Mental Illness and Medication
This topic only comes up every now and again but each and every time it does I’m always passionate about it, there’s lots of issues that I feel passionate about so it’s impossible to remember each and every one (apparently I’ve got a lot of opinions lol) but I was recently reminded about this one.
I take anti-depressants every day in fact I take 350mg of Effexor-XR and it’s the third one that I’ve been on, it took some fiddling and that wasn’t really any fun but they do really help. I know that there are lots of doctors who will hand out psychological medications as if they’re lollies and I’m not advocating that people who don’t need medication take medication but I don’t think that taking a total view either way is a good thing either.
There’s a lot of natural medicines around which are also great, I personally use aromatherapy for all sorts of things from head aches to nausea to colds I would much rather use the natural essential oils then use a pain killer (especially given my rather bad history with painkillers, from OD to rare allergic reactions I’ve had my fair share of pain from them) however I’m not about to stop taking my anti-depressants because they’re chemicals.
Most who have suffered from a mental illness will tell you that once you do find the right medication they can help immensely, of course you get the people who don’t respond to medications at all or who have very bad side effects with little to no gain from many and that is the nature of any medication. You shouldn’t not try a medication just because there is a chance of a side effect, I get a dry mouth from mine but I also know that without them I’m not stable enough to make any real progress. Of course you should be careful with starting or stopping a medication especially the psych ones because some of them can and will have a pronounced withdrawal should you randomly stop taking them and for the first few days you can be a touch more emotional one way or the other (I was).
I really do believe that some medications are worth trying and yes they’re worth the risk of the rare reaction (which you should be aware of just in case, you want to stop before it really becomes a problem) after all I still try medications if they’re necessary as they occasionally are. To not try something that could make your quality of life better would be like not trying a new food because you could have a reaction from it. I know some medications are bad and the side effects are very nasty, I’m not saying they’re the ones to take on the contrary I avoid anti-anxiety’s and sedatives like the plague because I know they make me ‘zombie’ like which doesn’t help but I don’t shy away from other medication just because I could react to it.
Try to keep an open mind, if your doctor says you need psych medication don’t assume it’s the worst thing possible think about it in terms of how you’re currently doing and then decide if it’s the best thing for you. You might think that you’re stable enough to work on your problems without medication and that’s fine tell your doctor that but if you’re stuck in a hole/ditch and falling farther then maybe the medication will help you to stand on a ledge so that you can work at getting out, that is what I did and I’m so much better off for it.
Petition
Normally I don’t like to push my own ethics especially since this blog isn’t really aimed at that but I feel this one in particular must be shared because the people face such a large challenge and they deserve support. I promise this will not become a regular thing.
The petition below is one to stop Russia from taking a backward step and allowing the slaughter of the stray animals that are in the country, animal welfare organisations, volunteers and the public have been denied an official voice in the discussions about how best to deal with the stray population and much of the legislation is kept hidden from the public. It has been show that if properly managed and followed trap, neuter/spay and release programs work better then killing and many animal rights people want to see more control in pet breeding to help decline the amount of strays otherwise the killing will have to be constant and wont make any difference anyway.
These people face a corrupt government who are far more interested in lining their pockets then in what the people want and an information black out, in many ways I feel more sorry for them then I do the poor animals as their battle seems unwinable. I really think that the people of Russia deserve help and support of anyone who has the spare time to sign their name, so I’m sharing this petition. Please visit the sight below!
Bad Food.
I’m part of an activist site so that I can keep up with animal related news which is important to me, but the website I’m apart of also has other issues that it covers including a “Healthy Living” section and this section has a tendency to baffle me. I scanned one article that was about how fish is actually one of the most toxic foods that we can eat (which did have back up to support it) but the author of this article took the idea too far, as often seems to be the case in this section. Today I just read another one about 20 types of foods that you should just stop eating all together.
This got me thinking about all the different foods that we’re told are in fact bad for us, hell even carrots can turn you orange if you eat too many of them. I realised that the people who are so concerned about their health that they’re cutting out huge sections of food are not only missing out on some great food (cause lets face it there’s days where it is fanatic to sit down with a pizza and watch TV) but they’re also likely to cause more damage to their own bodies. I might not have been very good at it before I got sick but I firmly believe that everything in moderation is fine, of course you’ve got to know yourself since it would be pretty stupid to eat a peanut if you’ve got a deadly allergy but there’s no point in not eating something because currently science says it’s bad for you.
A good example of this is eggs, they’re quite high in cholesterol and the yolk is rather high in fat and yet anyone who knows anything about protein will tell you that raw eggs in particular are a great source of protein. Another example that I love is sugar, have too little of it and you can be depressed, weak, shaky and pretty sick but of course if you have too much it can also kill you.
I find that I get agitated when people try to give me eating advice (especially now that I’ve got to follow such a strict diet in order to keep my stomach semi happy) since they assume that what they’re doing is best. I try to avoid giving out specific advice unless I’m asked about the types of fiber or how to avoid upsetting reflux and the only reason why I’m comfortable doing this is because I’ve gotten my information from doctors and then tested it on myself otherwise I avoid saying you should cut out all chocolate from your diet. If we where all to suddenly stop eating foods that could be bad for us we’d all starve to death!
It’s important not to make eating into something that you need to do to live rather then something that you do actually enjoy because (in my experience) it then makes it just that much harder to eat. It’s a similar feeling to going to work, you know you have to but you don’t particularly get any real joy out of it…you’re going through the motions. I use to look forward to meal time but now it’s just something that I have to do because otherwise I can’t live, it’s work and the more enjoyable foods you cut out of your diet the more likely it is that you’re going to end up feeling the same way as I do. Remember everything in moderation!
The Grim Reaper
This post is only going to be short, I’m a bit sick at the moment but I’m watching Dead Like Me and the idea suddenly came to me.
So I’m referring to the actual skellington in the black robe and hood. Most people are under the impression that the Grim Reaper actually kills people and thus they are under the impression that he/her/it is evil but this isn’t the case. The Grim Reaper is more like a guide, he/her/it is there to meet you to help you get use to the idea of being dead to help you understand what it means to be dead. To live your life under the impression that death is an evil force constantly out to get you is only going to make it harder to accept when the time does come.
Believe it or not but I’ve actually faced my own death a couple of times and even the first time I wasn’t actually scared as such, I was worried about what sort of pain I would die in…I was also agitated that I’ve made friends between the time I tried to kill myself (short story, I was in an abusive house hold with no other out) and the time that I was dieing of dehydration. What didn’t happen was any sort of anger/frustration at the Grim Reaper or death, I just accepted what was going on. It was the same both times, ironically what bothered me most was the fact that I was in Emergency so long lol I actually got board.
If you start to see death as being nothing more then ‘something that happens’ you wont have as much of a problem when and if your in the situation. Of course everyone takes these things differently and I can’t say it will help for sure but I know it helps me.
Chicken Or The Egg?
Before scientist came in and spoiled the fun, this topic was one that I use to love to think about and again it’s a pretty classic philosophy type question yet I found that once I’d come to my answer it was so very simple and obvious that it seemed almost stupid that it took me so long to come up with an actual answer.
I’m all about thinking for yourself so while I’m putting down my answer to this question (which was something I came up with before it was proven though science, science proved me right hee hee) I encourage everyone not to agree just because it seems reasonable, if you’ve got your own answer or answered this question before science I’d love to hear how you came up with said answer.
Chicken or the egg, which came first? There are two stand points to take when thinking about this question and without taking one of those stand points the question becomes more or less impossible to answer, in my view at least the lack of a stand point is what creates the circular nature of the question. The first and easiest stand point to take would be the stand point of Creationism (when I use this term I mean any creation myth, not just the Christian/Catholic story), this causes the question to become more or less irrelevant. Any deity would create several animals at once, including baby animals and non-born ones which would include a chicken and an egg. Therefore they’d be created together and neither would come first or they both came first…that would depend on what sort of semantics you wanted to talk about and that’s not the point of this post.
Clearly the second stand point would be Evolution, now I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the specifics of Evolution because I got board with the specifics but the basics would be little things mutated into bigger things over the course of millions of years. By this line of logic the egg would have come first because it’s what contains the genetic coding for the chicken and an egg is much much smaller then a full grown chicken. Thus the egg came before the chicken from a Evolution stand point.
The Inmates Are Running The Asylum! **Mature Content**
I’ve recently just taken a big step and sent a complaint to the Mental Health Unit (a.k.a a modern asylum) that put me though hell back in early 09, now I don’t actually think anything can or will be done but it’s an important step for me because I’ve been afraid to do so for so long. See when I first filed a complaint/gave feedback the guy read it in front of me laughed and then ‘misplaced’ it so I was worried that the same would happen if I tried again. Where did this inspiration come from? Emilie Autumn’s new and only music video Fight Like A Girl (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dvOXuZwOEvM).
The video actually reminded me of my stay in this particular Unit which really was similar to a Victorian era Asylum, and while what happened during that say isn’t really what this post is about I’ll give you a quick run down of what happened to give the rest of the post context. I can’t actually remember how long I was there because my perception of time was (and still can be) very distorted but basically it was the second hospital I’d been to and it was the first public one I’d stayed at so my expectations where far, far too high. The staff tried to force me to eat meat (I’d been a long time vegetarian by this stage, still am), they prevented us from talking to each other, we had nothing to do bar play on a Nintendo Wii, they took away harmless but important things such as pens and paper as well as books, they refused to treat my head aches as per my GP’s instructions (I gave them my GP’s name, the clinic name where I see her and the phone number, they never rang her), there where several times where they threatened to hit me and others as well as threatening to lock us in solitary, they refused a diabetic boy food (he later collapsed), they bullied/mocked/breaded ect me and others, we where not allowed outside or to exercise (no running on the ward) and worst of all they offered no kind of treatment (talking about triggering topics where band, the logic behind this still escapes me to this day). In response to this I demanded that they give us basic rights, I demanded to be transferred to a privet hospital, I demanded they called my GP and let me take the proper medication for my head aches, I demanded they offer some sort of treatment (nothing happened) and what I’m most proud of I stirred the other patients up and encouraged a rebellion (we refused to go to be and then refused to get up again, security was called). I got told off many times for calling the doctors intelligence into question and for breaking the rules and getting others to tell me their stories (they finally felt so understood) and basically caused as much trouble as I could and tried to take over…I honestly think they let me leave cause I wasn’t worth the trouble. This leads to the rest of the post, why is it such a terrifying idea that the inmates run the asylum?
We’ve all heard of this situation and it’s been the plot of many movies (most of them horror) but I’ll never forget the really weird French movie I watched that was set in an asylum (SPOILER ALERT) which turns out that for most of the movie is actually run by the inmates and it’s the ‘doctors’ trapped in the cells down stairs, once the doctors get out again and our not so crazy main character finds out how the doctor has been ‘treating’ people it’s shocking to see the decline of the place. When the head fake doctor was running the place most of the people where acting ‘crazy’ in a relatively safe way, one guy is hitting his head against a post that holds in the building and tied to this post is a pillow…the said guy is subdued, silent and gently rocking forward to hit is head on the pillow. The face doctor explains that in order for a crazy person to recover they need to act out their crazy within a safe environment, whereas the real doctor believes that mental illness came from an imbalance between pain in the mind and pain in the body…increase the pain on the body and the crazy will stop. Now I don’t know about you, but to me it seems that the fake and crazy (he had delusions of Gander and a phobia of being buried alive) doctor actually had a much much better idea of how to treat these people then the real doctor. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying that the Criminally Insane or those who are violent should be allowed to roam free and run the joint but what I am saying is that most people with mental illnesses actually have a much better idea of how to deal with others who are mentally ill then those who haven’t experienced it.
When the inmates of the asylum are running it those inmates feel much safer, much more understood and much more at peace then they ever will with a tight laced environment run by doctors who more often then not can’t actually treat people on an individual level. Granted in the past the doctors have been much worse and when the inmates get out the first thing they do is take revenge/justice on said doctors, it’s a hypocritical assumption that is then made that the inmates have done this because they’re crazy when really all they’ve done is exactly what was done to them and/or others that they’ve known. Answer this, if the doctor was preforming barbaric experiments and ‘treatments’ and the inmates (a.k.a tortured people) escape then kill said doctor in the same way he’d experimented on them, who is really crazy? Keeping in mind that often these people would be trapped their for years knowing nothing but this cruelty and with mental illness comes a distortion of time that make’s it hard to remember what happened three months ago let alone what’s happened years ago. There’s a reason why so many people find themselves comfortable in an asylum it’s the first place they’ve been in where there are other people like them, they’re understood and they can see that it’s not so abnormal as they where lead to believe. For this reason I think that the best psychologists and psychiatrists are those who’ve had/have mental illness themselves or know someone closely who has mental illness…I often find in those horror movies that I sympathise and empathise with the inmates who are now running the asylum. The mentally ill are people too and often feel things deeper and stronger then your average non-mentally ill person and they should be treated as such, who knows that better then anyone else? Someone else with mental illness! I often find I’m far more at home with people who are mentally ill then those who’ve got no experience with it. So hell yeah! Let the inmates run the asylum and see the benefits!
Nature of Writers
And I start to wonder just how many
Of us are truly mad?
For, every decent writer will tell you
In order to write a convincing character
You must become them.
So where does that leave the likes of
Tomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter?
Where does it leave me, who understands their thought patterns?
Are we all killers inside?
Our Own Worse Enemy
This is actually going to be a bit more light hearted then my other blogs but I do still believe that this topic is philosophical in nature, no matter how skewed people may think this hypothetical may actually be. I’m a fan of many scifi shows and I’m currently watching one of my more favored ones Stargate SG 1. So I believe 100% that somewhere in the universe (which is so big that we can’t even comprehend the size of the universe) aliens are out there. No matter what anyone says about statistics or whatever other arguments there are against the idea of aliens existing, I’m still sure that in a universe so big it’s not only pointless but it’s also statistically impossible that there is no more intelligent life out there.
As I sit here watching Stargate it occurs to me again (this is something I think about often) that we’ve really done a good job of telling aliens how not to invade us. It’s true that our signals don’t go very far but for all we know something could be sitting out there watching our TV shows and movies working out how best to attack Earth. I realise this sounds a bit far fetched and I’m not saying it’s true however I do find the concept fun to think about, the same way we think it’s fun to make a movie about similar concepts. So anyway it occurs to me that the other thing that could happen is again ship sitting up there watching and they could decide that human beings are far too dangerous to let out of planet Earth…after all in most of our shows we display the fact that human beings are cruel, hateful and destructive but worse still we’re very bossy. In most exploration type scifi shows we get out into the universe and we start policing the place the same way we do in our world, they might decide that it’s a much better idea to ensure we can’t leave our own solar system.
So anyway just a light hearted topic that’s fun to think about, I have no doubt that aliens exist as I’ve said before it’s pretty impossible for them not to so I do enjoy thinking about the various ways that we could all interact together. It would be quite funny to think that there’s a massive space ship sitting up there watching our movies, TV shows and the like and learning how humans would react to invasions of different types.
What is Justice? **Mature Content**
So this topic actually came up in song lyrics, a song by Emilie Autumn. Her song Fight Like a Girl talks about fighting back against the forces that are oppressing you, fight like a girl protecting her child do anything that is necessary to survive. The line that got me thinking was
“There is no such thing as justice”.
I’ve been thinking about the various ways that we try to go about getting justice in both the society and in our own personal lives. I’m starting to wonder what the difference between revenge and justice actually is, after all justice is defined (dictionary.com) as “the administering of a deserved punishment or reward”. So we’ve got the reward part down pat, we’re pretty good at rewarding ourselves but it’s the punishment end of things which poses the problem especially when we’re talking about really awful life destroying events. When someone suggests that we take an eye for an eye it’s almost instantly called ‘revenge’ rather then justice and honestly that seems stupid, maybe I’m just bias because I’ve been victim to crimes as well as life shattering events for which I will never get justice or revenge.
So I ask what is justice if it isn’t revenge? It most certainly isn’t a stressful trial in which the accused is rarely found guilty and it’s not the person who caused damage sitting in jail getting better treatment then the rest of us out here struggling. How does someone get justice for 16 years of child abuse? You’ve got to give justice for a missing childhood, all the emotional issues and the actual pain. How does a family get justice for their murdered sister/brother/child ect? It’s not actually possible, so no I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to get your own justice whatever that might be. At the end of the day I don’t believe that justice exists and I don’t believe that it’s possible to achieve, all those people (including myself) who have been hurt by other people can only fantasize about getting their justice because outside of dreams it just isn’t possible.
Where’s My Luxury?!
By now I’m sure it’s become apparent that I try to live as cruelty free as possible which means I buy only brands who are certified cruelty free or vegan(though I’m not myself vegan) and I think I’ve worked out one of the main reasons why more people don’t buy cruelty free products. All the items like razors, toothbrushes and the like are very very basic…now we all know that everyone likes a little luxury and I’m no exception which I’m more then happy to admit and I want to know where it is.
Why when we’ve got Venus razors is my vegan-company-owned razor so plain? The companies don’t need to test anything all they need to do is upgrade the products, have a thicker moisture strip or put some moistursing gel around it, add some more blades. It’s the same with toothbrushes, while the removable head is cool(you buy new heads rather then the whole brush, same as with an electronic toothbrush) but its still very basic. Why can’t they make them with bristles angled differently like other companies? For me its not important, I have no choice my ethics and emotions wont let me knowingly support animal testing companies but I know for others the cruelty that the companies fund doesn’t matter as long as they have the whitest teeth or cleanest shave.
That said the cosmetics, skin care, hair care and shave creaming/gel have all been amazing, nice on my sensitive skin, mostly natural and good at controlling my oily kin plus my hair is better then it’s ever been. They’ve got that stuff down pat but the other stuff is lagging behind and it’s the animals that suffer, and I also want a better toothbrush lol.
