Forced Psychiatry on the NHS 5,6,7&8
I didn't have wifi for ages, so this combines a few articles. They are more of a continuation of the saga, which I could turn into a book. "Forced Psychiatry on the NHS, an anecdotal account of life on a section 3".
Forced Psychiatry on the NHS 5
Today (Tuesday, 16th May 2017) I was released from Rowanwood PICU and transferred to Kentmere Ward, Westmoreland General Hospital, Kendal.
This morning I was actually allowed off-site leave to go to my Nationwide bank in Carlisle city centre to get some money out and then get a haircut, seven weeks after first wanting to do so, so my hair missed a complete cycle of a haircut and had gone about thirteen weeks without being cut. I also had the tremendous privilege of being allowed to go to Asda and buy some food myself for the first time since Lent started. At least being locked in a loony bin is economical in terms of my personal finances as there is very little opportunity to spend my own money, even though it is costing the tax-payer ￡1000 a day.
When I got back to the ward I found out that there was a bed free on Kentmere ward, so I accepted that offer and changed plans accordingly.
I had had this option a month ago, but hadn't fancied the dormitory arrangement of the ward. I didn't really have any choice this time as going to an acute ward seems the only way they were going to let me leave Rowanwood. Providence was on my side, and it just so happened that when I got to Kentmere, after an uneventful, but rapid journey down the M6, the only single bedroom on the ward became free this afternoon and so I could take it. It has a sink of sorts, and lacks a lavatory or a shower, but having my own side room is a big bonus over the dormitory, which I would have struggled to cope with, I think.
This situation gave me an idea for a new concept of 'Minimal Optimalism', which I am sure won't be original, but seems an idea worth developing, along with Christian Anarcho-Primitivism, and Re-Tribalisation – all topics largely irrelevant to this particular post. Anyone silly enough to read these posts of mine on LinkedIn will realise that I am just brain-dumping ideas and thoughts fairly randomly and they will get heavily edited and mostly deleted at some point in the future!! Hopefully there will be some good points and worthwhile ideas as well, and maybe something original once in a while, to distil out later on. The more interesting stuff is at the end of a post, so you could always read it backwards!
This Kentmere Ward, despite it's need for a thorough revamp, is small and friendly and has quite a different atmosphere to Rowanwood. It has just twelve patients and is mixed with an equal split of genders and most patients are just mildly depressed or suffering from anxiety and in need of a break from their home circumstances, rather than violent and totally psycho as at Rowanwood. I am still not sure why I was there – they still wouldn't give me a reason why I was sectioned, after nearly two months.
Six of us, four patients and two staff just had a pleasant time playing Uno, seven rounds. One lad won three rounds and although I didn't win a single round, I had the lowest overall score by a long shot, so I was quite pleased with that. Tomorrow I'll see what the activities room has to offer. (Not much!) I'd still rather just go home and get on with my own things. I will, however, miss having servants to do all my cooking and cleaning and bed-making!
This Kentmere ward is a good example of a hospital environment which would be ten times better for the patients if it had triple the budget and was set in a small, modern, country estate with a dozen en-suite bedrooms, plus a kitchen and social areas etc., and a nice garden and park surroundings. I suppose this would cost about ￡4million or so to set up, never mind run. The same sort of set up would work for most long term hospital admissions or chemotherapy units etc. I guess you get what you pay for, and no-one is going to put me in a private spa in Switzerland, which would be more to my tastes! Maybe that could be my next research project!
I don't have wifi yet as I have to verify the login procedure by accessing my yahoo account, which I can't do without wifi in order to get into my yahoo account, so I am stuck in a cycle of needing to access wifi in order to access wifi. . . . . . . Hopefully, I'll be allowed leave to go to the town library and access it there in a few days, otherwise this post will just get longer and longer. . . . . .
Wednesday, 17th May 2017. The food here is quite good. It is cooked on site, so is fresher and tastes better than the Wiltshire Farm Foods/Appetito stuff I've been used to at Rowanwood. As usual, there is a lot of food wastage which galls when I am used to being habitually frugal with resources. Otherwise there isn't much to do. I have a limited degree of escorted ground leave, which is fairly boring, just walking around the peripheral road of the hospital grounds and car parks, but it is still fresh air and a little bit of exercise. It will be nice to do a few miles walking with some views of and from the fells. You don't really appreciate these things until you are denied them.
The only worthwhile practical thing I did today (or even this week!) was to catch up on some laundry and ironing, otherwise I just spent nearly the whole afternoon in bed trying to recover from a nights disordered sleep. Some stupid night nurse shone a torch in my face to see if I was asleep, a bit like a communist interrogation lamp. I usually find that I spend most of the day recovering from a nights 'sleep'.
In the absence of wifi, I've been reading various articles I've downloaded in the recent past. The current topic of interest is 'Christian Anarchism', which seems such an oxymoron that it caught my attention. There will be scope for some posts on this subject, I am sure. There is plenty of room in the subject for new voices, and it seems to provide a good vehicle for debating various conflicts in the world, and for interpreting the clash between the 'power-less' and the 'power-full'. It could also first and foremost provide a set of practices to deal with a lot of modern issues. Jacques Ellul makes some good points in his 'Anarchism and Christianity', Katallagate, 1980, such as: 'there is no fixed Christian position on political power'. However, even statists and monarchists are under threat from the impending corporate 'New World Order' takeover, so maybe even former imperialists (i.e., those who would like to see an Emperor return and a reinstatement of transnational sovereignty) will have to become anarchists in the interim! It seems to me that anarchism by itself cannot be sustained for very long, but is a useful tool to invoke change.
I had a brief chat with the ward doctor, Dr. Fielding, this evening, but he seemed too exhausted to make any sensible responses. He seemed to be mainly trying to establish whether I felt detained against my will, which I thought was pretty obvious after seven weeks internment on a section 3. I guess I will have to earn my right to outside access, at the moment it is only 15 minutes escorted ground leave twice a day. I really don't see why I couldn't have some escorted home leave to check my house out and change my supply of clothes etc., and listen to my favourite Segovia vinyl lp.
Forced Psychiatry on the NHS 6
Thursday, 18th May 2017. Another night of disturbed, uncomfortable, sleep. In life in general, poor sleep is my main problem, and if I could sleep well then I would probably be dangerous as I would then actually get loads of stuff done! I only tend to get 'ill' when I've gone more than three or four nights without any sleep at all. It does, however, make for some interesting thought processes, and I find I seem to end up in a curious and enjoyable sort of state where I am dreaming when I am awake. . . .
It would be an interesting experiment to try living in a well-stocked cave in either a desert or forest environment where I was a few hundred miles away from civilisation and could get some genuine peace and quiet, and go totally off-grid. It was quite pleasant when that volcano went off in Iceland a few years ago – the lack of air traffic over Sedbergh was distinctly noticeable. No contrails for a week was a delight, as was the lack of vibrations from the planes flying overhead to New York etc. I'll look forward to when it's big sister goes off with ten times the force, and stops European air traffic for a few months. Oops, the geo-anarchist is coming out in me! [Geo-anarchy: Hoping that natural geological forces will combine together to put an end to Western Civilisation.]
Unfortunately, as G.B. Shaw said, to live the simple life you have to be a millionaire first. If that was true then, then nowadays you probably need a few billion quid to really escape reality, plus an army of people to maintain supplies and defend against paparazzi etc., and you are still locked into civilisation.
Actually, Rowanwood PICU, when I was dodging the medication, was a pretty close approximation to escaping civilisation and I got loads of work done in a three week interval, editing my story, 'The Adventures of Gura'. Unfortunately a Haldol depot injection of 50mg of Haloperidol works wonders to stop original creativity, and artistic insight. Sleep is now quite intermittent and dreams on Haldol are really boring and repetitive! It also makes me very lethargic and it is difficult to do any stretching exercises. It is also hard to spell for some reason, so a lot of correcting is required, but there is nothing else to do, so I might as well write. I think I can still write, because until recently, for me, writing as an activity has been more or less dormant since university and doesn't seem so affected by the medication as current 'active' processes. It would also be interesting to have another PET scan and see if there were any changes since 1999 when I had one before at Guy's. . . I bet my reptilian cortex has grown bigger. . .
Really, the way things are set up in NHS mental hospitals is just about the opposite to what is really needed from a patients perspective (apart from the gorgeous student nurses)! I think there was some merit in the old style of mental hospital where it was more of a self sufficient community, and patients all had a vital role to play and even the most far gone person could feel valued. The main problem with the current protocol is that there is nothing worthwhile at all for patients to do. By restricting patient freedom and activity it is totally counter-productive to getting people 'well'. I also think that the spiritual component of mental health issues is totally under-estimated, but then western psychiatry is fundamentally atheistic and so to suggest that mental health could be defined in terms of spiritual oppression or possession would be utterly abhorrent to most doctors, and probably most patients too. It seems to me, from my experience of a lifetime of bad medical advice, that it is the doctor's who are the primary oppressors.
Most people don't feel valued today. Lots of people can't quite cope with the idiotic arrangements of modern culture, with it's relentless, shell-shocking pace of change and chronic waste of resources, and utter trivialisation of human intellectual and emotional capacity. This of course, is a deliberate arrangement, so that most people are kept too busy earning a living and keeping their families together to pay any real attention to the direction in which our 'civilisation' is going, or to have enough time or money to do anything about it.
It would be interesting to do a statistical analysis of people with 'mental health' problems and see how many of them are single or unemployed or on low incomes. If many were, is this a cause or effect? I.e., does poor mental health contribute to a reduced earning capacity, or does a low income contribute to poor mental health? It would also be interesting to see how much family history and genetics played a part. The work has probably been done, but it would also be worth correlating mental health issues with personality types. For instance, are certain Myers-Briggs categories linked with any particular 'mental' illnesses? Correlation doesn't imply causality, but it is a good starting point to see if any one thing has anything at all to do with any other thing.
Maybe it is the 'normal' people who are so dull and insensitive and un-imaginative that they are quite happy to conform and just go with the flow, who are more in need of 'treatment'. 'Normal' is being defined too narrowly, by an increasingly small sector of the population. Even Hitler didn't kill 'Manic-Depressives' as they were numbered among his best generals. Without 'Schizophrenics', we would have no poetry. What would Salvador Dali's art have been like if he had been on Olanzapine? How much would Alexander the Great or Winston Churchill or T.E Lawrence have achieved if they had been on Lithium carbonate or Haloperidol? Nothing at all, is the short answer.
These 'mentally-ill' people, who now number a quarter of our population, are merely the canaries in the coal mine, 'expiring' in large numbers, with no-one really paying attention. What will we do in twenty odd years time if (or when) half the population has a so called 'mental-health' problem? As governments and internet servers increase their control over people's lives with increased surveillance etc., these issues will only get worse. We don't yet have to deal with forced implants of tracking microchips; we are just being softened up by wearing Fitbit trackers and Smart watches voluntarily. How about a microchip in your wrist that activated the banking power of your smart watch and smart phone? You could then just go shopping and simply walk out of the shop with your stuff, and the RFID chips in everything would be assigned to your account and billed in due course. You wouldn't be allowed to buy anything without it. Oops, sorry, that is designing the mark of the beast! It's time to buy a portable GPS jammer. Advertising is a big offender and is becoming increasingly intrusive. Social media is also a primary contributor to poor mental health, especially among the young, as people are now able to compare themselves (falsely) with a large number of others, who hide behind a make-believe avatar and a highly edited personal profile.
[HaHaHA, myself included – Bill Gates earns more in 15 seconds than I have ever actually earned in a whole year! I haven't actually earned a single pound for well over a year, not since 4/2/2016! (However, I've boosted GDP by well over ￡125k. It's a game I'm playing – how much can I boost GDP without earning anything at all, the game is over next time I earn a pound or more.) It wasn't my Ferrari 458 Spider in my profile photo! Yet. I just drive an early ML320, that is nearly old enough to vote! I can hardly afford to fire it up more than once in a while! Huge fun, even though it doesn't quite do 20mpg.]
A lot of people who 'can't quite cope' today would have had far fewer problems in the past, especially the distant past, when communities were more close knit and income requirements were generally lower. This generated it's own issues, but people seemed to have been more resilient in the past, mainly because they had to be – it was sink or swim. Obviously, there will always be people who are sufficiently 'ill' to be a danger to themselves and their communities, or at the very least an 'inconvenience' to their relations. This latter factor helped to keep the old style mental hospitals filled to the brim. A lot of folk who are no longer in a mental hospital are living very diminished lives in the community, often isolated and impoverished, and scarcely able to look after themselves, or who are perhaps, even homeless or in prison.
Such people would have found a place in society in the old days of service. Fairly ordinary people could, once upon a time (a hundred odd years ago) afford a housekeeper or maid and larger households had abundant staff. Aka 'Downton Abbey'. In reality though, domestic staff and their employers were much more distant in their relations, but country houses still provided a lot of work and gainful employment. Service took care of seven or eight per cent of the population, a percentage that is now largely unemployed. The argument could also be extended further back in time to suggest, provocatively, that the sector of the population that were once slaves are now homeless and destitute, and the sector of the population that was in service is now unemployed.
Which is better, to be a servant or slave with a fulfilling role in life, or to be 'free' but unemployed or destitute? I guess a good old fashioned hefty private income is the best option all round. . . One of my mottos is 'Live free, work free', and my best work has always been done for free, but that is true of all fine artist's work throughout history. The finest work was never paid for. It was given. In examples such as the building of cathedrals, the best work was done gratis and out of sight!
How about some sort of workfare arrangement, where domestic assistance was tax-deductible and slightly subsidised by the DWP if the worker had been unemployed for more than three months? It would have been better if the manufacturing industries had been slightly subsidised by the government too, with apprentices 'paid' what they might otherwise have received in benefits. A couple of hundred years ago, apprentices paid to do the apprenticeship. The popular TV show, 'The Apprentice' wouldn't have many candidates if the prize was to pay Alan Sugar ￡100,000 a year for the privilege of working for him! If I had it, I'd pay that to learn how to work from someone like him.
I digress. Back to 'mental' healthcare.
Brains are made from food, so it makes sense that if your brain chemistry is out of balance it can be restored with food and naturally occurring compounds, whereas blocking receptors with prescribed brain damaging poisons is only going to delay the brain's own mechanisms from doing their jobs. Most people with severe mental health issues smoke and drink and a lot have done street drugs like cannabis and eaten rubbish diets. They just need detoxing, if it isn't too late. It takes seven years for the body to replace all of it's cells, so a long term detox and rebuild program should work for most people.
The same applies to people in prisons, although there, poor education and the lack of educational achievement plays a big part, together with a lack of moral framework and personal discipline. It is a silly false economy that prison food is so poor, (except for Muslims) when the behavioural problems are partly due to a lifetime of poor nutrition and high levels of lead etc. If prisoners were given vitamins and good food and detoxed of heavy metals their behaviour would improve, especially among the young. I bet the prison population could be halved over a twenty year period by tripling the budget to primary schools and doubling the budget to secondary schools. At the same time, scholarships and grants could be re-introduced for universities, so that the very brightest students could study free and in comfort, whereas those who lacked ability could only go to university if they were rich and sporty, like used to be the case. To provide an additional incentive for not going to prison, state pension amounts could be reduced to a basic minimum. Conversely, if you have worked and paid taxes all your life and have never been in prison or on benefits then you should get a much higher pension than if you had spent many years on the dole or in jail.
My personal experiences of naturopathic, orthomolecular, nutritional therapy showed that it made a huge difference to me for a fairly modest cost. The NHS would quite happily supply me with ￡500 to ￡2000 worth of toxi-molecular pharmaceuticals a year, but not a few hundred pounds worth of high quality ortho-molecular Solgar vitamins and minerals. It is the total denial of vitamin supplements while I am in hospital that cheeses me off the most, as lack of proper diet and nutrititional input is really wearing me down, together with lack of sound sleep.
My own private nutritional therapy regime had at it's peak expenditure only cost me about ￡10 a day, including day to day food, and a sauna twice a week, and that had kept me out of the hands of the NHS for a dozen years until debt incurred by several bad jobs meant I had to cut back on things like food too much. Hopefully I can, one day soon, gradually get back into this old regime and detox from my time in hospital. I also need to lose 14kg in weight. . . Unfortunately, I bet I end up on a community treatment order and I will be forced to take the depot injections even though they stop me sleeping properly and totally trash me. I guess the only way forward will be to emigrate outside of the jurisdiction of the NHS!
Forced Psychiatry on the NHS 7
Friday 19th May 2017. Still no wifi connection, which is a bit tedious. I was very tired and un-motivated this morning so after breakfast I went back to bed for a couple of hours until 11am. Reading seems hard work on Haloperidol, and it is difficult to read even my Bible or to pray. Maybe that is the purpose of these anti-psychotic drugs – to stop anyone being spiritual. I've commented before about the anomalously high percentage of Christians on the wards. Maybe mental hospitals are the thin end of the wedge of the Tribulation! I am sure drugs like Olanzapine are designed with an anti-spiritual function in mind and are intended to stop you believing in anything at all, even yourself.
Loss of self confidence is a big problem with most 'mental health' conditions, and once you have been 'labelled' it is very difficult to get 'un-labelled'.
There isn't quite as much stigma attached to a mental health 'label' as there used to be in the UK, or as there still is in other countries like Russia or other Asian countries, but there is still some, especially in the work place.
It would be an interesting but unethical experiment to randomly section people off the street, without telling them they are being sectioned, and give them the full works of five or six people holding them down and giving them brutally forced injections of 5mg Haloperidol in their bare backside and locking them in seclusion for thirty six hours without lavatory facilities, and keeping them locked up on a section 2 for another week before they find out they are being sectioned. Care could be taken to not let them know how they can appeal – you only find out about solicitors like O'Donnells of Preston from other patients. It would then be interesting to see how many victims display sufficient symptoms of mental distress to justify keeping them on a section. Most would, and so they could be kept on a section 2 for a few more weeks. If they objected to taking forced medication they could be put on a section 3 for six months to teach them a lesson. This would help to keep the mental hospitals full and thus on maximum income.
My point is, is that the initial process of being sectioned generates the symptoms which are used to justify sectioning the person. The doctors have a violent medication-only approach and are not willing to contemplate any other option at all.
In my case, the doctors seem to resent my almost total lack of involvement with the NHS for a dozen years and the fact that I haven't been earning them any money at all. This was a deliberate strategy on my part to see how far I could go in reducing my patient financial profile to zero. This is an interesting term I came across a long while ago, and it refers to the amount of profit to be made out of an illness without the patient either dying or getting cured. Rather cynically, I realised that this model of profit-orientated treatment underlies the primary philosophy of western medicine over the last century or so.
Pharmaceutical drugs are researched and developed to treat symptoms but almost no attempt is made to address causes of various illness and diseases, or to effect a cure that doesn't need continuing treatment. There would be no profit at all in a cure for breast cancer, for example, that only cost two or three pence a week to prevent the disease occurring, when surgery and chemotherapy are so profitable (i.e. expensive). Oops, sorry, that 'cure' is called Iodine. One drop of Lugol's iodine a day is all you need to stop a whole host of illnesses like cancer. Most people in the world are chronically iodine deficient, except for traditional Japanese eaters of sea vegetables, who don't mind the sea weed being radioactive after Fukashima. Iodine deficiency is a taboo subject in western medicine, as it is so much more profitable to treat symptoms without attempting a cure (of anything).
While I am on a rant, I could be more provocative and suggest that most of the general health work done by the NHS is generated by dentists filling patients mouths with mercury amalgam fillings, or from injecting people with di-ethyl mercury (Thimerosal - a 1930's vaccine preservative still in use). It would be fascinating to do a quick research project by correlating dental records with medical records. This isn't done at all. A basic preliminary study could simply count the number of vaccines and amalgam fillings people have had, including re-fillings, and then measure the thickness of their NHS medical files. I bet there would be a direct correlation just on that data. A more intensive study could see if a patient's onset of certain conditions correlated with a certain number of fillings and vaccines that they have had. E.G., a patient might still be fairly well when they only had three or four amalgams, but be quite ill by the time they had eight or nine, and they might have severe health problems by the time they had a full mouth of fillings.
This is partly due to issues like the presence or absence of an enzyme APO3, which helps get rid of heavy metals like mercury, one atom at a time. Three percent of the population don't have it, and so can't excrete mercury very easily. For everyone else, it is just like their windows are dirty. Mercury attacks your weakest genes. This is too detailed a subject to deal with here, but a good book title would be “'The Madness of Mercury', an overview of the deliberate toxification of the population”. Needs a load of research. Time to revise my chemistry and get a Nobel prize.
There are obviously many other factors, but the UK is one of the only countries left that still allows mercury amalgam fillings to be used by dentists and in my opinion, dentists that still put them in patients mouths should go to prison for ten years. Why di-ethyl mercury (thimerosal) is still used in vaccines, I do not know, but then thalidomide is still sold in third world countries, so it is all down to big pharma profits. Mercury is also a major component of low-energy fluorescent light bulbs. These are hazardous when broken and cannot be recycled. Incandescent light bulbs had a good light quality and contributed to one's heating and were cheap and easily recycled. They could however just as easily be made to last for ever with a thicker filament. They were outlawed simply because they were not profitable enough. Low-energy fluorescent light bulbs cost ten times as much, don't really last very long if you keep turning them off, contain mercury and should be banned.
While I am still on a rant, I could also suggest that most colectomy operations done on young women are done out of spite to condemn than to wearing a J-pouch for the rest of their lives. If they had been on the Blood-Type diet from birth they wouldn't have needed a colectomy. If at the onset of symptoms they had been put on the blood type diet, they would most likely have not needed the operation. I had severe ulcerative colitis a couple of years ago, and was told that food and diet had nothing at all to do with it, but one single meal on the blood type diet put me into remission. I stayed in remission until five or six weeks ago when I was at Rowanwood and had little choice in what I ate. It was just eating chicken again that tipped me into a flare-up. Chicken is the number-one thing to avoid on a B blood type diet. For me, turkey is even more totally catastrophic!!!
I think that there is a lot more to the blood type diet than even Dr Peter D'Adamo realises, and that diet needs to be tailored more sensitively to the individual, as he says in his Genotype diet. However, as Epictitus said, 'Eat what becomes you and keep silent'. I.E., food requirements have been known to be particular to the individual for thousands of years, and what suits you won't suit someone else, so work out what you can and can't eat yourself and don't make suggestions for other people unless you know their circumstances.
Our modern strategy of supermarkets supplying a wide range of 'foods' all year round has got us into the way of thinking that everyone is just the same and everything is good to eat if you like it, and if you don't like it, don't bother eating it. It is a sad but funny conundrum that the tastiest foods are the least healthy, and the healthiest foods are the least tasty! As a society we have got too programmed to eating foods that look and taste good, rather than focussing on how healthy they are for us as an individual.
Basically, there is so much money to be made out of ill-health that there is antagonism towards people that try and keep well by careful diet or by taking, for instance, high levels of vitamin supplements. Big pharma has found that people who take high levels of vitamin supplements don't get ill and therefore don't need their expensive drugs, and so big pharma is trying to ban high dose supplements. RDA levels for vitamins and minerals were set fifty odd years ago when there was little understanding of the variation in vitamin requirements between different people. Due to mal-functioning enzymes, one person's vitamin requirements might be thirty times that of another.
I'm getting out of the scope of this blog, and further discussion will need references etc., so I'll stop there, and watch a couple of DVD's. I think Starsky & Hutch and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl will do nicely. Actually, that is the sum total of DVD's that appeal to me in a very poor collection on offer. This is where a home visit would be appreciated and I could get a pile to watch. Most of the books available here are very shabby and would be thrown away by Oxfam. Basically, what is available for the entertainment of patients would be discarded by any charity shop they were given to, and it just simply isn't good enough. We are all intelligent people on the ward and proportionately are treated worse than laboratory rabbits awaiting vivisection.
NHS mental hospitals are like the Stamford Prison Experiment gone wrong, except it is all for real. The doctors have got things totally out of perspective and have been indoctrinated by their training. When they are junior doctors under training they should at least take these drugs themselves and see what they are like. Of course, they wouldn't do that, as they know that some of them like Haloperidol permanently block receptors, and drugs like Olanzapine just need two tablets to do a lot of permanent damage. If they took the drugs as they prescribe them, they would never ever be able to be doctors or pass their exams. Full stop.
Anyone who's read this far and read all my other LinkedIn posts and who knows me well, might just realise that I am merely playing with the NHS, taking the p*** and that I am on a self destruct mission to get revenge for having had my life ruined by doctors in the past. My target is the closure of the NHS. I am giving myself twenty years to do this. Being put on a section 3 has turned me into an anarchist of sorts. Obviously, the ransomware cyber attack last week was nothing to do with me at all, was it? Better luck for them next time! It is a good job I am IT illiterate, otherwise I would become a hacker, and down the internet (to get rid of porn).
Every time I am given a depot injection I will curse the NHS. A compromise will be reached if Teresa May actually scraps the Mental Health Act and starts again. I feel like Elisha in a bad mood, ready to call out bears to maul his enemies! It is time to wither some fig trees and move mountains. Bad luck everyone in the way. I will make Stalin seem nice. HaHaHA, that last sentence gives me an idea for a thriller.
Forced Psychiatry in the NHS 8
Saturday 20th May 2017. I actually slept fairly well last night, even over-sleeping a bit. I usually find that it takes me four nights in a new place to settle into being able to sleep properly. I try and avoid weekends away as they are too disruptive, and prefer holiday intervals of ten days to three or four weeks.
I nearly missed breakfast this morning and just caught the trolley before it disappeared. The porridge was nearly cold, and quite lumpy, but better than nothing. The only thing I'll miss from Rowanwood will be the full English cooked breakfast on a Saturday morning. A DIY cooked breakfast was an option here, but I didn't know about it, and no-one else wanted it so the stuff is still in the fridge. I'll have to do that tomorrow – there may even be enough stuff to have a cooked breakfast every morning! [Too bad, we cooked it all up for supper – there's just a little left for my breakfast in the morning.]
Still no wifi, so this is becoming more of a diary. I'll eventually lump the whole thing into one article to deter people from reading it unless they are unemployed! No-one in employment can afford the time to read long articles on LinkedIn! At some point I will distil it all into other articles, meanwhile I'm viewing it as a rough draft of a biography of current circumstances. I might even turn the whole series into a book, “'Forced Psychiatry on the NHS', an anecdotal account of life on a Section 3”.
I've been promoted to being allowed unescorted ground leave for 15 minutes. I've managed four trips out today. This is a step forward, but is still a petty and ludicrous position to be in and corresponds to being allowed to walk inside the perimeter fence of a concentration camp. It would be fun to see how far I could get before a full scale man-hunt was launched. Not far, as I have very little cash and no pin number for my debit card, just a few hundred quid in my Paypal account – enough to get a long way on a flight. It would be just like the TV series 'Hunted', except for real, with only about a thirty minutes head start. I would just have time to get to Oxenholme Station, half a mile away by road, and with only ￡25 in cash I couldn't get further than Edinburgh (or Manchester), but would probably have police waiting for me by the time I got there. The best option would be to get off just across the border and hitch around, and sneak to a friend's farm near Aberdeen and go underground, working for my board and lodging. Alternatively, I could get a taxi home, pick up my pin number, get a load of cash, fill up my car with petrol and camping gear and drive to Scotland.
Ironically, the mental health laws are different in Scotland, and I wouldn't have been sectioned at all there. Maybe I should move there. Or the Dordogne. Or both. I have my passport, so if I had wifi I could book a flight and escape the country, but I would almost certainly be picked up at the airport.
Thinking back to a possible correlation between Myers-Briggs personality types and 'mental' illnesses, why can't we accept a wider range of personalities and temperaments? Hypomania is glorified in films and TV and comedy, but if you actually behave like Jason Bourne or Mr Bean you instantly get sectioned. What is wrong with a bit of elation or depression, or just being a bit crazy? All the Old Testament prophets would be sectioned today. So would a lot of artists from history. Michaelangelo was a lot more manic-depressive than I am, and it is just as well he wasn't medicated to oblivion. He couldn't have done the Sistine chapel ceiling on medication. [It is a pity that the shadows he painted in have been cleaned off by art 'restorers', thinking they were dirt. As Ruskin said, 'the essence of a master can be removed in ten minutes by a picture cleaner'. The Elgin marbles were likewise ruined in the 1930's. People took chisels to those!]
We are so conditioned in the West to having things our own way that if anything goes against the grain we call it an 'illness'. Everyday life is becoming over-medicalised and compartmentalised, largely to persuade people that they need to spend money to improve their situation, so retail therapy becomes 'commercial Prozac'.
I find my creative ideas and productivity come out of the transitions between 'mood swings', and without a so-called 'mood swing', I wouldn't do any art. Essentially, I switch between Myers-Briggs ENFP and INFP. This changes the relation between the personality traits and is potentially quite disruptive. I've coined a new diagnostic term for myself of 'Bipolar Switching Temperament', or 'BST'. This sounds to me better than 'Bipolar Affective Disorder' or 'BAD'. I also primarily have 'Seasonal Affective Disorder' or 'SAD', but even that could better be called, 'Seasonal Switching Temperament', or 'SST', or even just Normal Seasonal Adjustment, 'NSA'. I've tried experimenting with changing latitude in the Autumn and Spring, quite successfully, but it needs six to eight weeks going 10 degrees south in the Autumn and four to six weeks going south in the Spring to really work and stop the winter depression and spring mania. This does not need medicating for – all that is needed is a change of latitude. I haven't tried going further south for a long time, and I never got more than 20 odd degrees South. Looking at some old photographic charts of rate of change of day length years ago, I reckoned 40 degrees south would suit me best, so that would either be South Africa or South America. I'd prefer it a bit cooler, so maybe I could go for a higher altitude as well.
A weekend in the Dordogne in the middle of March this year had a counter productive effect and exacerbated my spring mania and has put me in the loony bin ever since. Oops, I won't try that experiment again. Ideally I could experiment with migrating south with the swallows or ospreys and then coming back with them. I wonder if migrating birds would get SAD if they weren't allowed to migrate?
Going on a human migration would make a good road trip every year, I just need to make those millions, or maybe just live poor. At the moment I could afford a two-way trip partly overland for a month to South Africa, but I might not want to come back. Being stuck inside a hospital building in Kendal is quite good for the imagination, and escapist travel plans give it good exercise. There is a fifteen year old copy of Lonely Planet's South America on a Shoestring here, so I'll have to study that. How about Riobamba in central Ecuador? I wonder if the Hotel Humboldt is still going. It might even have wifi now. [Yes it still gets excellent reviews, and the wifi is excellent, too, only $18 or so a night.] I could probably afford to go there and stay for two months before coming back again. I bet I'd get better food and accommodation than I do cooking for myself at home.
If I had wifi now, or when I've next got it, it would be fun to construct a fake travel blog and pretend to go travelling around the world while I am still incarcerated here! On the other hand, it would be more fun to actually travel somewhere like South America, using just an old out of date travel guide and without googling anything about it first, to avoid the 'annihilation of surprise' that can occur so easily nowadays. At the same time reconnaissance makes such a big difference to an expedition's success, that it would be silly not to do some research first, at least for up to date travel logistics. It would be nice to look up some old maps of a region at the RGS in Lowther Lodge.
It is a pity that about 85% of my normal capacity is taken up with trivial domestic stuff like buying food and feeding myself. As a good friend pointed out a long while ago, I can either live or work. At the moment I don't need to think about the basic living side of things, so it frees up a certain degree of creativity. It is a pity it is at the expense of my freedom. It would be an interesting experiment to blow all my savings on a few weeks in a hotel on Queens Gate and catch up on RGS lectures and London culture and do some library research at Imperial College while being looked after in style. It might even be profitable if I could publish something out of it!
Sunday 21st May 2017. Had quite a lot for breakfast and lunch today. I really will have to exert some self discipline and reduce what I eat, but the food waste in this hospital is enormous and I don't like to see it wasted. I can't afford to buy beef as good as we had for lunch, and most of it gets thrown away.
I have wifi again now, having opened a Twitter account in order to join the NHS Choices website and access their public wifi. I've been avoiding Twitter for a long time, but if I stick to fairly serious political stuff I should learn from their tweets and get more in touch with current affairs. I guess it is now time to join the twenty first century with it's utter trivialisation of life! It will be very easy to waste a lot of time on Twitter and LinkedIn. If I could make some money out of it, it would be different! At least here, I have nothing to do except wreak havoc on the internet!!!