Tag: Mental Health

“My Suicidal Period” by John Reed

On Saturday Night Politics, they mentioned a conversation between Steve Bannon and a friend of Donald Trump. Steve Bannon said that if the pressure on Donald Trump gets high enough he will kill himself. Trump’s friend replied “no, he will fake a heart attack.”

I don’t know if this is a true story, but it reminds me of when I was suicidal. Two things contributed to this feeling:

  1. A very severe form of depression that made it impossible for me to feel pleasure anymore. Things that I used to enjoy and things that gave me pleasure gave me less and less joy and less and less pleasure the more time passed. I literally became catatonic and I didn’t want to live anymore. The poetry I wrote back then (see link in previous sentence) wasn’t bad, though.
  2. I had relationship issues revolving around my parents and this young woman who in retrospect liked or even loved me, but I only wanted sex and also I was temporarily hypersexual because before this period of severe depression I had bipolar mania.

Mania was weird for me because it happened at around the same time as me reaching male puberty, and I conflated a lot of the symptoms of mania with symptoms of male puberty. During this period (before the suicidal depression) I was so hypersexual that I compulsively needed to masturbate roughly every half hour around the clock, and when I was 13 I thought that this hypersexuality was just male puberty. In retrospect I totally did not have psychologically normal male puberty, but I did not know this at the time. It took four years for me to diagnose myself with bipolar disorder, and it is this mental health problem that drew me to psychiatry when I was in high school. I did not become a psychiatrist, but I did deal with these problems and learned from them. One consequence of my sexual and romantic issues that I had was that I began to loath my sexuality and myself. My demeanor changed. At one point when I was 13 or 14 I literally felt like I would have been better off if I were neutered. I do not feel that way anymore, but I did have SERIOUS psychological and psychiatric problems that I only gradually overcame and that only gradually lessened with age. In between then and now I did many things that I regretted or that I shouldn’t have done, such as stalking and engaging in bad relationships like this one in which I was psychologically abusive. You might not think it’s that bad because I was never physically violent with them, but the stalking, clinging, and “shadow relationships” were a constant, very severe problem for me. It was like an addiction, one of multiple addictions and compulsions that I experienced, but in my opinion it was the single worst of them all. I never got into drugs or gambling (with the exception of non-addictive psychiatric drugs, but even then it was very controlled and monitored), but if I did get into addictive drugs or gambling I very might well have either overdosed on drugs or gambled away every single penny. I had mental problems.

My single worst problem that was a consequence of both my mind and my body was an addiction to “shadow relationships”. I am attracted to female bodies (hips, ass, the smell of their body, and the “electric” sexual feeling in my hands from heterosexual touch), but I am not attracted to women as people. Like there is something about their “womanly” personality that just doesn’t work with me, but when you are 13 you are more focused on her boobs than on her personality. By the way, the individual in that last link, Lauren Hanley (a classmate whose personality really isn’t that sexual in real life) was the first person who I ever masturbated to back when I was 13 years old. This makes her a special woman. I think we both had visible symptoms of ADHD in middle school (like one time I karate kicked open a “push” door and later she also kicked open the same type of door by jumping up and kicking said door with a “hy-ya”, causing it to fly open), but she actually is not as stupid as people might think based on how hot and “ditsy” she is. She actually sat two seats behind me in eighth grade math class back when I had my “nymphomania” problem. We both repeatedly asked for bathroom breaks in the middle of class, but I used my bathroom breaks to masturbate and she used them to skip class and meet up with a friend. In real life nothing ever happened between us, but I would have loved to fuck her brains out ❤️.

The point is that I had problems going way back to my early years. Lauren Hanley is kind of adorable, and guys seem to love her, and I totally get it (see comments in link), but I’m kind of a little queer, I just didn’t really fully get that until later. Like I love women, I’m just not attracted to them as people. That last link was meant to be a joke. I’m a funny guy. And also kind of an egomaniac who really enjoyed Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along blog.

  • John

p.s. I know I say sexual things sometimes, but this is not meant to be erotica (even though some straight women seem to read it that way).

A Solution For The “War on Drugs”

Hi. My name is John, and I have experimented with a lot of drugs that affect the mind. No, I am not a drug addict. I have a mental health history, and when I was younger, I wanted to be a doctor who specialized in drugs that affect the mind. I wanted to be a psychiatrist, and one way to learn about drugs that affect the mind is to carefully and methodically test them out.

The first rule when it comes to drugs that affect the mind is never discontinue them abruptly. Bad things will happen. For example, imagine a drug that changes you from sad to happy. You take this drug for a week. If one day you decide to suddenly discontinue, you will feel more sad than if you never took the drug in the first place. This “reverse” effect has different names, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just call it the withdrawal effect. Good medical doctors do not put patients through the withdrawal effect. They taper people off gradually and use more gradual, longer lasting, extended release or slow release alternatives which are less addictive.

How does this translate into “the war on drugs”? Well first off, if the people who worked in prisons were doctors, they wouldn’t cut people off many of these drugs such as heroine abruptly. They would calculate how much heroine the person has been consuming and give them a gradually decreasing amount of either that opioid or a substitute opioid each day. This technique is valid for virtually any drug that affects the mind.

Here’s the problem. There is a very severe shortage of people who are qualified to do this and their learning in school is not reflective of the learning that they need in order to do this job. There is a multiple months long waitlist to see a psychiatrist in America, and many psychiatrists who went to medical school suck at psychiatry. There are psychiatrists who are less qualified to treat schizophrenia than I am, and I didn’t even go to medical school. Frankly, you don’t actually need to know any bodily anatomy or physiology to treat schizophrenia – if you understand the mind, have personal mental health experiences that can relate to those of your patients, read journals, and have tested out over a dozen different pills and analyzed their effects on the mind, that’s more valuable than all the anatomy and physiology courses in the world in terms of actually doing the job of a psychiatrist.

Now here’s the problem. Most insurances do not cover these treatments fully. I personally have had to pay money out of pocket for a psychiatrist. In another case, I submitted a form to my health insurance company and instead of them paying me the full $100, I got maybe $18 back from the insurance company. There is a wait list and in addition to the wait list, it is relatively expensive. People who are going to prison and also mentally ill homeless people don’t have the means to get ahold of good professional treatment.

Much of psychiatry isn’t really medicine in the traditional sense. Like to me, most mental conditions are not really medical diseases. They are just deviations from what is mentally the norm or the average in the population. Deviations from the norm are normal in populations. There are all sorts of mental differences in the population. These mental differences are only considered a disease that needs to be treated when they become a problem. Some people have minds that might be very abnormal, but they do just fine, so they’re not treated.

Think about human height. Some people are really short. Some people are really tall. Being super short isn’t a problem until you need to dunk a basketball. Then all of a sudden being short becomes a problem. Then you admit that you have a problem and that you need stilts to get the basketball into the hoop. Mental disabilities are kind of like that. They’re not really diseases in the way the common cold is a disease. It doesn’t really make sense to categorize mental conditions or abnormalities as diseases. A psychiatrist once told me that he only uses the manual of mental disorders for billing purposes for health insurance companies. It doesn’t really make sense to give mental conditions or irregularities numerical codes like the codes that are given for medical procedure billing purposes. Codes aren’t made for patients – they are made for health insurance companies. In fact, I would argue that the medical system as a whole is not made to cater to the patients – it is made in such a way as to cater to the health insurance companies. From a business perspective, the patients are not the customer – the health insurance companies are the customer.

Basically, the mental healthcare system in the United States is fundamentally fucked up. There aren’t even prices that I can look at before I get billed for something that I ask my doctor for despite the fact that the money is coming out of my checking account. The American healthcare system as a whole has serious issues, with the mental healthcare system being particularly fucked up. If the system is done right, there will be huge improvements for vulnerable people like drug addicts and mentally ill homeless people. A system done right can make a huge difference for the end customer – the citizen.