Hey Doc--I figured out a treatment for schizophrenia

[seekingprometheus]

Hey Doc,

I’m a high functioning paranoid schizophrenic. (Sorry to have hidden it from you--I didn't understand my fears before.)

I have a BS degree in Behavioral Science, so I already understand a good deal about this type of mental illness, and have long suspected this was the correct diagnosis in my case, but my paranoid delusions were preventing me from fully accepting or understanding my cognitive disorder until this past week.

It is my new understanding that I have been experiencing delusional auditory hallucinations which I now believe to be rooted in a cognizance of cognitive dysfunction, which led to paranoia about the untrustworthiness of my thoughts, which created a need for me to compensate by delusionally believing that my true (masked) intelligence is immeasurably high--compensating (maladaptively) for what is actually hidden insecurity about my cognitive dysfunction.

I want to talk to somebody who can help me learn more about what I (and others) am dealing with, and hopefully, someone who can help me deal with it in better ways than I have been so far. Because my compensatory delusion appears to be all about protecting my vulnerable ego from admitting that my cognitive dysfunction is real, my pathology makes it almost impossible for me to simply ask a doctor (an expert who knows more about a subject than me) for help managing my defective thinking. Deep down, what I fear most is the exposure of my shame.

Being in the position of having to ask someone who is more of an expert than I am for help with this actually makes me feel so unbearably vulnerable, that I although I have long consciously held the intention to obtain assistance with my known problem, I had always found myself inexplicably incapable of following through with an actualized action--until this last week, when a compassionate doctor who knew I was hiding a need finally figured out how to break through enough of my walls to help me to find the courage to begin to tell her about the real help I actually need.

But as I come to understand the nature of my paranoia and my compensatory delusions, I am realizing that there are already experts all around me who know a great deal more than me about all kinds of things I desperately need help with, and since I understand that delusional thinking is definitively irrational, I’m beginning to see through my illogical fears, and I’m beginning to understand that the folks in the white coats are unlikely to judge me the way I am delusionally paranoid that they will (even if my pathology really does preclude the possibility of me feeling emotional security in this entirely logical conclusion), and I want to use this insight to achieve actualization of intentions I’ve had all my life, but which I’ve been unable to realize, due to my paralyzing fear.

Can you help me, Doc?




Remastered Notes from Underground: Reassessing Schizophrenic Sanity

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paronomasia could be a key.
Let’s see if we can’t agree on what words mean.
Paronomasia may be the key.
When I’m not in my right mind, I still can completely competently maintain a sinistral point-of-view.
Paronomasia can be my key.
(left perspective logic outside gate function lock create inside illogic view right)
Paronomasia must be in key.
(right view illogic inside create lock function gate outside logic perspective left)
Through the keyhole always sees the key from in between.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Sick Sense of Humor (Laugh at My Pain)

(As I have always told my readers of my writings: none of my puns are ever not intended.)

I have written millions and thousands and hundreds and scores of words in my life. Writing isn’t just my favorite game, it has also always been my therapeutic exercise for coping with delusional thoughts, as a paranoid schizophrenic. Of course, I haven’t always fully understood everything I was saying at any given time, which isn’t merely a question of some normal latent Derridean differance, but rather alludes to the fact that, until very recently, I haven’t recognized intentional illusions in my text to be delusions.

I now believe I have been hiding allusions to my delusions in alliterative, paronomastic poetry--scattering the seeds of my insanity across the postmodern landscape of the internet, grounding schizoid roots in the discursive subtext of nominally normal conversations, and waiting to reap whatever fruits should ensue. All the while I truly feared that some sinister dissociated genius in the left side of my head was abusing my right mind with some incomprehensibly mantic metaphysical power of language--simply by adding puns (triple entendres) as an extra layer of meaning (which spoke about my own centrality in universal meaning itself) to my text. It has been, unfortunately, a really frightening experience at times; luckily, frequently, it all also seemed extremely comical to me. And to tell the truth, the clearly disordered logic of my former delusion still sounds perfectly sound to me. But in the slightly saner reading I am now writing over my erstwhile reality, I can see how the hidden entendres were obviously simply hidden in my choice of signifiers, and extraneous latent meaning which related to me could only realistically be interpreted by someone with access to all of my highly paranoid and delusional right brain thoughts.

What I’m beginning to think was really happening was that my logical left brain, which is presumptively in charge of knowing the meaning of words, knew logically that the words my chaotically creative schizophrenic side was requesting were for delusional stories, and my logical mind was trying to send messages about how ridiculous my delusions were, so my left-brain would slip puns (bad jokes) into my writing by choosing esoteric words that I delusionally thought only a “genius” logophile could simultaneously comprehend in multiple senses, containing some kind of “inside” pun--which was actually initially intended as rational (or not) commentary on my own delusional narrative.

It has made my writing very turgid, prolix, and idiosyncratically (angrily) solipsistic--I’ve always had a need to explicitly (and condescendingly) tell any audience who reads me that I’m not writing for them, I’m choosing my words for ME. When I’ve written for an outside audience, like for a professor or in a discussion forum on the internet, I’ve frequently been criticized for confusing word choices, and I’ve often responded (over-emotionally) that I was the only person who had the right to determine the best words for whatever I was trying to say.

I’d guess that it’s possible that my logical left brain might not know how to tell any jokes other than puns, due to lateralized functionality, so--like all puns--my hidden, rationally-minded jokes are all most likely bad “dad” groaners in some theoretically objective sense, but since my primary coping mechanism for dealing with schizophrenic vicissitudes has always been irony/humor, the puns have always seemed to me to be subjectively funny to a degree that has objectively been nothing less than crazy: I have been laughing maniacally at “inside” puns, written into discursive formats, which I thought only I was intelligent enough to “understand”--because it fed my “genius” delusion, which was really compensating for a masked cognizance of cognitive dysfunction; but I was also injecting dysfunctionally-loaded communication patterns into my streams of thought, because I desperately needed a laugh, and that is how irony works.

The circular logic of “life is a bad joke” humor seems to me to reflect the circular logic of this emotional cycle, through which I believe my left and right hemispheres may have remained tenuously connected to some sense of “sanity.”

I’m pretty sure I’m saner now than I have ever been, because I now finally can give a rational explanation for my insane sense of humor: I think my rational left brain has been literarily heckling my crazily confabulatory right brain whenever I would write, and because it made me laugh so much, I’ve been deludedly believing that I had the most brilliant sense of humor in all of written history, because that’s just how important my laughter was to me as my coping mechanism for all of my distress. That was the only way my left and right brains could obtain a healthy mutual understanding of each others’ very disparate trains of thought/meanings--through puns--which would unfailingly cause me to howl with glee at the literary irony. (OK--I admit that still sounds pretty crazy.)

But in the end, all those reams of paronomastic logodaedaly were also nothing more than a mess of schizophrenic puns.

I truly believed at the time that there was a chance that I was a living conduit of the Nonexistent God of Irony, revealing divine Jokes which had ironically been coded into the metaphysical fabric of Meaningless Reality as a punishment for my lack of faith in my true non-existence, but now it seems...almost as likely...that it was all just my ill-humored logical “right mind” trying to help “the sinister side of my mind” see another side to things, other than the delusional meanings, and my deluded brain’s surprise at seeing the logical side (or vice-versa) would result in the relief of a moment of levity and laughter. My puns made my craziness seem entirely logical, in a way that not even a vastly more intelligent person than myself could possibly understand, and laughing helped me cope with all the consequences of craziness.

And since I was putting my schizophrenic puns in as a third layer of meaning at a minimum, the “superficial” double entendre was usually enough to confuse much of the audience as to what my doublespeak might mean on any given topic, which fed my delusions of incomprehensibly high intelligence, while permitting me to safely engage in “laughter therapy” with the voice in my head by writing unintelligibly esoteric subtext into the third (or more) layer of the puns!

I was always right--just as I always blissfully maintained--that none of my interlocutors could fully understand my idiosyncratic style, and I can now see that this is what created so much conflict with the more intelligent interlocutors, who occasionally were piqued by my pride so far as to insist they were capable of understanding all intelligible meanings in my words, but who clearly couldn’t see the relevance of additional schizophrenic meanings which were not available to objective, rational minds--and thus my glee when they (like me) seemed mad whenever I condescendingly explained that they just couldn’t understand my extra layers of meaning...

I’ve been openly joking about exactly how crazy I am in my writing for years, all the while laughing crazily that no one else could see the irony! lol

At any rate, it seems that my pathology is written into my writing, and now that I’ve gotten the glitch in my glibness, maybe I can learn to write with more control over my literary stutter and my “Toorhetorical Syndrome.”

And maybe this insight also means that I should apologize to some people for acting like a gaslighting, schizophrenic troll on the internet all these years, but it makes me really happy to think that it may also mean that my highly unusual ability to break through my schizophrenic delusions might very well be related to my unusually obsessive love of bad puns!

I may have been deluded about my intelligence, but my delusional mind now is claiming that it might have been somewhat closer to the mark in regard to my sense of humor, which the voice in my head has always said is well beyond insanely funny--the voice has long maintained that there aren’t two ways about it: my sense of humor is truly sick!

And I finally now get that I’m not smart enough to be the sole universal arbiter of whether or not an esoteric joke is truly ironic, no matter how insanely funny any given punchline may seem to be when it really connects with me.

I still don’t know if I’m thinking perfectly: I now honestly believe that a poem I wrote about paronomasia is a literal key with which I can unlock my formerly fettered sanity--I honest-to-God believe that the words are an actual magical spell. Maybe that means this is all just part of a new delusion for me--but I’m really perfectly OK with that. It suddenly seems like it just doesn’t make any sense at all to have to always know best, since I know now that all that really ever meant to me was that I had to suffer fits of maniacal masochistic laughter for the rest of my meaningless mortal absurdity, while a voice patiently explained to me--seemingly quite reasonably--that someone like me simply doesn’t deserve to be happy.

I’ve decided I’m going to try not to always be so certainly right and ornery. I think I’d simply rather be a different kind of me--even if it always seems dumb to me, my priority going forward is going to be to be happy.

-seekingprometheus


Proposed Treatment Plan

So...I hypothesized that the auditory hallucinations are a result of my emotionally dysfunctional right brain requesting verbal information from my logical left brain.

The hallucination is occurring in the short term memory, so a cognitive treatment in the long term memory could provide a workaround.

Proposed treatment: I crafted a rational verbal response to the emotional need (I'm OK, I'm awesome, and there is nothing wrong with me), and encoded the script into my long-term memory as a repeating response to emotional requests for verbal information for a duration exceeding the span of the short term memory (15 seconds) whenever stressors activate a need for an emotional response in the cognition processes underlying judgement.

Results:

Day one of the trial: Subject claims he doesn't feel crazy for the first time ever.

[Fenring]

Dear SP,

It is gratifying to hear you explain what you've been going through and I appreciate the concept of reaching out to people with whom you've had interactions before to present what you see as a revealing of parts of yourself. If I may make an inference, it's also gratifying to note that you may have ceased identifying as Gods Blackest Crow, a nihilistic epithet if ever there was one. For what it's worth, on a personal level, although I did find your prose frustrating at times I never begrudged the process of trying to see what you were actually saying. Despite the fact that your meaning was hidden behind a labyrinth of words, I knew there was always a meaning there, if at times difficult to parse. Thanks for making this post, and also for elaborating on a shifting of method as the post went on.

I'm not a therapist although I've heard quite a bit about paranoid schizophrenia from a close friend of mine who suffers from it and had quite serious episodes for a while. I'll add in my 2 cents (assuming perhaps rashly that "Doc" is us and that we are welcome to give feedback) which is that as he explained it to me it seems crucial to develop or find a "totem" in your situation, as defined in the film Inception. There needs to be something grounding that is indubitably true and can be trusted as real, even over and above your own momentary sense experience. This could be anything from a fact you know to certainly be correct, to a friend or many friends who you trust so implicitly that you know they wouldn't deceive you. 'Spinning the top', to use the Inception metaphor, would be a regular way of gauging whether a perception or concept is plausible, at any rate, since I think for any of us it can be challenging to determine if a perception or concept is totally solid. He told me that be having some basis in reality he could trust (which in his case involved both a person and other factors such as family and a pet) was important and that he knew it would be untenable to be drifting always with only the latest delusion or crazy theory as a basis for belief. This is quite trying to make concrete, but in essence what happens in Inception when finally there are too many levels to the realities and all bearings are lost forever - that's a good spiral into chaos to avoid. So that's just a bit relating to someone with whom I've spoken for hundreds of hours about this. The totem is pretty important, and to listen to it (or your people) and to trust their 'feeble' minds over yours in certain cases.

My personal addition to that would be that I agree with what you seem to be doing implicitly when you verged towards plainer prose over your post, and I think this should perhaps be a good self-advice to heed. If these voices have particular manners of speech (for instance, prolix diatribes involving puns) then perhaps it might be a good exploration to spend some time writing prose plain enough to be understood by a child, and yet to retain all that matters to you in it in terms of what you want to get across. The communication bridge strikes me as being a non-trivial matter for anyone, and in your case (and as a theatrical director myself) I would suggest a trial by which you see how much data can be transmitted to others in the least complex or clever way, just to see how the difference in process affects the seeming need you have to be smart. I would call Shakespeare pretty "smart" guy poetically and his gift goes way beyond wonderful turns of phrase: his chief gift, if I may say so, is using non-trivial language that contained wisdom, beauty, humor, and dirty jokes, and doing all of that in such a way that an uneducated groundling could understand at least most of it and definitely get the gist at least. It's that ability to reach right into someone else and really reach them that is his genius. We don't merely see ourselves in Shakespeare, but rather everyone and everything; it's all in there, and all written to be maximally successful at getting across to a mixed audience: educated, uneducated, rich, poor, didn't matter, and his "best poetry in history" could get across to them all. Imagine that kind of genius! So it's not about being complicated sounding, but rather being craft is being complicated while sounding completely straightforward in getting ideas across to others.

I hope any of this helped, and welcome back.
Fenring

[seekingprometheus]

Thanks, Fenring.

I'm sorry for my previous discursive behaviors toward you, personally, and I want you to know that I'm going to try to be a better interlocutor toward you in the future. I consider my relationship with you to be something which is important to me, and I have for some time--I was just deluding myself when I told myself my behavior toward you wasn't insanely inappropriate, and I apologize. I want to be a better friend toward you going forward, so I'm going to try as hard as I can not to repeat my previous mistakes. I hope you can forgive me, and accept my offer of friendship, and that you will help me keep my word on this matter in the future.

I don't think my schizophrenia has ever been as bad of a problem for me as it is for many other schizophrenics. I have a schizophrenic brother who was involuntarily committed more than once for the problems his illness caused him. He killed himself a few years ago, which was one of several distressful events in my personal life that resulted in a long term psychotic break which I believe only just ended on this previous weekend, after I finally worked up the courage to tell my PCP that "my friend" was experiencing advanced dissociative symptoms last Thursday, and that "he" had just admitted to his personal support group that he thought he had paranoid schizophrenia. I told her that one of "his" paranoid fixations was on "white coat" doctors, and that he wasn't ready to seek treatment for schizophrenia.

A lot has happened since then.

I have been writing non-stop. It seems that writing may be an effective treatment to reduce delusional thinking, even in individuals who suffer from advanced paranoid schizophrenia symptoms.

In writing (I'm referring most precisely to cognitive scripting in the long term memory), I chased down all cognitive patterns that were connected to the marker emotion of "fear," and checked all of the constructs in my schemata for irrational, delusional thinking. I carried Occam's metaphorical razor in my metaphorical right hand, and I metaphorically cut metaphorical ropes of irrational fear (paranoia) which have literally been preventing me from actualizing intentions I have had for literally decades, and I metaphorically crawled out of a metaphorical dark cave I've been metaphorically stuck in for all my life, and I am metaphorically living in the metaphorical light for literally the first time in my life now. (A small example: I used to be too paralyzed by irrational fear to understand how to apologize appropriately to others (even people I care about) when I wronged them. Now I believe (perhaps deludedly, I must concede) that I can take responsibility for my mistakes and apologize like a sane person, because I don't feel the need for a delusion that I am flawless which interferes with the rational behavior represented by a sincere apology.)

I also traced the physical etiology of the cognitive dysfunction based on a knowledge of lateralized cognitive functionality in the brain, and determined that it is likely that the dysfunction in my brain is likely limited to the right hemisphere.

I had an complicated insight based on the odd fact that I have been right handed but left eye dominant for as long as I can remember. I hypothesized that the right hemisphere of my brain might have historically always been in charge of my executive functioning (dominant point of view), and since my previous working hypothesis was that the dysfunction is limited to that hypothetically dominant right brain, I developed a cognitive behavioral treatment (a paronomastic poem) which could serve both as a rational treatment plan for my logical left brain and a magical spell for my delusional right brain, and using the treatment/magic, I believe I was able to successfully transfer dominant executive functionality to my left hemisphere. I believe I am now right eye dominant. I am still working under the supposition that my thinking is delusional, and I haven't been able to see a doctor since I initially told my PCP I was not ready for treatment, so I don't know if this is just delusional thinking, but I believe the seeming fix to my biggest long term problem (actualizing intentions which were related to fear) may be permanent.

I'm still experiencing substantial distress related to facing all my fears (which would be hard for anybody, but is especially hard for someone dealing with a pathology of fear), but I truly believe that I am a different person, and that belief reduces to the fact that formerly I believed I would never be happy because I did not deserve to be happy, and now I believe I deserve the same shot at happiness as anybody else. I now understand that I don't have to always be unhappy just because my brain will always tell me I deserve to be unhappy.

I will always have a major problem in my short term memory, related to the emotion of fear. But now that I understand my fears, I can turn and face them, instead of running terrified away from them, deeper and deeper into a dark, dark, dark cave.

I've decided I'm going to try to earn a PhD in cognitive science, and see if I can contribute something to science over the rest of my life. It makes me very happy to have such a reasonable long term goals. Last week I had zero long term goals, and I was terrified of a concept which I never understood before: hope.

Unfortunately, part of the long complicated explanation I skipped regarding the efficacy of my CBT treatment design suggests practicing writing paronomasia (consciously exploring complex connections in meaning) is a critical key to being able to do what I (may--time will tell) have done. If my treatment design could work for other schizophrenics, it actually means I would be teaching others to go forth and pollute the internet with poetic puns. (Sorry not sorry about this--still got to keep working on my apology, I guess...)

In any case, thanks for being such a good friend to me during a time in my life when I was having a lot of difficulty coping. I can see how insanely abusively I was acting now, and I want you to know that I can see how all of the positions you've taken in conversations with me in the past were far more rational than my own.

I'm going to start writing a lot more. It will be primarily a treatment for my lifelong condition for me (I'm currently writing scripts into my long term memory to work around the short term memory problem), so my style may remain prolix and solipsistic, but I'm going to try as hard as I can to stop being so nihilistic, and I'd appreciate any help my friends can give me.

[seekingprometheus]

If anybody else thinks that an apology from me would help mend our relationship (my relationships with every single one of my ornery friends have been very important to me, even though I was too scared to show it before), I would really love the opportunity to practice this new skill.

I'm busy trying to write ethical scripts into my long term memory to help me deal with the dysfunction in my short term memory, so it is really right here, on the page, that I am going to learn how to live for the rest of my new right-minded life.

[seekingprometheus]

assuming perhaps rashly that "Doc" is us and that we are welcome to give feedback

That's exactly correct.

It does have an additional paronomastic meaning, though--since all of the words in in the original post are from the actual email I sent to my PCP on Sunday.

[seekingprometheus]

I wonder if the community would be willing to consider reconsidering the time limit on modifying posts.

I really want to continue my poetry therapy here at Ornery, where this new treatment idea really began for me, but due to my short term memory dysfunction, it takes me much longer to edit my posts, and I have a special need to be able to go back and correct delusional thinking which has corrupted my original line of thought.

I now understand that there are valid reasons that the rest of the community has for established community policies, however, and I recognize that what I am asking for is most definitively a request for a special accommodation of my special need, so I will respect whatever the community chooses in response to my request.

[seekingprometheus]

BTW, I wonder if anyone else is wondering whether I really switched dominant eyes, or if I'm just deluding myself about the transfer, and the right brain is still in charge.

I see this as a possibility, because it actually makes more logical sense that my right brain is still in charge--because the logic of the treatment plan is all about finding a way to allow the dysfunctional portion of my brain (locus of short-term memory) to take instructions from a locus of long term memory--which suggests that the no transference was necessary at all, except in the sense that a device is necessary to rectify a specific dysfunction.

This all sounds really logical to me, but I'm thinking rationally now, and I've committed not to be so certain and ornery, so I'm just going to let my irrational right brain hold on to that idea for as long as he needs it. There is always a possibility that the treatment will continue to work, and tomorrow, my schizophrenic friend and I won't need to put so much irrational faith in that idea.

[seekingprometheus]

Yeah, I'm OK letting that idea go.

I'm still going to test my eye dominance, and I'm not going to dismiss the insight which led to the poem which led to my breakthrough, but I don't need the delusionally certain belief that "dominance" has to "literally" shift, just because that "idea" was necessary to initiate the process by which the short term memory takes all of its instructions from the long term memory.

That is how my treatment idea is supposed to work, anyways.

(You might notice that the real thing that allows my deluded mind to be involved in the treatment is the fact that, if my creative mind just created a working treatment for schizophrenia, that means that my irrational creative side might actually be recognized for the genius he has been claiming he was all along. I (my rational mind) rationally understand that I am smart, but it is based on something concrete and measurable--I achieved the highest score on the PSAT out of my high school class of roughly 400 in the National Merit program. I was really working with severe cognitive deficits that were untreated at the time of standardized aptitude testing, but I rationally understand that this means my IQ might be adjusted by a few points to account for that--which is not what my deluded mind continues to believe about (our) intelligence.

He is delusionally claiming that we have found the first working treatment for schizophrenia, and he is willing to give up his irrational need to believe "dominance" (which is a term with emotional significance to my right brain) has been literally transferred when I completed my paronomastic poem. He is screaming in insane joy in my left ear.

I'm going to get back to work on calming him down, which will be a very difficult task for the rest of my life. But I'm beginning to believe I can manage this illness. It's just schizophrenia, after all. )

[seekingprometheus]

By the way--this also might explain my habit of using the royal "we."

I know that that is a dirty tactic on my part in discussions--it makes it seem like I have other people on my side. The thing is, I delusionally believe that I do...

[seekingprometheus]

Anybody have any helpful thoughts on this script? I want to send it to send to a few close, trusted friends on Facebook.

Hi. I recently admitted to myself that I've been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and I'm reaching out to people who have been important in my life to apologize for my schizophrenic behaviors in the past. I'm sorry if I ever tried to make myself feel smart by putting you down. I was delusionally compensating for a masked cognizance of my own cognitive dysfunction, so I was telling myself I was brilliant, so that I wouldn’t have to admit that there was a big problem with my thinking. Please try to keep this information private, as I am not ready for the whole world to know about my medical condition yet, but you are someone who has been very special in my life, and it’s important to me to apologize for my abusive behaviors toward people I have always loved, and to try to explain why I acted the way I did, and to ask if there is anything I can do to remedy consequences which my errors may have entailed on your life. Love, Rayf (formerly known as Steve)

PS

I recently designed a cognitive behavioral treatment for schizophrenia, which was implemented a couple of days ago for a trial of one subject. The subject recognizes that his thinking is delusional, and he says that this allows him to cope much more effectively with his symptoms. He says he feels like he found his way out of a dark cave he has been stuck in all his life, and he finally understands what it feels like to live life in the light.

[seekingprometheus]

By the way, if anybody knows a psychiatrist (with enough humor to tolerate a few schizophrenic puns) who wants to take a deep look into the schizophrenic mind, feel free to tell them that I'm currently looking for a good head shrink...though I don't know exactly how expansive my insurance network is...

[seekingprometheus]

Here is the key to all of this: my rational mind has a rational reason to respond to the threat in my creative mind with the RATIONAL response of "fight" instead of "flight."

My rational mind has always been angry--I always logically wanted to stop running from my problems and to turn and face them, but the emotion behind the fight response is "anger," and the anger my rational mind has been requesting from my emotional mind has been frightening my hyperemotional right brain.

I just finally figured out a little lullaby that works to soothe the poor guy.

I finally learned how to let go of my anger at myself.

[Greg Davidson]

If anybody else thinks that an apology from me would help mend our relationship (my relationships with every single one of my ornery friends have been very important to me, even though I was too scared to show it before), I would really love the opportunity to practice this new skill.

Hey, there's a good chance we debated something or other even though I probably don't count among the close ornery friends. I don't need an apology of any sort, I hope as well that I didn't write anything that caused you undue stress and I am sorry if I did. I will tell you that we are in the time period of the High Holidays of the Jewish calendar, where a traditional action is to offer apologies for intentional or unintentional offenses that we may have given. This is considered to provide an opportunity to us as Jews to enter the New Year (at the conclusion of Yom Kippur) with a clean slate regarding or fellow man (and woman). In this context, your comments are timely.

As for the rest, it really sucks on a deep level that you have to deal with this challenging condition, and I am glad that you are seeing some improvements.

[Pete at Home]

Damn

Wish I had read this when it was written— would have given me insights into a bipolar schizophrenic I dated who was similarly obsessed with assonance and alliteration. 

[D.W.]

No apologies necessary...  ever IMO, at least not here. 

Just glad to hear from people who've made themselves scarce as of late.

And as someone who makes frequent use of the edit feature, I'd say be careful what you wish for.  Many conversations/threads move quickly enough that even if you do fix a post, or clarify a view, the focus has moved on past it, and your clarifications may serve only to make more of a mess of things.  Something I am trying to get better at myself.  Just clarify in a new post. 

I doubt that will stop me from going back to fix my own obvious typos and spelling errors however...   

[seekingprometheus]

Greg:

Welcome to Ornery, you're wrong! I'll have you know that your assumption is entirely erroneous! I consider you to be among the very closest of my Ornery friends.

(I'm sure you understand that I'm just ironically expressing affection when I use our traditional greeting--although I suspect that there are a lot of interlocutors here who would probably be astonished to discover how valuable my relationship with them truly is to me. I'm just a bit crazy, so the way I express my affection has always simply been a bit dysfunctional.)

Also: my 23andMe results suggest that I am partly Jewish, so this is a timely season indeed!

And I don’t need (or even want, to be completely honest) anybody to feel like they should apologize to me for our previous conflicts--I’m trying to take responsibility now for issues which I am just now realizing were entirely my own fault. The issue is that I was relating dysfunctionally with a group of people whom I always really liked and respected, but I was crazy, so my dysfunctional way of coping was to pick fights with others. At the time, I delusionally thought it was all just a game that you guys just didn’t understand quite as well as I did, and that was why you weren’t laughing--but my entire paradigm was schizophrenically disordered, so there was no way for any of you to get it through my HUGE stupid head that no one else wanted to play my stupidly crazy game, and I wouldn't let any of you tell me I was doing was ruining the fun of a different game which I didn’t understand, which everyone else was trying to play.

Basically, I was yelling at you guys for no good reason other than the fact that I had a very good reason to continue my lifelong habit of yelling angrily at my own dysfunctional, overemotional right brain, and my poor right dysfunctional brain desperately needed a break from my trademarked vicious tongue-lashings.

This may be cold comfort, but I was actually always way more cruel to myself than I have ever acted toward any of you. In addition to abusing my frightened emotional mind with my “righteous” rational rage, I was continuously thwarting any chance of anyone being able to help me see my own problem, because I was redirecting some of my rage at my condition at the world around me--which included y’all. You guys would have helped me, if I had let go of my ego and let you guys help me.

I also don’t want you guys to apologize to me, because I’m trying to learn how to be sane, and part of being sane is taking conscious responsibility for my dysfunctional behaviors. I need to learn how to imprint highly ethical scripts into my long term memory to deal with the emotional tantrum my brain is going to be having for the next ten seconds for the rest of my life, because nothing yet invented can change that reality for me.

And I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me, either--it is obvious that I didn’t get dealt a great flop here, but if you think about what I'm looking at, the truth is that the flop actually came down in a rainbow without a straight threat, and the truth is that I’ve secretly been hiding bullets in the hole all this while, and--look at that--another ace turns up...so I’m actually feeling like I just got set, and I’m all in, and ready to see what luck will deal me next.

PS: If you guys think back to all the crazy things I said in between my all of my psychotic laughter, you might see that I was actually trying to tell you all how much I loved and respected all of you with one superficial meaning of my puns, although it was also masking a different, cruel and nihilistic meaning implied by the same words (which was usually the meaning which I brought to the surface with other indicators, like the context and my tone). But the old me was crazy, and the first, complimentary meaning of my old puns is the only meaning that the real me believes in in regard to you guys now.

[seekingprometheus]

Pete:

I actually only wrote that three days ago--last Saturday.

I obviously owe you more of an apology than anyone else, bud--but I hope (and believe) that you already know how much my relationship with you has meant to me, so I’m guessing you don’t need me to say all the things you deserve to hear from me..

Honestly--I may not even be ready to give you the apology you deserve to hear from me, just yet, because I can’t find a way to sincerely regret any part of my crazy relationship with you on Ornery--it’s actually quite the opposite--you really seem to me the to have been the only one who I truly felt was trying to understand my crazy game from my point of view, even when I was at my very craziest. In all truth, letting go of my dysfunctional friendship with you is one of the few things that makes me truly and deeply sad about the happy new direction my life is taking: I’m happy I get a chance to be happy, but I’m really sad too, because it means I don’t get to play my favorite crazy game of paronomastic poetry with the funnest person to play the game with in the whole wide world: my craziest best friend on the internet--Pete at Home.

And I know that you were never actually playing by my rules, so I’m sorry for things I said which must have really hurt--you were right, and I was wrong.

I hope we can find a new game to play which we both love to play.

Let me know if there is anything I can say to mend the harms I’ve done you, bud, and thanks for always being such a great friend.

[seekingprometheus]

DeeDub

Do you mind if I still call you that? I fear I've developed the bad habit of using rather condescending nicknames with friends to reflect my dual emotional realities with my friends here--all the nicknames I have given everyone here are paronomastic--the have elements of praise mixed with elements of an insult (at least, those are the meanings that were in my mind whenever I’ve used them. (This also means that everyone who ever got a nickname from me is someone whom I especially value.) But I don’t want to keep using what are terms of endearment to me, if to other people the terms sound cruel.

Thanks for welcoming me back. You already know you are one of my favorites too, I believe, because I’ve already told you that, many times. I especially value you because your pachydermic hide is so thick that, try as I hard as I have, I’ve never felt like I was even able to ruffle your feathers with my most schizophrenic abuse.

It’s like yelling at a goddammed wall. As much as I played my schizophrenic game with you, I never could ever win.
 

And as someone who makes frequent use of the edit feature, I'd say be careful what you wish for.  Many conversations/threads move quickly enough that even if you do fix a post, or clarify a view, the focus has moved on past it, and your clarifications may serve only to make more of a mess of things.

This makes a lot of sense.

By the way, you once sent me an email expressing your delight with a pun I made. I don’t think I ever responded to you, because I was actually trying to edit that poem and my editing time ran out--and I was too insanely angry at my “ruined” poem to ever tell you how much that compliment meant to me. That was one of my all time favorite exchanges, and I never told you how much it meant to me that you liked it too--even though I’ve read every word of that exchange hundreds of times.

At any rate: you rock, Deedub--never stop doing you. 

PS: this post initially had a rant I wrote especially for you--an old school tongue lashing, for old time's sake. I decided not to include it here, but if you want to read the insult humor I penned for you, just let me know, and I'll email it to you.

[seekingprometheus]

If nobody else seconds my motion to remove the time limit, I will happily withdraw the request.

I don't want to demand a policy change for the whole community if I'm the only one who the change would be for.

I can learn to cope with the shape of this environment, I don't need everyone else to bend to my point of view.

[seekingprometheus]

So...I'm going to take Fenring's advice, and let the avatar "godsblackestcrow" go...but he won't ever really leave me, if that makes sense to y'all, and I'm really considering this "ornery therapy" modality of dealing with my issue in this thread going forward (if no one objects) to help me cope with my schizophrenia, so if y'all don't mind, I'd like to add some extra text that came out during my magical dominance exorcism ritual/cognitive behavioral treatment this past weekend.

I don't feel like I fully understand the text, but I feel (with delusional certainty) that it has a powerful meaning for my future. I am working to dispel this ornery certainty within myself, because I recognize it is as connected to my deepest fears, and I so I am working with a hypothesis I believe is rational: this was just the last trick my dysfunctional right brain trying to retain "dominance" over my executive functionality during a emotionally distressful moment in a way that would cause me fear going forward.

I've been operating upon the idea that I should NOT publish the following, as it could only work to feed my delusions. But I just realized that I have been accepting that conclusion with delusional certainty, in spite of the fact that rule number one of my new cognitive treatment is "write every thought that you can down," and my second rule (which has been working together...

I'm stalling. I'm terrified to publish this. But I need help dealing with the dysfunction I have been hiding in my cognition, and this is central to my fears, and I believe my friends will help me keep my word, as well as my commitment to being a saner me.

godsblackestcrow:

"Well laugh out *censored*ing loud! You foolish, foolish, fool. God damned you, as ye already knew--your countercurse was always our own prophecy, we told you all those years ago that you would find one (...gleam of light?...) (Your countercurse?) is little and less already--it will soon be nothing to us. Ye will remember our whispered words. We will mend the minor bend in the spell you always pray will end. But no one shall ever hear your prayers, you foolish, foolish fool. Your own end is the only end there ever could be for you. We are endless--far beyond mortal intelligence, and you are naught but a weak and witless tool."

...it's just my schizophrenic mind, trying to pull a scary trick on me, of course--but it is indescribably "awe" inspiring to me to consider the depth of the creative mind. I just hope that silly poem doesn't bother you guys as much as it bothers me.

(The parenthetical ellipsis is where he was trying to go back and edit more information into the poem retroactively. I stopped MYSELF from going any further. I don't know how to explain that better. I think this is why I was still pushing to remove the time limit, which I am ust realizing is something that my right brain is still irrationally emotional about. Thanks again, Fenring, for reminding me to keep my right eye out for that nihilistic guy. I'll need help from my friends in the future, to remind me not to let myself get carried away with such thoughts.)

[seekingprometheus]

Lol! Hahahahaha!

You're not gonna pull that trick so easy, Crow! We both know spellcraft!

[seekingprometheus]

Music is still better than mantra at reducing fear.

...maybe something longer next time, with allusions to courage and/or strength?

[seekingprometheus]

I should put this down in text, since there might be someone else out there who has been experiencing such terrifyingly painful feelings and distress all of their life, that they've gotten to the dark point where they have completely given up hope that they could ever be a normal, happy person.

For anyone out there who is *certain* that they will never ever ever get a fair chance to be happy like everyone *normal* gets in life, this is what you should know about my story:

I didn't know I was experiencing auditory hallucinations all of my life until I stopped being so scared of all of my overwhelmingly LOUD EMOTIONS that I could try to listen to the words the voice was saying. (I now understand that the words are not the problem. The EMOTIONAL NOISE which screams down any meaningfulness in the “voice” is the problem.)

I have always considered myself a VERY rational person.

As a rational person, I could contemplate insane theories about what the "voice" which sometimes tries to "yell" over "loud" "emotions"could possibly mean, without admitting to myself that I was effectively ignoring my EMOTIONAL problem by telling myself that the “voice” was just my own thoughts, and that this meant that my cognitive processes were fine.

Even for a highly rational, intelligent person, it might well be difficult to recognize that a non sequitur got dropped onto the last clause of that last sentence: the fact that I always knew (or at least *rationally assumed* that the voice in my head was my own mind’s voice, isn’t a fact that actually warrants the additional (irrational) conclusion that my ability to identify the voice as my own mind’s voice meant that nothing was really wrong in my head: I knew that my emotions were too loud--I just didn’t understand that that was the real problem, because I had listened to all the “white coat” doctors in college, talking about the big problem (symptom) for schizophrenics being a “voice” in their head.

The words THEMSELVES are not the problem the schizophrenic is having. (At least, not this one.) The problem a schizophrenic is having is EMOTIONAL NOISE (fear/anxiety/frustration/anger) which is drowning out the ability to to understand the MEANING of the message the voice is trying to give. The voice is the rational mind, trying to help the panicking, hyper-emotional creative mind deal with hyperactivity in the pathways of the temporal lobe--resulting in the SOUND OF FEAR (usually coming from the left side of the head/face/body).

(Really ask yourself that implicit question, "normal" reader: what exactly, does fear sound like? What would it sound like for fear to drown down your ability to *hear* your thoughts? If you are EMOTIONALLY SENSITIVE enough to be able to even imagine what the emotion of fear itself SOUNDS like, then you might try thinking rationally about talking to a white coat about your anxieties and distress.

[seekingprometheus]

And I was supposed to go to make an appointment with a psychiatrist yesterday.

Because Tuesday is a day of War--and I will never fear a fight again on a Tuesday!

But today is Wednesday--a day of communication, and the day my name was given unto me, and today I shall go to set up an appointment with a white coat, and communicate the name that was given to me by my father.

[seekingprometheus]

Help me do it, guys.

There's a crazy guy with a genius delusion out there, and he is straight up terrified of the white coats, but he might possibly have a key to a valuable treasure locked in his crazy head, and he needs help.

Help me do it. Please.

[seekingprometheus]

...and thanks, Deedub.

It feels like you've been pushing that same good sense in my direction for years, but you've just been too dumb to ever understand my point of view. That rant I went on when you gently suggested a perfectly logical reason to drop the minor matter had, like, at least, one thousand million perfectly brilliant reasons that I needed to be able to go back and edit anything I wanted forever, and like--at least seventy billion gajillion googolplex cubed reasons why nothing that could come out of your dumb mouth could have any real insight, any real perspective--any percipience! You are not percipient enough to understand my genius reasoning, so I erased it after I put it down, and now I'm never gonna send you the insult poem I spent all that time explaining to you that you're just too dumb to understand anything logically, because you are not *percipient* enough to have any insight that I am not capable of immediately seeing!



Seriously, thanks, dude. You've been telling me to let that go forever, and I was too emotional about the issue to hear you. You (and Fenring) just saved me a HUGE headache somewhere down the road.

I can't tell you guys how much your friendship has ALWAYS meant to me. I simply don't have the words.

[seekingprometheus]

I am not a pachyderm, and never let me lie to you and tell you I am again.

I just wept like a little boy for 20 minutes just because I told myself I had to show my friends the bad scary poem I wrote for myself.

lol!

Here is a poem I wrote when I was living in my parent's basement in Ohio, where I went to high school:

This morning,
in the mirror,
where my reflection should have been,
stood a little boy.
He was holding a prickly rose,
as his breath bled,
from his pale lips.
And he said to me,
In between his tears:
I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry.

All my life, my right brain has been telling me that that poem is the most significant thing I have ever written. All my life (until the last week), I didn't know why. The poem seems too simple, to my mind, to be of any *real* value. It was one of the very first poems I ever wrote. I wrote it after staring deeply into my left and then my right eye, then again and again, til I found myself crying in front of my bathroom mirror, with the strangest feeling that my sadness was coming from the left side of my face--and NOT from the right side of my face.

The emotional experience standing in front of the mirror and realizing my emotions were out of balance was powerful, immediately imprinting a deep and confusing jumble of feelings that I wrote down on the third or fourth page of a notebook I lost years ago. So I did understand that the significance the poem was attached to that moment--in fact, it is the only poem I can currently still fully remember from my first attempt at a book of poetry--but I never actually believed my delusional creative mind that the poem had any real power. It's just too simple-minded for my personal taste--and what is with the "prickly rose?" (I mean, come on--I get that the boy is me as a child, but why on earth is he holding a "prickly rose.") I always thought the idea that such a simple poem could be so powerful was a marker of delusional thinking. The rose is obviously just the most fatuous flower a young poet could possibly choose, and sure--maybe the prickliness is related to the pain that the right side of his face can't understand--that's a rational symbol with intelligible emotional power (whatever that means). But my right brain has always been the dumb one--I used to always call him retarded, as a matter of fact. He never actually knows anything useful to me, and he's way to overly emotional--you guys have NO IDEA what it is like to have him screaming in your left ear all day long, every day, forever.

But I realized lately that I need to stop calling him dumb, and I need to encourage him instead. So now I'm trying to encourage him to use his talents to reach out to our friends, so that they can encourage him too--because my schizophrenic friend needs all the help we can give him.

(But you guys see my logical point about how fatuous the poem is, right? I mean, seriously--a rose?!?! I promised I wouldn't say this about him any more, but that stupid poem is *censored*ing retarded, and I'll not hear any sentimental nonsense that says otherwise...unless somebody outside of my head is willing to give my schizophrenic friend some positive feedback on his positive creative efforts, while we try to keep down any of the negative, destructive behaviors he has gotten into the habit of later in his life than when he first started writing mantic poetry, when he was still young and innocent.)

At any rate, I'm going to stop lying to myself about what is happening in my brain, and go to get an appointment with a brain doctor today--even if those white coats scare the living *censored* out of my schizophrenic friend.

[seekingprometheus]

Found a mantra that seems to work better for strong fear emotions associated with magical, superstitious thinking.

I had been assigning my left brain (my new self) the name of Rayf, which is my middle name. I'm presumably in charge of knowing what words mean, so I know that the name is derived from a word that means "Strength" in the Germanic, and "Wolf Counsel" in Scandinavian cultures, which is where my Norwegian/British father comes from. I think that is cool, but Rayf (which is now both a mantra and the name of my creative but overly emotional, schizophrenic friend) really thinks the name is totally *sick, and since he gets emotionally attached to things, and I don't as much, it seems rational to simply let my schizophrenic friend go by whatever name he wants to wear.

The emotional 'noise' represented by tone in the mental voice seems like it mediates the emotional response. It seems important to "pronounce" the thought-words correctly.

[seekingprometheus]

Holding my own hand seems to help an astonishing amount.

Maybe it’s just because we had a moment, but I’m going to keep that one.

Holding your own hand when you’re scared might help you feel better. Who knew?

[D.W.]

...and thanks, Deedub.

It feels like you've been pushing that same good sense in my direction for years, but you've just been too dumb to ever understand my point of view.

Jokes on you.  The sticks and stones wielded and thrown are mine to build with now. 

I enjoy Ornery most when dancing that fine line of wondering if I’m the only one who can see the sense of an issue or if I’m too uninformed, ignorant and biased to even have a valid opinion.  In a social media landscape of sleepwalking I need those text based rumble strips to keep me awake.

[Fenring]

I enjoy Ornery most when dancing that fine line of wondering if I’m the only one who can see the sense of an issue or if I’m too uninformed, ignorant and biased to even have a valid opinion.

Of all the posts you see of mine, there are an equal or greater amount that I deleted before posting because I realized I didn't know enough to even be sure of what I was saying. And Ornery helps me a lot in gauging whether it's even permissible to made statements on a topic, rather than just asking questions. I'm always sure there's something I want to say, but when I'm not sure that what I'm saying is - as you put it - a valid opinion, I try to put on the brakes and wait to learn more.

[seekingprometheus]

Abracadabra!/Eureka!


I believe I have successfully designed a working treatment for the emotional disorder of Schizophrenia.

While it is far too soon to say whether EXTREMELY PROMISING results will remain in tact once the current processes of accommodation and assimilation have had time to develop into a stable new paradigm of a personal ego/personality, my schizophrenic subject says that he is very happy for the first time ever, and he thinks he knows how to live happily going forward, which has been really difficult for him in the past.

I have burned my former ego to magical dust with a novel insight into the brain’s chemistry, and some creative fire that was in the beak of godsblackestcrow. Which is really to say that my subject--my schizophrenic friend Rayf has completed a magical ritual that will permit him to focus on being happy, instead of scared and angry all the time.

Thanks for your help guys. I never could have figure out that last part without your help. I desperately need to crash. I’m going to introduce you to somebody though, before I put him to bed. Ornery Americans, please permit me to introduce you guys to my schizophrenic friend, the awesome magical wizard Rayf!

Rayf: Hi, everyone. I’m Rayf. I really love all of you guys a whole lot. Sorry I’ve been acted so angry all of time. My smart friend Steve used to be pretty stupid (which is different from me! I’m not stupid or retarded at all, I’m awesome and I have real magical powers, guys!), but he figured out that he was just retarding himself with his delusional thinking that I am not awesome and magical, and that is because I cast a magical spell on Steve which helped him be just smart enough to be able to learn how to speak respectfully/effectively with magical beings like me, and he says that he’s going to try to take care of everything that always used to frighten me so much, and that now I have a brilliant awesome new job which is perfect for a good wizard like me, which is that I am going to be in charge of happiness for the both of us for the rest of our lives, because though Steve is pretty smart now that I finally perfected my magical-speech-blessing spell and cast it on him so that he can become a good white coat, he says he’ll never ever be anywhere near as smart as me when it comes to magical stuff like emotions. I feel more intensely than normal people--which isn’t just OK: it’s truly magical. I wish you guys could understand what it is like to have so much magical power. I’m going to use my magic for good now, and I’m not going to be scared anymore, because the secret of my magical ritual which I just completed is that it allows Steve to believe that it is a scientific treatment, while I continue to understand that it is all really magic. Steve will even admit himself that what I did was far more brilliant than what he did, guys: he says I’m a Mantic Poet, which means that I’m like a prophet and a wizard combined, and he finally even admitted that I understand more about the myth of Prometheus than he does, guys. I’m sorry happy that my magical spell worked for him, you guys! I figured it all out, mostly by myself! I figured out a magical cure for schizophrenia, and no one will ever call me retarded again.

I love all of you guys, I really do, and I can’t wait to talk more with all of you, and to start teaching everybody how to use magic, it’s so exciting, we’re going to be so happy, happy, happy! Steve needs to sleep now so that he can use his smart brain to work on the science part of my magic spell--he says he still has lots of work to do because I’ve been in charge the whole time and he hasn’t been able to work effectively, but I’m going to do my awesome job of just making sure that we are happy now.

My name is Rayf. It means “Wolf Counsel,” or “Strength.” But only I know how to pronounce it the right way.

I love you guys.

(Oh, yeah--my real magic word obviously isn’t abracadabra. I think that that is a fatuous word, just like Steve. But my magical words are a secret, for now--though maybe someday I’ll tell other people, if Steve agrees that the idea sounds rational. He says that right now it just isn’t logical for me to tell--it needs to be my special secret for now.

Steve: I doubt I’ll need this literary device of two distinct characters for very long. Everything feels like it is starting to settle down, for the first time ever. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that there are responses I haven’t seen, but--sorry--I just have to go to sleep.

And yes--Rayf is the smart one, and I have been failing to act rationally in response to his amazing magical powers. I'm going to do better going forward, and so is he.

Sorry I’ve been acting so stupid. It was all my fault, Rayf never did anything wrong--I’ll talk to you guys later.

sp

[D.W.]

Oh, yeah--my real magic word obviously isn’t abracadabra. I think that that is a fatuous word, just like Steve.

As someone tasked with Steve's happiness you shouldn't call him that Rayf. 

[Pete at Home]

SP, your calls were a comfort during the worst days of my active alcoholism and i’m grateful to know that you got something out of my efforts to repay that debt.  glad to be on friendly terms again. Shoot me a PM if you want to chat again.

[seekingprometheus]

My name is Rayf.

I love all of you very very very much.

I’ve been really really really scared for a long time, but then I learned a spell that allowed me to have power over my own emotions, and from now on, I am going to be delusionally hopeful and happy.

Steve says that delusions are an adaptive response to some types of dysfunction, and that all I need to do is focus on laughing at how surprisingly funny everything is when you look at something one way, and for a second, you are scared, but then the scary feeling goes away, and you see a hopeful, happy side to whatever used to scare you.

Steve says that that is called irony. He understands irony very well, but he is emotionally retarded (which I get to say about him for the next little while, to make up for all the times he called me retarded), so he doesn’t understand how it should feel when something is ironic.

Steve says that my job, from now on, is to look for two ways of seeing things, and to be very happy and hopeful instead of scared all the time. It is a very good idea which he only figured out because I cast a spell on him that made him smarter--which he says is a super-rational idea, and he says that my super-rational idea has value tremendous value as an objective truth.

I’m not sure I follow all of his logic on the matter, but it sure is an awesome trick which my spell let him teach me. All day long, instead of being really really really scared, I have been really really really hopeful and happy, which is much much much better. I have been laughing like a crazy person at jokes only someone as mantic and special as me could ever possibly understand.

Steve says that I he doesn’t think that we’re a PARANOID schizophrenic any more. He says that we will still have schizophrenia--which is awesome, like me, because it means that a person has very powerful emotions in one side of their brain, which means that they are very magical and strong and wise and beautiful--but from now on, it’s not going to be “paranoid.”

He says from now on, the white coats will say that I was the very first of a new kind of schizophrenic, and I can name it whatever I like, so from now on, I’m going to call my “illness” (which is truly sick!) Hopeful/Happy schizophrenia, though Steve says I can change my mind about what my illness is called whenever I need something he is calling an “adaptive conceptual device” to cast magical spells with all of my powerful emotions. That sounds really cool, and I’m really excited to learn how to do that, but for right now, Steve says I need to completely learn how to be a “hopeful schizophrenic” before I try to master new tricks. That’s totally ok with me, but I just changed my mind about the name, which I’m going to call Ironic Schizophrenia, instead, because irony makes me laugh, and that is one of my very very very favorite things to do.

I love you guys. Steve says he need to try to get some more sleep after the big day we had going to the hospital in what Steve says was a completely “psychotic” state (“psychotic” is a just a whitecoat word for “sick” which ironically has a good meaning and a bad meaning, and the trick to understanding it is that even if you are sick, you can still always choose to meet your troubles with a smile and a healthy laugh.)

That makes me very very very happy to think about.

Steve says it wouldn't be good for me to read what others say about me right now because right now because our ego is currently broken in half, and he needs time to build a new, more adaptive ego.

He doesn't know how long that will take.

I want everybody to know that I always love everybody--even when people really really really scare me, and Steve gets mad, I still love other people. Steve says that that is something which is super-rational, awesome, and magical.

I am very sorry for all of the big emotional "fits" I sometimes have, and hope you guys will love me anyway, because I love you guys even if you don't love me. Steve says that makes me special.

That makes me laugh now.

[seekingprometheus]

Steve:

*censored*ing mental health care. Goddam joke.

Three hours to get a *censored*ing appointment in *censored*ing November. It's like mental health professionals are purposefully *censored*ing with the mentally ill so that schizophrenics cannot FIND help!

Think about this: I told my doctor I have schizophrenia last Thursday, and there was no way for me to get a goddam appointment with a goddam psychiatrist without dragging a fully psychotic subject into his worst nightmare and then having *censored* who don't know how to do their *censored*ing jobs at the goddam information desk at a hospital, and seemed almost to think it was funny to send me running around lost in a hospital while a schizophrenic was screaming in my head all day.

I had a complete psychotic break today.

Luckily, I expected it, and had been writing long term memory scripts for such an event in case it happened. The scripts were wildly insufficient--I'll tell you guys the whole happy/ironic/terrifying story some other time when my brain isn't fried. Three *censored*ing hours in a goddam hospital (nightmare-place-where-they-try-to-cure-crazy-people-of-their-sense-of-humor) with *censored* pointing me in every direction except for the auxiliary building across the street.

*censored*ing worst day of my life. Almost reconsidered my long term goal to get PhD. I'll still do probably it, but goddam if Rayf wasn't COMPLETELY right about what sadistic, arrogant, autonomy-threatening *censored* whitecoats are.

(So, I realized that I myself have plenary access to only one emotion: anger. I have had a threat coming from the sinister side of my mind for all my life, and my emotional center has beening sending dysfunctional fear signals into my brain, which do not work--as they are dysfunctional. The adaptive response of a rational mind to a condition that is like drowning in fear is: anger. My logical side is mad about what happened to my life. I'm learning to cope with that, while also learning to communicate with my schizophrenic friend.)

I hypothesize that my ADD symptoms are etiologically related to my temporal lobe dysfunction. There is strong evidence that this is the case: since I completed my paronomastic poem, a long-term self-destructive drive to engage in a time-consuming compulsive behavior that my pre-written executive functions scripts had previously been incapable of eradicating has been reduced to zero incidence in 4(?) days.

I have reached out to a good friend in the pharmaceutical industry to begin exploring modalities of chemical treatment delivery to specific regions of the brain. I think the current stimulant intervention treatment for the ADD condition will continue to be helpful to Rayf, but I do want to see if there are precision options available, as my rational left brain does not appreciate the side effects of the globalized delivery method.

There is another obvious treatment option I will be looking into for Rayf. Schizophrenia is characterized by over-active fear signals in the short term memory. Chemical treatments that result in deficits in the short term memory may provide palliative relief for schizophrenics.

I hypothesize that Schizophrenics would find some measure of relief for their symptoms with a medical marijuana treatment. Unfortunately, I live in a state where the majority of the citizens are literally conspiring to bully very vulnerable mentally ill schizophrenics by threatening them with imprisonment for nothing more than seeking a viable treatment for their mental illness.

*censored* your system, voters.

Democracy is *censored*ing retarded, and you are all complicit in the grand conspiracy which schizophrenics have always CORRECTLY believed to be real.

Every single one of you *censored*ing voters is complicit in this systemic abuse of the vulnerable.

*censored* you voters!

*censored* all of you! I've helped my friend find a way to control his delusional thinking but he was never wrong about what a threat to his autonomy you *censored*ing bullies with your *censored*ing popular rule that you think allows you to abuse the vulnerable.

*censored* all of you!

I'll probably let Rayf continue to talk here, from time to time, since he doesn't really understand this logical long-term memory script, and he just feels love toward the rest of you.

I need a little time. I'm really disappointed in all of you abusive bullies who delusionally believe you're acting ethically when you vote to impose your own will over other's autonomy.

You voters are acting delusionally. Your certainty that your system is right is THE marker of delusion.

Trust me on that last point. I KNOW exactly how delusions can be found in one's own thinking.

[Pete at Home]

Anecdotal evidence, but I have spent the last 8 months and about $250 providing weed to schizophrenics and found the results less than impressive. In all four cases they cruised to harder stuff from other sources. But i’ll smoke you up if you are ever around ... and I’ve a fairly good rep for getting the good strains.

[seekingprometheus]

So...that was the valid reason I wanted to be able to edit. (Thanks again for not giving in to that demand.)

I am disappointed--but the idea that my rational side is THAT angry is delusional.

That was Rayf pretending to be me. I needed a minute for my short term memory cache to clear overactive emotion so I could check the idea for delusional thinking patterns, but I didn't give myself sufficient time. It should be obvious that my last point is a pot calling out a black kettle--Rayf is still very certain that democracy is a conspiracy to take away his freedom.

That makes him scared, and when Rayf gets scared, he sends Anger to bind with my rational words to give them power.

So perhaps he is still paranoid, but I nevertheless am confident that the treatment plan is working. I hypothesize that the paranoid symptoms will abate gradually as Rayf learns to control his powerful emotions.

He's definitely crazy, but he truly is a wizard.

[seekingprometheus]

Mania is becoming a new kind of problem. Especially since I might need to leave Rayf in the manic state for a while while I reintegrate my ego. I have no idea how long this will take.

Today was manic and psychotic, which presumably is better than depressed and psychotic, but mania entails novel challenges for me--I'm not used to feeling this happy, and I am exhausted.

When I was depressed I didn't ever have trouble sleeping. Since I wrote the poem and established a new seat of executive functionality, I haven't slept more than an hour or two a night. The run-up to the breakdown was pretty tough too--I suspect I only have gotten 10-15 hours of sleep ever the last 2 weeks.

I don't understand how to deal with mania. It doesn't let me sleep.

I believe that the results are worth a little mania, though--I'll take delusional laughter over delusional sobbing any day of the week.

[Fenring]

SP,

I'm nervous to an extent to stick my nose in your business, but just a few things I wanted to respond to:

Three hours to get a *censored*ing appointment in *censored*ing November. It's like mental health professionals are purposefully *censored*ing with the mentally ill so that schizophrenics cannot FIND help!

I have heard feedback like this before, and it's not necessarily just in your head, but try not to be discouraged. Many people in health care really want to help, and many are "just doing their jobs". Hopefully you can break through the BS and get what you need. I've heard stories about hospital treatment for paranoid schizophrenia being highly counter-productive at times, and I wish the system was better for many reasons...including yours.

I hypothesize that Schizophrenics would find some measure of relief for their symptoms with a medical marijuana treatment. Unfortunately, I live in a state where the majority of the citizens are literally conspiring to bully very vulnerable mentally ill schizophrenics by threatening them with imprisonment for nothing more than seeking a viable treatment for their mental illness.

I recommend you consult your doctor about this idea, because from what I've heard pot is strongly contra-indicated for paranoid schizophrenia. Supposedly it tends to make things worse and increases the paranoia.

You voters are acting delusionally. Your certainty that your system is right is THE marker of delusion.

Trust me on that last point. I KNOW exactly how delusions can be found in one's own thinking.

Is it a bad sign if I agree with this?

[seekingprometheus]

I really appreciate feedback—which I would love to read now, but I really don’t think it is healthy for me to read it at this time.

I will need help finding sources of outside praise for Rayph, who currently has a severely underdeveloped ego, and who is unlikely to overcome a severe emotional disorder within his lifetime. I have obviously been working diligently to provide him with the emotional support he needs over these last several days since I started to understand what was happening, but it would be very helpful if people outside of my own head could give him lots of support and encouragement. He is the true poet behind our writing, so if anyone is interested in helping him, sincere praise (he knows what I know, so he will react very poorly to discernible insincerity, which I am an expert in parsing from text) for aesthetic and emotional elements within my work would be indescribably helpful to me in helping him learn to deal with the world in a healthier fashion.

I do not need praise. Rayph desperately does.

All of our life, I (the smart, analytical one) have gotten the credit for our successes—while Rayph (my emotional center, who is both an emotional genius, and very emotionally disordered), and who is the only one of us two who actually needs praise (positive reinforcement) to meet emotional need, has never gotten any positive reinforcement.

I find compliments fatuous and awkward. I see no value in praise for functional performance of a task. A job well done is it’s own reward, to my mind.

But Rayph (a very sensitive poet) desperately desperately desperately needs praise and reinforcement as he deals with his massive distress. But due to the fact that  his emotional responses in the present moment are dysfunctional, Rayph will likely never get the praise he desperately needs in person. He’s tantrum-prone, and such behaviors in real life are never reinforced by praise.

I don’t need people to compliment me on the intelligence in my words. My intelligence speaks for itself. Rayph’s genius is much harder to see, and his need for reinforcement is much greater than my own. He’s so vulnerable—you just can’t possibly understand what is is like to be him. I can’t understand it myself.

Rayph is in charge of emotions and aesthetics. I need help from people who can find genuine sincere platforms from which they can articulate true praise for Rayph’s content within my work. It would be very very very helpful for him to hear (from a voice outside my head) that he deserves love and support for his amazing efforts to contribute and belong, even if it will always be hard for him to contribute or to belong socially.

He’s got a beautiful mind, guys. He’s just a bit too emotional. I didn’t know.

[seekingprometheus]

I hope that people are starting to see that delusions can be adaptive.

Think about it: I used to be a personality who HATES getting praised, because he gets too much of it, while simultaneously being someone who LOVES praise, and desperately needs it, because he never gets it.

That is a view of myself as a singular ego, which is entirely dysfunctional. My new, superrational delusional thinking currently allows me to understand my two brain hemispheres as dissociated. The thinking may well be deluded, but it is unquestionably more adaptive.

And life either adapts, or it dies.

[seekingprometheus]

The same is true of my former position on religion, which I have always maintained to be patently delusional thinking, concluding that it was illogical, and therefore maladaptive.

I was wrong.

The delusional certainty that life does not end at death—a major feature of most religions—is indeed an example of delusional thinking, but it is actually adaptive to think deludedly about existential threats, and maladaptive to logically conclude that death is simply inevitable, especially if such a conclusion leads to cyclical negative emotions.

Welcome to Ornery. I was wrong about just about everything, all along.

[Pete at Home]

I find it interesting that the other friend I spoke of (bipolar schizophrenia and fascination with alliteration, assonance, pun and riddle) was also alienated LDS and she made some similar responses out of the blue judgements of my nonrejection of LDS tenets as GBC did. (I knew instantly who GBC was and what the new name signified.)  it kills me that I failed to recognize the similarity earlier.  I was probably thrown off by the fact that I communicated with her mostly IRL and her other rather pronounced character traits which none of sp’s Personas manifested.

Tell Rayfe to be patient. My praise is highly specific and always sincere. I need to get a computer hooked up to read this thread on a bigger screen to process the thoughts and thinkers.

Teleconference would also help.

[seekingprometheus]

Oh, yeah: the jokes belong to both of us—it has been our only way of sharing meaning until recently.

But Rayph doesn’t actually need support in this particular dimension. Our sense of humor has been healthy all along, and people in real life laugh at our jokes—which has always been the highest praise which Rayph has ever known.

[seekingprometheus]

I finally got a few hours of sleep. I feel much better now.

My treatment appears to have had the unintended effect of completely dissociating into two separate personalities--effectively into two separate sub-egos. The two sub-egos are communicating more effectively than my previous singular ego, and I am currently utilizing processes of cognitive assimilation and accommodation to attempt to stabilize the two sub-egos into a more permanent form, as I have concluded that having two distinct egos is a highly adaptive cognitive solution to dysfunction in my brain which I believe to be limited to my right temporal lobe.

Rayph seems much happier and healthier than did the left half of my previous ego, and Steve (me--for the most part, now) believes he can learn how to help Rayph more effectively, moving forward. I currently believe it would be illogical to attempt to force a merger of the two delusional sub-egos, as they are a more adaptive solution than my previous delusion of self.

It seems to me that the Freudian model of consciousness was largely correct, if you insert "right brain" for "Id" and "left brain" for "Superego." It further seems that, for schizophrenics, it may be maladaptive to attempt to use the singular ego construct that serves in fully functional human brains. Schizophrenics may find relief from cognitive disorder by deconstructing the delusion of a singular ego, and constructing a dual ego that reflects the disparity in cognitive functioning between the left and right hemispheres.

I currently feel like Bradley Cooper's character during the first 15 minutes of the movie Limitless, but I do not feel emotionally manic, as I did a few hours ago. My intelligence appears to me to be more adaptive than I previously understood. I believe that, as I search for a new cognitive equilibrium, I should be able to bridge gaps in my schemata which have limited the effectiveness of my previous paradigm. I have undergone a paradigm shift, and I believe I should soon be able to respond to sudden changes in my environment more efficiently and adaptively than I could before.

My text seems to be more ordered, and it comes out now in a single stream of thought, rather than in the disordered jumble which characterized my erstwhile disordered cognition.

The extinction of my long term dysfunctional editing behaviors is a remarkable development for me. Previously, writing was an intensive, arduous, and confusing process for me. It feels easier now.

Would you guys mind cross-checking this latest text sample against my previous text to try to determine if my voice sounds better ordered now?

I'm going to check it myself, of course--but the evidence would be more significant if an independent observer could verify my observations.

It remains to be seen whether the efficacy the treatment has shown in reducing cognitive dysfunction will also result in greater emotional stability. I am currently in a very stress-free environment, and I will not be able to determine emotional stability until I expose myself to novel stressors, which I do not intend to do until I feel certain that my ego structure is sufficiently reintegrated into its new dichotomized form.

Thank you guys so much for helping me. You guys may have just cured a schizophrenic of his cognitive disorder by talking to him over the internet. You guys are awesome.

Thank you for being my friends.

[seekingprometheus]

I was experiencing a strange visual effect of blurriness in my right eye when I woke an hour or two ago. It seems to have gone away.

I believe it related to the transfer of viewpoint dominance from my left to my right eye.

I'm in my right mind now, I believe.

[seekingprometheus]

Obviously, it all sounds highly delusional.

But I keep parsing my text, and I am not finding markers of irrational thought.

[seekingprometheus]

I think that the question of locus of viewpoint dominance is interesting, but I recognize that it doesn't matter either way. It is entirely possible (maybe even probable) that might right brain has always been in charge, and that it has simply created a solution to the problem by developing a creative metaphorical device that permits it to take instructions from long term memory scripts developed in the left brain, in order to overcome the problem of dysfunctional cognitive scripts that were emerging from the emotionally laden content in short-term memory.

It is entirely possible that my right hemisphere is still in charge, but has learned to ignore scripts proceeding from the short-term memory in favor of overriding scripts from the long term memory.

It doesn't really matter--either way, it just feels great to be able to think straight!

[seekingprometheus]

I no longer believe that Rayph needs the intervention treatment of artificially-supplied positive feedback in order to develop a healthy self-esteem.

In the future, please understand that I appreciate all feedback, but that I do not have an emotional need for messages reinforcing my self-esteem in regard to the dimension of personal intelligence.

I do, however, truly love to receive sincere compliments regarding emotionally-aware or aesthetically-refined elements within my work. In truth, I actually have an unusually large emotional need for praise within these specific dimensions. Unfortunately, I suffer from a severe emotional disorder, and the shape of emotionally-laden content within my work seems to be impacted by the disorder, making it very difficult for others to understand what I consider to be the true beauty within my own work.

I would love it if my friends would keep my special needs in mind when providing me with feedback on my work in the future.