo ads say..? Fair dos: xmas is the single worst day of the year, but I shouldn't need heroin to survive even that.

My New Year's Resolution is to STOP HEROIN FOR EVER and within the next 12 months to STOP METHADONE TOO. You see why I'm so put out at "having to buy heroin" just to cope with a day I'd rather was just expunged from the calendar? There will be no blow-outs. No last hits on New Year's Eve. I've already got the gear for tomorrow, so that's a fate accompli. But after xmas day, there's no excuse left for drug-taking. Not even in my drug-skewed mind, which is supposed to invent justifications for everything. That's part of the "illness" of addiction. (I do get a bit wearied by NA members' parrotings about their "mental illness" (of addiction). They wouldn't know a mental illness if it slapped 'em round the face. And quite a lot DO deserve a slap with a wet fish: eg for constantly mistaking my manic states for crack cocaine intoxication. The drug clinic seem to be able to distinguish even mild mania from drug intoxication and yet NA can't? Maybe that's because NA have one-track minds, even more so than methadone clinics. Well whatever...

As you can probably see, the only xmas spirits I ever believed in came in bottles. Because I don't believe in drinking any more, I don't believe in xmas either. Nonetheless:

I WISH YOU ALL A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND IF IT CAN'T BE MERRY THEN MAY IT AT LEAST BE TOLERABLE !

See you afterwards

G XxXxXxX




Aren't xmas songs horrible? Except for this one:

BAND AID: DO THEY KNOW IT'S XMAS


 
O and this. At least this one captures the true spirit of xmas
POGUES & KIRSTY McCOLL: FAIRY TALE IN NEW YORK


BTW if anyone's wondering why I insist on spelling the holiday with an X, that's because THERE IS NO CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS  ... But there IS a DOWNTON ABBEY SPECIAL on ITV at 20:45 so DON'T MSIS IT!

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Back Home at Last!

YESTERDAY evening I had the bizarre feeling that I was "normal" again. My head was full of rational thoughts and I looked back to my ridiculousness of the past week or so and thought "I'm glad to be myself again". I felt like when you come back from holiday and your house is cold and stale (and in my case, foetid) but hey, it's home! So I'm back at last. [From alleged "hypomania".]

Binky lent me the film A Beautiful Mind starring Russel Crowe as the schizophrenic Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash. O boy was he crazy! His entire life seemed to be a fable and then when the doctors come to arrest him I actually thought they were the KGB! Just like the director probably intended. I've never gone mad like that ~ that's paranoid schizophrenia, where a person has an entire delusional structure they live by. My worst madness was far more Confusional than Delusional.

At one a.m. I finally went to bed. And slept. And slept. And woke up at nine feeling "ukh why so early". Except that 1-9 made a perfect eight hours' sleep... But then I drank my methadone and went into the kitchen and spotted something that looked like a Rice Krispie on the microwave but ~ wahey! ~ it was a lump of "B". So I banged that up in my leg and promptly fell asleep. And slept, and slept. And slept and slept and slept. And slept some more. Finally getting up after four. And no, I wasn't gauwching, It was true sleep. A Rice Krispie sized bit of 'eroin would never get me that high. Actually, that stuff doesn't even make me sleep any more. Nowadays if it makes me "high" it's a hyper high, like heroin isn't "supposed" to be. But I've got to the stage now where my mind is so fried I never know what to expect of anything.

Excessive sleep is a warning sign of depression. How can I be depressed when my mind is still full of such marvellous ideas ~ all thought up last week. And apart from some of the names for my clubnight they are marvellous. I mean, I haven't even told you about my fabulous magazine yet. Condé Nast will piss their pants when they see it. The key to success in magazine publishing is obviously ad revenues. I think that's where Andy Warhol went wrong: he never seemed to have a top flight ads team for Interview magazine ~ and I bet he was too stingy to pay them a cut of revenue. Well my mag will be nothing like Interview. Imagine the fabulousness of Vogue but without the boring clothes and you've got it. [You really think I'm going to give out my concept on my blog?] Bulgari, Van Cleef & Arples, Cartier, Tiffany all the big names will be queueing to get in ... It will be for everyone male or female, young or old who is Fresh, Fabulous, Funky and Friendly... the Big Wow of tomorrow...

Anyway... It's late; I've got to go. It's getting dark around 4:30 now the clocks have gone back. But hey, my golden fleece still gleams wondrously in the night...

The Great Heroin Rip-Off Scandal!

I VERY NEARLY got ripped off for four bags of vulgar brown heroin this morning. The normal guy, who is just running for somebody else, said his man had "no B" but not to worry, he'd get it off somebody else and could be use my phone. So he rings up saying "can I see you and are you still doing the usual for £40?" And then I asked what are you making out of this? And why would you want to help me out anyway? I mean, he usually acts all friendly and promises that if I come to him with nothing he'd be only too happy to "bail" me a couple. He also pulls this "I'm only on cannabis" act ~ then asks couldn't I sort him out with 100mg of methadone. So he's one of those closet smackheads. Dealing in the stuff and using it daily and yet unwilling to admit, even to someone like me, that he has a raving problem.

So I queried: Why are you doing this for me? Surely it's four for £35 and you're keeping the fiver? And he said oh no, it's four tens for forty up here and the dealers never give discount (well mine do! Except the man who's supplying this one and I only pay £40 for four bags because they always used to be nice fat ones ~ and they're not even that any more so I don't know why I bother...) So he's claiming to be making nothing on the deal, except when he introduces five new customers to this new guy, he gets a £10 bag free.

And then I realize, not only is this guy running up the road with my money, but he also has my phone! I can be so dizzy in the morning. And then what appeared to be a crackhead and a dealer showed up, which really put my back up because I know this crackhead of old and when he started waving a handful of gear and crack at me I wasn't impressed. "If it's so amazing, you go and smoke it yourself!" I said. I grabbed the runner who still had my money and had to wrench my £40 out of his hand. Then the "dealer" started yelling at me by name, telling me to come back because he was serving up. No dealer is ever that desperate to sell. The paranoia always outdoes the money-grabbing, and it's just not cool to look that desperate for a sale. This guy did have the dealerly look about him. Tall and dressed in new-looking sportswear and the right colour skin (mixed race colour ~ I've never in my life met a heroin dealer with blue eyes and blond hair). But his eyes were so obviously drug-frazzled that I just kept on walking.

Then the runner comes back ~ junkies are nothing if not persistent ~ and keeps saying Just wait with me and my guy will sort us out. But my nerves were far too jangled by this point to waste any energy pondering who was in league with who~ and I hadn't liked the way he was so friendly to the crackhead. And how come the crackhead just happened to appear with four bags in hand right at the wrong moment? Which he was way too over-eager to flog to me. Crackheads smoke crack. They don't want to sell it unless there's something wrong with it! And that was another problem: the "drugs" he had: two heroin, two crack weren't what I'd ordered anyhow ~ I won't touch crack cocaine at all these days. It's far too vulgar. So I kept on walking and the £40-and-my-phone guy was running after me saying What are you doing? And I said Tomorrow. Tomorrow. I'll come back tomorrow. So then he swore at me because he is foreign and I vanished into the main shops...

Eventually I did score, off the guy I always used to go to. Once my dizziness had cleared, I worked out that of course Mr Runner guy was intending to pick up five tiddles for forty, keep one and pass on the four to me. So why couldn't he just tell me that? It would have made far more sense. So I scored off another guy I'd never seen in my life (old number, new man ~ the usual guy was in prison) I gave £30 for 4x10ses ~ the bog-standard price these days ~ and then I disappeared back home. It was such a chill morning, yet because I'm a junkie, my back was pouring with sweat, which is so gross...

Ukh: my elevated mood has fallen down. How terrible is that? I spent all last week insisting I wasn't hypomanic, I was Just Fabulous ~ so I MUST have been hypomanic. My mood was most certainly Up, but the Symptoms: the hyperkinesis, racing cognition, "decreased need for sleep" etc were all very minor and that's partly why I didn't believe I was mentally ill. It's true I did start Hearing Voices in the night ~ but Hearing Voices is NOT a symptom of hypomania ~ so how about that! I only think of it as a sign of madness because everybody else thinks so.

I could say here "and what's so wrong with going mad anyhow?" but I don't want to go up that path. When other people go mad there's normally a LOT wrong with it. A lot of ridiculous and bad behaviour and ranting and raving and all that but when I was mad [last year] I just thought I was fantastic. And yet did feel this inner desperation that something was badly wrong and yet I didn't know what... I mean, I was fully aware of meeting the diagnostic criteria for mania because only an idiot wouldn't, but I felt deep need of a label I could throw in people's faces: "IT'S THIS!" Talking of madness, I only KNOW that terrible crackhead with the four bags in hand because I met him in the nuthouse years ago! He gets incredibly "prang" ~ that means paranoid ~ so why on earth he insists on continuing to pipe the crack, I'll never know. He only seems to have Drug Psychosis, but his mum, so I hear, is the full cuckoo-clock schizo ~ you see it's all in the genes. I get my bad genes from my mother's side. She gets recurrent depression. Which gives me an equally elevated chance of unipolar depression and bipolar i disorder. See? No wonder I went crackers! My uncle, her brother, was an inverterate drunken gambler. One of my cousins was chucked out of school for toking Mary Juana, another called herself "the Coke Queen of South Kensington" and had a boyfriend who wanted to lug over a kilo from South America until she reprimanded him and told him not to... My other cousin is two nuts short of a fruitcake... Oh man they're all crazy. You see, it's all bad genes. But I'm the only manic-depressive junkie in the family. I wouldn't call myself a black sheep. I like to think of myself as a golden sheep with wool that twinkles in the night because when I'm Elevated that is just how I feel...

Well now I'd better go. My electricity needs topping up. My house has gone beyond chilly and into that Damp n Dank phase where it feels like a dripping wet mine-shaft ~ most unpleasant.



Right, here's some charming psycho-active trance for y'all... The music's very run-of-the-mill ~ not a single good tune until 12 mins 22 in ~ and again at 14 mins 55 and 31 mins 09 ~ but hey you can watch the kiddiewinks dancing... (And what terrible, half-hearted dancing it is! Surely this can't have been filmed in the UK~?, because the Brits are far more up-for-it than this!)



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New Eye Test Identifies Schizophrenia with 98% Accuracy

THE JOURNAL of Biological Psychiatry have just published results of research that claims to be able to detect schizophrenia with 98% accuracy by means of a simple eye test.

Schizophrenics apparently have difficulty following slow-moving objects smoothly.

Now every time I see something slow like a ladybird crawling along, I'm going to be terrified of looking at it wrong!

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Talking of visuals, I love this trancey light-show:




Illustrated: slow moving ladybirds ~ a possible cause of insanity~??!?



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Crispy when Wet

I DON'T QUITE know what the title means, but it is indeed what they like to call a "crisp" day here in London. In other words it's BLOODY FREEZING COLD with SUB-SIBERIAN TEMPERATURES. At least it feels that way. My electric fan heater has been belting it out 20 to the dozen. I don't care how much I'm wasting by using one of those things. At least I pay for electricity as I go (mostly on emergency) instead of getting stung by great overestimated British Gas bills every quarter!

I'm just going to have to drop the tiresome bipolar language. I'm not "hypomanic" I'm deliriously happy and isn't it great. I mean yes I'm a bit loud and disinhibited at times but no "racing throughts" or confusion or hallucinations. And I'm only as "grandiose" as I'm Meant To Be. O yeah and I'm losing a single hour of sleep, on average, under my usual minimum (ie I'm on 7 hours: usually I sleep 8-10) and yet that, annoyingly enough, scores me one point on some Mania Rating Scale I once googled up ~ when I scored a good 42 out of 50 (ish ~ I can't remember the bloody numbers now) you know when I went cuckoo last year.

I'm so shocked, offended and ashamed at bearing that nuttly label "schizophrenic" ~ even my GP talks about my "schizophrenia" and I cannot be bothered to tell her I actually suffer from what Emil Kraepelin called Manic-Depressive Insanity (well I do according to his book of the same name). Anyway: I'm so traumatized at having gone stark raving bonkers last year I'm starting to feel I need a brief spate of counselling sessions to get over it! How dreadful is that? The memory of the "disease" is worse than the actual thing!

I am reading the Andy Warhol Diaries. What a blast! He and I are cut from the same cloth: I'm obsessed by all that is fabulous and shallow too. Well I am 85% of the time. The other 15 I'm transcendently profound. Well I like to think so.

Ho hum I have to go. Not much else to say except if I don't get out of here soon I'll miss Downton Abbey!

This is how I know I have "manic-depressive insanity" because here's Andy Warhol in the terrifying grip of delirious psychotic mania just like mine ~ except his is far more florid. Watch closely:~~~~~~~~




Ey! I just did the Mania Scale again and I score 11! O! or maybe a 12. I love this kind of crap: reminds me of the type of nonsense you find in the women's magazines in dental surgeries etc...

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Eyes on the Future...

I'M FEELING BETTER today. Less depressed. I woke up at 7 in the morning and couldn't sleep again. That means I was out for the count for only 9 hours ~ a vast improvement from the last few days where I was slumbering a good 12 hours solid each and every night. Hypersomnia, to me, is a sure sign of depression or an impending low mood.

I wish I hadn't gone on about last year's mental breakdown yet again. I have written countless posts about it and often, when I start posting on paper rather than directly online, I end up talking about my weird and wonderful experiences yet again. (But most of it I have not posted.) Obviously I have unresolved issues around this. BIG issues. I need closure, but don't know how I can ever get it. Being "bipolar" there is, of course, a big chance that I could launch into an extreme mania yet again. When I had that big breakdown in the winter of 2010/11 I had no notice at all that I was going mad. After a "lost weekend" in December my moods were cycling up and down for six weeks. Then on the Sunday I was hearing voices and depressed enough not to want to go home, so I ended up wandering the streets in the rain. The next day I felt noticably high. I remember being in the post office and laughing out loud at some fancy shopping bags they had in ultra-glowing colours featuring yellow smileys. On Tuesday I was extremely irritable and paranoid. By Wednesday I was in full-blown psychotic mania. It happened that fast and I've lost confidence in my own mind.

When I have been depressed I never thought of myself as "mentally ill", but in mania I know I am "ill". This has nothing to do with "delusions" or hallucinations (you cannot know you're delusional anyhow!). The big problem I had in extreme mania was that my thoughts were racing more than a hundred times faster than usual and I went into complete and utter confusion. I kept losing my glasses, losing my keys, my phone and I couldn't find any money. My life was complete chaos and I knew it.

So trying to deal with the after-effects was really painful. If I had to pick a serious illness to suffer from, I would choose the kind of mental problems I have over something physical like cancer every time. And schizoaffective disorder is the psychiatric equivalent of cancer. Like one doctor said to a schizophrenia-survivor I saw lecturing on her condition online, schizophrenia is worse than cancer. At least cancer has a cure. You can medicate schizophrenia, but in 80% of cases, it never goes away...

By the way it's the doctors who say I have schizophrenia. I and everyone who knows me thinks of  me as "bipolar" because sustained extreme moods are my most obvious symptoms. Like I have said before, schizophrenia is invisible to those who suffer from it. I have never walked around thinking "I feel really schizophrenic today". But on many occasions I have found myself stranded in shops, too depressed to make up my mind what to get, and thinking: "O no, I've got manic depression". Then I realize I really am a manic-depressive, and I feel even worse!

Schizoaffective disorder, by the way, means a crossover state where a person meets the full diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia and a severe mood disorder simultaneously. The main symptoms I get that are supposedly characteristic of schizophrenia rather than bipolar disorder are what my friend Pinky calls "social phobia" (I haven't socialized with anyone but her in weeks) and what I would call extreme laziness but the doctors call "negative symptoms" (don't want to do anything, lack of get-up-and-go).

This is why I'm powering on with these children's stories that are burning brightly in my head, demanding to be told... I wrote nothing yesterday because I just could not motivate myself to press forward. Yet today I'm brimming with the ideas I should have had yesterday. The fact that I'm such a hard taskmaster to myself, insisting that even when this book is finished I should have no rest and launch immediately into the next one just stresses me out. Children's books by unknown authors, I have heard, rarely get advances of more than £2000 each (about $3000). So to make a living writing, as I want to, I'd have to produce about one a month... From this point on, if I'm seriously into writing, I'll never have any rest. I have too many ideas for too many more books ever to stop ~ and like I've said before, I cannot go lost and stray, cast aimlessly adrift in life like I used to be.

I'm the only person I know who wants more from life than I have now. The only one with a dream or with any goals. And I will never ever give up on that dream ~ until I die.

Well I'm about to be timed out so I have to go. Back on the subject of mental health yet AGAIN. I can't wait till THAT is a thing of the past as well.

Have a great day everyone, and see you tomorrow...



ELEANOR LONGDEN: LEARNING FROM MY VOICES
She started hearing a voice making a running commentary on her actions in the first year of university, had a schizophrenic breakdown, but eventually went back to score the highest mark in BSc Psychology the University of Leeds had ever awarded.

She was at one point told by her psychiatrist, "You're better off with cancer because cancer is easier to cure than schizophrenia."




CONVERGENCE FIRESTORM
sPENCER fREELAND AND pHIL rEYNOLDS USED TO BE THE IN-HOUSE djS AT A CLUBNIGHT CT NAMED fRANTIC i USED TO GO TO....
Like most DJ mixes, it starts out terrible and only gets good 14 minutes in...
... and the tune at 37 minutes is the one I like best...


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What a Grey Day...

IT IS nearly 4pm. I have been up since 10 or 11am. I go to bed relatively early and get up late because I'm sleeping 12 hours solid. Between 7 and 9am I nearly always wake up. Then I drink my methadone and fall back to sleep. Drinking my dose a good 2 hours before I get up means that once I am up, the methadone is working full-on and I'm far less tempted to use the alternative.

I had a horrible dream that my Dad, who doesn't even like taking headache pills, had a couple of ounces of very low grade, dark brown heroin.

Usually when I wake up after a dream like that, I just want to use. But today it never even crossed my mind.

I got up, got tomorrow's methadone (because I pick it up a day in advance) and for some reason, youtubed up the Prisoner Cell Block H theme, which made me so sad I nearly cried.

I have felt lousy all day. I never even bothered showering until ten minutes ago. I have been stuck in a chair, staring at television, not wanting to move.

Yesterday, I suppose I managed about 900 words of this children's story, which is supposed to be ridiculous comedy. I was going to force out another 600 words (2 manuscript pages) last night, but had taken my medication too early and just wanted to sleep.

I'm only on 300mg (quetiapine). My friend is on 750 mg quetiapine (Seroquel) plus TWO antidepressants ~ mirtazapine and venlafaxine (Remeron and Effexor). What the doctors are trying to do in her case is medicate the very changeable moods of borderline personality disorder (her quetiapine is for schizophrenic psychosis) but I'm not sure this can ever work.

The BPD is sometimes considered to be on the "bipolar spectrum" but the mood swings in BPD ~ swinging from OK (not euphoric or high) to very angry, frustrated or sad ~ are totally different from bipolar moods which in my case have, at the extreme, alternated between highest exaltation and deepest despair, although I can get extremely irritable at both poles, especially mania.

Anyway I am not and have not been even hypomanic for several weeks. I am now getting more and more depressed.

Under normal cirumstances my moods aren't very much more extreme than those of Stephen Fry as filmed for the Secret Life of the Manic Depressive documentary, although when I'm hypomanic I'm probably more hyper, more cheerful and prone to laugh uproariously  over practically nothing. My attitude towards the "illness" is similar to his. He was taking no medication and I don't want any more than I'm on. The last thing I want is a mood that's pancake-flat.

I also agree with the man who says he's seen angels in psychotic mania ~ that it's worth any amount of misery to go that high. [I didn't see angels: I felt trillions of volts powering through my brain and went into outer space.]

But I agree with Carrie Fisher too ~ eventually I'm going far too fast. Thoughts are racing totally out of control. Then they all crash into each other and become completely garbled. The whole world is in ridiculous slow motion. So that when the computer asked me for a password and then spent what felt like months considering my answer before allowing me in, I very nearly sent it crashing across the room, on many occasions.

Someone once asked me how, if I was in such a mess, I managed to put up posts with pictures. The answer is, I very nearly didn't. The pictures only appeared hours later and the effort of finding them put me into near-meltdown with yelling and swearing and the computer was lucky to survive at all.

In mania the symptoms vary widely over the course of a day. So when I was in complete confusion ~ which lasted for hours ~ I never posted at all. I couldn't even speak coherently, let alone write, And there were many occasions when I literally could not read at all.

As for "liking" being bipolar, if my mood continues to fall, ask me the same question in a couple of weeks and you might get a very different answer.

(I'm not trying to say, by the way, that I enjoy losing my mind, just that I love the extremely high moods... And why does the world have to be so crap that the only "illness" that makes you feel better than anything else is the same one that shows you utter hopeless bleakness and despair?)

Over the last couple of days, I took to wondering, if I ever did achieve success, how I would possibly cope. The answer is, if I ever made any serious money (how would I do that anyway?) I would be extremely stressed by it. But would still far rather be rich than poor. The only thing it could pay for is a change of scenery and I would use it to insulate me from the world as much as possible. And I don't think I will ever find true happiness. Never, ever.

I have just been watching, with one eye, a documentary about the Baader-Meinhof gang and Stammheim prison. I love TV programmes about the Cold War era, the Iron Curtain and the Eastern Bloc. That's one reason I so like watching telly in German.

My house is getting more and more untidy. I don't mind cleaning sinks, surfaces and showers ~ what I hate is clearing, sweeping, scrubbing and mopping the floor ~ and it requires all four. So most of the rubbish is on the floor now, uncleared up.

The Great Bathroom Stench, by the way, has temporarily gone. I know if I call the landlord, the bad smell will hide, only to return with avengeance once he's left.

I should end on an inspiring note ~ weeks before that man made the 128,000 ft leap from space to earth, another guy in America, constructed a gas baloon with a camera that filmed the whole ride up right into the stratosphere. When it fell to earth with a GPS, they found it and you can watch the film here.

Fastforward 2 mins 15 in to see the launch...



And here's that Prisoner Cell Block H tune...



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