Mental Health

While I am on a role, I might as well write about what it is like when those who know you have had a mental health condition for a while, and what happens to one's relationships with them.  Perhaps you have had had one or two episodes, acting crazy, and likely causing mayhem and sometimes destruction.  My experience is that the longer you have a mental illness, the more lunacy you have, and the fewer friends you keep.  This falls into many categories, the ones that give up because you have not made any effort to contact them, you have ignored their efforts to communicate, so after many attempts, and some do try many times they eventually give up. 

Another category is the one where your friend has stood by you and been there at times though not all the time, and has not experienced a significant mental breakdown in their presence.  When they do eventually see a significant mental event and the mentally ill person directs his illness at them.  They back off, this is beyond anything they have seen before, or if they have seen it before, it is beyond what they believe to be in their best interests to deal with from their perspective.  They have families or a business, or work, a mortgage, a wife or girlfriend, whatever, the cost is too high.  The insanity shown is not worth the friendship, and they say enough is enough.  I never blame these people; they have a good reason for cutting off the friendship.  Your hope is that once the doctors find the answer to controlling the primary cause of your mental illness, that these friendships will mend over time.

The worst category is the one where a person feels he/she had done so much for this mentally ill friend that he/she is somehow a god that deserves recognition for being there when a friend needed them most.  His/her narcissism catches up with him/her and he/she thinks they know more than the psychiatrists do.  He/she feels a growing resentment towards the mentally ill person.  This person starts to feel the mentally ill person is faking it and that they are enjoying their life.  This type of person begins not to notice the illness and when he/she does their empathy disappears, and their sympathy becomes nonexistent.  Eventually, a fracas overwhelms this kind of person, and they snap and lash out with hateful comments and actions.

The last category are the ones that stick by you, they understand you are ill and no matter what they are there if you need them.  They know when to back off and when you are in trouble.  They get the least recognition from the mentally ill person, yet they deserve the most.

I cannot say whether this is the same for others who suffer from mental illness, but it has been my experience.  Dealing with a person with a mental illness is not an easy business.  It takes a certain kind of person to understand what to do when the mentally ill person, someone like me, goes mental.  Has a manic attack.  It does happen, it will happen, I cannot control it, and I wish I could. It ruins your life it destroys everything it touches.  Yes, medication can control it, and yes, it works, but I will tell you now, it does not mean it goes away.  One has to fight hard, focus continuously, and never give up.  It is like any other disease, it can be controlled and beaten but it bloody difficult to achieve.

Reconciliation

I've been mulling how to write this and what to say.  I met some friends last night, some I had not seen for over 25 years. I enjoyed the evening it was a good laugh.  It was something I could never have done only six months ago.  When you have a brain that continuously thinks of why things are bad one feels that is how others think and feel.   You lose your identity. You have to tell them that the person they knew was a facade, an illusion, created to allow me to survive life. The strange thing about it all is that one does not realise it is an 'Eleanor Rigby' face you have created over many years.  When I had my breakdown and I lost all my false identity, it unnerves you, it causes one's anxiety to increase because you feel you have let those friends down, and you have become insignificant and worthless.

Being worthless and insignificant makes one reclusive and you do not want to see or hear from anyone.  You go into your shell and this is when real problems start to occur, this is when one can die.

Dying becomes something you think about every minute of every day, every type of way, every action is analysed, you wonder whether one can do it and then you realise if you want to get better you have to try and kill yourself. People do not understand how unwell you are when it concerns mental health until you try and kill yourself.  The way the NHS works is too simplistic when it comes to mental health.  They ask the question straight away, do you want to hurt yourself.  However, when you are first there you do not wish to kill yourself.  You want someone to help you the best way they can and the NHS GP's do not. Once a GP establishes you will not kill yourself or hurt yourself, they lose interest and just give you anti-depressants.  As you get worse and more ill, you start to realise that the only way your life will change is to do something drastic.  Make them understand you are sick, well why not commit suicide.  You have lost all hope and had no ability to see a future; you can only see despair and misery.  Then you start to go through the motions of thinking of death. 

Walk in front of a car or train.  Jump off a bridge.  Take an overdose. Slice one's wrists.  Slice one's throat.  The list goes on and on, you think of everything.  I decided if I were going to kill myself (which you have to remember subconsciously I do not want to do), it would be an overdose, take drugs to make you fall asleep and never wake up.  That is what I did. However, once I had taken at least hundred various pills for different reasons. I decided hell I do not want to die. I wanted the NHS to help me.  That is the problem with the NHS; you have to try to kill yourself before they help you.

So I logically decided if I take these drugs in this order I may die or a may survive, I gave myself a 60% chance.  Luckily, for me I won.

No Creativity just Business

It does seem after a few days of comparing the two that Twitter is better for budding writers like myself than LinkedIn.  LinkedIn in great for business and the sorts of jobs that I hate.  Still I have found lots of friends on here, people I have not spoken to in a long time.  I hope that I am wrong and out of the sea of businessness, I will find some creativity.  However, if I do not find a creative position, it is a good lesson in who does and who doesn't forgive one's digressions and one's illness.  People seem not to realise that being bipolar or any mental illness for that matter does not make them stupid or ignorant.  It is like a mental version of a physical disorder and most people, in fact, more and more people are starting to accept that.  Imagine if you had Spina bifida, which is a terrible birth defect, would you treat someone with that awful illness the way some people treat mental illness.  It is hard when one does not know one's mind when one loses all control.  It's, even more, difficult when people who were your friends once, cannot forgive you for being mentally ill. Some can and I praise them and thank them for some I know I put some through a lot of unnecessary agitation and grief.  Luckily over time, the psychiatrists try lots of different drugs for you to find out which ones make you better. What also makes you better is when you are in control of your life, and no one is forcing you to be ill. They trapped me in that situation; my mind would not let me get well because it was not good if I got well.  Now I can get well; it's a work in progress as all great artwork is, nothing happens over night but I know I will succeed because I am in control now, I decide my future no one else.

The World is in the Shit

As 2105 ends, a friend of mine mentioned how the world was in a mess and life was shit at present, with all the problems we are facing. Nevertheless, when has life or this world ever not been shit?  It was shit in 1945, yes the year WW2 ended, two nuclear bombs destroyed cities in Japan.  It was shit in the 80's, the miners' strike, cold war; nuclear war terrified me as a child.  We would play stupid games - what would you do when they sound the warning.  100 years ago was pretty shit, we were at war again, this time in trenches, waiting to die, or if one goes forward a couple of years to 1918, yes the end of another World War, but we had the worst flu epidemic ever known, killing millions.

The biggest thing that always strikes me, is when we say humanity, as if this is some greatness bestowed on us, humanity is a joke. Saying we have humanity is like saying you are the devil because the two are linked together like two peas on a pod.  Would humanity allow people to make money off murder and death?

Yes, you've heard it all before, the world is a shit place at the moment, we have the crazy desert dwellers of Iraq and Syria, deliberately acting like psychopathic maniacs in the name of religion.  We have countries like North Korea, many African countries and the worst of all, Saudi Arabia, who think they can treat their citizens in any deranged way they see fit.  Why do we allow Saudi Arabia to murder a man for writing a poem?  Why, simple, because they have all the oil and until we get away from oil this madness will continue.  We allow companies to make billions of dollars selling death, whether it is from weapons sales or cigarettes, and all the other hideous and awful things corporations get up to without our knowledge.  We allow companies to bribe the best and brightest to work for them to make money, instead of using their abilities to help make the world a better place. 

As we live in a capitalist society, it is, or it seems to be socially acceptable to allow people we can save, to die because they are not rich enough to afford medical care.  It is, of course, profitable to keep people sick and ill because, no large pharmaceutical company will make any money off well and happy people. We have political elections where the choice is between one idiot or another, and there is never a credible option.  Popular Party Politics is not the answer the world is looking for in today's society. Our emotions rule our rational, logical intelligence and we ignore this or ignore the evil it causes in the name of profit and capitalism, and then describe it as democracy, instead of looking at ways to improve the system and make it better.  We blindly follow ancient documents and constitutions.  The American Constitution for instance causes millions of deaths through firearms every year, just because it says so in a document written by a newly formed country, terrified of the giant of the time, the British Empire.  Does not mean it should be allowed today.

However good they were for their time; times change. They should show how we are today and not a hundred or even a thousand years ago. We allow lawyers to rule our lives giving power to those who do not deserve it and take it away from those who do. We use an antiquated system of payment in the form of money, which allows the wealthy to control everyone.  How many millions does one person need?  The psychopaths in Iraq and Syria distract the world while the real power men of the world perform their magic tricks.  Misdirection and deceit are all that these desert fools are creating.  Now we are bombing them, we in Britain want to buy more nuclear weapons to keep us safe.  For fucks sake, one British nuke costing billions of dollars will not keep Britain safe. However, that money might save the lives of countless individuals.  We need to find a better way to form a government; we need to move away from Popular Party Politics, and find a more sensible solution. The people who want to be in power are the people that should never be in power.  Unfortunately, Popular Party Politics causes this kind of person to rise to the top, not like cream, as the quotation states, but more like ice - cold and frozen, lacking any feeling or empathy, unable to help anyone but itself, keeping the world cold and in a state of fear.  We live in the cold frozen heartless society today.  Life is shit, but let's be honest it's always been shit.

Why do we have floods?

They say that global warming is causing more extreme weather that is causing all the awful floods - bollocks.

The reason we are having more floods is because we have more concrete on the ground because we have more and more houses, removing the natural way for rainwater to disperse.  Too many people live in the southern part of Britain, causing the reason we have floods. They build houses in places that thirty years ago, architects, or town planners, housing estate planners would say no way we don't build there; it will cause floods

It's not rocket science you can see it everywhere.  Our city infrastructure is falling apart and trying to fix the problem causes terrible delays.  Where I live, they are widening the A1 near the MetroCentre, now whether it was because it was too expensive or for whatever reason, any idiot with half a brain must have thought, this is going to cause problems in the future.  It is not like they built the MetroCentre fifty years ago, they constructed it in the late  80's, early 90's, so they must have realised the issues.  They must have known there was going to be a bottleneck at this part of the A1 in future.  Eventually, when things got so bad they decided to widen the A1, and the havoc it causes is terrible.  I feel sorry for anyone who has to go passed that part of the A1 on a daily basis. It fills me with dread whenever I have to go to the MetroCentre.  I use back roads and any way possible just to avoid the A1.

Nonetheless, this is an example of the problems we are having with the infrastructure of our road system, our sewage, drainage, anything that stops water running its natural course.

Instead of wasting money of buying nuclear weapons, or bombing psychopaths in a desert that probably kills more innocent people than the bastards we're aiming at, spend the money on bringing our country into the 21st century.

Not used in a long Time

A life is a funny old game we play. I was once unhappy with my life,  so I decided to write this blog and I called it the CaptiveThinker.  Captive because I was trapped in a nightmare, unable to break free, unable to fathom how to get out of the chasm I found myself in.  I was deep in dire shit, unable to control my life. I was in the hands of others and they made my life a living hell.

I would not like to call myself a control freak, but I do like to be in control, I like to know that it is me who decides my future, not someone else.

I suffered a significant amount of mental damage over those years when I had lost my control and I was a captive thinker.  When one loses control, one loses their dignity, their sanity slowly worsens, you become a shell of your former self.  You hide away, not wanting to be seen, for if you are seen, and someone you know, someone you may have cared for even, says how are you?  It is hard not to become emotional and say no life is not good.  Life is so sad I want to tell you to go away and leave me alone and let me wallow in my self-pity for a while longer.

When you start to feel this way you begin to become irrational and say and do things without realising you are doing it.  You turn into a Jekyll and Hide character, or should I  say a caricature of what you think life might or should be.  You stay awake at night and only ever leave your house when you feel there is less likelihood of people being around.  You start to hate being near people they scare you, make you have to face the fact you are now in your own mind a demon. Someone who cannot ever be happy and unfortunately because the problem is mental it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Your head in is turmoil, you are unable to realise what you are doing things that are not normal.  You lose all sense of reality.  Your mind switches off sometimes for days, and strange things happen, you can create a fantastic painting or you can drink too much and take copious amounts of drugs until your mind comes back to reality. Then you are unaware of what you have done, or, at least, youthink you are aware, it is more like a dream or a nightmare depending on the outcome.  This is scary, when I used to dissociate and go places in my mind, I am unable to describe.

There that is what it is like when one is mentally ill and has no control over one's life.  Now, I have control and though I still suffer from mental illness. (I would like to say I am not at all ashamed of being bipolar and all the other mental illnesses my psychiatrist says I may or may not have).  One does not tell a person with cancer it is wrong to say they have cancer, well I have a mental illness, so there and I have no issue with this fact, at least, I do not now.  I am trying my very best to use this new control I have to create a new and better life for myself and now I am in control, I have no excuses, I will win and not fail.

When the Tobacco fields turn into Marijuana fields

I read this morning an excellent article in the Guardian regarding the banning of "legal highs", or to be more precise anything that has a psychoactive effect on the brain.  To me, that seems as if they are banning anything that creates an emotion, they want to turn us into emotionless automatons.  Since most things have a psychoactive effect on the brain how do they apply this ridiculous law?

What happens when in a couple of years the US, legalises marijuana, cannabis, or hemp, and all the tobacco fields suddenly turn into cannabis fields.  With the way the US lobbying system works, once one can make large amounts of money growing, as well as on Wall Street, on weed, how will the UK or any other country stop legalisation?

Once it is legal and profitable in the US, good old snivelling UK will suddenly be all for the legalisation of weed.  All the obvious reasons that they presently ignore, these pathetic politicians will suddenly use as if they have always thought this way, but party alliance has made them speak differently.

Does it make a difference if they suddenly make illegal highs legal?

Tobacco will eventually be such an evil that it will make perfect sense for any wealthy billionaire tobacco company shareholder, to force their company to change to cannabis.  Since the rich billionaires rule Washington, once it is profitable and viable, we will see a seismic shift in drug policy.  Then how foolish will our inept government look.

I predict the end of the banning of Marijuana around the world before 2020, possibly even earlier.   

The Theory of Everything using Imagination

The greatest problem in science is the ability to find a theory to combine the very large with the very small. This has tested the minds of some of the greatest scientists of all time. I am not a scientist, however I have a creative mind and I find there must be a simple answer. What can this simple answer be? Is it a beautiful equation, or an fantastic diagram, no, it is how we see the world and why it is the only way to figure out the theory of everything.

To work out the theory of everything, one has to use ones imagination and imagine the world of the subatomic particle and the madness that is happening. The way atoms and subatomic particles act is so far removed from how large objects like planets, stars galaxies act. Nevertheless, try to imagine that the way the world of the very small acts, is the norm. That everything is jumping around in and out of dimensions, between different universes, and in more than one place at the same time. This is how the universe is at any size, or level. What makes the very larger seem stable is the fact we observe the universe from this perspective. This creates our reality, and we can only see our reality in this stable state, because we could not comprehend the actual madness of how the universe is acting if we saw the universe from the perspective of an atom.

Limits and parameters keep our reality in check, so we see only what our simplistic senses can handle. This also brings us closer to recognising the multi-universe theory, however there must still be an order to how the objects of the universe act, if there was not, how could we create our reality in the first place. It would be simply impossible to create a reality without an order to the madness, quarks, atoms, molecules, living entities, planets, stars and galaxies, even the universe and beyond must work in some kind of order. How and why subatomic particles jump to and from different places in space, can be calculated to a probability, then that being said so these probabilities should be used to calculate other dimensions and universes and how the how infinitiverse in created.