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A letter to Barry Bitzer

2008-04-15T23:56:00.000-07:00

An Open letter to Barry Bitzer. He's running for State Senate in Sandoval County, New Mexico and he fights for the mentally ill. He's also a Republican, oddly enough.

Dear Barry:

Something I wanted to tell you tonight but I thought it bad timing. I am...more interested in the rights of the mentally ill than most because I'm actually a recipient of a big government program that helps the mentally ill. Since around January of 2004, I have been on SSI. You might find that surprising...perhaps not. I'm on SSI because I'm a diagnosed bipolar. But I'm also a (fairly) lucid and well-educated soul, which puts me in a lot of interesting positions.

When I first got on SSI, I swore I would be an advocate for the mentally ill. I was steeped in advocacy as a (mostly) homeless person for years and years - once I started to get well, (it's amazing what regular meds can do for someone) I sorta put all that "behind" me, or at least to the side, as I focused on what my "real" interests were.

I truly applaud your efforts in fighting for the rights of the mentally ill. As someone who has been "fortunate" to be both very sick and very well and nowadays a more or less functioning member of society, I have seen both sides of the issue. Listening to you tonight made me want to figure out some way to help again, to be an advocate for those who are, in fact, my brethren. I feel like I could be a bridge, in some respects - challenging the assumptions of those who think they know what a "mentally ill" person looks like.

It may not be time for me to do that, yet. I am struggling to get a career off the ground after many years of being waylaid by an illness I couldn't control. Perhaps someday I'll be able to be that bridge. For now, I am pleased that there are smart-thinking folk like you are there to make the necessary changes that society needs to help those less fortunate struggle to get their lives under control. Republican or not - you're a hero to me, man.

with deep regards
Gregory Pleshaw

In Memory of Michael McQuaid by Stephen Rubin, President of the Santa Fe chapter of UVA Alumni (and proud BPD patient)

2008-01-12T14:58:00.000-08:00

Editor's note: We originally posted that it was possible that Mike McQuaid committed suicide and we apologize for the error. Someone who was close to the deceased wrote to us to say that suicide was not the cause of death, and that Mr. McQuaid died "doing something stupid." We won't speculate on what that might be. It remains that Mr. McQuaid was a BPD patient and that his death was untimely and probably sooner than necessary.

In Memory of Michael McQuaid

With much sadness, I just read of last year's death of UVA classmate (CAS 96) Michael McQuaid. McQ, as we called him, was a fun loving, entertaining and wild in all the right ways kind of guy. Smart but not pretentious he was goofy and always willing to talk and have a good time. And he was a great lacrosse player. I was manager of the lax team and he and were often roommates when we traveled and otherwise spent a lot of time together. We were neighbors fourth year and often bussed, walked, carpooled or otherwise got around campus together.

I have since learned that McQ suffered from a similar mental problem that afflicts many of people, myself included, more then people might imagine: bi-polarity. On the surface we may look like happy go lucky exuberant people but underneath we often suffer from extreme lack of self confidence, fear and sadness in the world and general depression. From what I hear, McQ, in his post UVA years, spent much of his life traveling in service of people like us and others in general around the globe having reached every continent but Antarctica in his quest to explore and help others and he was currently seeking a degree in an appropriate field.

Hearing of his death makes me quite sad. I bonded closely with Michael at Virginia and never thought as I perused the pages of the obituaries in the Alumnimag that I would read of somebody I knew so well. My heart goes out to his family and friends and all of our lacrosse compatriots.

Also, I send my support out to those who suffer from bi-polarity but are not recognized or not taken seriously by society as needing help and support. Yes, in a sense all humans are bi- olar, its called moodiness, but there are chemicals in some of our brains which make this transition more violent and harmful than it is in others. Bi-polarity is recognized by the respected psychiatric community as a treatable ailment that people who suffer from it can, with proper medication and therapy, live somewhat happy and healthy lives.

May Michael McQuaid find peace wherever he is and best wishes to his surviving family and friends.

Another Lost Thing - Keep me from LOSING IT.

2007-12-05T15:40:00.000-08:00

I'm teetering on the edge of my seat with anxiety such like I haven't felt in a long time. A bag I had which contained a notebook that has a big pile of notes for my latest project has gone missing and I'm going crazy (pardon the pun) with seething rage. I haven't really let it out yet - it's just making my whole body tingle and want to punch someone or break something but I'm sorta holding it together.

I had such a simple day yesterday. I got up and carried the bag with me and went to the Baking Co. Then I went to a friend's studio to discuss another project before heading home. I hung out at home for an hour, called the friend back, went to his house to pick up a check, went to the bank, cashed the check and then went home to wait around for someone. Then he arrived and I was ready to leave for Albuquerque and I couldn't find the bag. I figured I'd just leave because I thought I had those notes in another notebook, but no, they're in the notebook that's in the bag. I'm so pissed I could just SCREAM.

addendum: Okay - I found the bag. The bag was in the friend's studio. But the notebook I am looking for wasn;t in it. Grrrr...Fine, I give up. I drank some Yogi tea and felt much much better. I even just ate some food though I have dinner plans elsewhere. Life is okay...it's just so freakin' hard all the time...

I am the Very Model of a PsychoPharmacologist

2007-11-25T12:14:00.001-08:00

Don't get Mad - Get Even

2007-11-19T00:09:00.000-08:00

Hee hee - Did I mention I started a new blog today?

Adderall, Modafanil & Bipolarity

2007-11-16T21:59:00.000-08:00

So lately I've been thinking about trying to get my doctor to prescribe me with some kind of pharmaceutical stimulant. I've been really down lately, not "depressed" per se but feeling like I lack the kind of motivation it takes to be a person living with Bipolar 2 disorder, without a formal job, working at home, and having to get every day and MAKE IT UP, since that's what freelancers do.

I have found through street experimentation with modafinal and adderall that both give me the increased "edge" I feel like I need to get through the day and be productive. The problems with this is:

a) both of these probably have addictive side effects;

b) they are mostly prescribed for either ADHD (Adderall) or Narcolepsy (Modafinal) and I am not prescribed with either condition.

Part A is what worries me most - and probably would worry my doctor - is that I have a pre-existing predilection for street stimulants. "Speed" has always scared me for being too harsh, but I like cocaine for its ability to make me feel "normal" and "okay", and of course I like Ecstacy but it's impossible to be productive on, per se. I would prefer to be playing around with either of these under a doctor's care, rather than:

a) getting the pills off the street, which is difficult and dicey

b) using more cocaine than I should. (More than you should? Most cocaine is "more than you should" - what I mean is going to buy cocaine with the succinct idea that you need it to "feel okay" rather than to do a line at a party with some friends to get a little lift. These are different behaviours, obviously, fed by differing motivations and outcomes.)

I have tried both modafanil (aka "ProVigil") and Adderall. Modafanil is very ...light is a good way to describe it, but gives sufficient lift for really odious chores like laundry or cleaning the house, both of which have always fallen short in the motivation category for me. Adderall is sorta like being shot out of a cannon, but I've only taken a 20mg and a 30mg XLR and both kept me up all night - not so great if the desired outcome is "productivity."

By productivity, I mean, by the way - I get inspired a lot but often lack follow through, particularly on big projects. I would like this not to be the case - it's depressing enough to be poor and have no real job. If I have grand artistic projects to justify my impoverished existence, I end up feeling a lot better about myself.

I have a feeling my doctor is going to tell me - no way, jose and I'm going to have to fire him and find another doctor. Which is a sucky process, all in all. I really just want some help getting through this winter - already it's feeling like a lulu.

Med check: I am currently on 1200mg lithium (mood stabilizer) 5mg Abilify (mood stabilizer) and 10mg lexapro (anti-depressant.) Can someone help me with the math on an additional dosage of either Modafanil or Adderall for Bipolar 2s? Is this a completely insane proposition on my part, owing more to my addictive personality for stimulants rather than a real sincere attempt at greater wellness?

A Bipolar Blog Ring

2007-11-06T21:46:00.000-08:00

Remind me http://bipolarplanet.blogspot.com/

Hating Being Manic - Depressive On Day of the Dead

2007-11-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

I hate this illness. Today...I feel like such shit. Last night was Halloween and at some point I realized that I was without spirituality in my life, as if the goddess had left me, as if the magical thinking I'd come to rely on before was now buried in a pile of meds that *still* don't provide me with a sense of life purpose. I feel like I've lost my life purpose. Like I'm just going through the motions of being alive. Like I'm alive and wasting time. Like I'm trying to do and be and nothing's there.

I don't have to work, you know. Social security takes care of my basic needs, and sometimes that feels like a scam but today it feels necessary and also like a prison sentence. I try to write stuff everyday...i'm working on a project, but I don't have work with deadlines and that makes me feel like I just have these huge swaths of time to fill with nothing in particular. I wish I had other skills. I wish I made stuff. I wish I was carving a stone or a piece of wood but I know nothing about that stuff. Everything I make looks terrible anyway.

Applying for Social Security Benefits

2007-10-09T07:22:00.000-07:00

(Some day, I'll write a longer and more thorough treatise on this. In the meantime....)

The bottom line with Social Security claims is history. Documented history is certainly preferable...any bipolar is probably going to have that, in either psychiatric time or jail-time or both.

There are two ways to go about it: 1) buy a book and read about the process first, (something I did because I'm weird like that) or 2) just simply walk into Social Security, tell them you want to apply for SSI or Disability and start filling out the paperwork. I would suggest, (for a thinking person,) a combination of the two.

The book is "Nolo's Guide to Social Security Disability," an immensely readable book about the nitty-gritty of applying for (and being on) Social Security. It will familiarize the patient with everything about Social Security (and is *quite* oftentimes a better source for information than even those who work for Social Security. It's that thorough.)

At that point, I would suggest the following: do not ask for the intervention services/help of any social agency to assist you, but simply DO walk into Social Security, tell them you want to apply, and begin the process. The hardest thing about an Disability/SSI application is tracking down the medical paperwork, and I spent months trying to do that on my own before realizing that SS actually has mechanisms in place to do that already, so you don't have to go it alone. In fact, I found my local SS office folk to be better informed and just nicer people than I had expected them to be. So my Rx on this is:

1) Order Nolo's book on Amazon.

2) While waiting for the book to arrive, go down to your nearest Social Security office and tell them you want to apply for benefits. (Point of information - SSI is people who have worked in the system (legit) for less than 20 quarters (aka five years) but not necessarily consecutively.) Many Many Many mentally ill people simply do not have the work history that will justify five years work history, (at 34, I did not) and thus will be applying for SSI rather Disability, which is why people tend to associate SSI as "welfare for crazy people."

Bush Vetoes Health Care for TEN MILLION CHILDREN

2007-10-05T06:07:00.000-07:00

Show this guy what you really think of his "quiet veto" on children's health. Hasn't he done ENOUGH to make America the meanest country on earth?

He's Not My President...AGAIN.

2007-10-03T15:41:00.001-07:00

Bush Vetoes CHILDREN'S HEALTH INSURANCE.

Jesus, I hate this FUCK.

Let's call it the kiddie roller coaster

2007-09-20T15:16:00.000-07:00

Had a meltdown today - this time, I was working on this crazy project on SEO stuff that I've been working on this summer, and I was coming down to the wire with a sick pile of notes and the need to organize them. And one of my main notebooks wasn't anywhere to be found.

I flipped. Life was a worthless pile of shit and the joke was on me. The whole thing lasted about twenty minutes, me convinced that even when I find work that suits me, I'm gonna fuck it up because I'm such a loser and I'm never going to get off disability. Yadda yadda yadda.

I collapsed into a heap on the couch with my stuffed dolphin. Yes, I really own such a thing, and Lauren brought me a valium as I lamented all the times I could've offed myself but someone (usually me) intervened. By the time I found the notebook the Valium kicked in, and working seemed like a kinda pointless thing to do.

Oh yeah....the trials and tribs of the mentally ill. Thanks for all the fish.

The Icarus Project .net

2007-09-19T16:47:00.000-07:00

I honestly don't have time to figure out what this is all about right now, but it was recommended to me by a wild-eyed fellow patient on the porch at the Aztec, who suggested that we start a local chapter of this organization dedicated to "radical mental health," whatever the hell that means. Something tells me I'd end up hospitalized again - but at least I'd have friends on that med vacation....

San Francisco Offers Health Care to the Uninsured!

2007-09-14T11:12:00.000-07:00

Yes, it is true. The community that I spent a good bulk of my madness in is offering health care to all uninsured adults. That's right - grownups can now get health care if they are uninsured. This is SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Whoo-pee!

Scopolamine Offers Hope for Manic-DepressivesGive Us The Patch or a Shot

2007-09-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

Scopolamine Offers New Hope for BiPolars
From Scientist, Interrupted

I had vaguely heard of this last week, and the thing that intrigues me most is the skin patch administration. If the gastro-intestinal side effects of my meds could be eliminated...or better still, if a patch could last for a period of days, that would be a *tremendous* boon...

After my episode last week (and trust me, it was a goddamn lulu, on par with my first break but slightly less scary because now I know what I've got and slightly more scary because it gave me a real sense of futility about the illness...) I am *terrified* to have another break. But pill meds...are so complicated. You have to take them every day, and in my case, you have to take two different sets, one in the morning, one in the evening.

This very morning, I couldn't find my pill box. I have just added 5mg of Abilify to my daily regimen, which also includes 1200mg of lithium and 10 mg of Lexapro. I got two weeks worth of Abilify and loaded up the pill box, then mislaid it. This morning, I couldn't find it and I began to panic. Rage attack came on fairly quickly after that. Sucks...

I found them eventually, but by then I had elevated heart rate, anxiety, anger, blah blah blah. I called my doctor and told him, "Fuck side effects, I'm taking the whole day's dose in the mornings," because while it's *easy* to remember taking pills in the morning (you feel weird if you don't) it's hard to remember at night and I *frequently* accidentally "skip" my evening meds because I just forget. That certainly was the cause of last week's episode.

Improvements in meds are great. Improvements in administration - I keep telling my doctor I "want Norplant for lithium" (with a shot once a year) - would be even better.

More on Mania and such

2007-08-29T09:54:00.000-07:00

So I left a kinda incomplete post before, and I don't know how deep I'll get into it now, except to say that the past week has been one of the more difficult episodes in my entire manic-depressive career. remember that scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton shoots himself to get rid of the Brad Pitt part of himself? That was me this week - all suicidal thoughts hinged not on ME, who I like, but on this THING that has come to colonize my body and make life so confusing and unbearable at times.

It sounds really melodramatic to people who haven't been there. I know it must, but that's just the way it is. I *do* love myself - my illness is something I could really do without.

I've written extensively about What Happened in my journals in the past week, and I think it's important to try and glean some kind of conclusion about What it's Really All About. Basically...

One of the themes I've explored in the past about manic-depression is that in addition to whatever episodic symptoms you're experiencing that can be qualified by medical-speak, there are also some intangible qualities that can only be described as "mystical," where your intuition is on absolute overload and you become CONVINCED that there's a helluva lot more going on than the surface of things would suggest.

But coupled with this "sixth sense" is also an overwhelming sense of paranoia...okay, imagine, this: you feel like you know something's going on, but you also feel like this thing that's going on can also hurt you. In other words, you take it personally....

So imagine this scenario: You SEE something important. But you also FEEL that that thing is being brought to your attention because it can potentially bring you harm. Thus, it becomes very difficult to proceed from a rational perspective, because not only is somethng noteworthy going on beneath the surface, but you also believe it has the potential to hurt you. Henceforth, all actions stem from this fear...

All I can say about this past week is that it reminded me of what happened in 1994. I cant really say much more about it at this time.

I Hate Being Manic Depressive

2007-08-25T16:11:00.001-07:00

I probably won't write much, because I'm miserable and sad and waiting for the Valium to kick in. The past two days have been horribly crazy...I went to this art opening and all kinds of things about it just really flipped my shit. I don't know where reality was or if I was totally out to lunch the whole time. I hate being manic depressive. I told my doctor today that I was wanting to die and I am. I don't hate *myself* - I just hate how hard this life feels all the time.

I think I have insight and I know *exactly* what's going on - and then I'm completely confused. Is it "insight" talking or just crazed paranoia and psychosis? Misery. Total fucking misery.

2007-07-25T22:44:00.000-07:00

Tonight I went to a men's meeting. I won't say which one - it probably isn't a secret, but it just doesn't matter.

At first, they asked us to articulate the thing that was the source of our feeling for the week. Mine was all about the past month and how I haven't been paid for any of the work I've done lately, and how I'd been starting to feel completely crazy inside, filled with anger about it. At some point, I was babbling about these various scenarios - one where I'd done the work and hadn't been paid yet (Native Peoples magazine, for anyone considering writing for them) and another project where I had said in my contract that I wouldn't start work until I got a check for half upfront, and they hadn't paid me either. I was dying to start the project because I LOVE TO WORK, but I was making myself hold back untilI got the check and I was just dying inside.

At some point, I started to cry. I felt like such a fucking baby, but for some strange reason I felt super connected to the people in the room, and I was just so tired of feeling angry about the way I put myself out there and work hard and I'm always broke because I'm waiting on one goddamn check or another. I never write about this stuff, and maybe I should, because it's just so painful to try so hard to be a person with a voice in this shit-for-brains culture, and to just always get pushed around for it.

Later on, after a break, they said something about being time to work on "a man's work," and they asked us all to pick a number. I chose five, arbitrarily, and I had the highest number so it was my issues they were going to work on. (I'll know better next time, ya fuckers. ;-) All the men but one left the room, and when they came back, they had decided that we'd role-play the scenario...

I guess I had mentioned my dad a couple times while talking - today was my father's 74th birthday - and when they came back, they asked me to choose one man to be my father. I chose a guy...I couln't stop giggling, because it all seemed so ludicrous. Then they asked me to choose one guy to be my client - and I chose this guy who all night long had struck me as someone who enjoyed the role of the antagonist...later I would realize that he actually *did* remind me of my real dad.

So then they stood my dad before me and said, "What does your father say to you?" And I said, "He keeps wondering when I'll get a real job. And he keeps wondering why I still call him for help sometimes when I'm 37." And they turned me around so I was standing in my dad's place, and the "dad" was standing where I had been. And they said, "You are your father - what will you say to your son?"

I have mimicked my father's voice a thousand times in my life, but I have never had a Gregory before me to yell at, and in moments, I had become him. "Jesus Christ, Gregory, you only call when you need money for chrissakes, you live 2500 miles away in goddamn Santa Fe, New Mexico with your crazy mother and her hippie boyfriend..." the pyschodrama was more or less total, but it hadn't climaxed yet.

The consensus more or less became that because of my father, I didn't really feel like I deserved to be paid for the work that I did, and so when I didn't get paid, I didn't confront people about it because I had miserable self-worth. A good guess - incorrect, as things would turn out, but a good guess. And so I was told to become myself again, and to confront the client that refuses to pay.

He was a right bastard. The man should have a career being the asshole client. (Maybe he does, though I was told after the meeting that he has shared in previous meetings about being in the exact same position as me.) Anyway, as soon as he said he couldn't pay me, I caved, as I usually do, and proceeded to hang up the phone. And he was being such a bastard...I had said it had been ninety days already, and he said it would be another 45 days more, and at that, I snapped.

"You goddamn fucking cocksucker, what if I come over to your fucking magazine and pull my piece from your fucking hard-drive." And I was in this guy's face, ready to slug him, when all of a sudden self-preservation kicked in and I ran to the opposite wall, hit it about ten times with my fists, then grabbed my notebooks, said, "I'm fucking out of here," and almost made it out of the building, before I was stopped by the voices of men and stuck in my tracks.

"How the FUCK did that happen?" I didn't even know these people or this group and here I was, in the throes of a scenario that plays out in my mind almost daily, when I try to confront the people that owe me. But I never do THAT - not anymore. A few years ago, I would shit down the necks of fuckers that wouldn't pay me, but then I just learned to avoid confrontation altogether - and just stay quiet and hope they would pay me instead, without confrontation.

"Stay passive and you don't get paid. Get aggressive and you don't get paid. Either way you're fucked," said the guy playing the client.

It all felt like "Fight Club" to me. It made me want to quit this horrible hideous profession I'm in and do anything else. It made me wonder what it was about me that made people want to take advantage of me. I never want that anger in my life - I would've decked that motherfucker in another time and place - and I felt, as I do now, as I've felt for some time, totally trapped, whether by myself or by the forces in my life, in a place where I'll always feel helpless.

I am so angry with the way I've been treated in my life. That anger subsumes all other issues, where most days I can't think of anything else. I burn with the slow burn of being burned and having no one to turn to, no avenue to go down other than the ones I've gone down before. Maybe I'm wasting my time trying to do anything other than wait tables. All I know for sure is that I *can't* ever assume that anything anyone says is true, and that any work I ever produce will ever earn me anything other than the empty mailbox I see when I'm waiting for a check. And it's doing something to me lately that it's never done before. It's making me want something entirely different - I just don't know what it is yet.

My First Big Break

2007-06-07T15:20:00.000-07:00

This morning, when I was on the phone with a friend, I was talking to her about my last visit to a shrink and how he'd wanted to discuss re-visiting my first break from reality, in the spring of 1994. He thought we should approach it from both a clinical and mythical perspective and see if I could get a better sense of what had happened to me, since it all continues to trouble me...

Talking to my friend this morning, I articulated what happened for the first time in years. I had pretty much forgotten about it, but speaking about it again I began to remember just how Real it all seemed when it was occurring. And it probably was - I just haven't been able to integrate the experience into my consciousness in a way that it serves me, though certainly I have tried.

I want to say something about it here...it so much easier to talk about it than "write" about it, and you may understand why in a moment. It was the spring of 1994 and I was working on about thirty credits, (no lie) and papers about all kinds of different topics. Yet, they all seemed to bleed into one another, with writing a little bit over here on this topic affecting what was happened with this topic over here.

By the time I finished the semester, I was a total basket case...my thesis was called "ReWriting the World," and I was convinced I was stuck inside some insane narrative story of my own making. I mean, to a degree, who isn't? But in this particular waking dream, I was convinced that I had the power to write things and make them come true - which was fun, for awhile, but then I began to get really scared about having all this power.

I went in search of someone who could help me and I met this old shamanic looking cat in a coffee shop on Haight Street (which, of course, seems absurd and funny, but that was part of it, it was just so narratively perfect, as everyhing was at that point.) And he told me that I had to dip all my pens in sea salt to break the spell, but that I needed this special sea salt that formed in a cave near the Sutra Baths.

Of course, I almost drowned trying to find this psycho salt, but when it was all said and done with, my pens and my ability no longer had any affect on the world. And I was so deeply utterly lost...I went home, and totally despondent at what I'd done, I started seeing shrinks to try and pull all of that into meaning. I saw astrologers too, and psychics and channelers, but it was then that I began to feel crazy pretty much all the time.

Looks terrible in print. Much funnier when I told the story.

PNM Discriminates in Favor of Web-Complainers Classist discrepancy Makes PNM Look Stupid, IMHO

2007-05-10T15:14:00.000-07:00

May 10, 2007
To whom it may concern:

I have a problem with PNM, one that is based in both fact and extrapolation based on what I tried to do with a disconnect notice and what I think it means. I'll give you the facts first - then I'll give you my opinion. Both of these should stop and give you pause about the the state-supported monopoly utility company in our state.

In the middle of April, I received a disconnect notice. I wasn't surprised to receive one - I had gone an entire winter without paying my bill. In fact, I was expecting one, and surprised it hadn't come sooner. As a recipient of SSI living on a fixed income, there reached a certain point where my bills were so large I simply hid from them - not exactly the most pro-active thing to do, but certainly in keeping with my symptoms as a chronic sufferer of BiPolar disorder, PTSD, and Seasonal Affective Disorder.

When spring came, I was less burdened by depression, and ready to take on the issues I had avoided over the winter. The disconnect notice came with a bill for around $750 - I applied for LIHEAP and received $152, still a far cry short from paying the entire bill. As it stands, my monthly income runs at $603 per month, giving me just enough to pay my rent and divvy up the remainder among several bills I receive. And so, with $50 in hand, I stepped into the PNM offices on Pacheco Street in Santa Fe and went to the Customer Service area in back to see what we could do about a payment plan.

That was on or about May the 1st. I stepped up to an office, told them my problem and asked to be placed on a payment plan. I was told that there was no payment plan that I could have - that I should've applied for Budget Billing sometime long before the problem reached this crisis point, and upon informing them that I had already applied for and received LIHEAP, was given a list of charities such as Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul for whom I could apply for funds to pay my bill.

Let's just think about that for a minute - a client walks in and offers to pay a bill in installments, and the company says "No, please apply to these charities for the money because we need it NOW." Think about that as you weigh the rest of this letter.

I made an attempt to go to St. Vincent de Paul, but I simply couldn't believe that I would be turned down from making payments in good faith, so on May the 3rd, I returned to PNM and this time went to a different clerk. And again, I was told that no payment plan was possible and that no extension would be possible and that I had to come up with the money or my utilities would be turned off. In other words, I had to *pay now* or get my stuff turned off, which would invariably result in more fees, and probably (VERY likely) PNM never seeing its money. Does this make anything close to good business sense? I for one cannot see how.

Being a resourceful sort of fellow, I decided I'd cruise around on PNM's website and see what I could find. Finding nothing to support my notion that "pay or else" wasn't the only option, I decided to craft a letter to Customer Service. (Appendix A) I didn't expect much - I had already been informed *twice* that PNM is an all-or-nothing creditor, so you can imagine my surprise when I received a phone call the following day from a chap named Eric telling me that I was going to get my payment plan after all. He later sent me a letter (Appendix B) reaffirming that was the case - but not before I expressed my concerns about the following:

1) Why is it that in the office, customer service representatives appear to be unaware of the availability of payment plans, offering an all or nothing option, but a customer who sends a letter from the website elicits a totally different response?

2) Could the outcome of a letter have something to do with the fact that most schlubs will wander in off the street and just ask (and then go away) when real gadflies like myself (who presumably have intellectual and class resources) will send letters and create paper trails?

I'd like to thank PNM ever so much for the payment plan offering, though I'm quite sad it took three tries to get one. Doesn't the law require utilities to offer payment plans to customers who indicate an inability to pay their bills due to financial reasons? If this is the case, why didn't the first two company representatives know this? I'm also sad about the implications of verbal request versus written ones - it suggests a classist sort of tier for determining who gets a break and who doesn't. I knew all along that eventually, someone would tell me a payment plan would be possible - but that *IS NOT* necessarily the case for people who have less education, less intellectual resources, less time on their hands, and who may, as is the case for many people in our state, operate from the relative handicap of having English as a second language.

For SHAME on PNM if this is not an isolated incident. As a citizen of New Mexico, I demand to know what the people who work the Customer Service desks are told in regard to payment plans for overdue customers. And I'd like to know why customer service representatives such as Eric, who are responding to emailed inquiries, have a different understanding of PNM policies than those at the customer service desk at the Pacheco street office. Are payment plans being reserved for those only able and persistent enough to know and demand their rights? I am concerned that PNM's practices not only violate the law, but are also potentially racist and classist, and may have violated my rights under the American for Disabilities Act. If this is found to be the case, I hope that PNM will be severely punished.

When I'd twice been told by PNM that I was not entitled to a payment plan, I contacted Community Action New Mexico in search of answers. When I talked with them, I learned not only that Chapter 17 of the New Mexico Administrative code requires utilities to offer payment plans to customers expressing an inability to pay a past due bill, but also that PNM is obligated to *negotiate* with customers to arrive at a reasonable payment plan. When Eric offered me the payment plan, he did not make any effort to determine if the proposed plan was reasonable given my income, expenses, or any other circumstances. Nor did he indicate to me that I had a right to negotiate based on these factors. I accepted the plan that Eric offered because I had no idea I had the right to negotiate, and I'm concerned that other customers are not being adequately informed of their rights to negotiate for a plan that is reasonable.

In the interest of assuring that all customers receive the treatment we are entitled to by law, I will continue working with Community Action New Mexico and the PRC until PNM's policies and practices surrounding payment plans are clarified. I believe that PNM has to answer to what precisely occurred here, and if it is happening as a systemic practice, appropriate parties such as the PRC and the media need to be informed. Classist treatment of consumers will not be tolerated by a corporation that enjoys a clear monopoly - in this case, PNM is that sort of company, and need to be watched and regulated appropriately.

Thank you very much
Gregory Pleshaw

How Poisen Pen Letters Can Ruin Your Life

2007-04-30T14:34:00.000-07:00

I don't when it started - probably in 1994, when I first started using the Internet - but I am the master of the Poison Pen letter. No, really - I can write the meanest fucking shit you've ever read - and if you're reading one, it's probably directed at you and it's DESIGNED to hurt.

You've never imagined I ever thought any such things about you - but when the bile comes for you, it flows to the page. I have no idea if I can even blame my illness - it's certainly a contributing factor - but when I feel cornered by you, I just might want to DESTROY YOU.

It sucks. It's getting worse - insofar as now, I KNOW I have to stop doing it. A friend called me out about it about a month ago, and I pledged to try my hardest to stop. I just recognized he was right when he said, "Your life would be so much better if you just stopped doing this." Saying mean and hurtful shit only works for about five minutes - then, (generally) I'm hiding from my inbox from whatever blowback might fly in from what I've said.

Ay-yi-yi: I did one last week. A friend and I had an argument that felt like "This is it. I hate you and we're never going to talk again, I hate you so much. I'm going to drop kick you as hard as I can." Vicious terrible things, I said. And of course, because this person was *my friend*, he was terribly terribly hurt.

So not worth it. I thought I could control myself - I have to work harder. When you write one and when you send it - it's better than sex. Or maybe it's just another escapist lie from a very sensitive and wounded person that I most certainly am most of the time.

On Being Manic

2007-04-10T10:43:00.000-07:00

The beauty of it is that you're in a groove where you mind moves lightning fast - the bad part, for me generally, is that I have ideas that I can't execute, and not just writing ones, but simple things like...hanging a picture. Having an idea in your head (like for a mad theme camp, for example) isn't the same as executing that idea. The other day I tried to hang a picture and truth be told, my spatial understanding falls off dramatically when I'm manic...it was either too high or too low, and I made gouges in the wall with my nails, and hit my finger with the hammer, and tossed the picture to the floor just to hear the sound of tinkling glass - sharp, sudden, dramatic, like banging a tuning fork and feeling all the sound molecules in a room just line up at the ready...

Later on, I was trying to organize/re-organize my books and stuff....I always have piles of papers that are more or less unaccounted for but I can't throw away - YEARS worth of medical records, social services receipts, business cards of doctors I haven't seen in years (they should all be in a big box or folder marked "Crazy in America,") but more of them come every month and I have no good systems.

I was in the process of building one the other day and the music stopped. My big desktop wasn't churning out Pandora and so I checked it. Nothing. Nada. Going nowhere. Tried to reboot. Lost wireless signal. Turned on my laptop. Tried to open Pandora. Nothing. Turned on WinAmp. No sound. Nothing. Turned on Itunes - but I had recently re-organized all my MP3s and it couldn't find any files. I was getting desperate and angry. I turned off the desktop roughly - it now fails to work, has a crazy blue screen I can't decipher. My mind was racing at a million miles an hour and I wanted to get back to what I was thinking about, but the silence without the music was like an incessant itch, an irritant that had to be dealt with. I tried harder to get music out of the fucking laptop and then I just went berserk and pounded the keyboard of the laptop as hard as I could with my fist, more or less knocking out the hard-drive and sending the screen blank.

THAT'S mania, or manic dysphoria, when the mind moves so quickly that it can comprehend itself and it wants to ride that ride and so do you, but there's something else going on that makes you So FUCKING angry that you just lose your fucking mind.

Someone came over last night. They fixed the laptop - I'd been drunk all day so I was next to useless and they told me I needed an extra hard-drive to get the data. I drove to Wal-Mart and bought a 160GB drive. Got it back and it was only a 20GB, but the best part was that it was FULL of someone else's data - they'd swapped out an old 20GB for the 160GB and returned it to Wal-Mart. Funny shit, really. But today I tried putting the laptop back together and it all just froze and I was suddenly back in the anger and desperation of it all and I just went into the kitchen and started breaking plates...

Meanwhile, I've got a lot to do - assignments feel like they're piling up and of course, I work all the fucking time and I'm really broke and I feel like I'm going nowhere - every minor glitch feels like a catastrophe, like the day a couple weeks ago when I got stopped for speeding. Speed trap. A disingenous mechanism to earn revenue for the police-miltary complex. A total fucking sham. 48 in a 30 that was clearly marked 45. Another fine PIG move on the part of the police, whose authority erodes daily as America makes a criminal out of everyone for no seat belts and excessive smoking. I wanted to KILL THAT SMUG MOTHERFUCKER, but of course, I kept quiet, and today I signed in at court and artfully Got the Fuck Out because my country has been so fucking good at making a criminal out of me that I now know that waiting to see the judge to plead Not Guilty is for squares - I requested a Waiver of Appearance, filled it out, and WALKED ON DOWN THE HALL and out the fucking door.

That's the system - NEVER say you're guilty, NEVER say you have money in the bank, NEVER say you're getting better. It doesn't pay.

Meantime - I have a room full of broken computer simply because I was trying to follow the mind's directive...it was sweet and pure in there, in that space of a million ideas. I long to be there and then some totally minor thing will just send me over the fucking edge. You'd think I'd Just Say No and never want to go there...but it is *so* tempting in this crazy life to just have a few minutes when you feel like You Know Everything - even if you can't do a fucking thing about it.

Bipolar2 & PTSD:Must they come together?

2007-03-06T08:13:00.000-08:00

Reporting live from the SF BakingCo.'s computer - the space bar blows,soifwordssometimes run together, that's why. Space Takes Effort Here.

SO..

In 1996, in a series of rounds with various shrinks as I vainly attempted to find a "softer, gentler way" than bipolar disorder, I had a meeting with a cat who told me, that in addition to having Adult ADD (jury's still out on that,) I also had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - aka "PTSD." I was instantly taken aback, and responded with words that have rung in my ears ever since:

"What trauma?"

Think about it -when you think of PTSD, your first thought is probably the Viet Nam war. Mine was. *THAT'S* trauma, baby: killing babies in rice paddies,fighting an absurd war for a bunch of Cold Warshit-heads,going from rural jungle to fight to basecamp to party - admittedly,I know nothing about the VietNam war, just what I saw in movies, but Viet Nam and PTSD have become almost synonymous - and what could my relatively safe and sound middle-class life have offered me that I could be a civilian victim of shell-shock?

The answer, it seems, might be - not much.

Trauma is a problematic term, in that respect. Violence, war, aggravated rape, repeated sexual abuse - all these situations sound like ripe breeding grounds for a PTSD diagnosis. Parental divorce, bad grades in school, a certain sense of "never belonging," - again,these are common middle class problems and I had them - again,so where's the trauma?

I can't cite anything specific that I've read (it'sa blog,stupid) but let's just say that in my travels, I've come to understand that there are two kinds of trauma - what I call "acute trauma" (which includes all the wars and assaults) and what I call "localized" trauma -things that happen to you that don't seem like much in comparison to the acute kind, but which stay with you nonetheless.

And - if you already have a genetic pre-disposition to a major mental disorder (which it seems like I have),these localized traumas *may* actually have the power to contribute to onset of that disorder.

Which would make sense - the period surrounding my onset in 1994 was without a doubt a totally stressful period. So trauma = PTSD = onset of BPD? Something like that - again, remember -*it's a blog.*

Meantime, here's another theory, posed to me by my "family shrink" Peter, and maybe grounded in actual study, perhaps just a total guess - the experiences brought on by being bi-polarmay be stressful enough on their own to create and/or add to the existing pool of PTSD fodder. So dig this equation:

trauma = PTSD = onset of BPD = more trauma = more PTSD = more BPD symptoms.

See what I'm getting here? A symbiotic relationship for chaos - which is great if you'd like your life to always be like a bad movie - terrible if you'd like to entertain, as I occasionally do - A Way Out of this Movie.

So. My last client (don't make me tell you) showed me that lurking beneath the surface of the nice clothes and pile of meds is a terrified person in desperate fear of being in trouble. Lord knows, I should be used to it by now,and at this point I've been so exposed as I fight my way towards getting paid...I can'teven tell you what a stressful scenario it'sbeen

But lately, I've been thinking that the PTSD parts of my psyche need something. And today, I have a Somatic Experiencing session. I'll let you know how it goes.

Situations, Bio-Chemistry, & Trauma, Part Three

2007-02-09T00:59:00.000-08:00

So this brings me to what I really want to talk about: cause & solutions, which can be outlined in three broad categories:

1) Situations: People get angry and freak out because of the situations that they are in.

Lots of people lose keys and don't freak out - other people do. So the question is, "Who is triggered by external scenarios and how do you change the triggering for something less crazy?"

If people are triggered by situations, then what is happening is that something in the present is touching on something in their past. This is what psycho-therapy is for. For example, for awhile there, I seemed to be getting into violent confrontations with people every time I turned around. I spent some time in psychotherpy changing this behaviour - recently, someone hit me in bar and I didn't react in any way except with words. I said, "Hey - you can't hit me." But otherwise, I didn't flinch, and that was some real progress from before. And I was pretty proud of that.

Psychotherapy has you focus on what is unconscious so you can think it through clearly. It's a very rewarding thing to do - on the other hand, when I was told that people were mad at me for something I'd done, and I reacted with total (primal really) fear, then this was a situation which I hadn't dealt with before. And I've tried to understand all that, but it's pretty hard on your own.

2) Bio-chemistry - where you are reacting to external stimuli because of some imbalance in your system.

3) Trauma - now this is the thing I am most interested in now as a possible source of problems and their solutions. Because, face it - I've been dealing with lost things triggering my anger for a long-ass fucking time now. I hardly want to leave the house because I'm afraid of what will happen if I lose something again or feel overwhelmed. And I just keep thinking that there really *is* something in the body that causes the way I feel, which is often *very* physical.

Situations, Bio-Chemistry, & Trauma, Part Two

2007-02-09T00:34:00.000-08:00

It's close to 2am - I slept all day on Zyprexa and of course, I'm restless now.

I just found out I got fired from a gig - good riddance to it. Early on in the situation, I screwed up a bit, pissed some people off for "speaking out of turn" (in a manner of speaking) and I could never stop feeling resentful about it. Obsessive grudge shit. That oughta be a warning sign for me - I spent hours burning up phone lines talking to people about it - I just couldn't shake how weird it made me feel to be reprimanded for something so petty. I still did the work as best as I could - and they fired me as soon as the work was turned into one of our "clients."

I should be really upset about it, but after the last few days, I'm so bogged down with having been upset over stupid things, I haven't got the time to care. In fact, it was worry over this dumb-fucking client that got me so worked up on Wednesday - let's call it Black Wednesday just for fun.

After I tore my office up on Sunday night, I seemed to calm down. The ring thing still had me upset, sure, but I was able to put the feelings down...until Wednesday. I had some things to turn in for the client, and I was at the computer by ten, only to discover that my lame boss had changed all the titles of the files were working with, so 1) I didn't know what they were without opening them, and 2) I had to re-name them so I'd know in the future. It just made me mad, because it made what should've been "easy" into a terrible chore. I was cursing her in my head, and getting more frustrated, and then I looked at the clock and saw I had about forty-five minutes to get them to the client. And I had to print and my printer is notoriously slow.

I put all the files in queue and then I made myself play a game to calm down. I was feeling okay, and I put the packet together and got dressed and was ready to go out the door - feeling like I was running late already - and I couldn't find my fucking keys. Goddamn, I just hate the things - whenever I feel frenzied it's the first thing I can't find. So I went in search, cursing the day I was born, feeling like I had so many loose odds and ends in my life, feeling like I was running ragged, and I got angrier and angrier, at the keys, at the dumb client, at all the little projects I was working on and how everything felt like it was at loose ends all the fucking time...

I WAS SOON SO ANGRY. Really, angry, and I knew I felt like breaking something. And I did.

I grabbed the dresser in the middle of the hallway (a bookshelf actually,) and just flipped it. I felt like the Incredible Hulk and then it hit this mirror in the living room and it shattered. I cared but I didn't care - I wanted my fucking keys and I wanted to just Get the Fuck Out and GO ON to my stupid meeting so it would be done with.

I dropped off the stuff in a haze, my left side tingling as it is now, and I went to lunch with a friend - there, I was all a flutter of worry about my Stupid Client. The *work* was so easy and manageable, but because of my screw-up I'd gotten an earful of the politics of the situation and it just scared me. It had _really_ scared me. And I felt the tingle of everything and I just wanted to Drink Beer. I had two with Dan and a couple more after he'd left, sitting at the bar, talking to this old guy about back in the day stuff, and then I headed to my next scheduled meeting - with my shrink.

In the back of my mind I was thinking about what my G-F was going to do when she saw what I'd done, and I was thinking that I'd go to the house and make dinner and clean the livingroom and sweep up all the glass before she saw it. I was an Angry Motherfucker in my shrink's office - I really was upset, and I told him something had to happen with all this shit, that I just couldn't take it anymore.

And then came the coup de grace - I went to the fucking grocery store and got all the stuff I needed - and no fucking credit card. Gone. Poof. Just DISAFUCKINGPEARED. All day long, for days in fact, I'd tried to hold it together, but things just KEPT BEING MISSING LIKE LITTLE BITCHES. Fuck, I was so angry walking out of that store emtpy-handed. Just Real Honest-to-GOD FUCKING PISSED. I couldn't win. I couldn't make anything work right.

Makes me mad just to think about it - see, sometimes, I look back on this stuff and I can't figure out why I was so mad, but the past few days - fuck, I'm still so angry about the ring. Found the keys. Ordered a new AMEX card but I'm STILL SO FUCKING ANGRY it was missing in the first place, that all of it was missing, just when I needed it most.

Situations, Bio-chemistry, and Trauma

2007-02-08T21:24:00.000-08:00

So i spent the day under sedation on Zyprexa. I hate neuroleptics - sure, they tamp down the emotions, which makes it easier to think straight, but I can feel them all in there and it just isn't fair because I want them GONE. Dealt with, changed around, transformed. I want them to just not be so intense or something.

It must be winter if I'm spending more time writing here than elsewhere. I went months without a post in here, but I have to talk about this, write it out, because maybe I can get help for it for real this time.

This cycle began over the weekend - the previous week it might have been there also, because I was fixed on getting rid of my girlfriend. I even told my shrink I was going to dump her - and then I just had a change of heart. We were fighting and we just started ...I don't know, loving each other again. She really is a good person, and I have to try and make it okay for her to love me and vice-versa. I know longer no about the "marriage" bit - the very word seems to place all these expectations on myself that I really want to fulfill, but feel so overwhelmed by the world to do so.

In any case - Saturday put her back at work, and I suddenly felt like I wanted a fresh start. My office was and had been a total mess for months - stuff piled up and such - and I just decided to get some coffee on and just burrow away into my office and clean. Place papers in their place or in the burn pile. Mess with my CDs...just generally clear out clutter to make way for something new.

I felt restless doing it - I wouldn't have been able to tell you I felt manic, but by the evening, I knew I did, because when Lauren came home, she proceeded to re-arrange our living room furniture. She asked me what I thought of it as I finally let myself stop working and went into the living room to watch a movie with her. i said i didn't like it, but not to move it around again because I just wanted to sit and watch the movie. She insisted, and I flew off the handle and ran into the guest room shouting, basically upset because I just wanted to sit and I was completely exhausted.

I slept in the guest room that night (something I do a lot when I feel crazy because I sleep better alone) and woke up the next day feeling sorta sheepish and apologetic to her. Knowing that I was manic, I decided I'd try to do all the right things that day - I took a shower first thing, then had my meds. I went to the Baking Co. and had a real breakfast. I wrote in my journal, then got an iced coffee to go and went back to finish up office things. I decided at 4pm I'd go to the gym and exercise. Once at the gym, I noticed I was wearing my rings, and carefully took them off so i wouldn't lose them in the pool, and put them in my pants pocket before I changed into my sweat pants. I made a mental note that I needed to wash all my gym stuff, then went and worked out.

Later, at the house, I tidied up the last bit of my office, placing all the loose papers that I couldn't deal with on the counter, and then Lauren came home. I was glued to the screen, totally pre-occupied and feeling content. She asked me a question and I felt agitated. (She might've said Hello for all I remember) and I realized I didn't have my rings on. I dug into my pocket and only found one ring - the one I liked least - and realized the other one was gone and I just got mad. Really mad.

"Fine, I try to do all the right shit and clean my stupid fucking office and try to make sure my rings are safe and OF COURSE the one I really like DIS-A-FUCKING-PEARS." Jesus, I was so angry, so fast, I felt tricked and mocked like I always do when something I like just goes away, and I swept all the stuff on the counter off to the floor, just saying, "FINE. Far be it for me to try to do the right thing, I'll just get pissed on in the end no matter what I do."

I was SOOOOO ANGRY about that ring. Just livid. And I tried to forget about it but I just couldn't, it made me feel so fucking mad inside that I'd even bothered to try and pull things together when it would all just get torn apart in the end.

Days have passed and I'm still really angry. Losing something has been a trigger for years - but this one *wasn't* a question of being careless. This was a question of being thoughtful about it and losing it anyway, and it sucked in that way.

Next: Part Two

Another flip-out: New Meds, New Direction

2007-02-07T23:34:00.000-08:00

I flipped out again. Three times.

Morning: Lost my keys so I overturned a bookshelf.

Early evening: Couldn't find my credit card at the grocery store so I came home and broke a couple glasses.

Evening: Couldn't sleep and thought I'd get up to hammer a nail in the wall by the door to put my keys on. Couldn't find the hammer. Broke another glass. Then found hammer and put up a nail for the keys.

Spent a long time talking to Peter my personal therapist. Called him at midnight suicidal because the tingling sensation I'd felt all day was driving me crazy. I said, "Clearly, this rage crap has nothing to do with being bipolar. There's a physilogical cause brought on by trauma - PTSD. Do I treat it with somatic experiencing or EMDR? Something's gotta give."

We talked for awhile - earlier in the day, my shrink saw me and prescribed more Zyprexa and said I wasn't stable enough for EMDR. I won't get any stabler if I don't stop trashing my house. There's something so deep within me that just gets *triggered* by losing stuff - other people don't do this - I've done it forever and I'm sick of just loading on more meds.

So much anger today. So much rage. So much sadness that this shit STILL hasn't gone away.

I Want to Be Bigger.

2007-02-04T19:26:00.001-08:00

I'm sorry. I'm a bit of a mess, and when I'm a mess, I get self-centered and ridiculous. I am actually manic at the moment - have been all weekend, which is okay until I get agitated by something (which could be anything) but tonight it was that I went to the gym today and put my rings in my pocket of my pants and then tonight there was only one ring, and all the stuff that's been bugging me lately just came up. i was going to drive to Phoenix - I didn't go because I just didn't feel like I could justify leaving, with so many projects hanging in the air and my place is a mess, so I cleaned it, placed manic nose to the grindstone to make the fine grit of OCD (I am not OCD, were I OCD my place would never be a mess, but as a bipoloar I can occasionally manifest ALL of the mentally ill symptomologies, I can even be schizophrenic but I try not to be...)

I am better now - the ring is still missing and my office is a mess again, because all the piles of random shit that I stacked up on my counter got swept into the center of the room when I was overwhelmed by losing my ring. I kept telling myself it wasn't the ring, that the ring was just a catalyst for all the sad feelings I had all day, that I'm inadequate, that I'm not famous enough, that I'm really just a freaky freak with too much time spent on this stupid computer, banging out nonsense no one wants to read. People tell me I'm a good writer, I get paid for it sometimes too, but I am So Damn Caught Up in the locality in which I live, and really, Santa Fe is a closed circuit most of the fucking time, and I just think my words and stories and ideas belong in a bigger picture and yet I feel so Goddamn Stuck Here.

Sundays are the worst. Always have been, here in Fe. A hush descends over the city of St. Francis, and everyone is home, one presumes, praying or something. But I am a secular humanist, a second-generation hippie whose second coming came and went, or is yet to be within the arcane theological theorems of 2012. So I shiver and try to clean house, to make way for something new and it all just feels so futile, like i'm kidding myself and I start to think of ways to destroy everything around me. The laptop is like a loaded weapon in those moments, and yet I can feel it coming on and I am (mostly) powerless to stop it.

I hurt. No one is here. My floor is a mess (again.) I just wanted to make something perfect and it never works out.

Feeling Suicidal? Next time, just trash your house

2006-12-10T11:06:00.000-08:00

I got the call on Thursday - an artist I know was calling, and I picked up the phone, just having had coffee with another artist pal, and it made me giggle.

"Hey man, what's up?" said he.

"Surrounded by freakin' painters today," I said, hiding my phone beneath my steering as I rounded a corner onto Gaudalupe Street. "Painters everywhere," and I giggled again.

Anyway - this artist never calls and I had a feeling I knew why he was calling. We have a mutual friend (another freakin' artist) whose been really depressed lately.

"I wanted to talk to you about Michael," he said, and I knew it was coming but I just hoped I was wrong. I sucked in a breath.

"Yeah, how's he doing?"

"Well...he's in the hospital."

Fuck.

The details aren't too terribly gory but I'll spare them for you. The other artist and I talked - mostly about how he knew that Michael would want to be talking to me, and that he himself was really grateful that I'd been chatting with him lately about depression and meds and therapy because he was finally reaching a place where he wanted to get some help. I wanted to call him right away, but the friend on the phone said Michael was still in-patient and I should call Michael's wife in a couple of days.

I pulled over when we hang up. Fuck. That place is not so far away for me that I don't have a lot of empathy for people who head there. And I *know* depression like an old and unwelcome friend - but I also had to stop, because it's just so easy to slip into the whys, and why bothers that always accompany hearing that someone else just doesn't want to live anymore.

I put it out of my mind and got immediately back to what I'd been working on, and around towards the end of the day I noticed an unread message in my inbox from Michael, and I opened it. Turned out it was from Michael's wife, and it said, "Hey, this is Margie. Michael says he's going to get help now. Thank you for talking to him." It was dated three days before. Maaaaan.

Today, I made my call, to Michael's wife. I didn't really *want* to make the call - there are so many better things to do, you think to yourself, then offer advice or friendly words to the wife of a suicidal patient - but that logic fell apart in about thirty seconds and I dialed her number. Turned out Michael was already home on an outpatient program, and she put me on and we talked.

"So what did you hear?"
"Heard a little about your method," (and I'm not telling what it was) "and I just gotta say - most people use pills."
"Yeah, well, the body tends to vomit pills up," he said. "I wanted something more certain."
"Now that you mention it - most of us who've used pills weren't successful."

We laughed. We laughed the gallows humor of the failed suicide.

I didn't ask "why?" There is no reasonable answer and if you've been there, it's a terribly stupid question. I can only say that if you get to that place, it seems like the Only Good Idea there is. Thank goodness for meds, therapy, pills, exercise, sex - whatever you can use to chase that feeling away. Alcohol and drugs Are Not recommended, but we've used those too - however, if you're really In It, illicit medicines are just the freaking worst. Alcohol (even a *little) brings on this strange internal warmth that is very conducive to feeling convinced "they'll be sorry." Cocaine and amphetamines just make me think of more elaborate ways to die. Psychedelics make death seem groovy - a terrible deterent for the melodramatic amongst us.

I had a day planned of drawing - I'm a writer and I don't draw, but everytime I do it makes me think about art a little differently, makes me understand (perhaps) artists a little bit better in terms of their challenges. I have a book on drawing cartoon characters, and I had it all ready when I made the call. As Michael and I rang off with each other, talking of med taking and therapy and a couple visits a week to the gym, I settled into drawing a space man when I realized I wanted a cigarette. And I couldn't find them anywhere.

As I searched, I became more frantic - this is a long-standing symptom with me, which I'd hoped my diagnosis would make go away. Now they think maybe a new diagnosis (ADHD) and some Straterra will help. My strategy has been figuring out how not to lose things, but my cigarettes Had Just Disappeared. I began to panic - really panic, and swept surfaces and paced my house and threw things. The enormity of the sadness of Michael mirrored my own once upon a time, and all the issues I'm dealing with right now, work and learning, schmoozing and networking, getting known and getting calls again, confronting my illness and trying to keep it from running my life, all of it rose to the surface as I began to pick up plates -

for nothing is more satisfying in the whole wide world than smashing a fucking plate

- and the bees began to buzz in my head (and I actually hit myself a few times, an ancient coping mechanism) and I was certain that the elves that steal my stuff so I can lose my mind were laughing at me, mocking me, taunting me, and I threw more things, pulled the sheets off the bed frantically looking, wondering if it was really possible that I would ever be well, until eventually I just collapsed into a miserable heap on the couch, house askew, mind blank.

I had found my girlfriend's cigarettes in the melee and I lit one, and thought back to Michael. He had said, "I'm never going to watch TV again," and I remembered when I'd made that call, as a teenager - at least getting out of the house seemed to help - and I looked over at it. Behind the tv were my cigarettes. I hadn't been anywhere near the tv today, and yet, there they were. I could see them. I got up and got them, squeezing them in my hand.

I still have no idea how they got there. It was almost like I needed it, needed to feel the pain and panic and frustration and anxiety just enough to push everything to the floor and break a few plates. Sometimes my rage brings me great clarity...not this time. It just brought me enough mess around me to remember that the life I've built since the time I was depressed enough to want to die is worth cherishing - and worth continuing to clean up and make even better.

Go ahead. Smash a plate. It's a remarkable focus agent. And it gives you something to do afterwards, which is sweep up the pieces and start over.

BiPolars and Pro-CreationWould you want your mom to go off her meds to have you?

2006-12-01T08:42:00.000-08:00

(A guest contribution by Magdalen, queen of the Internet & world-champion BiPolar)

if my recent discussions with people about procreating are any
indication, many people would prefer that bipolars practice voluntary
eugenics and get our tortured but brilliant minds out of the gene
pool once and for all.

there are many reasons not to be a bipolar mom: having to go off
medications during pregnancy and breastfeeding; potentially being
overwhelmed by the same hormonal surges that sweep non-bipolar women
off their rockers and into severe depression after pregnancy; knowing
that mania can be triggered by sleep deprivation, and what is an
infant if not a charming bundle of sleep dep? even as the child gets
older, will an "unstable" parent -- though, hello, some of us
bipolars are far, far more stable, functional, and compassionate than
thousands of "normal" people out there -- be able to handle the
pressure, the exhaustion, the inability to crawl away and practice
whatever coping techniques she's developed over the years, because
she no longer has any time to herself? yet somehow, bipolar people
reproduce. we know this because here we are. lots and lots of us.

and then there is the issue of passing it on. greg says it is a
recessive gene that bounces a generation. anyone have a footnote on
that? is it cruel to possibly pass this on to someone, or is it cruel
to say that life is not worthwhile if accompanied by bipolar
disorder, and therefore bipolar disorder and its hosts should be
stamped out?

--magdalen

Getting Off SSI? Maybe...

2006-11-29T17:29:00.000-08:00

So it's been a kinda crazy week. When it rains, it pours. First I got accepted to a screenwriting program at the College of Santa Fe - a lifelong dream come true, certainly - and then I saw the price tag.

$13K just seemed like an awful lot of money to try and borrow - particularly when you really live on a fixed income from Social Security. Rules say someone *can* loan me the money, even if I can't actually repay it. In other words, the loans would live under my parent's names, and if I didn't make as a screenwriter, I could mow lawns for the rest of my life trying to pay them back.

They were into it. Despite my mostly miserable track record (ha!) they still believe in me. I should say my mom does - my dad does too, but he probably wouldn't have helped - he's got a lot on his plate, but maybe he might've. In any case...

As I was trying to figure that out, I was Offered a Job. A real job. 40 hours a week. With a salary. And benefits. Paid vacation. Insurance. A fancy title. And more or less a dream job - doing what I already do but for people with Budgets and Bottom Lines and Business Sense. For a gallery, writing and marketing and all that good junk. A gallery with 60 artists and an 8000 -plus mailing listing and scores of regular buyers. Name artists. People I'd get to meet and talk to about their work. Ho-boy.

I had to take it - I had less than a day to decide - the owners were taking off to Art Basel-Miami the next morning. I panicked - fled to the casino to play penny slots (one of my weirder not-so-coping techniques) but stopped half-way there, called them, and accepted the gig. Then went out for drinks with friends, celebrating, chasing the numb and the tingly away. Ate a fattening dinner of chicken fried steak and went out to some club.

Today I met with my psychiatrist and my therapist, nervously wondering aloud if I'm actually sane enough to work. The big big issue, of course, is the insurance. Can I hang on to Medicaid for awhile if I get off cash benefits? Better still, since my doctor doesn't take the company's insurance, can I hang on to Medicaid after that? Going to Social Security tomorrow to ask. But here's some reassuring gobbledy-gook I found on the Social Security website:

Extended Medicare Coverage. Section 202 extends the period of premium free Medicare Part A coverage and requires consumer protection for some individuals with Medigap coverage. Individuals receiving Social Security Disability Insurance who elect to work above threshold levels (substantial gainful activity) can maintain their Medicare coverage for eight and a half years after they return to work.

Wonder if that's the way it really works. I sure hope so.

Retire the Bouncing Blogger? Not Yet

2006-11-25T10:47:00.000-08:00

So, I had a weird but positive experience with this blog recently. I was busy schmoozing folks in a certain ogranization for work, when I got mail from the Admin. Assistant inside the company. He told me he'd google'd me and checked out some ALL of my blogs, including this one, and replied in more or less the following fashion:

"I think you're really brave to be upfront about your condition. No one knows but my shrink and I would be really scared if anyone at work knew. I don't know how they'd treat me or if they'd figure out ways to fire me. I've never talked to a fellow patient - do you think we could meet sometime and talk about meds and stuff?"

Absolutely, I replied, and we set a date, but it started me to thinking: should I really be as out there as I am with all this? After all, I'm a writer, which is fine if I just write fiction and hide in my little garret. But I write PR and marketing copy and all kinds of goofy stuff for companies that want CLEAN high-profiles, not messy crazy ones. As a client and friend recently pointed out, "your business is PR, so to a degree, you gotta be squeaky-clean yourself."

With everyone and their dog out there googling potential hires or scouring the Internet looking for people's posts with Deep Content, you'd think I'd wise up and stop telling people I'm a manic-depressive, live and global like I do.

But the way i figure it - it's just too damn late for me to hide. And besides, there are folks out there like that A.A., who find me and figure out that they're not the ONLY BiPolar kid who isn't drooling in a gutter somewhere. (Been there, but now *there's* a story I might not repeat too often.)

Free Meds are Cheaper than Jails

2006-11-01T13:51:00.000-08:00

So there's this law down in Albuquerque that has hit my radar but which I've also been avoiding - these types of things tend to make me mad enough to wonder if the meds ever worked, so I'm not thinking about the new law *too much*. The gist is this: it's now "illegal" for the mentally ill to not take their meds. Uh-huh. And I suppose what this means is that if you commit a crime on a med vacation, you can get charged with two crimes?

Who *are* these idiot lawmakers? (Mayor Chavez is the most grand-standing shit I've ever come in contact with,) but let's face it, he's not dumb enough to know that the reason that most people are OFF their meds for an extended period of time is because they can't AFFORD to buy them. So the city of Albuquerque ponied up some dough to make med compliance a possibility for Duke City crazies, right? Wrong again, pistolero. Compliance is your responsibility, financial and otherwise.

It's like they want to criminalize a *medical* condition. I hear the ACLU is suing, but jesus h. christ - the ignorance is just appalling. Are voters in the northeast heights sooo stupid and so mental health unaware that they think this is a just law? Chavez better hope so...

My Therapist Thinks I'm Paranoid

2006-10-11T20:46:00.000-07:00

I am, actually, a manic-depressive, so sometimes I am In Deep. I made myself wash dishes and keep apppointments today, which helped considerably. Then I went and talked to my therapist who assured me that it was perfectly alright for me to paranoid, since paranoia is WELL within my case history. It made me laugh. And then I said,

"So what if I'm paranoid? You tryin' to piss me off, bitch?"

And then I laughed again.

Great Moments in American Medicine

2006-06-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

So the other day, as I was standing on the porch of my favorite local coffee shop retelling the tale of my latest tragedy, all my patient-pals were gathered around as I told them one of the worst parts of it all was that I'd just picked up a two-week supply of Lexapro and they'd burned to a cinder on the dashboard of my car. A few tables away sat a man I hadn't seen around before, smoking Top and drinking coffee, hiding behind shades but still bearing the aura of a man whose seen the inside of a hospital psych ward more than once.

"Hey," he called out when I was finished with my story, "you really need some Lexapro? I got some in my van."

"Really? What size?" I said, stepping towards him.

"20mgs. I take 'em once a day," he said.

"Shit howdy," sez I, "that's a two-day bump for me."

Looking at him longer and introducing myself, I couldn't help but notice a silver-dollar-sized lump of derm-plaque in the center of his left arm. It looked like psoriasis, just like mine, only much more menacing.

"Do you have psoriasis?"

He looked down at his arm.

"Oh, that...no. I got bitten by a spider the other day and it just swole up on me."

A woman sitting at another table looked up and came over to examine the wound.

"Jesus - that's quite a bite for a spider. It musta been a brown recluse. Listen, you need to go to the hospital - that bite could easily get necrotic and you could lose use of the arm."

"Oh yeah?" he said, unconcerned almost in his voice. "Well, I went over to UNMH and those fuckers kept me waiting around for four fucking hours and I just got pissed off and left. What're they gonna give me for it?"

"Anti-biotics," she said. "Penicillin at least."

I reached into my bag. The previous week I'd come down with the strongest case of strep throat in memory and went to my pediatrician on a Saturday morning and had him cut me a 'script for pennies. Old fucker didn't even charge me he felt so sorry for me.

"Look what I got," I said. "The strep gone, but you can have these," I said handing him the bottle, wiht about five days supply left."

"Shit, man, that's cool - I think I can spot you even days dose on a straight-across trade."

As it turned out, he passed me five 20mg Lexapros - ten days supply for me. And for a little while at least, we both got to avoid the worst part about medicine in America - me, the beuracracy of the pharmacy, and the the long wait in the public hospital.

There But For the Grace of God...

2006-05-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

God Told Her to Sacrifice Her Kids

This is just so sad. I'm so lucky to have never heard such voices. You are too. Was she off-med or just without services? sigh...

Impractical Jokes for the Mentally Ill

2006-04-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

So...yesterday. Yesterday I posted soemthing about my mom, and she decided that it would be in her best interests (because it certainly wasn't in mine) to call 911 in Albuquerque and tell them I was suicidal. It was news to me, when seven or so cops, EMTs, and firemen assembled in front of my house to say hello.

I heard them knocking and thought it was a friend of mine - as a general rule, I rarely answer the door without knowing who's there, because I'm always a little afraid it might be the police, but I thought it was my friend, so I said, "Hold on a sec," and headed to the door before I realized that it was actually the fucking cops.

I walked away from the door. I knew it was too late, but I was interested to see what would happen next. My door was unlocked and they just opened it and I stepped towards the door - no need to create any additional unpleasantness by being uncooperative. Maybe if I was nice they'd just go away....

Did you know that *anyone* *anywhere* can call the police and tell them you're suicidal and then you have the burden of proof to show that you're not? I suppose it didn't help any that there was a broken cup on the floor that I'd thrown last night to attempt to alleviate some of my anger at my mom involving herself in my shit. The really ironic thing was that I was planning to tell her that I'd sign her stupid document if she agreed to go to therapy to talk about some of her control issues. The thought must have terrified her so much that she figured another Grand Controlling Gesture was really the best way to go.

Now I'll probably never sign it. She'll never sell her house. Or maybe she'll up the ante and move deeper into a Grand Controlling Strategy, you know, like tried to get me declared incompetent or some such shit. All I know is - don't ever do this to someone.

To begin with, it's embarrassing. In the mid-term, between the ride in the ambulance to the time you get around to discussing release, it's boring. I read old issues of the New Yorker in my hospital gown and called my Dad, my step-father, my girlfriend, my best friends including Gentry, Erik, and Danny Solis, to let them know what was happening. I fended off calls from a couple of clients, telling them I couldn't get to their projects at the moment, but that I'd (hopefully) call them in the morning.

Going to the hospital rarely means any greater help than a few milligrams of Adivan, which I took, finally, when the indignity of the situation was really leading me towards the "Crazy Man" outcome they were looking for. I actually hit myself in front of a psych-tech - a bad move, of course, and a behaviour that I had all but trained myself out of years ago - but the deal at the moment was that in order to release me, they said they wanted to talk to some people in my life who could vouch for my "sanity" (such as it is) and that would include the person who made the call, and That Just Irritated Me. I am, after all, 36 years old - why anyone should have to call My Crazy Mother for a psych evaluation struck me as the ultimate in absurdist medicine.

I have BEEN suicidal in the past, like, for real and shit. I had a girlfriend who'd just dial Suicide hotline and hand me the phone - within about ten minutes of crying and telling jokes to the volunteer on the other line, I'd remember some crazy project I was working on and go play with it, my dreams of shuffling off this mortal coil but a memory. But it's been *THREE* fucking years since I've been actively suicidal, and despite everything that's been pissing me off lately, suicide hasn't been an option. Sleeping too much because I can't deal with the theft of my items and the subsequent emotional aftermath - that's been an option. But not killing myself - and anyone, I think, who would make such a call about me or anyone else, should be subject to some kind of nuisance lawsuit - because claiming someone else is suicidal is no laughing matter.

One of the techs told me to get a lawyer. I'm thinking restraining order at this point - I bet some of you reading this might think, "She was only trying to help." Uh-huh. Sure. Wasting someone's afternoon and evening in a hospital is NOT helpful. Particularly when the only real problem situates itself in the person making the call.

tags: suicidal,
hospital, mentally ill,adivan,help

Triggered Again...

2006-03-18T22:36:00.000-08:00

tonight...trigger was getting an email from my building manager that i had a three-day eviction notice - I called the landlord and he told me he hadn't received rent. I lied and said I'd sent it, but the truth was that I hadn't been able to find my checks to write the rent check with, and since I've been on this (more or less successful) kick to not flip my shit over lost things, I decided not to flip and just forgot about it - but didn't write the check.

Tonight, I decided that the right thing to do was to drive from Santa Fe to Albuquerque to go to my apartment, get the checks, write one, hand it into the building manager with an apology, and come back to Santa Fe for my Sunday and Monday meetings. I remembered seeing my checks (because after all, who uses them anymore?) right after I got home from Mexico on a counter in the kitchen - and I also remembered putting them aside "somewhere" so I would remember them later.

I came home, couldn't find the checks, and went completely ballistic - a part of my ballistic side is a BIG healthy chunk of paranoia, which is always more or less in the background with most people, I'd imagine, but which rises front and center with me. The theme of this on was, "I can never do the right thing because really stupid obstacles are always in my way," and that dovetails nicely with all of the strange incidences of betrayal I've experienced in the past few years (predominantly with women.)

the interesting thing about that triggered time is this: while it's often *very* agitated and uncomfortable (literally feeling like the head is going to explode if the mouth cannot, for which telelphone is best for concentrated ranting) There is a surge of ...liquid electricity is the best description I can offer, which creates the ability to connect all these loose strands together into a cohesive totality. Because I'm fairly articulate, when it's going down, I come up with these pretty lucid stories, essay subjects, ideas, etc - for years, I would bet even money that most of my really good ideas to write about came during these moments.

Incidentally - I really feel like, in the past few years, as I've really tried (not my best, but better than before) to control my shit, my writing has suffered - of course, the stuff I do produce is often of superior quality - it's just not as inspired or self-righteous or crazy, (which, as anyone whose ever spent time on a listserv with me, can be quite entertaining.)

How I Feel Today:Special Podcast Enclosed!

2006-03-16T11:35:00.000-08:00

My Other Life is Near

This morning I woke up for the second day in a row feeling suicidal. It always seems so ludicrous to say that, but when it's real, it's real, and I had been doing so well up until now, it's seems like it's easily been a year since this happened. As I explained to one person, "Okay, I'm not really suicidal, because that means you want to kill youself. But I definitely don't want to live anymore."

It never lasts. It always goes away. My shrink tells me that. My best friends, Erik & Gentry, always remind me that it'll go away. Feeling suicidal, though, isn't like a black mood - it's like an actual sickness in and of itself, where you feel unfocused and pointless and unhappy and it just seems like staying alive is going to be so painful that you might as well off yourself, and if you can't pull that off, then just SLEEP somewhere. I've slept a bunch in the past two days because I can't imagine dealing with anything. And generally speaking, this crap hits when I have a LOT to do.

This morning, when I woke up and didn't want to live anymore, I was settling into that thought when I thought of my friend Gentry, who two years ago tomorrow lost one of his best friend's to suicide. I met that guy, DJ, once or twice, and saw him play a mean sax with Gentry's band The Night Watchmen. But I knew him more through Gentry's letters and phone calls about this fantastic collaborative relationship he had making music with him, and the suicide ripped him to shit. And I begrudgingly realized that as long as I had friends (so many friends) who care about me and like having me around even when I'm miserably sad, I couldn't off myself even if I thought it might make me feel better.

The last song DJ ever wrote is called "My Other Life" and was recorded by Gentry for his solo album "Home." After the funeral, the bereaved wife freaked and sued Gentry and he had to take it off the album. I had an early release and it's one of my favorite Gentry Bronson cuts. You can download it here - I've been listening to it all day.

suicide, suicidal, sadness, depression, sleeping

Back from Mexico & 2 Crises Await

2006-03-09T11:22:00.000-08:00

I spent my last twenty-four hours in Mexico leaving the country, first boarding a bus in Puerto Escondido at around 8 in the evening, accompanied by my Mexican community - Daniel from Montana (also bipolar, who provided me with lithium when I was out, briefly) and Gregory & Antonio from Canada, (neither mentally ill but fine folks to drink wine and eat fish with.)

People had told me to prepare for Mexican busses - that they were all sweltering hot and filled with farm animals and such. This is out of date information - these days, Mexican busses are so overloaded with air-conditioning that you could hang a side of beef in the bus I was on, so I had layered up with sweat-shirts, sweaters, long underwear, bluejeans - and I was still freakin' cold.

Bus to Mexico City took all night. Taxi to airport took a half an hour and cost almost half as much as the bus ride. I checked in, ditched my big bags and spent hours in the bar and food court area, drinking beer with stranded passangers from Scotland who'd missed a connecting flight. No worries. We took turns watching each other's bags to go pee and check out the McDonald's menu in Spanish.

My flight for Dallas left at 2pm. I arrived around 5pm, and somehow cleared customs, though not before some jarhead shit-for-brains told me my passport was "too dirty" for travel. Whatever the fuck. Here's the big kick in the pants on customs - you arrive in America, get your bags from a special baggage claim area, then go through a security checkpoint and re-check your bags. Fucking unreal. They unload the bags, we carry them through a minimal checkpoint, then we put them back in the check-in. Stupid stupid stupid. No wonder all the airlines are going bankrupt.

Another flight to Albuquerque and I'm home. One of my bags was damn near ripped apart in the zeal of Homeland Security to inspect it - it contained an ancient laptop and my leather jacket, but they just Had to Know what was inside. Sigh...I was greeted at the airport by my friend Courtney and we went home and I gave her a gift and we drank a little beer and that was that. I was home at last.

The next day I tried to normalize things - went to the golf course for a bucket of balls - I hit several over 225 yards, I'll have you know - and just puttered around my house. Day after that, it occurred to me that I actually couldn't remember the last time I'd taken my meds - and so I began to look through the debris for them. And I couldn't find the lithium. And I started to panic in a bad way.

Before I left for Mexico, I had filled a prescription for Lexapro at my local Walgreen's pharmacy, a script that was supposed to contain 15 units of 20mg Lexapro that I could split into 10s for 30-days worth of 10mg/day dosages. Instead, Walgreen's, in it's infinite wisdom had decided that I only needed 15 *10mg* tablets - a stupid mistake that's easily rectified when one is in-country, a deadly decision when the patient flies to Mexico without reading the label and checking the number of pills, which of course, I did not.

The Storms Have Subsided

2006-02-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Sorry I disappeared. The storms subsided. After counting my meds, I realized that I had been hoarding haphazardly - 5mg of Lex today, 10 tomorrow, 1 lithum in the morning, 1in the afternoon one, two each the next day...fuck around like that long enough and things begin to get out of control, but the changes are so subtle (at first) that you don´t really notice...

the funny thing about it (it´s not funny) is that you start doing it because you want to save yourself from running out and getting all messed up - and then you´re messed up. Funny, sad, not funny haha.

I was dreaming in my sadness that I was ALL ALONE in the world - not that no one would ever understand me, but that no one woul love me, that my parents were going to die and then no one would care at all, that someday I was going to be all alone AND crazy and that no one would like me enough to check in with me and make sure I was okay. I have been in that place before, and it´s damn near the scariest place on earth and it´s always a wonder I get out of it without attempting suicide.

This time around (synchronicity) I was damn near crying in this cafe near the beach when I saw this big strapping fellow named Daniel with his obscenely gorgeous girlfriend at another table. I waved, then walked over to say hello, more out of politeness. Daniel speaks fluent Spanish (in addition to be able to CLIMB palm trees and gather coconuts) and asked Como estas? I said, "You want the formal polite answer (Muy bien) or do you want the truth?" He said the polite answer would be fine and I said,¨"Muy bien,¨and went back to my table.

he was over in a minute, alone, wanting to know if we wanted to join them. Then I really burst into tears, because I knew that if he knew how rotten I felt inside he wouldn´t want me anywhere near him. I told him I was feeling awful and that I was a manic-depressive -

and he said,¨"Well, then you should definitely sit with us, because I´m bipolar too. Are you having trouble getting your meds here? Because SO AM I."

At this point, I am officially out of Lexapro, but (synchronicity) a girl I went to high school with fifteen years ago is HERE, in this little town on the west coast, and it turns out she´s a Lexapro taker too. She gave me a four-day supply because I *thought* my meds were incoming yesterday from the states - turns out the woman who was to bring them may not be here until next week. Daniel found out that the drugs we want are available here - Wellbutrin, Neurontin, Lexapro, Zyprexa - but that LITHIUM (the most benign substance unless it helps you) is considered a "controlled substance" in Mexico and requires a prescription - but he found a friendly doctor that will write us scripts for 200 pesos ($20) apiece.

I have been taking the proper meds since Monday, and was fine until last night I got stood up on a date with a Mexican girl and I felt the loneliness and fear begin to roll out again, and though I was well-medicated I drank a few Mezcals and beers to choke it down. This morning, at 8am my friend with the Lexapro came for our surfdate and I forgot to drop the pills before I left - I also forgot the keys to my house so when I got out of class later in the day, I couldn´t get in to take the Lithium, having taken the Lexapro in the morning at her place.

Am I boring you yet? Fuck. I long for the day when they can just hand you a patch or get you a NorPlant style shot once every five years for this shit...

The Truth Hurts

2006-01-29T21:29:00.000-08:00

For the past few days, my mind has been a whirl of shit, a creeping mania that has taken me through all the usual cycles including absurdly risky behaviour that resulted (of course) in a dangerous situation that the sane can only shake their heads in disbelief. It happens to us, you know, when existential need drives one off the edge of reasonable action into a nether-nether land of go, go, go, go, go until the need is satisfied.

For the past two days I have been as close to the edge as I ever want to be - it had been awhile since I felt FULLY suicidal, the kind of pain and hurt inside that makes you feel like you are simply dissolving, simply ceasing to be, so alone and lost and adrift that the Internet is a poor substitute for human contact. I broke free. I spoke my truth to a stranger, an AA rep right here in the middle of the tropics, and that glimmer of hope was the beginning of a crack in the darkness....

Soon after I discovered a fellow traveler who is also a patient, also struggling with the issue of finding 1st world drugs in a 3rd world Paradise. We went out as I shivered with my bottle of water, afraid to take any wrong turn that might lead to my heartbreak, and I spent most of today still shivering, desperate to leave this fantasy world, desperate to leap on a plane before the deep depressive obsession of loneliness and aloneness threatened to take me to the depths of hell.

Think I´m kidding? Think I´m being melodramatic? Guess again. The swirl and the swirl and the swirl and swirl continued all day as I struggled with a level of discomfort that I thought I´d left far behind...and tonight, there was a cut through to the clarity that I thought I´d never see again.

I´ve been skimping on meds. There, I said it. Before I left the states, I ordered a month´s worth and they gave me fifteen days of Lexapro. Why? I don´t know. I´ve been getting 15 20mgs pills for two years every month - just for shits and grins, Walgreen´s thought it would be a swell idea to give me 15 ***10mg*** tablets just before I got on a plane to Mexico. MOTHERFUCKERS. So instead of getting 10mg a day, I´ve been taking 5mg, or just skipping my doses altogether to make it last until Wednesday, when the new shipment arrives courtesy of a friend´s mother who happens to be flying into Puerto.

FUCK WALGREEN´S. Costco Pharmacy, here I come. I´ve heard they´re cheaper anyway, but that isn´t really the point now, is it? I just wanted to make it last...

Manic for Days in Mexico

2006-01-28T22:23:00.000-08:00

I´m damn near episodic and I just caught on today. this is a letter i just wrote to my mom...

Having fun...sorta.

Listen, I wanted to call you tonight but the telephones to the states are shut down for the night. I´m manic, and I´ve probably been this way for three or four days. I´m a little frightened (more than a little) but toay I was suicidal and I introduced myself to the english-speaking AA group leader because I didn´t know who else to talk to. Then I met a fellow traveler who is also bipolar and we spent the evening talking meds and episodes.

I´m scared because it´s taken me this long just to figure this place out and I´m sorta wanting to come home. I don´t want my illness to beat me again, but frankly, this has all been much harder than I thought it would be. Where to stay, what to eat, how to find and buy food, taxis, busses, making new friends - all of it exciting, but totally taxing.

I wanted a rustic little cabin with a lock on the door and a place to cook. Instead, I have a condo with satellite tv, which should make me happy but leaves me feeling rather cold and alienated. It´s so hard to say here which comes first - do I think and feel the way I do because everything is so new, or because I´m chemically altered? And I hate that question, as I always hate that question, but here it is just so much more extreme.

Maybe I shouldn´t travel alone. That´s what I´ve been thinking. It´s been just so difficult to figure everything out, and tonight I had the first real and honest conversations I´ve had since I arrived. It was very gratifying, and made me realize that while I just fucking love the beach (and I really do) I just might be too sick to travel without help.

It´s really absurd, when you think about, that a person with a history of mental illness would fly alone to a foreign country with the intention to stay two months without ever having been to the destination and not speaking the language. It´s a fairly bold move - some might call it utterly crazy. Right now, it really feels that way.

My friend the bipolar speaks totally fluent Spanish - and today, he had the same problem finding his meds - lithium, Seroquel, Wellbutrin, neurontin - in any of the local pharmacias. He might take a bus to Oaxaca City before he runs out, or get his parents to drop-ship his ´scripts - of course, that´s risky, because this is Mexico and stolen packages are not uncommon.

I don´t know...I find Mexico to be a really quite silly place. The investments in basic infrastructure in minimal at best - Zicatela Beach has the best amenities because the gringos who run the beach have American and Canadian sensibilities about how things should be. I constantly hear weird horror stories about the Mexican people and what they do (and don´t do) to each other, the environment, and what have you.

I have spent WAY too much money. I just hadn´t intended to be in a place where I wasn´t in control of basic expenditures. From where you are, it can´t make any sense, and it doesn´t, but it´s what has happened and I´m really sorry about it. I wanted a beach. I guess I wanted Mexico, but now I´m not so sure. It´s wild and raw and kinda scary, frankly.

Right now, stories are circulating about Dengue Flu. Google it. I ran into three Canadian tourists the other day whose friend got it and they were leaving the country. I thought they were being a bit alarmist but then last night on the southern coast in a town called Puerto Angel, I had a UK expat warn me about the issue. He´s staying, but he wanted to make sure I knew that people were pulling out of his town. Bizarre.

It´s just been So Much More than what I thought I was after, and the learning curve has been Way Too High. And yet, I just feel like I would feel defeated if I left. I just want to be safe and happy mostly, and right now, I´m not sure if I´ll really get that here.

love
gregoryp(tm)

Perhaps the Fight is On Again

2006-01-06T14:16:00.000-08:00

I just sent off the packet to Cheif Lennen and I feel loads better. The whole process has made me feel so alienated, alone, and paranoid and I'm glad it's done with. Soon I can think about other things, but Not. Quite. Yet.

I wonder who else sees it the way I do - that the abuse of police power is a microcosm of the macrocosm of the abuse of power in general. I had a phone call about it this morning wherein I was able to articulate it all fairly well. An abusive power - like, say, the Bush Administration - sends a message to every wannabe fascist toting a gun that it's "okay" to bend the rules to serve out your own personal vendettas.

If that were the extent of it, it might be fine and dandy. But given the supposed agenda I came back with to New Mexico with, what it really means is that stringency at the top of the line means more abuse all the way down the food chain, strangling initiatives of all kinds that might shake up the power structure. This results in a landscape littered with "alternative press" variants that do little more than comment on arts&entertainment offerings, and perhaps a handful of "deep thinkers" that earn their fame and bread issuing pronoia-style pronouncements on "the future" - rather than any meaningful analysis of the true state of the body politic.

And why not? It's what people pay for...

When I came back to New Mexico, I carried with me notes, sketches and vague outlines for a book that might someday be called "Crazy in America." It would have been about my decade-long journey through the American Psychiatric system and the US Health Care System, which would culminate in my acquisition of what IU call "the SSI grant" (welfare for crazies.)

Repeated arrests - each of them trivial yet inextricably linked to my diagnoses - in a New Mexico where mental illness isn't even *seen* (much less recgonized) has without a doubt created within me a level of deep paranoia that I am only beginning to recognize, an antagonism willfully perpetuated by an atagonistic state in order, one assumes, to lead the "criminal" towards more crime.

My moral compass is a good deal stronger than that, however. Since I left the city of Santa Fe (officially known as "the Adobe Disneyland,") I haven't been arrested once. I *do* wonder - is that a coincidence?

If I could only describe to you the multiple levels of PURE, DEEP FEAR that I experienced at the hands of Officer Gardner Finney and the Santa Fe Police Department (not to mention the county jail, but that's a whole other issue) then you might actually believe me when I tell you that such tyranny went a long way towards pushing to find Lighter Topics to pursue. Make no mistake - writing about the systemic abuse of the sick at the hands of a system that would rather *create* inmates than *treat* patients** fosters levels of deep fear within me that can make any distraction seem Much More Interesting. Repeatedly seeing other people (who really ought to know better) fail to see the connection between diagnostic states and arrests leaves me so disheartened, not just for me but for the millions of patients who are far less articulate than I am.

( ** and this is not hyperbole - most street crazies know that a handy way for a diagnoses or medication check is simply to get arrested and thrown in jail for awhile)

The best upshot of this latest incident with Gardner Finney may be that it is precisely the swift kick in the ass I needed to remind me I can't just play pretend and abandon my original pursuit. The story of the metally ill and their treatment in the United States is hardly a dull plodding tale of abuses without hope. It is a story rich in metaphor and meaning, rich with variable perceptive states both bleak and kaledioscopic and everywhere in between. And like psychedelic research and the Human Potential Movement which harbored it, understanding a bit more about it and the system that fails to deal with it properly may lead to new frontiers of research, not just for patient's immediate health needs but also towards the dismantling of power structures designed to keep such revelations in check.

It is no secret that I am an enemy of the state of statist power corruption. I had hoped that by keeping my head low and my body out of sight that the agents of the state would simply leave me alone. But the arrogance of the system is such that I need only show myself in public for the corruption to continue. You might have once counted on my silence - but not anymore. I stand marked no matter what I do - perhaps I can internalize that and use it to help me fight.

I make no promises - but it's on my list again.

Beverly Lennen, SFPD, manic-depressive, Gardner Finney, fascist, Santa Fe

Imagine a World Where Cops SOLVED Problems And Didn't Create New Ones

2006-01-05T18:40:00.000-08:00

Ever Wonder Why They're Called PIGS?

A year ago today, I was waiting to be arraigned on charges stemming from what I believe was a false/illegal arrest on the part of Santa Fe Police Department Officer Gardner Finney. The details of the case are voluminous and not worth re-iterating here - anyone who wants to know more can get in touch and I'll send you some .pdfs outlining the whole nasty business.

Suffice to say, I was arrested for the violation of a temporary restraining order, held in custody for five days, then released only when my family ponied up a $5000 CASH bond. To give you an idea of what an absurd amount that was for doing nothing more than writing e-mail (I'm not making this up) I'll have you know I was arrested in the previous year for domestic violence and my bond was just $500. $500 for hitting - $5000 for email. What a wonderful world - the pen truly is mightier than the sword!

I have on the table in front of me a packet of papers addressed to Santa Fe Chief of Police Beverly Lennen. It contains my personal history of the events in question, my dealings with Officer Gardner Finney before, during, and after the event in question, my mother's personal account, and a copy of the torts claim my attorney filed for illegal arrest and emotional distress that my attorney filed on January 19, 2005.

I have read interviews with Chief Lennen, soon to retire but a member of the SFPD for twenty-five years, and she is clear that she always wanted the force to not "be bogeymen," but to create a culture where the police could actually be trusted. Gardner Finney was not the first SFPD officer to violate that trust for me - that award goes to Officer Jeff Worth(less), aka "Thor," - so despite whatever claims to a kinder, gentler force, I'm not holding my breath that the Chief will respond to my queries in a timely a matter as I would like - or at all, for that matter. If this fails, I guess I'll just end up getting another civil rights attorney, or keep shaking the trees for the kind of CopWatch-style advocacy groups that I could take for granted in places in like Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the other cities in which I've lived. Not here in New Mexico, though - I wonder if that has anything to do with my Total Lack of rapsheet before arriving back in 2003 and all the arrests (4) I've racheted up since.

Protection'n'Advocacy tried their level best to turn me down, (proving once again that services for the mentally ill can only help those smart enough to leap through hoops, defeating the purpose of the existence of such groups in the first place.) They said, "We don't get involved in criminal cases." Well, I reasoned, what is a wrongful arrest complaint? Is it a criminal case, because someone was arrested? Or is it a civil case, because someone is filing a complaint?

In other words, if you're arrested for a crime and it's a false arrest, is that a) a criminal case because the cop says you're a criminal? or b) is it a civil case, because the cop is a prejudiced dickhead using his badge to settle a score over the fact that no one likes him, a short-dicked shithead who needs to be, say, educated a bit about the IMMORALITY of his judgement calls?

Immorality - that was the toughest part of it for me. Gardner Finney shows up at my house, and tells me he wants to talk about "the situation with Kate." For a moment there, I think I can almost see the humanity in his eyes, and though he's dressed in uniform, I acquiesce to speak with him because he is a friend of Kate's and his demeanor is one of a person who wants to maybe referee a little, and maybe iron out a hasty peace.

Of course - I couldn't have been more mistaken - this is why romantics like me DON'T BECOME COPS - and you can bet I'll never mistake "the cop on the beat" for a member of the human race. All he wanted was an admission of guilt so he could stick me in a cell. What a wonderful world, huh?

"Okay," I said, and sat down.
"What going on with this?"
"Gardner - it's just e-mail. And she has a lawyer and I have a lawyer and this'll all get worked out."

A variation of that ended up in my "probable cause" statement that Finney used to gather a shotgun warrant at 2am as I lay in a jail cell that night. He never wanted to solve a problem (silly me) - he just wanted to trap me in his cop-little world of lies and deceit, where everyone's a perpetrator and it's all hard-boiled and shit, like on TV.

This, Pig, is why we call you Pig - because you just aren't a human being anymore. You lie for your arrest quotas or to settle your personal vendettas - do you really wonder why no sensible person likes or trusts you, at all?

Santa Fe Police Department, Gardner Finney, Beverly Lennen, Santa Fe, Police Misconduct

Happy New Year Thoughts Will Blogs Really Replace the Mainstream Media?

2006-01-04T16:48:00.000-08:00

It's been a bit of time since my last post. Three days before Xmas, in fact, but there was just so much else to do for all of that. I got some cool stuff - most notably a small tripod and a card-reader for my trip to Mexico. I'll be gone for six weeks but I may get inspired to write something about being crazy, which a friend was kind enough to remind me was my One True Area of Expertise. He gets hypermedia - I get hyper. Some deal.

Appropos of nada: Last night, I flipped out for the first time in months. It had been building, but I thought I had things under control. And I guess I did, because really, it didn't feel "out of control." It was more like a controlled rage, one I stepped into in order to let off some steam, feel the adrenaline coursing, to get a handle on the jillion thoughts that tend to accompany these things.

I beat my DVD player to death. Just picked it up by its power cord and flailed it on the ground. It was really really satisfying, ultimately, because I bought the thing eighteen months ago from a woman who used to be a friend but just stabbed me in the back and dumped my friendship like it meant nothing to her. Now the player is in the dumpster, along with another memory of her, just one less thing that reminds me of what a Rude Fucking Cunt she was. Maybe I'll post a picture later...

There. That's better.

Onto news: Right before I stopped for the holiday-time, I was thinking a lot about the situation about Rigoberto Alpizar, in particular, the subject of the post for December 13th, wherein I "revealed" that the story was Absolutely Dead in the mainstream media - and thus, out of the blogosphere as well. The world moved on THAT FAST from a man shot down in cold blood on the tarmac of a Miami airport by a bunch of lame fed-pigs - all because they were smart enough to flood the media with tales of his "unpredictable" behaviour brought on by bipolar disorder.

And I had to think about the reality of this "media hobby." As a blogger, I'm really just an armchair commentator wherein I surf the Internet looking for links to link to and comment on. Or maybe I get to write about "My own weird life," or whatever. But when it comes to "breaking news" - if the mainstream press stops writing about the story, there's nothing to link to. Thus, interest in the story just *fucking* disappears. Poof. Overnight. And maybe there's a trickle of blogposts and then - Poof. No one cares. Who's Angelina Jolie fucking this week?

In the case of the Rigoberto Alpizar story, despite my utter lack of editorial credentials at the moment and my zero-based budget, I *do* know enough about what to do next and I *did* make a call to the Miami-Dade police department, wherein I was told that "all legitimate inquiries into the investigation" should be sent via company letterhead to XYZ-PDQ dickheaded spokesperson, blah-blah. I asked how I would go about being placed on whatever electronic press release mailing list they have down there and was told pretty much the same thing.

Am I going to follow up? No. Probably not. Maybe. Maybe in a few months I'll run across my own dumb blog post and go, "Hey, whatever happened to that...?" And I'll make another call. But the point is that most bloggers wouldn't even go that far. It's not because they're lame and dumb and boring - it's because the blogosphere relies on SPEED and FREQUENT POSTS even more than a daily newspaper. They need fresh churn on fresh stories or they'll DIE A FAST DEATH. If you don't believe me - check out the Number One blog on the Internet - those guys are great, but they're hardly doing more than checking their email for press releases from PR slacks with goofy products or weird ideas to pitch to them. Not a lot of investigation going on there. and that's hardly a replacement for mainstream news, no matter how slanted and sucky it is.

Though I've been thinking about this sad state of the "blog-revolution" for weeks, I was inspired to sit down and punch it out by my friend Mark Pesce's HyperPeople presentation, which I was watched/listened to last night on my new favorite form of web-crack - Google Video. ("GOOGLE IT!!!" - snicker.)

I'm linking to it because it's a pretty great and interesting way of summing up a lot of what's happening on the web these days - but the bit about the blogosphere is a little bit hard for me to swallow, a little bit too "Internet revolution, circa 1994," - because like a lot of the empty promises about how an Information Revolution was going to change the world as we know it, it fails to take into account that FREE MEDIA doesn't necessarily mean GOOD MEDIA. If boing-boing is any indication, it just means a lot more clutter and trivia (like this blog, for example) and a lot fewer answers about What the Fuck is Really Going On.

ps: Just remember, if you still don't believe me - Plamegate was not daily news (and it's almost played out by now too) until Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald brought an indictment against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - an event that ALL the mainstream news outlets covered in full technicolor glory. A lot of the post facto revelations that hit the news since then had been floating around the blogosphere for over two years, including (especially) the news that the "intelligence" was bogus. Remember the 10 Downing Street Memo? And no one cared - really cared - until they heard it on CNN.

Comments? (yes, I want them.)

Technorati Tags: rigoberto alpizar, rage, hyperpeople, blogs, blogosphere, blog revolution, mainstream news, plamegate

Maybe he never spoke at all...

2005-12-22T22:31:00.000-08:00

(Written in response to Tiffany's piece below, this just arrived from a fellow patient, also named Gregg - note the two Gs...)

Greg -- From what I understand (and what i've read up to this point in tyme),
the facts about the (effective) execution of this man attempting to evacuate
the airplane are:

(1) He not only never claimed he had a bomb, he never spoke at all, never uttered ANYTHING, prior to when he was assassinated.

(2) His wife was following him as he attempted to deplane, explaining he "was
ill."

(3) He and the wife were en route to Orlando, FL. His flight had originated from
Ecuador and arrived in Miami, where the couple got off the plane (w/all the others
originating from Ecuador) and checked thru customs. Cleared thru customs, he
and his wife boarded the last leg of the flight from Miami to Orlando. Apparently, it
was sometime before the passenger boarding door closed (not clear if all passengers
were on board, or some still boarding the plane) that this man wanted off the plane.

Note, that to get to this point in his travel from Ecuador he had to have passed
through passenger boarding inspection in Ecuador and in Miami (customs, etc.).
That conceivably he could have had a bomb in his carry-on bag(s) seems less than
remote. Ie., that air marshalls could imagine that he passed through security
(esp entering the US from another country) twice and managed to conceal a bomb
appears bizarre. And if they really suspected that this could be a possibility then what does that say for the security measures in force at airports?

(4) When he evacuated the plane into the jetway, he was wearing a moderately
sized fanny pack which prevented him lying protrate on his stomach as was alleged
he was ordered to do. Seemingly, this noncompliance to the satisfaction of
the air marshall(s) on top of him, was the reason offered for why he was then
murdered.

(5) One report I read claimed that he was shot 4 times, at least twice in the back, from very close range.

(6) Supposedly, up to 40% of the "air marshalls" that are "trained" (attack dog style)
are recruited from a recent pool of (now) unemployed (former) prison guards. Must be
for their communication and interpersonal skills no doubt developed on the job.

Feel free to pass this on to your blog-readers.

Happy Holidays

gregg

(5) One report I read claimed that he was shot 4 times, at least twice in the back, from very close range.

(6) Supposedly, up to 40% of the "air marshalls" that are "trained" (attack dog style)
are recruited from a recent pool of (now) unemployed (former) prison guards. Must be
for their communication and interpersonal skills no doubt developed on the job.

Feel free to pass this on to your blog-readers.

Happy Holidays

gregg

Rigoberto, Alpizar, Rigoberto Alpizar, shooting, Miami, marshals, HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION, bipolar, mentally ill

Disputing Misinformation: Mental Illness & Deadly Force

2005-12-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

Dear readers: today we are pleased to turn the blog over to guest blogger Tiffany Lee Brown, a Portland-based writer and performance artist whose on-going project "Candy Blue" deals with Brown's alter-ego and topics germane to bipolar disorder in particular and mentall illness in general. (we wrote about Candy Blue here.)

(This piece was written as a response to today's edition of NPR's "Talk of the Nation")

Today, Neal read aloud a letter from a man claiming to have
first-hand experience with mental illness, because his son has
bipolar disorder. That's called second-hand experience. I have
first-hand experience with it: I myself am bipolar; my writing and
performances about the condition have appeared in the Enteractive
Language Festival, Performance Works Northwest, and other venues.

I would really hate for your listeners to think that this man's
opinion (that it's okay for law enforcement to shoot the mentally
ill) and his experiences with his son (who refuses to take his meds),
are typical or somehow representative of mental illness in America.
Many of us take our meds, work alongside the rest of you, chat with
you in line at the grocery store, contribute greatly to our
communities. Most of us do not want to be murdered by law enforcement
officers, though we are four times more likely to have that happen to
us than are people not diagnosed with mental illnesses. It has now
been widely reported, by Time magazine and others, that the bipolar
man who was shot and killed by a Federal air marshal in Miami did
not, in fact, say he had a bomb. So why was he killed? Is it illegal
to have an anxiety attack and say you want to get off an airplane???

Our society is beginning to deal with mental health issues in a more
healthy way, but we need to lift the burden of shame and the legacy
of stigma currently beleaguering those of us with "serious" diagnoses
like bipolar disorder. We need to stop hiding our own mental
differences, and those of our families, in the closet, and start
accepting mental conditions. In recent years, thanks to Prozac and
the media storm following it, depression has become much less of a
stigmatized, hidden matter; so should other conditions.

Some tribal communities have celebrated bipolar states, elevating
manic-depressives to shaman status and giving them an active place in
society. While it's hard to imagine that happening in America, we
should at least attempt to come up with a better plan than murdering
the mentally ill when they happen to step out of line. Of course they
are going to say or do odd things: that's what mentally ill--you
know, CRAZY-- people *do.* That's how they get diagnosed in the first
place.

How ironic, too, that this man's letter was immediately followed by
one that discussed the thousands of gays gassed by Nazis under
Hitler. So, too, were thousands of mentally ill people, though prior
to Nazi Germany, the United States of America led the world in forced
sterilization (eugenics), trying to weed the mentally ill out of the
gene pool. Nice try, guys, but it looks like we're here to stay.
Rather than shooting us at airports, it might be more intelligent to
contemplate what positive evolutionary force mental illness serves in
the gene pool; obviously, it serves some purpose, or it would indeed
have been weeded out by now.

- Tiffany Lee Brown,
editor of 2 Girls Quarterly

Alpizar DISAPPEARS from National News Investigation Pending by Miami-Dade PD

2005-12-13T22:06:00.000-08:00

The headline about says it all. The last story on Alpizar (google news, time, washington post, google alerts) was on or about December the 10th. I've been combing for days and nothing.

What I found interesting was that the investigation isn't being done by the feds - even though the plane, one might assume, is "federal property" in that federal air marshals were involved in the incident. Instead, the investigation is being conducted by the local PD, in this case, Miami-Dade. I tried my level best to get through to anyone as a member of the press, but I really felt lost in the shuffle. Getting on an investigation's mailing list (sadly) isn't anything like subscribing to a blog - it's much more complicated.

(I had the same sad case happen with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald...sigh.) The blog press will never amount to much without the same access to that information as any other press person - in cases like this, when the mainstream STOPS reporting on an issue, what can we do really?

Maybe He Never Said "Bomb"Was the Death of Rigoberto Alpizar a War-Crime?

2005-12-11T14:28:00.000-08:00

I'm a little late posting on this topic. When I first heard about it on Friday night, I'd already had my own personal mental health crisis to deal with all day long. In the course of dealing with that, I'd done what I usually do, which is to touch base with a few select other patients for support. We're a loose network of folks that can often provide better advice for each other than our doctors, and I'm on the phone with mine rather constantly.

Gregg returned a call of mine from earlier in the day and I phoned him back as I was leaving Albuquerque with my meds securely in my pocket. We spoke of meds and their retail prices - I hope to do a piece about that later - and then the topic invariably turned to Rigoberto Alpizar.

Mr. Alpizar was the man shot by federal air marshals on Flight 924 from Medellin, Columbia to Miami last Wednesday. Initial reports held that Mr. Alpizar had announced that he had a bomb in his bag, though in fact he did not have a bomb. It was also widely reported that Mr. Alpizar was a manic-depressive off his medication and that his erroneous claim of having a bomb may have been due to an off-med induced anxiety attack. On the day the event occurred, I posted on it twice, here and here.

Given my natural propensity to believe any conspiracy theory that comes down the pike, I had to fight off the feelings that this was a completely unnecessary killing - I wasn't the only person on the Internet, however, who "had a funny feeling" that there was more to this than just a routine discharge of a weapon.

I fought back those feelings and accepted the initial reports, that a man had yelled "bomb" on a crowded airplare, certainly the relative equivalent of yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater, a breach of common etiquette that any child is aware is the wrong thing to do. Even though the experience would hit closer to home for me than most, I also forced myself to quickly accept the conventional wisdom that he was a manic-depressive off-med and that the moral of the story was not, "We're too fucking paranoid in a post-9-11 world," but was instead, "People need to take their meds."

The fault, in other words, would not be laid at the feet of the federal air marshals, however much I might abhor their supposed "necessity." As one news source put it, "this is a cut'n'dried case. Man says bomb and marshalls are trained to protect everyone else, not play conselor." The fault would lie with a patient who didn't take his meds, didn't take care of himself, and put himself at risk with his ill-timed statements. End of story. Not their fault.

As The Furious Seasons blog put it well:

Moral: take your meds. Find the right ones. Take them all the time. If you have very severe bipolar disorder, then be self-aware and know when you are getting psychotic and knock that shit down with an atypical antipsychotic. Be responsible for your own life. It will help the lives of others around you. And your own.

And I bought that, because I wanted to give that man who shot Mr. Alpizar a way out of what I imagined was terrible guilt and shame. Who was I to compound the tragedy by being among the voices demanding an inquiry into a situation that seemed so clear? That marshall is a trained killer without the power to negotiate or the skills to talk someone down. I had read that. It seemed reasonable to believe.

And so you can imagine my surprise, dismay and fear when Gregg told me over the phone that AirAmerica had been reporting all day long that Rigoberto Alpizar had never said he had a bomb.

I hung up the phone and began to cry. I pulled over to the side of the road and made myself stop. I knew nothing yet, hadn't seen a shred of confirmation that this was the case, but suddenly, I knew that my desire to believe that there was nothing "unusual" or incorrect about the scenario was dead-fucking-wrong no matter what the situation. An innocent man had been killed by a trigger-happy rent-a-cop weaned in a violent environment where everyone is the enemy. And they tried to pass it off as a necessity by saying he said he had a bomb - and he didn't even say it, at least according to my friend, and the links below.

The story of Rigoberto Alpizar is not a longer a story for the mental health community - it now belongs to everyone. Federal agents are like anyone else - they'll lie to protect the fact that they decided to kill someone for no justifiable reason. The war has finally come to home to roost, and it's probably safe to say that NO ONE is safe on an airplane from the forces they've placed there to protect us.

Time magazine: Thursday, December 8: Eyewitness Says, "I Never Heard the Word Bomb."

Brisbane Courier-Mail: Saturday, December 10: Bomb Claim Unravels

Taser exec asks why Marshals don't have Non-Lethal Choices

Department of Homeland Stupidity: December 8 - Shoe bomber alert prior to Miami Shooting

J-Ultra blog: December 10 - Rigoberto Alpizar Shooting

Technorati Tags: rigoberto alpizar,miami,air marshals,DHS, bipolar, meds, shooting, War Crimes, terrorist

Today Totally Sucked

2005-12-09T16:19:00.000-08:00

I flipped out. And not because I didn't TAKE my meds, but because I left them in another city. A bunch of things happened around this today that makes me really want to compose something larger, but I have to stop for now. Just suffice to say: "It's terribly ludicrously unfair that the only med-lines in this country are inside jails and prisons. A quarter of a billion dollars on a war Out There means a war on people In Here. And that sucks."

Jesus H. Christ...Mental Health Awareness Now!!!

2005-12-07T22:36:00.000-08:00

This just in from the blog called Bratt's Pak:

An analysis this year by the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit group in Virginia, found that mentally ill people were four times more likely than members of the general public to be killed by the police.

Having been harassed by the police in the past and had my fears and paranoia exploited to the hilt, as well as having spent a bit of time homeless because of my illness, it always seemed to me like cops love to hassle the crazies, but holy shit...

technorati tags:
mental illness, cops, bipolar, kill, shot, dead

Did they know he was crazy?

2005-12-07T16:42:00.000-08:00

An update on the shooting of the bipolar patient Rigoberto Alpizar at the Miami Airport:

This report from the Washington Post seems to suggest that federal air marshalls were informed by Alpizar's wife that he was mentally ill. Nevertheless, given the climate these days, maybe the issue that needs to be addressed at this point isn't the fact that a mentally ill person was shot but that we still have this hair-trigger fear-mentality at the airport, four years after 9/11. When is the paranoia going to end?

Miami, shooting, Rigoberto Alpizar, bomb, bipolar, air marshall,

A Moment of Silence, Please

2005-12-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

For Rigoberto Alpizar, the man killed today by a federal air marshall at the Miami airport. He claimed he had a bomb in his bag and ran off the plane. In fact, he was simply a bipolar patient off his medication. sigh....

Mary Gardner, a passenger aboard the Orlando-bound flight, told WTVJ-TV in Miami that the man ran down the aisle from the rear of the plane. "He was frantic, his arms flailing in the air," she said. She said a woman followed, shouting, "My husband! My husband!"

Gardner said she heard the woman say her husband was bipolar — a mental illness also known as manic-depression — and had not had his medication.

by John *Pain*, Associated Press writer

We may have more to say as this develops...

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Miami, shooting, Rigoberto Alpizar, bomb, bipolar, air marshall,

Today is Better

2005-12-04T21:00:00.000-08:00

For most of the past week, things have been wildly up and down...not "down" per se, because I just don't seem to get depressed anymore since I starting taking SSRIs...but not "up" in that wildly expansive way that makes some people say that "mania is an addiction." (Little Miss Tiffany Lee Brown said it to *me* first, whilst scolding me for my predilection for going off my meds.)

Manic dysphoria is actually what I've been experiencing, and I'm throwing it our there because I think it's a powerful phrase, one that certainly gave me insight into my condition once I heard it for the first time. All by itself, "dysphoria" says volumes about what you're going through when "mania" isn't any fun anymore.

Wikipedia has a so-so definition of dysphoria here, but while the Online Etymology Dictionary doesn't even list it as a word, it offers other information that allows us to piece together a working understanding.

dys - prefix meaning "bad, ill, abnormal," from Gk. dys- "bad, hard, unlucky,"

&

euphoria - 1729, a physician's term for "condition of feeling healthy and comfortable (especially when sick)," from Gk. euphoria

Like the wikipedia, this definition seems to imply that dysphoria is the *opposite* of euphoria - but that's a mistaken identity...if that were the case, you'd just *feel bad*, why, it'd be just like depression and you'd been damn sure you'd know what to do. But manic dysphoria just isn't that simple. Manic dysphoria is a kind of agitation that feels quite a lot like manic euphoria - except that at any fucking moment, you can turn into a raging raging bitch and start crying hysterically if something doesn't go your way. Oh - and did I mention the anxiety and the edginess, kinda of like being coked up all the fucking time?

Here's another interesting thing about the word "dysphoria" - it is used as a follow-up to the word "gender" when describing someone who doesn't exactly feel quite right in the gender they were born with. I personally have been known to feel "gender dysphoric" - particularly during a Seasonal Affective Disorder induced bout of "manic dysphoria." Does anyone else have any thoughts on whether these two states of dysphoria have any relation to each other beyond using the same word to describe them?

Have you ever felt like you were the opposite (or perhaps even a third) gender when you are manic dysphoric? I'd love to hear from you.

dysphoria,
mania,
gender,
manic dysphoria,
gender dysphoria

Candy Blue

2005-12-03T22:38:00.000-08:00

This blog was partially inspired by Tiffany Lee Brown, a performance artist, singer, writer, editor and all-around cool chick and friend from Portland, Oregon. I think I also get to say that she's a *fellow patient* - I think we figured out our affliction(s) when we met (it was a worlds collide kinda situation...)

A few days ago, I asked her if she'd do a biploar blog with me - but she's already planning one around her bipolar performance art project Candy Blue.

Naming her "altered" self, Brown will explore many aspects of the bipolar experience in this ongoing project, which will include a Candy Blue blog of its very own. As soon as it's up, I promise to link to it.

Cross-Lateral Text-Based Suicide Prevention

2005-12-03T21:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.inspire.org.au

I just received a telephone call from a friend in Australia, who wanted to tell me all about this new service over there that may come here soon too. It's called Inspire, and at the moment, all I can tell you is what I think it does - or should do, based on what I get of it.

Ever wanted to kill yourself? I know I have, and for years I simply had the Suicide Hotline number memorized and I would call them, just to check in before I checked out. What Inspire plans to do is figure out a way to build virtual communities around the issue of suicide - perhaps your own personal cohort of would-be suicides whom you'd keep from pulling the trigger - only to find them pulling you back from the edge as well.

The beauty of Inspire is two-fold: 1) it's geared towards young people, who in Australia as well as in the United States have staggeringly high rates of self-destruction, and 2) it's virtual, which might just mean you could only access it via the web - but if I had my way, you'd be able to contact your suicide anti-pact cohort via your mobile. A would-be suicidal teen could text a quick message of down-ness while in the lavoratory - or tap-text feel-good affirmations to a depressed buddy in class. You could even stand on the soccer field and file a voice-rant over the mobile - which would then be converted to MP3 and available for everyone else to hear, both as an alarm that you were hurting - and as a reminder that *everyone* sometimes doesn't want to be here anymore.

Introduction

2005-12-03T20:40:00.000-08:00

I'll make this brief - for the past weeks, I've been cycling back and forth like a yo-yo - not so much "up'n'down" in the classis understanding of bipolar disorder, but more along the lines of "somewhat stable - then completely unstable." I'm not off-med. I'm actually on lithium (1200 mg daily) and lexapro (10mg daily) and this dosage generally works perfectly well.

I'm hoping to use this space to talk about WHY this generally works well, WHY it's not working well now, and to just generally use this space as a place to talk about meds, doctors, insurance issues, and how often I call up friends to talk about issues like: benzodiazapemes, colonopin, mood stabilizers, tranquilizers, and anti-psychotics. I think I've needed a place like this for a long long time, but other than my notebooks (and yes, I have piles of them) I haven't been able to put this out there. Now I will.

Here are a few of the things I'm hoping for:

1) I hope I don't write in here all the time.
This was inspired by a post about my episodic condition in my regular blog a couple of days ago, when I was convinced (paranoid and afraid) that friends were worried about me on the other side of the country and the world. (turned out not to be the case, but I felt like I needed to reassure them.) In addition to being bipolar, I also have a real live life where I do lots of other things - when I'm not episodic, I have a fairly full life, though it doesn't always stay that way.

2) I hope that I have guests - either writers or sources or talkers on podcasts.
Bipolar is getting to be a fairly common diagnosis, I hear - and I have a fairly wide circle of friends and acquaintances who know exactly what a modd stabilizer is and what they think of theirs. In fact, a story in The New York Times from a couple of weeks ago suggests that all us nut-cases are just as likely to find out about new meds from friends

3) I hope that I can say something that will bring clarity about my condition - at least to me and maybe to others as well.
It's been eleven years since I first walked into a psychiatrist's office and said, "I have unbelievable episodes of rage over practically nothing, followed by three or four days of the deepest possible depression. Could I have PTSD or repressed memories from childhood sexual abuse?" Those were just two possibilities of the dozens I've examined in the past decade. I've tried all kinds of meds, lived on the streets, spent time in hospitals and half-way houses, and seen up-close and personal why we need mental health courts.

Maybe I can give the rest of you some clarity to that as well.