| Slade Farney 2004-09-30, 7:06 pm |
| Dust <Evanstewart15@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<cja6tq$bua$2@domitilla.aioe.org>...
> Hey Everyone,
> I'm trying to determine whether or not I was/am schizophrenic. If you
> could read my story (I know it’s long, but I cut it down as short as I
> could without excluding anything that I thought was important) and
> compare it with your own experience, the experience of people that
> you've known who were schizophrenic and anything else you know about
> schizophrenia, I'd be incredibly grateful.
Thank you very much for that story. It has brought some wisdom to my
life.
In your question about whether you are schizophrenic, I think you
should examine the people who defined schizophrenia. Like any other
study, including astrology, history, biology, and medicine, psychiatry
has had its share of hoaxers, BSers, honest researchers, and plain old
got-it-wrongers. That is the nature of human intellectual activities.
You might be a Libra -- does that tell us anything more than your
birthdate? Thus with Schizophrenia. If you hear voices you are
schizophrenic. What is schizophrenic? It means you hear voices.
The definition for schizophrenia has not led to a cure, nor even a
useful diagnosis. The professionals were for a long time unable to
agree on a definition, and now that they have a loose consensus, their
only cure is a slow poisoning that makes a person unable to feel his
own pain or think his own thoughts. Lobotomy is still classed as a
treatment by some practicioners, and is not outlawed.
If you told one of those professionals this story, they would not
believe you. You are as Marco Polo returning to Europe. The
"experts" on geography to whom you might tell your story are so full
of misinformation, you would not be believed. Both you and Marco Polo
have wandered far outside their small sandboxe of the truth.
I am trying to say that the landscape of the mind is still unkown,
unexplored, and uncharted. Have you, Marco Polo, seen the edge of the
earth that we know is there? Then you are a liar.
Marco Polo was not a geographer and he had few tools to chart his
journey. He was not even a writer -- we know of his adventures only
because he shared a prison cell with a man who was impressed with his
tale and took the trouble to write it down. Who knows how many others
followed the great Silk Road across Asia? And who knows how many
others have struggled with their personal hells and eventually
conquered them as you have done?
You may spend your life trying to understand what has happened to you,
and you may succeed in learning something. Or you may put it all
behind you and hide in normalcy for the rest of your life -- as I am
sure thousands of others have done.
If you choose to pursue the truth, I beg you to lay aside all the
mythologies and fantasies of the failed disciplines -- like psychiatry
and psychology. Do not let them rule over your experiences. Do like
Marco Polo, traveling everywhither unto the ends of the earth to learn
of those places as they are -- do not as the port tavern drunks who
tell and retell the same old wild yarns.
Good luck. I congratulate you on your victories. Yours is the
happiest story I have heard all year.
--Slade
|