Fox News is Astonishing

I fail to understand how this network exists. I took this picture from Kabobfest.  Check to see if you can find what’s wrong with it….

Give up?  Check out where a certain country the U.S. is currently occupying is.

Fox News fails.

The Mentally Ill and Violence

The mentally ill have somewhat of a reputation – more accurately, a stereotype, of being more violent than the average person.  Anyone who knows me might dispute that – I haven’t thrown a punch since 6th grade, and when that happened I lost pretty badly.  But there seems to be a fear of the mentally ill, schizophrenics specifically, as more violent than average.

I think schizophrenics are the most demonized here.  I read this survey, taken by a health agency within the British government, that states that 33% of people would firstly characterize the mentally ill as “someone who is prone to violence.”  Admittedly, this number has decreased over the decades and it was the leask likely term to be used to describe the mentally ill in the survey.  However, it is still quite high.

I understand the fear of schizophrenics as violent specifically.  Those who don’t suffer from the condition might say, “well, these people are losing their grip on reality – what if their voices say they have to kill me?” or something along those lines.  It is an understandable fear and I’m not going to deny that scenarios like that have happened.  But it is unrealistic.  It is simply not the way most of us with psychotic symptoms experience our illness.  For example, when I get psychotic symptoms I experience them as a loss of control.  I’m hearing things that aren’t there, believing things that aren’t true.  These things make me paranoid.  During my last major psychotic episode, I hid in my closet for a day and did not eat or shower.  This loss of control and loss of basic hygiene is common among those with severe psychotic symptoms.

I don’t mean “loss of control” as a way of saying a loss over control of my impulses or desires.  If this were true, then those with psychotic symptoms really would be more prone to violence or rape.  What it truly means is to lose your ability to function properly as a human being.  The core of our bodies, the brain, is sabotaging us.  To get  a good feeling of what this is like, I recommend reading “The Center Cannot Hold” by Elyn Saks.  She gives a great description of what psychotic symptoms are like.

Most violence from those with psychotic symptoms is small scale.  In a fit of rage in the midst of a delusion, there are instances where psychotic sufferers kill.  It is almost always involving someone they know.  When you feel like you are collapsing, that you are losing control of yourself, sometimes you lash out at the first available person.  Sometimes your voices command you to do so.  This is not likely to happen, but it does.  Given how I described my experience of psychotic symptoms as hiding in the closet and becoming a mess, how harmful could I be?  If anything, I am much more likely to be a victim of violence than a perpetrator if I have such a loss of control.

However, I do feel that one variety of the mentally ill are dangerous and that not enough is done to help them.  This is people with extreme depression and suicidal thoughts.  Before anyone criticizes me for this, I’d like to acknowledge that I am talking about maybe one percent of those with major depression.  I know that the vast majority kill only themselves.  But the mentally ill are all human beings like any other.  Most of the mentally ill are good, average people but some simply are not.  Some are amazingly compassionate, others are bitter and hateful.  All of them are normal human beings with a wide variety of emotions.

Obviously, this group is still more likely to be dangerous to themselves than others.  Those who wish to kill themselves have gotten to a point where they are so severely depressed that they have stopped caring about themselves in any way.  They are willing to throw their lives away – the one thing that human beings are most programmed not to do.  In order to get to this point, one must not care about onesself but one often stops caring about others.  In not caring about themselves they also stop caring about the lives of others.  It is from these people that mass shooters like Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, or the Columbine shooters come from.  I believe that their mental illness and their natural lack of empathy combined to create perfect storm scenarios – not caring about their lives or others, they sought to go down in a blaze of glory.  Because these people don’t have psychotic symptoms, they still have control over all their cognitive functions.  Any act of violence towards themselves or others is premeditated with perfect knowledge of the consequences.  Depression may cloud your judgment but it does not change your reality and it does not change your ability to plan a massacre.  It simply increases the likelihood that you will care so little about yourself and others that you just might kill.

“It’s Hard to Fight an Enemy Who Has Outposts in Your Head” – Part Two

As I mentioned in the first post, being schizoaffective entails suffering from both mood and psychotic symptoms, usually coinciding.  My main mood symptoms are extreme depression and anxiety.  Depression and anxiety are normal human emotions that affect everyone.  Pretty much everyone experiences mood symptoms at some point.  If you’ve never been depressed, then, well, I’d like to meet you.  Clinical depression, which is by far the most common mental illness, consists entirely of mood symptoms.

Psychotic symptoms are a bit different.  They consist of hallucinations and delusions.  Often times, what is and is not real is not entirely clear to us.  It’s easy to think of it this way: your brain processes all of your senses and tells you what you are experiencing.  If you hear someone saying “hello,” your ears communicate that to your brain which computes it.  If someone touches your arm, your brain processes the sensation of touch.

But sometimes brains don’t work as they should.  When part of your brain is negatively affected by a mental illness, like, say Schizoaffective disorder, the brain displays things that are not truly there.  Remember that what you see and hear is what your brain is communicating to you. The reality of someone’s voice speaking to you is incidental.  My psychotic symptoms consist of my brain communicating things that are not really there to me, essentially because the part of the brain that processes a person’s senses is broken.  For example, I have voices that call themselves “The Watchers.”  They make up most of my psychotic symptoms.  I don’t experience them as any less real than a phone conversation.  If the Watchers are taunting me, telling me that I’m going to die, which they often do, it’s no less real to me than ordering food at a restaurant or takling on the phone with my mother.  I hear them the same way someone hears the voice of a normal person.  Except they are not really there.  The psychotic symptoms are outposts in my head – outposts of my enemy, my mental illness, that I have to both fight and adapt to constantly.

The first time I experienced psychotic symptoms was in 2007.  I was starting to become progressively more paranoid, avoiding certain areas of the house I was living in.  And I started to hear voices.  At first I though someone behind my door must have been speaking, but when I opened it no one was there.  Because my parents were often away, I was alone in the house much of the time.  This made things scarier because I was hearing things that no real person could have said.  I would often spend hours walking around the house paranoid, checking every room, locking every door over and over again, locking all the windows.  Eventually I felt that they must be inside the walls of my room – basically, my first delusion.  I’m still scared to sleep in that room because of lingering paranoia that they are still there, waiting.

At first, I thought I was being robbed or that I had heard a robbery.  By sheer coincidence, I was called by a number I didn’t recognize – which turned out to be the fire department.  I called them back and they explained they had dialed the wrong number.  I told the man on the other end I thought I might have been robbed.  I told him I checked the house and found nothing changed but that I had heard “them.”  At that point I chickened out from filing a report and hung up.  I’m lucky I was never investigated further.

Right now, I am on a couple of anti-psychotic medications that control the symptoms.  I’m very lucky that about three quarters of my symptoms are under control – they allow me some peace from hallucinations and delusions.  Sometimes I still get psychotic symptoms – I’ll get voices here or there, telling me evil or sexual things, or talking amongst themselves.  I’m enough under control to enter a graduate program at least.

I hope that this post was educational to those who don’t know much about the experience of a mental illness.

“It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”

I didn’t make this quote up; I was reading Feministing and saw a post entitled “On Being a Grown-Up” written by “that girl” – yeah, you know, her.  The post is about reaching maturity and growing up, but it ended with a quote from her Women’s Studies teacher: “It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”

That’s exactly how I feel much of the time, even though the article in question has nothing to do with mental illness.

My illness is called Schizoaffective disorder.  It is essentially a hybrid disorder, a variety of schizophrenia that involves extreme mood symptoms.  Those affected experience hallucinations, delusions and paranoia typical of schizophrenia.  These symptoms are called psychotic symptoms; they involve the brain projecting an alternate version of reality to those affected.  Schizoaffectives also experience extreme mood symptoms such as depression and anxiety.  Most often the mood symptoms are connected with psychotic ones.  I was diagnosed last year, although I’ve really had symptoms since 2007.

Diagnosing mental illnesses is not an exact science and I don’t have all of the typical symptoms of Schizoaffective.  For example, I don’t really get delusions in the way most schizophrenics do.  Many schizophrenics and schizoaffectives start to think that they are extremely godlike – or dangerous.  This doesn’t really happen to me.  My delusions tend to be linked mostly with my paranoia.  For example, I usually start to believe that someone is stalking or robbing me – even though this is not really happening – and I start to panic.  This sort of thing is as much a hallucination as a delusion.  The point here is that mental illness, unlike physical illness, is a very individualized experienced.  No two people suffer exactly the same way.  Some people have worse symptoms than others and have less ability to take care of themselves than others.  Many people with the same diagnosis will have markedly different symptoms.  The thing to remember when dealing with a mentally ill person in your life is to realize that everyone experiences mental illness differently.

So what is it like to be schizoaffective?  In the interests in keeping posts readable and short, I’ll put that on the next post.

In the beginning…

This is my first blogging experience, and I’ll keep it brief.  I’m a young, Jewish mentally ill guy and I’m going to blog about Jewish issues, mental illness issues and anything else that may cross my mind.  I lived in China for a while and I’m also very interested in feminism and gender relations, so those topics might creep in as well.