Safely go mad
Zell...@webtv.net
Especially stuff relating to forced medication. It occurs to me that
what is most needed in this world to promote mental health is for there
to be a place where you can safely go mad. A place where you can lose
your mind for a while without any danger of getting beaten up or given
drugs that leave you twitching and drooling. In short, an asylum, in the
truest sense of the word. So...I did a search on google for the phrase
"safely go mad" You know how many hits I got? None whatever. I tried the
same search on google groups. Nothing there either.
That's why I posted this. Now if somebody does the same search, they'll
at least find this message.
Oh, and for the record, I've never gotten beaten up or taken anything
that left me drooling and twitching.
Zell...@webtv.net
haven, a refuge, a place where hospitality and restfulness prevail." ...
http://www.peoriamagazines.com/aa/112004/arthistory
Michael Tremayne
>I've been doing all kinds of web searches regarding mental illness.
Hi, Zeller. No-one but you seems to post in this group (how many are
here, by the way?) - so I thought I'd post when I actually have something to
say. It must be a bit lonely here by yourself (or by yourself as to active
posters, anyway.) And your post does prick me a bit, and prompt me to say a
few things.
I'm a bit wary about revealing too much about myself in places like this -
not because I'm unfriendly, but mainly because I don't want to be recognized by
people I know if they happen to stumble upon what I post - even though I am not
using my real name to post under. I feel just my writing style is
recognizable, and I cannot disguise that. Still, I think, conservative people
as they are, they're most unlikely to be stumbling even fleetingly through
Internet places such as this - and the few who are more radical, I wouldn't
mind so much if they read it and recognized me.
But mental health issues have been something of an issue in my life, and I
tend to be very obsessive and perfectionistic, and I think I said earlier in
this forum that I quite likely acquired Asperger's syndrome early in life, and
have various other issues with anxiety, depression, and the like. I think
difficulties I've had in more "mainstream" areas of my life (lost ambitions,
existential angst, and so on) have combined to increase my preoccupation with
all this confinement stuff.
So I can feel some connection with your comments about mental illness.
>Especially stuff relating to forced medication.
Well, I've been lucky enough never to have suffered forced medication.
But I did recently read a first-person account of force-feeding of a prisoner
on hunger-strike - and it was truly, truly horrible, nauseating, and quite
sickening. (Emily Pankhurst, I think - I found this on "The Institute" bondage
web site. Those were the Dark Ages, all right, even though in the 20th
century.)
>It occurs to me that
>what is most needed in this world to promote mental health is for there
>to be a place where you can safely go mad.
Don't know about that. Maybe you've got a point. I can go crazy if I
want, though, because I live alone, and live a very isolated life - more
isolated than I sometimes want it to be. I can lose my temper or shout or go
crazy any time I want, and no-one will even know. At times I think it just
*escalates* your anger, though, rather than giving relief - makes it easier to
lose your temper on smaller provocation. I only do it if I lose control, not
because I decide to do it as the best way of dealing with anger.
At times I just get into a locker or suitcase, securely lock myself in
using a timer-controlled lamp and a combination lock, and kind of escape from
life that way. Once the light goes off, I just can't possibly escape until it
comes on again. (And I'm speaking more personally here than I think I've ever
done before on any of these groups I post to.)
>A place where you can lose
>your mind for a while without any danger of getting beaten up or given
>drugs that leave you twitching and drooling. In short, an asylum, in the
>truest sense of the word.
I guess my lockers and suitcases are just that, for me. And the lockers
at least have an intensely strong overlay of nostalgia harking back to my
school years, which intensifies the effect, no doubt. I was unhappy at school,
and the lockers were the only thing I missed about school when I left. I've
had this strong inclination all my life, since babyhood even, to crawl away
from life's hardships and curl up somewhere snug and remote (figuratively if
not always literally).
Goodness me, Zeller, what are you drawing out of me? I'd better have a
little more self-control now.
>So...I did a search on google for the phrase
>"safely go mad" You know how many hits I got? None whatever. I tried the
>same search on google groups. Nothing there either.
I wouldn't attach too much importance to that, actually: when an idea
can't be expressed in a single word, and needs to be expressed by a phrase,
even a very short one, usually there many permutations of wording that can be
used about equally suitably. Did you search for other phrases expressing a
similar idea, too?
But there are probably few socially-sanctioned avenues for safely going
mad, anyway. I don't think society even sanctions going mad at all, and, if
you must do so, it's up to you to find your own ways. For all the talk you
hear otherwise, I don't think the stigma against emotionally troubled or
mentally ill or just eccentric people has eased much at all.
But don't people go safely mad in a totally different way at soccer
matches, at rock concerts, rave parties, and the like? (Well some of those may
be safer than others!) Those seem to be much more socially acceptable than
curling up snugly in lockers. But those mass public events would be far too
socially confronting to me, so I shun them like the plague. I could be amid
all that rowdy bonhomie and camaraderie, but light-years away from it mentally
and emotionally. But it may be another variant on the same idea of safely
going mad. You ever seen a bunch of Aussie Rules footy fans at a Grand Final,
some time in September? That's madness of a sort - but very much part of
Melbourne culture - it's even been called Melbourne's official religion.
Am I, or those who have ways of "safely going mad", mad after all though?
Personally, I think the *world* is mad, and getting madder and more irrational
all the time, and society is getting mad - and at least parts of that madness I
do not share myself. I might cite what I believe the 1960s psychiatrist R. D.
Laing said, roughly to the effect that maybe some insanity is just a sane
response to an insane world - an opinion I have much sympathy with.
>That's why I posted this. Now if somebody does the same search, they'll
>at least find this message.
This forum is publicly searchable, is it? I dare say the same idea may
hae been written about by others, but just not using the same words.
Regards, Michael Tremayne.
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Michael Tremayne
>Zeller, however, favored the "fine old word asylum that suggests a
>haven, a refuge, a place where hospitality and restfulness prevail." ...
I think the word has changed meaning subtly at various times. Once upon a
time, people could get asylum by touching the door of a cathedral, and they
could not be touched by their pursuers. But asylums also became places for the
institutionalized torture and confinement and degradation of people whose
mental disorders the powers-that-be didn't understand, and respectable people
could actually visit the asylums for a Sunday afternoon's entertainment
laughing at the antics of the poor wretches.
Now, asylum is cited as something that refugees from war-torn countries
seek in countries like Australia, but instead get locked up in concentration
camps out in the desert and called numbers not names by their guards, because
the Government is afraid that poor people arriving in leaky boats are either
covert terrorists or subversives, or they throw their children overboard in an
attempt to blackmail the Government into admitting them into Fortress
Australia, and thus display their unfit ness to be citizens of this country
where "*we* will determine who enters this country and the circumstances under
which they arrrive" (according to our Prime Minister) - a claim (the throwing
overboard) that has now been thoroughly discredited since - and what should be
a shameful slur on the Government is like water off a duck's back to them, as
they use incidents like this to stir up xenophobia in an increasingly
conservative Australian public fearful of terrorists and Muslims, and expertly
use that to manipulate them to further their own power and whittle away human
rights - something like that, anyway.
Not sure what the point of all that was - it just came out. My
word-associations to your use of the term "asylum", I suppose.
>http://www.peoriamagazines.com/aa/112004/arthistory
Dr. George A. Zeller? Too old to be you, obviously - but a relative? Or
maybe just someone you chose your alias after? Your interest in matters of
this sort prompts me to wonder if you're involved in a medical profession - but
of course that's just my guess, and I don't expect you to say if you don't want
to.
But it sounds as if Dr. Zeller was quite a bit ahead of his time. And
here in Australia, we're "deinstitutionalizing" mentally ill or disabled
people, so they end up living on the streets or being warehoused in prisons
instead. Makes you wonder if we're going backwards again in this New World
Order where only market forces and the rule of the powerful and the survival of
the fittest - sanctioned by "free trade" and government policy - count.
I'm getting off-topic, though, aren't I? Or maybe I'm not sure what the
intended topic of this group *is*.
Regards, Michael Tremayne.
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Zell...@webtv.net
a great-uncle, my grandfather's older brother.
Yes, there is a stigma attached to mental illness. Sadly, some of the
people who claim to be fighting this stigma are actually promoting it.
Last year at valentine's day, a company that sells teddy bears as
greeting-cards-cum-gifts (Vermont Teddy Bears) announced it was selling
a "crazy for you" bear: a teddy bear in a straitjacket. The National
Alliance for the Mentally Ill immediately launched a campaign to
suppress these bears, and they were never sold.
They claimed the bear in the straijacket fostered stereotypes about
mental illness. Strange thing is, one of this organization's main
activities is to publicize violent crimes committed by the mentally ill.
They have an agenda to push: forced medication. If they can get enough
people scared of violent crazies, they can get support for forced
drugging of said crazies.
They don't mention the fact most of the violence committed by the tiny
minority of the mentally ill population that resorts to violence is the
direct or indirect result of drugs that have been forced on them.
You probably won't be surprised to learn the National Alliance for the
Mentally Ill is largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry.
zellerzone
Now she could go into raging delerium and nobody would get hurt, least of all herself.
"She became aware that she was lying on a bed with an icy sheet stretched under her bare body. another was thrown over her and it was also pulled tight. Then she found herself being rolled back and forth between the sheets while others were wound about her body. Then came restraints, tightening, forcing her breath out, and pushing her deep into the bed. She did not stay for the completion of whatever was being done...
"Sometime later Deborah came free of the Pit with perceptions as clear as morning. She was still wrapped and bound tightly in the pack, but her own heat had warmed the sheets until they seemed the temperature of her own exertions. All the anguish and fighting only served to heat the cocoon; the heat, to wear her out. She moved her head a little, tiring from the effort. It was all she could move.
"After a while someone came in. 'How are you feeling?'
"'Yes...' Her voice sounded surprised. 'How long have I been here?'
"'About three and a half hours. Four hours is standard and if you're okay we'll let you up in half an hour.' He left. Her joints were beginning to ache from the pressure of the restraints, but reality was still there. She was amazed that she had been able to come from the deepest place without the anguish of rising.
"After what seemed like a long time, they came to let her up. As they were freeing her, she studied the construction of the cocoon. There was an ice pack under her neck and a hot-water bottle at her feet. Sheets were spread over and under the complex of wrappings which made up the mummy case. Over the sheets were three canvas strips, wide and long, which were pulled tightly across her body at the chest, stomach and knees, and tied to the bed on the other side. A fourth strip was knotted around her feet and pulled down to be tied around bars at the foot of the bed. The wrappings were large sheets that fitted around the body; three of them interlapped like white wet leaves, and one, on the inside, held the arms to the sides."
Alas, that is a forgotten art. They made a movie of _I Never Promised You a Rose Garden_ back in the 1970s and didn't get the pack right at all. They left the arm sheet out entirely.
Putting patients in wet packs was a labor-intensive process, more so than putting them in straitjackets and/or tossing them in a padded cell. Certainly more so than just dosing them with something. The pharmaceuticals are so much more cost-effective, don't you know.
zellerzone
When Paschall came around that night and saw I really needed a dope-pill or a triple bromide he said, "I'll leave an order so you can get it if you think you must, but there's a way we think is better. It may not work with you. You may lose your temper. But we might try it. Want to try it?"
"Yes, what?" I said. "Try anything."
He went away and pretty soon the prize-fighter and another husky came in, carrying what looked like the hotel wet-wash. They fixed the bed so it wouldn't soak through to the mattress, then laid me straight and naked on the bed with my arms pressed along my sides like a soldier lying at attention and began swathing me, rolling me on one side and then the other, in tight wet sheets, so that the weight of my body rolling back would pull them smoother and tighter, over and over again, until they stood off to smooth any wrinkles out of the job and look at it and see if it was all right. I was flat on my back. Except that my head stuck out and lay comfortably on a pillow, I was the mummy of Rameses. I couldn't bend my elbows or knees. I couldn't even double my fists. My hands were pressed flat. I couldn't move a muscle except by telegraphing a deliberate local order to it as oriental dancers do. This was the famous "pack." It occurred to me that I'd have been willing to bet any amount of money--and I still would--that this would have held Houdini. I had seen straitjackets on the vaudeville stage, and a straitjacket was a ten-acre field compared to this cocoon.
It was tighter than any kid glove. And the tightness was so uniform that it didn't stop circulation. After they had gone I started to get excited locally, and it stopped even that. They told me I'd sweat a lot presently, and had fixed an ice pack on the top of my head where the skull was thickest. They has turned out all the lights, but had left the door slightly ajar, and had told me that they'd be down the hall somewhere so that if anything went wrong I could let out a yell.
I lay there in the darkness like an Egyptian mummy. After a while my mind began to work, and I discovered that I liked it. It occurred to me that probably I was masochistic or something of the sort. I set about rationalizing it, but of course one always does. I remembered the theories that we all have a subconscious longing to be back in the womb--that we remember subconsciously how nice and safe and warm it was. I remembered poetry about the womb and the grave. There wetre some distant, ordinary, living, human sounds way down the corridor somewhere, but they didn't disturb or concern me. Perhaps they did disturb me, for I became acutely conscious again of my jangled nerves. I wanted to turn over, to "toss" about in the bed. I wanted to put my elbow up under my pillow. I wanted to move my arms. I wanted to scratch my forehead. I'd have to yell for help if a fly alighted on my nose. In a little while, the active nervousness decreased, but I was conscious of increasing tension. I tried experimentally to break, or stretch my bonds, by contracting and straining every muscle. I found that I couldn't loosen them at all, and it was this that had excited me and made me like it. I went lax presently and was beginning to sweat. I sweated, time passed, and the tension was gone and the jangling nervousness disappeared too, faded slowly as it does under a strong soporific. I was soon as peaceful as a four-month fetus.
When they came back after a long time and began to unwind me, I was still peaceful. And when they went away I turned on my side. stuck my arm up under my head, and went to sleep without another movement.
I was put to bed that way for five or six successive nights, and then Dr. Paschall ordered it stopped. He said I liked it too well...