I changed my mind about being done on this blog. There is still some stuff to write about.

Recently a visitor, Andy, asked me a question about smoking and meditation.

My answer to his question is the same answer I would give if someone asked me if they could smoke pot, drink coffee, do hallucinogens or take pysch meds while meditating and what effects would it have on meditation progress. I have been asked those questions before many times since I started vlogging and blogging about it.

I did make a short video about Meditation, spirituality and drug effects. but not everyone gets to my videos and upon consideration I could expound a bit more about the effects because I was one of those folks who tried meditating in my early twenties when I hooked on or experimented with everything from pot and mushrooms and painkillers to caffeine, speed, anxiety,  and anger.

None of this is theory but my own personal experiences using substances and chemicals and observing their effects on my internal states.

The question goes something like this.

Can I meditate or begin meditating under the influence of substances X, Y and Z?

The short answer is simply this. It won’t matter at the beginning, it will be a problem later on.

Short winded is something I am rarely accused of and I readily admit to using ten words when two would do. Here is the long answer and it contains meditation spoilers. :)

It won’t matter so much at the beginning, we’ve established that. This is why it will eventually matter quite a bit.

The primary goal of meditation is to create stillness. When you have stillness going on your mind is comfortable at total rest. In that space there is no rumination on things. Especially troubling things like obsessive thinking, dwelling on the past, destructive self critique and all the little voices that tear us down inside in one fashion or another.

Along the way to building stillness you are going to want to resolve in some way all the things that prevent you being still in the first place. To do that you can cultivate awareness of your internal world in two ways. Concentration practice and sensitivity practice.

As you work on one, you will gain greater facility with the other. The longer you concentrate on being aware the more sensitive you will become. The more sensitivity you can develop the greater the accuracy of your concentration will be.

Between the two you will really develop your intuition. Your intuition will inform you as to things inside you that are not quite right. Your intuition sort of processes all the subtle sensations and runs them through the memory chip for correlations and experiential knowledge. In a burst of gut knowledge you will know with fairly good accuracy what is bugging you.

The more practice you give yourself letting intuition guide you the better. Intuition is another faculty and as it’s reliability factor goes up it becomes a resource you can tap into voluntarily. You can just ask yourself what it wrong with you and get an instant and honest answer that might have taken long moments of cogitating and internal self debate to arrive at.

Whether you are meditating for enlightenment, trying to find inner stillness or just using meditation to relax those beginning steps are pretty much the same and the beginning never really ends and is much the same at more advanced levels as it was at the beginning.

You take time to align yourself and sit comfortably. You are mindful of your posture and skull and hips. You engage with your breathing and take a moment to let your mind just spin while you begin to cultivate the intention of your desire to sit still and let everything go.

I did that when I practiced meditation before karate class in my early teens. I do that before I start tai chi while standing. I still do this to this day twenty later when I sit and meditate. The point is the basics are the same no matter what and it’s a work in progress you can keep making refinements to.

When you are first beginning your ability to listen and interpret what is keeping you from being still inside will be fairly general. You will sense blackness or fog inside. You feel different flavors of pain and discomfort. You may space out and drift the minute you try to listen or concentrate.

You will be able to differentiate some things. Some will be really obvious like, gee, I am really angry or really sad right now. You may experience all kinds of mundane stuff like hunger pangs, internal gas moving around, an itch somewhere. Each one of those sensations from the emotional to the physical will be throwing stuff up and the combined noise of your internal world serve as one big mess of stuff inside agitating you all of which is preventing or limiting your stillness.

In terms of substances, everything you put inside yourself can have essentially three basic influences on you. It can add to sum of the noise inside you, it can diminish the noise inside you and it can have more or less no effect at all either way.

In the beginning you are cultivating that concentration and sensitivity. You are working with your breathing and being mindful and you are growing your meditation legs. The processes inherent in successful meditation take time to develop.

The next important factor is how much time you personally devote to cultivating those meditation legs. On that I can say it’s really like any other skill. Whether you are learning a musical instrument or playing tennis or meditating you get out of it what you put into it. If you become freakishly obsessive about meditation you can go thousand miles in one day.

If you are doing it hours a day, six or seven days a week, which is the best way to really change your brain wiring in a continual curve, you will be going thousands of miles a week and you will grow your concentration batteries and sensitivity network (and consequently your intuition as well) considerably faster than a person who meditates one hour a day every other other day.

What ends up happening is you begin to notice exactly how sensation or feelings effect the quality of your internal stillness. You perform an investigation into precisely the nature of your internal stuff that is very much like a science experiment. You begin to notice all that black churning stuff and random sensations isn’t all that random and the black stuff contains things that have definitive qualities we can sense accurately.

Body tension is one of the simplest things that plague us all from achieving stillness. We will find different qualities to that tension as well. You can find yourself holding yourself in a tense way internally. In time you also perceive that hologram-like effect in which the way you hold yourself physically also effects your thoughts and emotions.

Now you are working on three different tensions. Tense muscles and posture, tense emotions, tense thoughts and tense awareness. You resolve all that stuff or bring some measure of relaxation to each of those layers of being and gradually (or suddenly) your internal world is much much quieter.

For awhile you enjoy that quiet. You’ve made real progress. You can stop there. You can maintain a certain meditation hygiene and relax your mind, body and heart and gain great benefit from that.

If you don’t stop there, if you keep on pushing the envelope, you keep growing those meditation legs and make a conscious, deliberate attempt to increase both your concentration and your sensitivity then some thing else is going to happen.

You just grow an affinity for being still and a generalized discomfort with things that detract from that stillness. You will like being still basically and you won’t like the feeling of not being still. Your awareness will begin to nag you about your internal stuff that remains.

Without consciously trying you will be offered up internally, reasons for the sensations and feelings that are still going on inside you. The internal quiet you achieved seems not so quiet anymore. Your sensitivity has grown during the interim and what you sense now is that a new level of stillness could be attained, a deeper level, by resolving the latest batch of unwanted internal sensations.

You are emboldened by your past success so you know you can perceive and remedy the things that are churning you up inside so long as you have the motivation and you are willing to continue to trust your intuition which has also been growing in the interim.

Now we begin to pay ever more attention and mindfulness of our internal world. If we have a weekend in solitude we can spend every waking moment of the day being mindful without the influence of others nearby. We can listen all day acutely to our insides and monitor our internal stillness status. We pay particular attention to when we begin to move away from calm and still towards agitation and our intuition will pop out the answer when you ask,

“What is wrong? Why am I agitated? What is bugging me? How did I just lose my calm and grace?”

The answer will almost always be, something you did or exposed yourself to and put inside you or cultivated that destabilized you from a baseline of calm.

Maybe it was a song on the radio or a movie on cable that you saw. You got into the sensory experience of the movie or the song and by the end you notice you are not calm anymore.

Maybe you got off the phone with a relative or a friend and you noticed you were fine before the phone call, and not fine after it.

Maybe it’s dinner. Maybe you over indulged on spicy foods and you’ve got heartburn or indigestion and sensations are churning you inside somewhere, somehow in some way.

Maybe you slipped on ice or a wet floor and fell hard on butt or on your side or banged your head. You were calm before the fall, after the fall you have all these sensations of injury and insult reporting in. Maybe you are shaking. Making you are self recriminating for falling or getting a good angry going because someone should have cleaned up the water.

Then you sit and meditate you notice all these reactions going off inside you. Spicy food effects your emotions and thoughts. You pay careful attention to what you were thinking and feeling before, during and after consuming one substance or another be it food, music, drugs, vitamins, sex, TV, or a book.

Chocolate for example. A psychoactive substance if there ever was one. You feel and think differently after you eat a good sample of quality chocolate. It can have both a soporific and an innervating effect on me and makes me aware of my body as a sensual thing. ( read that as horny)

Gradually you grow this catalog of stuff that you know knocks you off your meditation pillow. When you really wed your perceptions to your intuition not only will you know what destabilized you but as I hinted earlier, you will also want not to be destabilized. You wonder what you can do to avoid it.

When get to that point you begin to fast. When I mean fast, I don’t just mean abstaining from food. I mean abstaining from everything that represents a possible threat to your internal stillness.

You fast from TV and the internet. Knowing full well they are distractions from being at one with your internal world and being mentally and emotionally still.

You fast from phone calls with relatives and hanging out with that rageholic friend who has so many triggers it’s like walking on eggshells to be around them. You don’t allow someone else’s emotional states to disrupt yours so fast from people too.

One day you will be sitting in your favorite chair and preparing to meditate and you are going to notice that you woke up, calm, centered and still. That’s how you went to bed. If you do that often enough this is what is going to happen.

You will wake up, get up, sit in your chair and take your morning sip of coffee (or tea) and the first puff off your morning cigarette (or cannabis joint) and boom. There it is. Your internal world goes from still and calm to disturbed.

It feels internally like someone threw a rock into your pond of quietude making a big splash and ripples which distort the mirror-like quality of the still water you had about a 30 seconds before the caffeine and nicotine reached your brain.

Then you are going to nod to yourself and say “Fuck”. You will too, because you will know, intuitively and intellectually what destabilized your stillness and you will say “Fuck” out loud because you are going to know immediately what to do about not experiencing that destabilizing again.

Then you will have a little war inside your self that goes something like this.

“No”

“Yes”

“No way”

“You have to”

“No, I don’t”

“Strictly speaking, no one can twist your arm other than yourself. How bad do you want stillness?”

“Fuck”

“I know, you don’t have to do it today though, if you don’t want”

“And how many days that I don’t do it are you going to remind me that I am only impeding my progress by procrastinating?”

“Every damn day that you do it, how’s that?”

“You can shut up now.”

“We will talk again tomorrow morning.”

You will screw around a little longer. You will stop adding sugar or cut yourself down from two cups to one cup. You will switch to the Lights brand of your favorite smoke.

Then you will take only a few sips of coffee and a couple of puffs before putting it out.

Then you will finally get sick of it because while you were putting off the inevitable your evil sensitivity was paying more acute attention to the feelings of the morning ritual of chemicals and you know for a fact that so much as one sip of coffee or one puff can introduce a distorting element inside you.

On that day you will, out of disgust with yourself, finally quit. You will hate every second of it while knowing it has to be done. You are making changes to your habits and behaviors and rituals and that sucks. It’s like losing a good friend.

Then you dissolve that sense of loss. You become a person who does not do those things. Then you find that your evening stillness carries through in the morning. You meditate in the morning and that carries you into the evening.

Eventually, a long ways down the road, you get to a point where that stability is so ingrained that you find you don’t have to meditate as much to keep it going. You can miss an evening or a morning meditation sit and you will be ok.

You will also find yourself, not wanting to miss meditation sessions anymore either. The net effect in the end is that you control for the effects of everything you willingly subject yourself to. When you control enough of those factors you will have much greater stillness and internal perception.

That means in time you must have a biochemistry that is free of substances which agitate, sedate, fog up or inhibit you in any way. Until you free yourself of all the toxic stuff you normally subject yourself to you will be a slave to felt sensation of the distortions of your consciousness. The real You, the >>I<< underneath it all, the source of all intention, the mindstream, the nature of your spirit will all be obscured.

Remember it’s not just foods and drugs. Your sensory experiences create chemical effects. If you watch something offensive, or get yourself riled up reading politics on the internet or you have a codependent relationship with someone who is abusive your resulting thoughts and emotions churn you up inside making stillness difficult if not impossible.

That is what I mean by fasting from everything. Only you know what sets you off and if you studiously avoid those things while trying to develop internal stillness you will progress well.

Otherwise, its like putting one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake especially when meditating and most especially when meditating under the influence of mind altering drugs and chemicals.

Your thoughts are feelings are not your own. They are drug induced. Alternately, your lack of certain thoughts and feelings that are your own can also be drug induced. In the end, if you are serious about hardcore meditation progress all avoidable psycho active, agitating or inhibiting substances must go. You must dissolve your attachment and need for them and if you do you will only benefit.

The ultimate long term benefit and some good news for after.

The ultimate long term payoff for consciously fasting from sensory disruptions is the discovery of your spirit and the source of your mind itself. A great stillness will grow gradually inside you. Within all that emptiness you find both form and formlessness. Something that generates will and intent and awareness.

From there you can do a spiritual investigation, using your awareness of your inner world as the medium, of the nature of the >>I<< itself. If you are very lucky you will discover the mindstream. That takes an extraordinary amount of stillness and relaxed concentration.

The good news is, after a long time of building this core of internal stillness it won’t be dislodged easily. There is scientific evidence that is not just a mental state but a physical development that is real.

If you wanted, if it was practical, you might be able to spend your life in perpetual retreat. Whether you live in ashram or a a hut by yourself deep in the woods you can shield yourself from the bulk of the stresses and distractions of life itself.

The ultimate question becomes, do you really want to? Do you really want to have a life? Do you want to partake of the same things everyone else does? Will it destabilize you?

If the answer is yes, then you are going to be open to hanging out with people, perhaps strangers with all their mysterious inner content. You will read the internets again and watch TV. You will listen to music again. If you really wanted, you could drink a cup of tea or have a beer or smoke a cigar with your friends on New Year’s Eve or move from the country to the city.

You will have a base of inner calm and that calm will persist through things like, being stuck in city traffic. Standing in line at a busy mall. Even going to a bar and having a few drinks and smokes with your coworkers.

Each of those things will add some kind of sensation or agitation or sedation or whatever. You can get irate at the news and it’s ok as long as you don’t make it a habit. If you go back to smoking a pack a day, twenty ounces of coffee, doing different drugs, listening to loud music all the time and gnashing your teeth at the news all day, you will chip away, a bit at a time, all that stillness you won for yourself.

But at this point, hopefully you have a self-harm status indicator in your mind at all times that tells you when you are approaching toxic levels of anything. At that point, you take a break and detox and go back and meditate. You be present and mindful and use the dissolving to smooth the ripples out in your inner pond of stability and bring yourself back to balance.

That way you can still partake of life and keep your calm. You can eat spicy foods and watch an emotional drama and eat some chocolate and wash it down with some alcoholic beverage and you are going to be ok the next day. You are not going to be manic or depressed or agitated so long as the ratio of stillness to stimulus is perpetually slanted in the direction of stillness.

If you can’t moderate yourself to a have a normal amount of stimulation in your life, you need to keep working on stillness and you need to dissolve your attachment to your need to be stimulated. Once you have that core sense of Self and a stable internal world you should try to interact with people and things and enjoy life.

Enjoy that bottle of champagne or that cigar or that joint but be mindful at all times how it effects your stillness meter and your stimulation meter. Keep the former always higher than the latter and you have a formula for being able to enjoy the fullness of life without the ascetic deprivations that were necessary in the intermediate and advanced stages in order to find yourself.

With diligence and continued practice you won’t lose your sense of self amidst a thousand distractions and you have a tool to wash off all the crap that starts to accumulate on your inner clarity. That’s what you do if you want to have a life like everyone else and don’t want to live in a walled fort, unplugged in the middle of nowhere. That’s a path of moderation and balance and it’s one path of the Tao.

Dear readers,

The work that this blog represented has come to an end. This week I have finished the bulk of my manuscript. Just about everything of relevance related to my background and recovery story that is contained on these posts and in my videos is in this book.

The primary function of my blog was to teach myself how to write. Through all your blogs I have learned how to be a better writer. Many of you have helped open my eyes about the current state of mental health care in the US and the world over.

I want to thank everyone that has ever commented on my works and encouraged me to bring this work to fruition. I have spent the last six months working on my book and now the time has come for me to sell it. I have no purpose for this blog anymore.

I apologize for not being a faithful or regular reader of the many blogs on my blogroll. I am sorry I have not been able to keep up with or comment on anyone’s stuff lately. Social networking was really never the purpose of this blog but it was fun while it lasted.

There is a good chance that this blog will be closed in the future. It may respawn elsewhere later or at least small portions of it. The next step will be getting my own dotcom and I would probably periodically blog from that site but nothing is certain.

It has been a trying and educational experience learning from you all but I have also had enough. I don’t really make constuctive comments on other blogs. Just pronouncements and judgments. I am aware of it and what can I say except I am sorry for those who were terminally offended in the process.

At this stage of the game I want to focus on publishing my work. After that, I need a long break from the last two years of making videos and posts about mental health related topics.

I don’t suffer from mental health issues so talking about them, reading about them, hearing more stories about them is taxing. I don’t have to and I have no reason to. I know what people are going through and it’s not easy.

What I wish is that folks would take my experiences in recovery and apply them to themselves. The best way I can help those that suffer is by providing my book as a resource. I can’t force my views on people who are in love with suffering or psychiatry and I can’t heal people with a magical spell. My book will teach how to heal yourself if and only if you really want to.

If you love being bipolar or think it’s gift or a special mutation, none of my processes are going to help you get rid of it so long as you identify yourself as a psychiatric label.

I’ve mentioned before this work is not for everyone. It was never meant to be. It’s a path of desperation created by someone who was desperate. Not everyone is cut out for the meditation life so I have no expectation that my way is the right way, the only way or the best way. It did work for me when everyone told me there was no hope but drugs and therapy. They were wrong.

You can’t assume this material won’t work for you unless you try. In the final analysis, you have to take responsibility for your actions, your mental health decisions and your own recovery. I don’t make that decision for people or force people to do it my way. Such is not the path of the Tao.

I will try to get to replying to recent comments but that’s it. With the exception of this particular post I won’t respond to further comments between now and whenever I get around to cleaning this blog up and leaving the basics of it up as a resource.

Here is some last links that I wanted to share, some of you have seen them before. Know that I wholeheartedly agree with the views of the authors of the articles that I am linking. It’s partly why I have written this book.

Commentary: Against biological psychiatry

Loren Mosher: resignation letter from APA

Drs David Kaiser and Loren Mosher foresaw our current state of mental health care and the hopelessness of biological psychiatry, genetic determinism and endless use of drug treatments over ten years ago.

Nothing has dented Big Pharma and biological psychiatry. All warnings have been ignored even when they were accurately predicted years in advance. Some say money is the root of all evil. Perhaps. It is certain that money is the sole reason for this egregious onward march of psychiatry and chemical fixes that fix nothing.

You can not trust them to know what’s best for you or to care about you. That’s not their purpose. Their purpose is to make money from your suffering in perpetua. You can take my recovery work and free yourself from that perpetual suffering and the attendant bondage to psychiatric medications. Free yourself of that broken machine and you will have a happier, healthier life in the long run.

Please continue to check my pages for updates on my dotcom status and publishing dates

Good luck to you in your recovery and thanks for taking the time to read this.

A few things to talk about today. This is the one year anniversary of this blog. I have an archive for all but two months for the year 2008. During April I was seriously malfunctioning and during October I had no internets and no computer.

Technically, the blog is two years old. I posted a bunch of stuff back in October of 2006. I was writing my biography when I ground to a halt at the part where I tried to figure out how they knew I had a chemical imbalance.

After I found out what a pile of stinking feces the ‘chemical imbalance theory’ really was I started making videos about my recovery. In February 2007 I made my youtube channel ‘See Jane Talk with SFJane’.

Almost a year later I decided to use my blog to combine the utility of blogging and vlogging on youtube in a custom web 2.0esque live journalish type thing. A strategy that seems to have worked somewhat in getting viewers to read and readers to watch.

One of the first posts I made when I went ‘public’ with my blog was long rambling post called ‘mixed messages’. The purpose of that post was to talk about my feelings regarding psychiatry and drugs and to draw a line in the sand with regards to antipsychiatry activism. I don’t have any issues with humanistic psychology but biological reductionist psychiatry is a sick religion and I would not shed a tear if it was outlawed.

Ever since I got on youtube and started making videos I have been subscribed by a lot of people who identify as antipsychiatry activists. Some of those people also identify themselves as psychiatric survivors. I consider myself one of the latter and not the former.

I have been invited by a lot of people to join various groups and forums that consider themselves strongly antipsychiatry. I have turned them all down. I turned them down because I am not now, have not been nor plan to identify myself as being anti psychiatry.

The reason anti psychiatry activists find me is because of various content I have created. In video or in print I have either complained about the horror of being on psychiatric medications or I have endorsed alternative mental health treatments.

If someone were to ask me why I am not antipsychiatry given my bad experiences with it I would have two questions to ask back. Why should I be? (anti psychiatry) and Is it working?

There is no benefit to me to partake of that kind of politics. Nor do I see evidence that the antipsychiatry movement is effective. It’s not winning.  In fact I think the hey day of antipsychiatry activism has already come and gone.

I am not against psychiatry in any way. I don’t see how that would do me or anyone any good. I don’t look down on people who consider themselves antipsychiatry. I understand why a person would want to embrace that sort of thing. I don’t think there is anything wrong with it.

Among anti psychiatry activists and agencies there is a well know monolithic uber cult heavily involved with strongly pushing an anti psychiatry agenda. I have no problem with that at all. This organization has several front groups it uses to further it’s aims.

In a nutshell the hierarchy goes something like this.

C0$
CCHR       Narconon

I often get subscribers who have links, favorites and subscriptions to any number or combination of those organizations. Sometimes they comment on my videos. I generally don’t treat them any differently than I would treat other people of faiths and beliefs I find distasteful. As long as comments are on topic and there is no abuse involved I try not to make a big deal about it.

I also have had direct invitations from people involved with CCHR and Narconon. Usually it is a youtube friend invite or a myspace invite from various chapters around the world. In every single case I find myself denying the request. The reason I deny a request from a $cilon affiliated member is because to accept is tantamount to an endorsement.

The reason I get invites by people involved with those orgs is because of my psychiatric abuse and psychiatric drug slam videos. Most of those folks do not go through my stuff with a fine eye. If they did they would quickly realized that my views are not in line with C0$ propaganda.

The reason my views are not in line with $cilon doctrine is that I do not believe that there is any value to being completely anti drug. The fact is, I am very unimpressed with the ‘medications’ (I use that term loosely) used to treat mental disorders that have rolled out of the Big Pharma labs in the last twenty years.

That does not mean I am anti drug. I am not anti drug, nor do I think all drugs are all bad all the time or that the world would be a better place without all drugs. That means there is no way I could be $cilon conversion material.

I have found certain drugs to be useful from time to time. I have Tylenol 4 with codeine and Flexeril in the house for days when my back and neck are really hurting. It helps get me moving into tai chi and yoga. I have used and liked lorazapam from time to time. I don’t depend on any of those drugs. I have them just in case.

Another drug which I would not like gone is cannabis. When I first discovered cannabis I was in love with it. I found a naturally occurring substance which quieted down the voices and violence in my head better than anything else. Unlike neuroleptics, cannabis did not leave me twitching, drooling down the side of my face too stupid to think and too fatigued to do anything.

I felt better using cannabis than when I wasn’t using it. I gained an incredibly useful therapeutic benefit from marijuana. I’ve used marijuana for both mental and physical pain as well as recreationally. Marijuana gave me the ability to go to work and take shit from my boss or customers and not take it personally or go off and lose my job.

Who are any of you, $cilons, government agencies and the like to tell me that is wrong? I don’t like hearing $cilons talk about eradicating all drugs. I don’t like Uncle Sam directing me like a parent to a child telling me not to use cannabis but to use SSRIs or neuroleptics instead.

Not that drug! This drug!

I don’t give a shit about your precious patents. I don’t care what people think about marijuana users. If you pop pills you are just as much of a druggie as the person rolling a joint, snorting powders or shooting up. Hypocrisy does not sit well with me.  A drug is a drug is a drug. Don’t even play the ‘my drug selection is morally superior to yours’ game with me.

Big Pharma has already made the good drugs. The drugs I like were in your grandmother or great-grand mother’s medicine chest.

Perhaps you recognize Eli Lilly’s Tincture of Cannabis, Lloyd’s Cocaine drops and Bayer’s Heroin. I have tried cannabis, opiates and cocaine. All naturally occurring substances. I would gladly use them again if I felt the need.

The longer my videos and posts stick around on the internet the more self righteous, officious, indiscriminate reactionary witch hunters find my stuff.

“So how long have you been a scientologist?”
“Please just be honest with youtube about your scientology affiliation.”
“Lol looks like another $cilon front here, all hail lord Xenu.”

Melissa of MelsBasketCase channel flat out accused me of being scientologist and ‘psychiatric denier’ in one of her videos. Marian had this to say about hurling the accusation of being a scientologist “It’s nothing but a desperate attempt to distract attention from pure facts, by taking the discussion to an emotional level.”

I get comments and queries about it on this blog and my youtube channel periodically. These self appointed modern day witch hunters could do a little fact finding and digging through my stuff to find the answers to their Inquisition. I know where the vast majority of these folks come from.

Now the average age of a channer/anon/$cilon Inquisitor is 16- 25. For the most part that age group is not known for wisdom and depth. I would hazard a guess that for the most part these kids are pro drug (because it’s cool!)  and have never had psychiatric induced trauma. They have never been directly harmed because of ‘treatment’.

Nor have they ever had a legitimate enemy to fight growing up. These are kids that have grown up in the safety of middle class suburbia and this is their equivalent to having a cause and going to war. It’s a chance to be part of a modern movement. It’s a chance to take all those trolling skills and pretend to be a patriot for humanity with a mission to accomplish.

Honestly, if I was ten years younger, I would probably get my own Guy Fawkes mask and go on down to the $cilon raids myself just for shits and giggles.

The fact is I have better things to do with my time. I don’t have any causes right now. I am writing a book about how I used meditation to beat mental illness. The closest possible affiliation I might have is with certain branches of Taoism.

I’ve been accused of having a vendetta against psychiatry and for being part of a destructive cult with a documented track record of abuse, intimidation and threats.

For the record, neither of those accusations are accurate or true.  I was watching episodes of the original Battle Star Galactica on the air almost two decades before your average channer starting putting on the Fawkes mask. I know how to handle $cilons.

Launch all Vipers.

Unlike the medieval days of the Inquisition the mere say so does not mean fact. If you accuse someone of being part of a cult you had better have definitive proof to back you up. Otherwise, if you try running with that ball you will find yourself looking like a reactionary asshat at best, libel for slander and defamation at worst.

I consider it offensive to be considered affiliated with that organization just because I chose to speak up about a bad trip I had with psychiatry when I was a kid. It has become tiring explaining the concept of being a psychiatric survivor versus being an anti-drug, anti psychiatry cultist.

There is a universe of difference between exercising your right of free speech to criticize a flawed science like psychiatry and being part of C0$. Those folks would not want me anyway on account that I think drugs can be useful and I don’t believe in body thetans.

I am not sure what the problem is with these wannabe Inquisitors that they can’t use the search function to understand my politics and experiences.

Nor do I understand how a vocal psychiatric critic is automatically a $cilon. I can’t tell if their myopia is cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias. Either way all one of these self styled cult busters need to do to understand the issues is read up on things like the Zyprexa Documents, the chemical imbalance bullshit and the numerous cases of mental health recoveries with non psychiatric means.

Enough is enough, I will say no more about it.

Another issue, this one regarding Wellsphere. I was a bit put off by how rapacious these Wellsphere folks had been about blogs in the mental health area.

Marian had a great post covering all the particular problems with the Wellsphere pitch. Gianna concurred and pointed out that these folks would not confirm or deny whether or not the huge pharma ads were coming or not. After I read Marian’s post and Gianna’s comments I began to wonder of Wellsphere would be going the way of HealthyPlace.

I also dug up some nifty tidbits about the folks over at Wellsphere.

Certainly I am not keen on Wellsphere capitalizing on my content to gain viewers to click on pharma ads for the benefit of WellSphere and Pharma without a single dime being sent to me.

What is clear to me is that the blog content harvesting people for wellsphere are more concerned with warehousing blog feeds and not discriminating between the various and important mental health politics that abound.

I for one was immediately displeased to find out that pro pharma, pro psych med, pro biopsych bloggers were listed along with people like me. I was also displeased to find out that there was not even a cancel account or delete account function built into the user interface! Once you check in you can’t check out apparently.

Then Marian said to me  “Jane: If people like to join Wellsphere, that’s perfectly fine with me. You might even say, bloggers like you (or me) can act as a (very needed) counterbalance to all that biological bs they have on their site/link to .(Now that I’ve already let myself drive to extremes in my previous comment here: just as you might say, Loren Mosher acted a very needed counterbalance to it inside the APA while he was a member of it – I love this comparison with Loren Mosher! Hahaha!).”

I thought about it for awhile and I agreed. If I had my profile yanked there would be one less ‘counterbalance’ on Wellsphere. I had yanked my Wellsphere award once I saw that everyone was getting one regardless of their relevant views and experience. However I decided to keep my profile in order to offset the propsychiatry profiles. I put the award back up.

I kind of like the idea that nobody at the Wellsphere admin is actually reading my stuff. That means others might find it and be swayed to chose a path other than meds. So in a way Wellsphere is endorsing and propagating my ‘politics’ and propaganda. Which I find satisfying. Until they figure it out or Big Pharma tells them to cut me loose.

In that same vein, HealthyPlace did solicit me for  (unpaid) content for their site some time ago. It was easy to say no to them because they had full page interactive pharma ads all over their site.

On another note awhile back I made a post called ‘Bipolar Manic? Heal Thyself’.

I made a one hour video that consisted of 30 plus minutes of talking about specific symptoms of mania and manic episode features followed by a lecture concerning preventing or curing yourself of mania without therapy or drugs.

Today I have released a severely abridged version of that video consisting entirely of the self psychotherapy and meditation techniques needed for overcoming bipolar mania permanently sans the preceding commentary.

These techniques are what cured my mania. It’s entirely possible these techniques could work for you.

This is probably going to be it for posts and vids for this year. I really have to continue working on my book. I will reply to any comments as time permits.

Have a happy holiday folks.

Hello folks,

As some of you know October was lost productivity month for me.  I did not get too much done on my book. However I am pleased to announce that I have over 60,000 words committed to print at this point. For the last three weeks I have worked on the manuscript every single day without fail. I am cleaning up two segments of it now and when that is done I will be sending it out to few people that have offered to review it.

My spouse, who is the math brained person in the relationship, has assured me that at approximately 400 words per page of a typical book that I have over 150 pages.  That means I am about half done.  It was also the more tedious portion to do.

I have an apology to make.

Writing, like any skill, is something you get better at the more you do it. Writing intensely in September, taking October off and writing all through November has given me a better eye for what looks good. I am very sorry for the complete suckage that is most of my stuff for the last year. I am sorry for all the suffering I have caused with my lackluster writing skills.

On the news front Mr. Dawdy at Furious Seasons has another strongly worded article roundly castigating the atypical class of neuroleptics. I am in complete agreement with him. I have said it before and I will say it again, drugging children and elderly is neglect and abuse. Antipsychotics/Neurolpetics have been proven to cause brain damage

My experience being forced to take Trilafon/Perphenazine was sheer misery. I have hinted about it here and there and certainly ranted about the evils of antipsychotics time and again. I finally wrote a detailed account of what happened and my experience on trilafon in my manuscript. It was the most difficult part to do so far.

Gianna at Beyond Meds sent me a link to an article about the overmedication of foster children. This was something I witnessed as well during my time in the system. Here is a post I made  awhile back covering some of that.

In other updates I have to take down some of my stuff here. When I started writing about my past it was a first pass at detailing events and details. As I have thought about them and made an effort to remember certain things more and more I find that there will be some variance to what gets put in the book and what I put here.  In order to avoid confusion some stuff will come down.

The new WordPress 2.7 is simply fantastic. The wordpress interface gives you some very useful statistics. For example it tells me what key words people are using when they find this site.

I am pleased to see that nearly every day some critically thinking heretic is asking google the question “Is Bipolar Real” or is “Bipolar bullshit?”

I don’t know what to think about the number of hits I get about the Baker Act. It might have something to do with the fact that I made a video called ‘Beating the Baker Act“  about Baker Act Abuse or “How to Beat the Baker Act.”

Arrgh!

Every single day someone in Florida is being sent to a Baker Act receiving facility against their will as a form of control. My video will teach you what you should expect and how to defeat the system. I give it to you free as a public service.  I don’t live in Florida. I do have some experience getting myself out of an institution legally and by the book.

People are also looking for information on how to Baker Act someone when they find this blog. All I have to say to them is that the Baker Act is only in Florida and that it is wrong.

^^-not my actual plate number

I am pleased to see people searching for alternative methods for managing their mental health problems like bipolar and schizophrenia. Over the last year or so I was asked by many people to summarize the process of real recovery from Bipolar. That is a very complex topic that I could lecture about for hours.  I have summarized the bulk of the important things with a video and post about 12 steps to bipolar recovery.

One of my subscribers recently sent me a link to an article demonstrating that meditation was superior to drugs for treating depression. As many of you know it was meditation that set me free from my mental health problems. When I was very young I was fascinated by the idea of developing mental power through discipline. I went on to share a significant portion of my experience using meditation in a post not too long ago.

I was going to comment on the recent story about suicide on webcam but I don’t really have time. I can say there is a good chance that the kid who did it may have known that broadcasting your suicide  had been done before.

The holidays are a great time to get manic and or kill yourself.  The end of a new year and the beginning of another is a time to spend in reflection of how awful your life is and how hopeless and meaningless your existence is. I wonder how many people will off themselves between now and 2009.

If you feel like killing yourself, please kill only yourself and don’t take other people with you.  It infuriates me when people do that. Take other people with them that is. I don’t believe that every life is worth saving or that suicide is necessarily a bad thing for some people.  I talked about why I feel that way in a video about suicide prevention.

Thanks to Marian for linking the playlist for the documentary ‘The doctor who hears voices”. It was a fabulous series of videos and I fully support the more humane approach towards dealing with mental illness that Rufus May advocates. Throw away your psychiatric drugs, they will never heal you of your problems.

Here is a sample of stuff from my mailbox.

More teens telling me that the drug cocktails their parents force on them are not working and only making them sick.

More foster kids telling me about the abuse that they suffered at the hands of their foster parents because their inept social workers put them in places where they would be retraumatized. One girl told me that her foster mother constantly threatened to put her back in the institutions. An experience I am all too familiar with.

More people, especially veterans of the middle east conflicts with ptsd are being Baker Acted in Florida.

In the last few months more people of all ages have written to tell me that my writings and videos have helped them. I can not tell you how humbled I am by that. I am happy if sharing my experiences had helped. I never expected this kind of response.

I don’t have all the answers to everything. I am not a guru or a doctor or a lawyer. I never intended on doing advocacy or activism. It sort of happened with a life of it’s own. Finally I want to sincerely thank everyone that has given me feedback and encouraged me to keep going.

October was lost productivity month.

Starting with the first week. After years of reliable service Earthlink DSL simply stopped working without explanation. Customer service consists of talking to someone from India trained only in reading from a checklist how to reset your modem. If that does not work they have no answers for you at all. Talking with a supervisor entails being put on hold forever.

So we made the switch to Comcast high speed digital. That entailed waiting just over a week for a complete line install. When the install was complete we had digital cable internet (much faster than dsl) we have phone service and a basic cable tv package all on the same high speed data line all for one package price.

At this time I would like to point out that as soon as we had internet again it was blatantly obvious that there was no problems with our computer or routers despite Earthlink customer services insistence that it was our fault and not theirs.

Thank you Comcast for rescuing us from Earthlink’s bovine feces.

Our phone service is solid. Our internet is even better for playing online games and downloading stuff and oh yea, we have cable tv now.

As many of you may or may not know, I existed without TV or cable TV for most of my adult life. There was a period of time during my 20s when I lived with someone with a hacked sattelite TV but aside from that I have been largely without TV or cable for the better part of 15 years.

For the second week of October I watched cable tv all day. I caught up on some old movie classics on AMC but mostly I enjoyed the prolific science channels that were available. There is the NatGeo channel, the Science channel, the History channel, Discovery channel, Animal Planet and the Military channel has a lot of documentaries too albeit war themed as one might expect.

I finally got to see all the drug commercials I had been hearing about for years now. Unbelievably disingenuous advertising. I can’t imagine how they can sell drugs from their pathetic and unscientific commercials but some folks seem swayed by them or they would not keep spending money on tv adverts. Is it just me or are the side effect of those drugs worse than the problem the drug was supposed to fix? I have been seeing Abilify, Cymbalta and Flomax ads lately and frankly common sense should warn anyone away from those toxins.

Ok so by the third week of October I had lost about 2 weeks due to internet problems and resolution and 1 week due to the wonder of having cable TV in my life. I tried to get back to work dealing with my various sites and my book writing when my primary computer, my cherished and beloved laptop which had seen four years of almost daily use, had helped me create over 100 youtube videos, this here blog and on which I had leveled up my World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings characters died.

It also happened to have most of my YT videos.

If it were not for having obsessively copied and saved my book manuscript in an assortment of ways all over the place I would have lost all the raw materials for my book which consists of about 100,000 words distributed over a variety of articles, posts and private documents from the last 6 months.

My spouse’s home computer magically refused to connect to the internet and our old backup laptop had major cooling issues. The fans had ceased to work about a year ago and as a result the laptop will spontaneously shut down hard with no warning and you will lose everything you were working on. It’s only use is as a workstation to browse the internet with.

With my spouse having gone and bought 3 different computers in the last 4 years while I was using my only my laptop for the same timeframe we decided it was my turn to get a new computer.

I am pleased to say I am now back online with a sleek custom built Alienware gaming laptop. It is really a desktop replacement as it is too big to casually carry around with you for portable computing.

It took just under 2 weeks to get it made and delivered and it is an amazing piece of technology. More than adequate to the task of playing several  video games and programs at once effortlessly never mind word processing and surfing the web. That is my christmas/birthday present from my spouse.

The day that my laptop arrived I came down with the flu which no doubt was also given to me by my spouse since I spend most of my daytime hours alone and she spends all week in a company that employs hundreds and hundreds of people.

It was a strange version of the flu that left me fevered and sweating profusely while I had no sinus problems, no headaches, no stuffy nose, no vomiting, no intestinal issues, nothing but this intense sensitivity to cold and a whole body muscle soreness and stiffness. The entire event lasted from 7 pm to 7 am and was gone the next day completely. Then the following day, it seemed to visit me again, only affecting one side of my body and half as long in duration.

Currently I am getting used to Windows Vista which I have heard all sorts of horrible stories about but which actually is shaping up to be the best operating system I have ever interfaced with. It is everything I expect from modern computing.

In the meantime, I won a few more blog awards I have not put them all up yet and was invited by Wellsphere to make a video short about why I blog. Wellsphere invited me to blog with them right around the first time I had no reliable computer in 4 years.

October was the month I passed 1000 subscribers and I received almost a dozen urgent emails from people that had never heard of me two years ago and now have problems they want me to fix.

I am not strictly back as in blogging frequently and making the rounds on the blogroll I just thought I would give a productivity update and mention I got nothing done bookwise for the month of October.

I also got an unsolicited email from someone who works for a literary agency. I guess what happens is a literary agent can shop your manuscript around the publishing houses and they make a commission or fee or percentage provided they sell the book.

They can also handle details and they have contacts. This agent is actively seeking to expand their account which may or not may be good for both of us depending. I had come to accept that I would self publish small scale. I would not sell as many books but I would get all the profits. There is a certain appeal to having those details taken care of for me. If a publishing house sold my book they could distribute far more massively than I could do by myself and perhaps in the long run that would prove not only more profitable but more helpful to society so to speak.

The particular firm that this prospecting agent works for was amazingly credentialed and has put a lot of well known books on the shelves and into your hands. I have not decided at this time whether or not to sell the publishing rights to my story to anyone, that and this agent contacted me in October which as you know now was utterly nonproductive as well as costly. At this point I still need to complete the damn thing and I sure as hell don’t need an approaching deadline when I am working at my own pace on something so serious.

Finally a few ex-subs have discovered that I am not a saint, not a guru or an all knowing deity and that I am not always nice to everyone all the time. A few of them have since let me know how disappointed they were to learn that I did not live up to their expectations as to what a perfect person should be.

Recovering from almost two decades of clinical depression was not enough, recovering from psychosis, psychopathology, obsessions, ptsd, none of it mattered because I said some such thing in a comment to someone somewhere and apparently, that’s not what enlightened perfect spiritual people say.

*sigh*

Despite not being able to be all things to all people I continue this month to work on my book which when complete might just possibly help a lot of people. I get plenty of encouragement to keep writing and making videos from my ever expanding viewer base.

So I released the vid today about bailing out from blogging and vlogging to take care of the book.

Commenting will be disabled on this blog at the start of next week, next Monday. That should give enough time for finishing current conversations in progress.

I can not, for the life of me seem to be able to put the recent blog awards that Ana of Justana shared with me into a functioning widget thing. (If anyone can tell me how to do with it wordpress please email me!)

I told her I don’t really deserve them because I have been a self centered introverted blogger and not really all that supportive or social with everyone (like everyone on my blogroll for starters). She insisted I had earned it. So here we go. :)

Sharing the love award

and

The Friendship Award

Thank you so much Ana for being so thoughtful and including me.

Those are my first blog awards!

Fixed! update: a big thank you goes out to Gabriel over at Salted Lithium for providing me functional html that resulted in the the blog awards showing up in the side board widget. The man has skills.

And a great big thank you to my three biggest supporters/commenters over the last six months.

Gianna Kali

Ozjthomas

and

Marian

As well as of course, everyone that has stopped by to chat, comment or share their life story with me. I have learned a lot from you all.

If anyone wants to get in a last word or comment or word of encouragement, This is the week and this is the post.

I have spent almost all of August,  weeks, making one meditation talk after another so I could answer the mountain of questions I have compiled over the last year. I hope they help you all.

I look forward to presenting my faithful viewers and readers a one of a kind book in a couple of months, if all goes well.

Take care folks and thank you all.

Here is some of my favorite Tori for you to listen to as you browse my archives.

Cooling

Pretty Good Year

Precious Things

Looking for Manic Depression coping strategies? Want to know a drug and therapy free method for managing your Bipolar Manic episodes? Do you want to know how to cure yourself of the symptoms of and prevent episodes of bipolar disorder mania? Then this video is for you.

I have tried six times to make this video and get it right. Finally, months after my first attempts, I present to you, a one hour and four minute lecture on how to permanently rid yourself of the Mania portion of Manic Depression. I hate calling it Bipolar. However, this video will teach you how to deal with the *bi-polarity mood swings* heading North. This was how I finally learned to manage and then beat my manic thoughts and delusions while keeping my creativity intact.

The video is basically two parts. In the first 30 minutes I talk about classic symptoms from the DSM. I talked a bit about how I experienced some of them and how I was able to determine what they were. I make no apologies for my take on hypomania. I have been *hypomanic* and have gone on *bipolar powered shopping and sex sprees* and you know what? I don’t think that was evidence of an incurable genetic brain disease. No way Jose. I don’t buy it. I do not believe in hypomania whatsoever.

I do believe that most of the other symptoms are signifying a certain kind of cognitive pattern that goes on largely unnoticed by the person experiencing it until it is pointed out to them by family, friends, therapists and the like. You don’t have to agree with me. You don’t have to like my opinions.

However if you are like me you are looking for alternative mental health treatment for your thought problems I suggest you tune out what you don’t like and keep watching, knowing the good stuff is coming.

If you like your meds and you think I am full of it than pass on this video and nothing will come of it. Frankly I found myself dying a little bit each day on psychiatric medications. It was intolerable.

Unfortunately as an adult unless I was heavily sedated under the effects of marijuana daily I lived in an unquiet mind that seethed with an endless, sourceless seeming, living rage. A mind that raced along like a drunken driver in the wrong lane on the highway. A mind that slammed me with violent imagery and self destructive impulses sometimes from morning until bed time.

I had no choice but to find a means to live with myself and control my thoughts in order to have a meaningful useful life and remain out of some kind of institutionalized living. It was that or drug addiction for life or suicide.

I used meds alright, just not doctor recommended pharma approved meds. In time I gradually learned self psychotherapy and a kind of DBT or CBT with mindfulness and journaling sans the actual journal. Gradually I grew a mental circuit of stillness. Meditation helped develop my prefrontal cortex. That is the area of the brain responsible for emotional and cognitive processing.

Now Kimberly of Bipolarsurvivorback has a video called Bipolar Medications: The Truth.

At around 4:45 and on she launches into every pseudoscientific cliche and fallacy in the book. It’s genetic. It’s a chemical imbalance. It’s like diabetes. But it gets downright intellectually dishonest for her to make the following claim.

In the description box on the right she states this at the bottom “Bipolar disorder, like schizophrenia, requires medications for the amelioration of symptoms, and there are no alternative options.”

This is one such alternative. The techniques that I teach you in this video are not entirely unique to me. I learned some of them from a meditation master and some of his better pupils. However I have been told before and reminded (recently) that these techniques are occasionally to be found in a rare and dying breed of therapists scattered around the world. Psychology degree wielding practicing humanistic psychotherapists occasionally impart this information to their clients. Rarer still is the outlaw psychiatrist heretic that will also teach this information.

Some feedback I have already received indicates that some people vehemently disagree with some of my opinions on bipolar at the beginning. Look, if you storm off in a huff and unsubscribe, obviously I have hit a nerve. However, for those of you who are absolutely serious about beating bipolar mania, I enjoin you to reserve judgment until you get to the second part of the video.

The second part of the video is the most important information I have ever released on my youtube channel about the mind and how it works. This is real psychology folks. This means something to me to share this hard won knowledge with you. This is my version of The Secret and my Theory of Everything (Bipolar).

Information is power and the truth will set you free. The second part of this video contains both. Understanding and practicing this information may empower you and change your life and your relationship to mental illness forever.

Hardly worth mentioning but I have two brief tales of strange behavior coming from two different schizophrenic women the same age as myself.

Some of you may know Melinda Brown from her youtube channel Melsbasketcase.

Well Mrs. Brown created a a vile, hate filled, hysterical, threatening video last Friday basically telling her subscribers that several people needed to die. Namely she attacked Mike over at the Psychetruth channel but she included me as well in her tirade.

Mel was one of the people in addition to Liz Spikol and Mike/Psychetruth that got me vlogging about my mental health history. I have never, ever, ever voiced anything disparaging about her or offered her advice of any kind. Asked for or unasked for.

She accuses us of being scientologists, psychiatric deniers (wth does that mean?) and several other blatantly false or outrageously fabricated accusations. She accused me of having a passive aggressive vendetta and agenda against psychiatry.

I beg pardon?

Please see my post about mixed messages to understand that I am not antipsych or on any kind vendetta either. (chanfan2).

I will spell out exactly my contacts with Mel. I added her name as a thank you acknowledgement in my 3 part video series I made a year ago about beating Bipolar and SZ. She inspired me to make the video to talk about recovery.

I subbed her channel after she came back from closing down her channel for a bit and left a comment saying it was nice to find another Tori Amos fan out there on youtube.

I left a comment on a Brian Sapient related video and told her to stick to her guns or something nice and supportive.

After viewing several atrocious videos from her in the ongoing Theist versus Atheist clusterf*cked adhom festival that is the great religious debates on youtube I made two short vids where I tried to explain how to argue better and more reasonably and with less fallacy. One video was called something like ‘Debate tips for Theists’ and the other was ‘Debate tips for Atheists’ or something. She denied my video response and forcibly unsubbed me from her channel. >.>

That’s it. I never told her to go off medications or any of the other bullshit she accused me of.

I kept my cool, did not respond to her video in anyway and sent a note to Youtube who promptly removed her abusive hate speech video from the internets. Seriously, I have never done anything to her, why the hate?

Now for denial.

I am sure some of you know Kristin Bell from the youtube channel ichbinkeinberliner. Over the course of my research into antipsychotics I came across this post from Kristin’s blog about Haldol injections she had written about a year exactly before the day I found it this summer.

Well, as you can see in the comments section a psychiatric survivor named Mark was kind enough to drop by and mention that neuroleptics, especially Haldol have been shown to cause brain damage.

Kristin’s response to him contained all the classic signs of instant, hostile denial.

Paraphrasing:

Mark: “Umm hey there, Haldol shrinks your brain”

KB: “lol no it doesn’t”

Mark: ” Umm, here is a partial copy pasta from an article about it”

KB: “lol its from the internet that means it doesn’t count. You only produced 1 article, that means it does not count. Thought control is in now in effect. You are not allowed to slander such a great drug with your lies”

KB: “but thanks for stopping by and sharing!”

So you know me, as soon as I saw that I went into my archives to grab my 10,000 links of doom about antipsychotics. I posted a suite of links from Mind Freedom and from an online gossip/survivors bulletin collection. Also some studies which fingered Haldol specifically as a culprit for frontal lobe shrinkage.

Folks you have to understand this stuff is industrial chemical toxin. It’s not medicine. The original discovery that led to Thorazine and began the neuroleptic age of psychiatry was an industrial dye chemical. The *medicinal, therapeutic* effect is that of a toxin pollutant.

They have been tinkering with the different chains and strands of that molecule ever since. Each molecular adjustment or change is a different label, trade name and patent more or less. It is not an intelligently created, lab designed brain medicine. It’s a neurotoxin that pollutes the spaces of your ganglion, dendrites and axons which causes you to shuffle about, sleep, slur speech, gain weight, become diabetic and lose frontal lobe cells. It is poison.

My comment with it’s pile of incriminating links of numerous studies that Kristin asked Mark for was in que to be moderated for over a month before finally disappearing. She censored scientific research and information from her page because of the implications that meant she was basically voluntarily self harming. She might as well have gone to Home Depot or Office Max and tried any number of other chemicals randomly for similar effects.

So there you go. Denial from Kristin and hate from Mel. That’s what you get for outreaching and trying to help. Here is my old post regarding The truth about antipsychotics.

At any rate. My outreach days are over for now. I must press on with my writings. Of course once I am a published author I will have to act all untouchable and nonplussed about these sorts of things. Pretend I exist in a different reality than those that would try to refute, deny, denigrate, criticize or otherwise try to censor and invalidate my experiences, opinions and message.

Does ECT change your personality? Do antipsychotics change your personality? ECT and neuroleptics are proven to cause brain damage. How come the soul does not fix it? In my personal experience I have known people who had head trauma, concussions and undergone drug treatments that permanently changed their personality and behavior. In this video, ECT, neuroleptics, brain damage and the soul I try to talk about the relationship between the brain and the soul and why some people have brain damage that changes them for the rest of their lives. There were some interesting comments submitted that offered an opposite perspective too. How come some people with seemingly catastrophic brain damage do not change at all as a result?

September 1, 2008 Announcement and update:

Dear friends, viewers and subscribers. As many of you know I have been slowly working on an autobiography about mental illness recovery. The time has come to speed that process up. In order to do that I must cut down on time consuming sidetracks, tangents and distractions for a few months.

To do that I have enabled the friend lock feature on my youtube channel to cut down on inbox help requests, feedback and FAQs that I get daily. It is my hope to offer you help and answer questions to those seeking support, solutions or ideas on how to recover from mental and spiritual issues by creating this book.

I am not done making videos! There will be more. Please stay subscribed for future vids and updates. However I must cut back on my video creations in order focus on my writing for awhile. For now please use the built in search window on my YT channel and wordpress blog for answers to questions you have.

Also fair warning that I may not get to video comments right away but as time permits.

Commenting on this blog will be shutdown by the end of the week.

Friends, agents, publishers you may get my email at the bottom of the Site Index section.

Please do not email me for trivia/fishing expeditions. If you have critical psychiatric issues, please use safe professional services. No I can not recommend any services or professionals in your area. Please remember I am neither a lawyer or a doctor and thus all information on this blog is unprofessional opinions or personal anecdotes and does not constitute medical or legal advice.

Thank you everyone for your patience and understanding