Art created at the Torture Chamber called the Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital

February 13, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 15 Comments

I was a prisoner at Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living’s Donnelly 2 South from January 10th until February 7th, 2013, the day before the east coast blizzard, and I only “escaped” because the torturing doctor went on a four day vacation and the substitute decided that I was not actually psychotic any longer and did not need seclusion or restraints after all…and opted to let me go the very day I was freed from both.

Good thing too, because it was a Thursday and all travel stopped the very next day and for several days after that. The picture above is one that Shedana, RN liked very much. She said it captured her “physique” and while the flooring is imaginary, the unit was structured much as it is pictured. At least while I had a bed on the unit, with my door facing the med room and another bedroom opposite. Shedana was a “good egg” but of course it didn’t help when they decided to attack me in force and secluded me for two weeks and worse…But more on that later.

The first doctor I had merely convinced me to take, semi-voluntarily, a fairly stiff dose of Zyprexa. which I tried to do with regularity. I soon found, however, that far from being the miracle drug it had once been, mixed with Abilify and Geodon it induced a state of apathy and boredom. As if the Intake and Feeding drug, the drug on which I used to feel enthusiasm to learn and read, Zyprexa, simply mixed very badly with the Output drugs of Geodon and Abilify, such that I neither could read and learn, nor do art or write. In any event, this abysmal lethargy pushed me out of desperation to paint this, in oil pastels.

After that, I simply started refusing to take the Zyprexa, and refusing a lot of other things…A great deal of abuse happened. But I did this picture before all my art supplies were confiscated for no reason other than punishment (you cannot damage yourself or others with soft oil pastels)

Before I tell you some of what happened, without naming names, lest a legal case be made against them, as there might possibly be a chance to do, let me show you most of the rest of the art I did there, though one of them is unfinished and may never end up being finished, since it was hospital art and may stay that way.

This one is an oil pastel, me with a dung beetle pushing a ball of shit around on my cheek…Says enough just that, doesn’t it.

This one can be turned any which way to see all sorts of things buried in the picture. It was the one I started first and never did get to finish. What I can point you towards is the central object at the very bottom, which you can trace up to the blue figure and see what is happening. It should tell you something…The hand on the upper left is pointing at this process. Also, the exploding biohazard ball is part of it all, representing me, the all-polluting biohazard…But you have to look at the picture carefully. There is a Boat To Nowhere, and there are a couple of turtles, why, I don’t know…yadda yadda.

Finally, the very last time I had access to any art supplies, and I do not recall whether it was my last morning or some other time, I painted this one with oil pastels. I believe it speaks for itself.

What happened was that they were routinely, literally routinely restraining me “for not following directions” as they would quite openly state. Four-point restraints, in a tight no movement position, for many many hours at a time, with absolutely no indication of how, just how, I might “earn” my freedom. Of course they wouldn’t tell me what I could do to “be good” because I hadn’t done anything to ‘deserve” restraints to begin with as they knew perfectly well. For example,. and this was typical, but it was one of the few opportunities I managed to document because they ha removed all my writing materials, illegally, but I forgot that I had a right to a crayon and paper until Feb 6th. That afternoon, I simply walked away from my seclusion room. I had had enough of them saying it was “merely a side room” not a seclusion room, then preventing me bodily from leaving it. So when I could do so without someone actually wanting to fight me, I walked away, and proceeded to enter the unit and walk down the hall to the end and look out the window, I took a deep breath, heard THEM behind me, and sauntered back to the proper end of the hall, the “lost end” where they kept anyone from seeing me or knowing what they were doing to me. Once I got there, they descended on me, the horde of the goon squad, some staff I knew, but most I did not. I did not bother to look at who was doing what to me. I simply lay passively on the bed, and put my arms out so they could do what I knew they would do. Tightly, they shackled my wrists out past my hips so there was no play in the restraints and I could not turn on my side or do anything but lie stiffly on my back. At the same time, others jerked my feet apart and just as tightly shackled my ankles to the lower corners of bed. Then came the coup de grace. They pinioned me on my side somehow, pulled down my pants, and injected me with three drugs: Haldol 5mg, Ativan 2mg, and Benadryl 50mg. Why, except as punishment I do not know. because I had, just a half hour before, been doped up on involuntary Zyprexa 10mg.

But of course it was punishment. The very fact that they told me it was “not punishment” but “what your behavior brings on every time, Pamela” only proves my point. At first and usually they only said, it was because I “didn’t follow directions” so if they were not punishing me, what were they doing? They most certainly were not following Centers for Medicare and Medicaid regulations for the use of Restraints and Seclusion only in cases where a person is in imminent danger or harming self or others! Indeed, the best they could do, when I protested, passively, saying just those words, was to respond, “You are not safe” as if that proved somehow that I was in danger or posed any imminent threat to the safety of anyone.

No, I did not. I didn’t threaten or harm anyone. I merely walked the length of the hall and looked out the window and then went back to my solitary confinement. But it was enough to trigger their retaliation, and that started at 1pm. I was not released, not even to use the bathroom or eat supper, no never even was a single hand freed to permit me to eat supper — until 7pm.

THEN, at 8:30pm, I became upset and frustrated because — well, I do not know now why, but I “threw a half a graham cracker at the wall” as I recorded later. And the goon squad descended on this dangerous patient again, not only with the strait jacket of four point restraints, but with the same 3 drug IM-in-the-ass cocktail.

This time, however, passive as I was as they trussed me up — and I said only, “For shame, for shame. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, doing this to me…” — passive as I was, allowing them to seize my limbs and tightly shackle me yet again in truth I dared not resist, as that would only have justified their violence, and i already had my share of bruises. Bur I had come to my limit of the abuse i would silently tolerate. They could restrain and seclude me but they had up till now only silenced me in restraints because iu wanted to earn my way free quickly. THis time I didn’t give a damn. It was nearly nine o clock and no one knew what they had done to me. Everyone was getting their bedtime meds and going to bed without any understanding of what was going on. I was a stranger to most people on the unit, who had no idea I even existed. THAT was a situation that had to change. NOW.

After they trooped out of the room, stationing a 1:1 sitter at the door as usual, I stopped my merely silent and passive resistance and started to scream. I wanted to be heard. I wanted to scare people. I wanted them to wonder, Who is that person,. and what in god’s name are they doing to her? Are they torturing her? And I wanted them to ask questions of the staff that the staff could not answer. I screamed and I screams in desolation and despair, feeling like my life was at an end. The plan they had set up for me was impossible for me to live up to. In nearly 10 days I had not even earned my way to a pencil and my journal. Only to restraints and more restraints. I saw no way out of the hospital. So I screamed, long blood-curdling, heart-wrenching screams that I assume did the job of scaring all, as eventually they closed my door, much to the disgruntlement of the sitter who was forced to come inside with me and was no longer free to socialize. But not for a while. I kept on screaming until my voice gave out and I felt asleep.

The next day the substitute doctor freed me, I dunno why or how, but she did. and I thank my lucky stars as the staff doctor was a sadist and never would have. I have a lot more to say, but for now I am hoping to hear from a sympathetic lawyer who will take on my case for some reason for some purpose…Unlikely to happen. despite my bruised body and joints that are so out of whack I cannot sit indian fashion or cross my legs. Why won’t they help me or respond? I didn’t die, so they won’t earn a lot of money from my case, nobody gives a damn about mental patient abuse…

You really know when you are a third class citizen when you only MIGHT be worth more to them dead than alive.

Abuse, Health, Hospital

Body Bagged, 4-pointed, Secluded and Tortured — All in the name of Treatment?

February 8, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 17 Comments

The above is are just some bruises of many I received during my month-long course of “psychiatric treatment” at the Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living, on the unit called Donnelly 2 South. In Connecticut, the Institute of Living, first known as the Retreat, and once quite famous as a posh sanatarium for the rich and famous though this is no longer true, was first made famous by Clifford Beers, I believe, who wrote about similiar torture he underwent there just a hundred years ago in the book, A Mind That Found itself.

After burning my face with cigars and cigarettes, I spent the last month in Connecticut’s well-known Institute of Living (yeah the dangerous 6th month was JANUARY not February but nobody thought to check my math) being beaten up and trussed like a pig in four-point restraints almost daily for many many hours. Why did they deal me this sort of treatment? Why? Because “You do not follow directions”.

I DID NOT FOLLOW DIRECTIONS so they beat me up and tied me, shackled me with leather and metal cuffs to a bed for dozens upon dozens of hours.! Get that? I was disobedient, so they shackled me to a bed as an excuse for treatment!

After this experience, I LOST ALL FAITH in the ability of any institution to do anyone any good who has a mental illness or sickness of the mind, or any emotional disorder or whatever you wish to call it. I GIVE UP! I will kill myself if anyone ever tries to send me back to such a cesspit of a place. I do not care if it is appointed like the Taj Mahal. NO ONE who works there is uncontaminated by the evil infecting such places and they are ALL EVIL EVERY SINGLE ONE. I have NEVER been to a hospital where the people are kind and well meaning and where the treatment is actually kind and decent. Once in a while a single person, such as the Middlesex Hospital occupational therapist Christobelle Payne, may stand out in memory as being a rare human being of warmth and dignity and caring, but otherwise, they all to a one fail the test of being decent human specimens and all fail royally to be even normally humanly responsive to suffering persons. They are in it for the money and a cushy job, and don’t you forget it if you go into a psycho hospital, DO not expect to get well there. Expect PILLS, and directions (ie ORDERS) that you HAVE To follow or ELSE.

Get out of there as quickly as possible, because your life depends on it. I am serious. DO NOT LINGER expecting care and treatment or to feel better no matter how helpful it might want to seem.

Furthermore. if you are a young person, do not listen to the sweet seductive advice that some may give you that you woul do well to go for “disability” and social security payments. THAT Is a load of total crapola and the worst thing anyone could tell anyone under the age of 50. I am so angry and broken at the moment that I cannot speak more. But if I can later on, I will say more to explain. At the moment, I have to attend to too many PHYSICAL bruises and to find a way back to sanity on my own, havin been driven to the brink of near extinction by one of the best known hospitals in this state. At the moment I am both rigid with rage and so confused and broken that I scarcely know how to continue, or whether I even want to. Why bother? Why bother? How can people be such monsters, and in such monstrously powerful places and ways. I hurt so deeply and feel I will never trust an single person ever again when they say, Come let us help you. You need our help. YOUR help? Like being raped, I need your F—ing help!

GO jump in a lake of snot is what I should say to all of you so called helpers. I’d rather die. Go F— yourself.

Health, Life, Schizophrenia

“Lady Quixote” on Recovery from Hearing Voices

January 8, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 2 Comments

Today I have a guest poster, someone who has been contributing a lot of comments to my blog and who wrote one that I thought deserved a post of its own. Without a lot of introduction, since she tells it pretty much as it is, I offer the following: one brave woman’s unique and amazing recovery story.

From “LADY QUIXOTE”:

I believe it is a normal part of grief to have moments of hearing and seeing those close to us who have died. This is true of our pets, as well as the people in our lives, who have recently passed on. I’ve experienced it, as have many people I know, most of whom have never been diagnosed with any kind of mental illness.

What I don’t know, of course, is whether these experiences are “real,” meaning do they exist independently of our own grieving mind? I believe that at least some of these ghostly grief visitations may be real. The reason I think this, is because on two separate occasions, with two different deceased loved ones, my paranormal experience was witnessed and experienced simultaneously by other people who were with me at the time.

Life is a mystery. Death, even more so.

When I feel that someone who has recently died may be trying to communicate with me in some way, I tell them that I appreciate their caring enough to contact me, and that I miss them and hope they are in a wonderful place where I will join them someday – but to please refrain from contacting me again, because it is a “trigger” for the schizophrenia I was diagnosed with in 1967. I have not been bothered with continual voices since 1969, and I don’t ever want to go back to that miserable real-life-nightmare, again.

In most cases, when I make this request, the “visitation” immediately and permanently stops. On the rare occasion when it has not stopped, I prayed to my Creator for help and protection, and I also studiously ignore the voice or vision, and in every case it soon stopped.

My voices started when I was 14, shortly after my paternal grandfather died. His spirit seemed to visit me twice, the first time immediately after his death, when I was sitting at my desk in school and had no idea that my grandfather was about to die. Suddenly, I “knew” he was dead. It was so real, that I started to cry, right there in the classroom. When I got home from school that day, my mother met me at the door and said, “I have some bad news…” I stopped her and said, “I already know what it is, my Grandfather ‘R’ died today.” She asked me how I knew, and I said I “just did.”

A few months later a friend of mine introduced me to her Ouija Board. She said it was a tool for contacting the spirits of the dead. I had never heard of such a thing and was eager to try to contact my grandfather through her Ouija Board. We seemed to have success in contacting some kind of spirit, but whatever it was, it wasn’t my loving grandfather

My friend who owned the Ouija Board then decided to hold seances with me and some of our other friends, but nothing much came out of those, except that one girl starting screaming at the top of her lungs during one of the seances, saying that she saw a horrible vision. But no one else could see whatever it was that had her so terrified.

Around that time another school friend told me he had heard about the seances I was involved in, and he loaned me a book which he said gave excellent instructions on how to contact the dead. I don’t remember the name of that book, but it should have been entitled “Spiritism for Dummies,” or better yet: “How To Become A Schizophrenic in 5 Easy Steps!”

That book gave point by point instructions for things like “autonomic” (spirit) handwriting, and also on how to become a medium, so that spirits could use your body and your mouth to speak through. Good grief, what was I thinking when I went ahead and followed those instructions? I really must not have been very bright, when I was 14.

So, naive me, I carefully followed the book’s instructions and put myself into a trance, then I called forth the spirits, and – lo and behold – suddenly my hand was writing words all by itself, and the next thing I knew, I had a head full of loud voices that would not shut up even for a second. My only escape from the nonstop circus in my head, happened when I was asleep. During my waking hours, every moment was a real-life NIGHTMARE.

I begged the voices to PLEASE go away, go back to where they had come from. But they just laughed, cursed, and mocked me. Sometimes they told me to kill myself if I didn’t like my life anymore. They even told me to pray to Satan, since praying to God didn’t seem to help. Truly, I was in a living hell!

In desperation I went to my mother and told her about the Ouija Board, the seances, the How-to-be-a-Medium book, my “success” with autonomic spirit handwriting, and the visions and the voices that would not leave me alone. I desperately wanted help to get rid of those maddening voices, because I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without a crowd watching, mocking, and commenting! I couldn’t have a private thought without a multitude listening to it, and commenting and mocking me for the silly 14-year-old things I thought about! I asked my mother if she knew what I could do to make the horrible spirits go away?

My mother responded by making ME go away. Although I had never tried nor threatened to harm anyone, myself included, she immediately put me into a mental institution. The year was 1967, during that era when the answer to mental illness was to drug you up, lock you up, and throw away the key. My mother assured me that I would only be in the institution for a few weeks, until they made me well. But right after taking me there, as I later learned, she went home and took every item I owned to the town dump. I was never supposed to come out of the insane asylum, you see, because the schizophrenia I had been diagnosed with was “incurable.”

One of the other young teenagers involved in our seances, also ended up hearing voices, seeing visions, diagnosed schizophrenic, and committed to the same insane asylum. He had been trying to contact his mother, who died when he was six.

After nearly 2 years in the asylum, a social worker who saw me periodically because of my young age, asked me why I was there, when I always “seemed” so normal? (I was asked that question a lot, because I was not one of those who went around behaving oddly. I never talked aloud to my voices; I had no need to, since they could hear my thoughts, anyway.)

I told the social worker that I heard voices, and she asked me how the voices had gotten started. So I told her all about the Ouija Board, the seances, and the book on spiritism that had taught me step-by-step how to put myself into an hypnotic trance and contact the dead.

Then this brilliant social worker said, “Well, it seems to me that all you did was hypnotize yourself into hearing voices! You’ve seen hypnotists on TV, haven’t you? How they can hypnotize a person into believing something ridiculous, such as that they are a dog, and the next thing you know that person is barking and behaving like a dog? Then the hypnotist gives them the suggestion that they are no longer a dog, that they are themselves again, and they instantly revert to their normal human behavior. Why don’t you try hypnotizing yourself once more, and while you are under hypnosis, tell yourself that the voices are not real, and that when you wake up, you will not hear those voices, ever again.”

I went back to the ward, got into my bed, and did what she said. I highly doubted it would work, because the voices seemed as real to me as anything – how could I make myself believe via hypnosis that they were not real, when I “knew” better? But, I went ahead and tried the self-hypnosis-reverse-suggestion like my social worker had advised me to do, and…. IT WORKED! When I woke myself out of my self-hypnotic trance, the voices were GONE! There were only a few, very distant, occasional “echoes” of “little voices” now and then, for a brief period of time, but they were so quiet and intermittent that they were very easy for me to ignore, and soon even that stopped.

In this manner I have been free of voices, 99% of the time, since 1969 when I was 16 years old. I have also not taken any anti-psychotic medication since that time. The only exception to my not hearing voices is, like I said at the beginning of this long-winded post, when someone close to me dies. But in every case, I handle it by telling them to please leave me alone, with a brief explanation of why I need for them to leave me, and most do so immediately. Those that do not comply with my request, quickly go away after I pray to the Lord for help, and then I tell the voices to “get behind me,” and after that I ignore them until they get bored enough, I suppose, to go bother someone else. 😉

Today, my residual “mental problems” have to do with my chronic PTSD, general anxiety, and an occasional dark depression. I am in therapy for those things, and I also take a low dose of an antidepressant and an anti-anxiety medication. But I have no schizophrenia, and no psychosis of any kind, not in over 40 years, YAY!

I shared my story here in the hopes that it may help you in some way. You are someone I feel very privileged to call a friend, and I feel sad when you are having a rough time.

Art, Family, Health, Writing

iPad Art, also Portrait and Poem: In Memoriam Howard M Spiro, MD

January 6, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 1 Comment

The first three pieces here were done with my finger using the app, Art Set, on an iPad 2. I had never used any digital means to do art before, and in fact had just started drawing a few months before. So when I did the window curtains drawing, it was really among my earliest drawings anyway. The “hand with pencil” was just for fun, because I had nothing else in front of me to draw, and I used my right hand to draw my left, I think, though I could have reversed it. Not sure, as I was doing either one in those days. Now I tend to strictly draw with my right hand and write with my left hand… Anyhow, I must have drawn my feet in flip flops last summer, since it is more sophisticated than the other two and I don’t think I would have been able to do that sort of thing until last year.

The pencil sketch, which I took from a movie of Athol Fugard’s play “Boesman and Lena” (staring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett), I drew off the television, stopping and starting it until I couldn’t bear to not know what was going to happen any longer, and gave up and simply watched the movie…It was a terrific if also very dark play. I watched it twice in a row, one night and then again the next night. Then I even went so far as to look for the text of it, which is apparently difficult to find…I did get a study guide though, which may have the text embedded in it. At any rate I hope so. Anyhow, I had planned to do other studies from that movie but I got so engrossed in the actual play, that I failed to stop the action long enough to do so. I guess that speaks volumes for how good a playwright Fugard is (was?). In fact, I watched yet another of his plays/movies and even sent for a third, “Tsotsi,” that was unavailable any other way the following night. “Master Harold and the Boys” was incredibly difficult, yes painful, to watch, and should not have been easy anyway, not for anyone with a light skin in this country and any conscience. We are ALL implicated, we are ALL guilty…

Finally, the picture, at the bottom, is of my father. Oddly, my first title of this post (edited out) called him “my dad”; I usually refer to him as my father, but always, always, always called him Daddy..When I did this portrait a couple of days ago, it scared me: the eyes began to move and the mouth made sounds, as if he were trying to tell me something, and I was afraid, so terribly afraid he wanted to say that he didn’t want to be “there,” wherever he is…I was so scared in fact that I left the painting room and said I wouldn’t listen to him. But then my cat, Eemie, who died not too long after he did, also came around. Literally, or as literal as a dead cat can be. Visual and audible! I dunno how that can be, because she was NOT a ghost, but a real cat, really Eemie..which only adds to my consternation. Finally I decided to take a teensy bit of Zyprexa to stave off any potential disaster. This is a bad time of year for me, 5-6 months along after “the last time” and after last summer I know I have nowhere I can trust to turn to, no place that is safe for me (Natchaug Hospital is too dangerous, and they wouldn’t even take me back if I needed it, if I even agreed to go should I need to). I frankly dunno that such a tiny dose of Zyprexa makes any difference, but I had to do something…

Oh, I have a lot to say about Natchaug still, but that would take another post, and a lot of thinking. I just might post it as another open letter to Natchaug’s CMO…Because she is the one to whom I wish to speak, and who really needs to hear what I have to say. But we will see. In the meantime, I want finally to post the poem that I wrote for my father after he died. A lot of people have asked me for it. I read it at the memorial service at the Unitarian Church in Hamden, CT. Alas, I see that it won’t paste in single spaced lines nor will it preserve the proper large blank spacing where it belongs, so you should know that it ought to look a bit different on the page than it does. The only other words of explanation you might want are these: when Martha, my younger sister, read her own eulogy, her major metaphor was water and the ocean and waves, because our father, was so very fond of swimming, especially the breast stroke, or a weird kind of what seemed to me a modified-dogpaddle-cum-crawl, his head more out of the water than in. We were shocked to discover that water and swimming were the governing metaphors in my poem as well.

(You might not need this information, but in case you do, Tir Na N’Og is a mythical Irish “Land of Youth.” Island of the Seven Moons is meant to stand for much the same thing…)

This is for you, Dad.

BUOYANT

The dead cross the river, swimming.

Past drowning now,

some crawl,

some leisurely sidestroke,

some float on their backs,

toes pointing toward the sky.

Who knows what lies ahead:

Tír na nÓg, Valhalla,

Island of the Seven Moons?

No one can say for sure

if there’s any shore, far or near.

Some have cracked their teeth

on bitterness, believing

that to die is to lose all.

Others say there is only light

shining on the best of what used to be.

We dream, we dream and wake,

we wake and hope our dreams

mean something,

that the dead know more

than just the river

and that they must swim.

Daddy, keep your head up,

kick your feet, push the water

away.

Art, Reflection, Uncategorized

MORE than just my Review of CREATIVE MARK Squirrel LE Brushes and Set

January 6, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 3 Comments

Originally submitted at Jerry’s Artarama Art Supplies

A limited edition series of CREATIVE MARK fine blue squirrel hair brushes! For centuries, natural blue squirrel hair has been one of the most cherished hairs for making high quality artists’ paint brushes. This traditional hair is extremely soft and highly absorbent, and offers several advantages over modern…

Squirrel LE Brushes and Set

Horrible, worthless brushes….

By PamWagg Artist from Hartford, CT on 1/6/2013

Pros: Fails To Glide, Rough, Stiff, Fails To Hold A Point

Cons: Poor Quality

Best Uses: Maybe Not Even For Glue, Maybe For Glue

Describe Yourself: Artist

Primary use: Personal

Was this a gift?: No

As an artist I need good brushes for all my work, and I invest in them, so when I saw these, I thought it would be a good thing to try them out. Unfortunately they were definitely nothing like the packaging asserts. Not at all. All I can tell you is that you have to say NOT to every single promise, including believing that these are even made of natural blue squirrel hair. NOT “soft and absorbent, hold lots of color.” NOT “handmade” NOT “round shape with fine point”. The tips are waxed into a pointed shape and you have to literally break off the coating to use them at all, but then you have a brush without any shape whatsoever, never mind a fine point. The brushes are quite literally worse than the cheapest department store brand. DO NOT BUY THEM. You will be wasting your time and anything else you expend on them. Jerry’s sells VERY good brushes, but these are not they.

I rest my case…

Tags: Unusable, After one use, Picture of Product

proof that these are Creative Mark brushes

Tags: Picture of Product

I wrote this review at Jerry’s site, but I wanted to add since I did write it, that the packaging pretends that these brushes are, and I quote, “entirely handmade” — the brush head is “hand-shaped and tied” and yadda yadda yadda.. But how can this be? Do they really expect us to believe that the metal ferrules were individually metal-worked? And the wooden lacquered handles, that is, painted with shiny paint, were individually painted and for that matter carved by hand? NOT! NOT! NOT! I do not for one second believe any of it and it bugs me that they think that they can get away with it. These brushes were NOT entirely hand-made, that is just plain masculine cow flops! I wouldn’t even give a hoot about the lies, if the brushes were decent but the idea that they could call this set worth nearly $70 or so, for 6 brushes, and then pretend to drastically mark it down for a once in a lifetime CHristmas sale just burns me. They are and always were crap. And they knew it. They know it now. I don’t get it. Why are people so dishonest. Wouldn’t they rather put out a decent product for a decent price and have some pride in what they make? People would buy it, then, and not complain.

But no, they would rather CHEAT people, once, but a lot of people. Once. Than have a limited number of repeat customers who were loyal to a good and trustworthy manufacturer. Oh, I will get off my soapbox but this sort of thing just disgusts me.

Health, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Sexuality

I am Asexual, I am not an Amoeba

January 2, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 4 Comments

Let me state this plainly so there is no misunderstanding: I am tired of people thinking there is something wrong with me just because I do not have a husband or boyfriend/lover or even a girlfriend/lover or a love-interest of any kind. I am not interested in sex and have never been interested in sex for whatever reason. This does not distress me and it never would have in the past, had others not insisted that it ought to. I have finally come to the conclusion that being asexual — definition: having no interest in a sexual relationship with another person — is okay.

I am not unhappy. I get a lot done and I am likely more satisfied by my life as an asexual than someone who is sexual and without a partner. I am never lonely. And I have tons of friends. (At least 16 friends — all of whom I adore — came to my 60th birthday party!)

It has taken me, via a tortuous up and down path, a long time to come to this position. And there may well be those who shake this foundation yet, as other people’s opinions, alas, still manage to have a strong effect on me. I have never told openly the story I am now going to relate, but I think it is time. It should be an eye-opener and a warning to those who believe they have the right, even the duty to “help” a young person discover “her true identity…”

As some of you know, a very long time ago, I was a student in a medical school in Connecticut. The two years I attended med school were extraordinarily difficult ones for me and I admit now that even as I matriculated, I “knew” at an almost conscious level that I would never get through. I didn’t honestly want to be a physician. Not really. Oh, yeah, I thought I could be a good psychiatrist. I knew that I understood people and mental illness enough to empathize and help others. But the notion that I could successfully get through four years of med school and four years of residency in order to achieve that goal was something I also knew would be impossible, even as I nominally attempted to undertake it. I had no choice. It was what you did in my family. And there was no question in my mind that I could work at a “regular 8-hour a day job.” I simply didn’t have the stamina either interpersonally or physically. I didn’t know why, I just didn’t. (I also didn’t understand that I had narcolepsy, so I construed my constant drowsiness as “boredom” for everything.)

So there I was in med school, without the ability to make friends or any interest in relationships, especially having just broken up with Bruce, the one boyfriend I had had and with whom I had sex (because he pushed it). I hated it…which was why I broke it off. I know I was noticed. I felt noticed. Possibly because I made little effort to be friendly, possibly because my narcolepsy made me noticeable. I don’t know. It is not that I was or am a striking person at 5′ 3″ and 105 lbs…hardly! Perhaps it was my mere aloneness that struck people. I dunno.

Things were hard to start with, but then the voices started up telling me to hurt myself and I acted on their commands, frequently. I had horrific nightmares nightly. And I could not stay awake in class or to study no matter what I did. People had all sorts of advice and jokes for me but no understanding. They gave me No-Doz and Vivarin for my birthday, which precipitated a caffeine-toxic all-night-up of horror. They took photos of “Rip van Winkle” sleeping on the med school lobby couch and published it in our newsletter. No one knew what was really going on, at home, at night, in my bedroom when the voices took over.

I had a run-in with the student health doctor, Dr E, to whom I had gone about possible Reynaux (sp?) Syndrome. When she saw certain scars on my body she became concerned and spoke with the psychiatrist I was seeing at the time. Dr S, who was a cold man who seemed to dislike me from the start, was angry at our next appointment for “parading” my wounds and warned me against ever doing so again.

I went back to Dr E and told her what Dr S had said. She seemed perturbed and gave me the name of a therapist that she said she often referred “troubled students” to. I might consider seeing Tamara instead of Dr S. The other students liked her a lot, Dr E said. What were their problems? I asked. Dr E shook her head and responded, Not so very different from yours.

I sit nervously in the waiting room, hoping that Tamara will be so late she won’t have time to see me today after all. I feel sick to my stomach and wonder why I’ve come. Five minutes late, ten minutes late. I am just about to leave when a very pregnant woman opens the door to the office and welcomes me in. I do not look at her face but whisk myself inside, trying not to guess how many more weeks she has.

Before she asks me anything, Tamara says, “Now, I see girls who like girls and boys who like boys. You’re okay with that?”

What is she talking about? I don’t understand. Girls who like girls? I like girls, I like boys. Why shouldn’t I be okay with it? So I say, yes. And assume that even so, she sees people whose issues are very different…

I didn’t ask her. I simply assumed that she had other interests. And went on from there. But it was critical, because I did not get that she was conducting therapy as if I had agreed that I was a lesbian, and yet I had made no such admission. I did not even understand what she was getting at. Why was she so coy? Why didn’t she just come out and ask me whether or not I was gay and then tell me that she only treated lesbians and gays with issues around their sexuality?

As it turned out, she had no idea that I was not in fact assenting to her coy proposition that I “liked girls.” On the contrary, if she had asked me point blank, I would likely have said, “Me? No way. I am not even interested in boys. I couldn’t care less about sex. I like, but don’t love, boys and girls…so to speak.” But the operant word, clearly, was not “like” at all, but love, as in “making love.”

Actually, in point of fact, I would not have been able to respond at all, if I remember my former self accurately. I was nearly mute much of the time, esp in therapy, and when I did speak it was often very cryptically and with difficulty making myself clear. This may account for the misunderstanding that so horrified me in what follows.

It was a crazy-making psychotherapy for about 6 months. I had no idea what notion she was operating under, because I didn’t know what kind of therapy she “did.” Likewise, if she knew the least thing about me, it was completely mis-colored by her mis-understanding of me as a lesbian. So when one afternoon she “told” me that she empathized with me, because I had had a sexual relationship with my previous psychiatrist…I hit the roof.

“WHAT? What the F— are you talking about?!” I nearly leapt out of my chair.

“It’s okay Pam, I understand,” she soothed me.

“It is NOT okay! I never said anything of the sort! This is YOUR filthy mind! I’m out of here. Go to hell!” And with that I got up and walked out. I realized then that she was nuts. Somehow she had gotten the entirely wrong idea, but I didn’t understand how. It made no sense to me. Where on earth had she fashioned that notion? I certainly had never said any such thing…

Then her statement “I treat girls who like girls…” came back to me. And I understood more. Dr E surely knew Tamara’ orientation, her clinical expertise, so Dr E must have believed that I needed to talk about conflicts about my “homosexuality,” about coming to terms with being a lesbian, unbeknownst to me. So she had set it up that I see Tamara, believing that she knew me better than I knew myself. But what right had she to do that? And how would she know whether or not I was a lesbian? Just because I was a conspicuous loner? How dare she? She knew nothing about me! What she had done was a violation of me as bad as any man who wanted to have sex just to prove he was Mr Right!

I spent a lot of time after that utterly paranoid that I might be gay, feeling that I must be gay, certain that I was gay…I even came to the point that I accepted it eagerly. But it was never true. It was just another identity forced on me by others who would not let me be. Who would not accept that I simply have never had interest in sex or sexuality beyond a pervasive non-sexuality. My libido, my psychic energy, is invested in other things, in art, in science and in life, but not in erotic interests. And you know what? Being non-sexual or asexual doesn’t make me an amoeba or less than human.

At least 1% of humanity is asexual, has always been asexual, permanently. That’s a LOT of people. We may not be the norm, but there are enough of us out there to rate your acknowledgement and the respect you would pay to any other human being. That’s all we ask, that’s all I ask. And for you not to try to change me just because you do not like it or understand my way of being. Thank you.

(For anyone who was reading the other post when it disappeared, sorry! There was a problem!!!!)

Art, Christmas, Holidays

Peace on Earth

Image December 24, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 5 Comments

Animals, Art

Animal Art

December 24, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner Leave a comment

Health, Mental Illness, Violence

Guns R Us…Why should Sandy Hook Surprise Us?

December 15, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 3 Comments

We are what we do. As a society we are what we teach our children to do. And we are no better than what we allow to happen by our inaction, if we don’t act to stop it. Our gun laws permit, nay, they encourage gun use by everyone, they enthusiastically promote gun ownership and usage, and they turn a blind eye to gun ownership and usage by those who should never lay their hands on a toy gun, much less a loaded one.

Guns kill. They are not decorative or ornamental items. They are not collectors items. So let’s not fool ourselves. It may take a human agent to pull the trigger, but it is the bullet from a gun that kills. And get this straight: when a gun kills 20 little kids, it matters not whether the slugs come from a sig sauer, a glock, a .22. or a Saturday night special, what kills is a gun that does the only job it was designed to do.

When it comes right down to it, it is far too easy to kill someone when you have a gun, any gun: if you push or punch someone because you are angry, it is likely that he or she will be bruised, but they will live. It is only when there is a gun attached to your fingers that lethality comes attached as well. GUNS KILL PEOPLE. People using GUNS KILL PEOPLE, but people without guns do not so frequently kill people.

Let’s face it, Adam Lanza would have found it extraordinarily difficult to have murdered 20 children and 8 adults in less than an hour without his two handguns. The guns literally empowered him to do what he did. Without his guns, he would likely not even have attempted such a deed. Guns made him a god to grant and take away life, and in a moment of passion, he decreed that 28 people would lose theirs. Now, I don’t even believe doctors should be playing god, so I am horrified that all it takes is a gun, and Everyman has the power to do what only god should be in charge of.

Check out the website created after the Newtown, Connecticut, kindergarten shooting this afternoon, http://wearebetterthanthis.org, sponsored by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. God bless them, I fully support the Brady Campaign. However, I am not sure we — whoever we are — are truly better than any “this”…Who are we anyway, and what proves that we are actually better than we witness happening around us?

The stats are ominous and more than distressing. And they speak volumes about whether perhaps it’s just a big fantasy, our being any better than the murderers among us.

For one thing, you should know that while there are 34, 589 hardware stores in the United States, there are more than 129,817 licensed firearms dealers as of Aug 2012 . Of those, 51,438 are retail gun stores, 7,356 are pawn shops and 61,562 are collectors. The rest are manufacturers and importers of firearms and destructive devices.

There are also 80,000 ice cream parlors. Ice cream does 18 billion in sales a year, which isn’t bad considering an average ice cream cone costs only between $2 and $4. An average Glock 17, “America’s favorite gun,” costs around $500.00 You do the math and then tell me how easy it will be to convince gun dealers to change their ways…

But right now, why should they bother? Guns are great business! In 2010 the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) ran 16,454,951 background checks for firearms purchases. Only a small number of these purchases (78,211 or 0.48 percent) were denied. During Obama’s first term, and well before it ended, more than 50 million background checks had been run by the NCIS. This was a bonanza for the gun industry compared to the same 3.5 year period under George W Bush, when “only” 28 million such checks — background checks are an index of the demand market — were run. So clearly, if guns in the hands of the wrong people kill, chances are that more guns had to be getting in the hands of more wrong people than ever during the last four years…many many more.

Note that it doesn’t matter how many guns are purchased at one time, there is only one background check per purchase. After that, what you do with the guns and how many you have purchased at one time, is your business and yours alone… Oh and lest you think the so-called “mentally ill” would be screened out by the NCIS background check, think again. Being “adjudicated mentally ill” and barred from buying a gun is not at all the same thing as simply seeing a shrink or even being hospitalized in a general hospital, with or without your consent for 15 days.

I have been kept in a hospital against my will for even longer, but I have not been formally adjudicated mentally incompetent, or if I ever was, now that I am OUT of the hospital, I am no longer considered non compos mentis, and I could buy myself any gun I wanted to.

Frankly, I think that is only right. Why should some angry redneck be able to buy himself a Glock 17 semi-automatic handgun and I, peaceable and very, very unlikely even to pick it up, let alone use it, could not buy a sweet little .22? Furthermore, I would be far more likely to use it ON MYSELF not on others…

This last is a notable case in point, because unbelievably, suicide far exceeded homicide as the cause of gun fatalities at least in 2005. In 2005, 5.75/100,000 people committed suicide with a firearm, whereas “only” 3.43/100,000 people caused firearms homicides in that same year. Since in 2012, the suicide rate has hugely increased, probably due to PTSD in returning veterans, this ratio likely has only increased.

Approximately 34 persons are felled by guns each and every day in the US. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, between 2006 and 2010, 47,856 people were slain by gunfire in the U.S., more than twice as many as were killed by any and all other means.

Whether or not the suicidal mentally ill should have access to guns – and just how to prevent it, just how to define who is mentally ill would be a huge problem — I see a bigger problem with an angry man of any stripe being able to purchase a handgun. Anger is a big spur to impulsive behavior and impulsivity and guns decidedly do not mix.

So I ask you: How can we be better than Friday afternoon’s Glockencatastrophe if we buy or permit/encourage the purchase of so many more handguns than ever? We are a gun culture, we worship guns, we hav a national love affair with guns. What do we expect?

You know, one of the first rules of writing fiction is, if you “plant” a gun in the early scenes in a story, it must go off by the end…Similarly, if we have and are a gun culture, who are we not to expect to be a culture of shootings? We have the guns, how can we expect people, both good and bad, not to use them?

During the Newtown shooting, from what I gather, the shooter killed himself after he shot all the 28 other victims…All the high tech and paramilitary heavy weaponry with which the police have equipped themselves did zilch in the end to prevent mass murder. No, 20 small children and 8 adults were quickly and savagely murdered, a horrific act accomplished largely so it appears with two handguns, a plastic and metal glock and a sig sauer. The shooter supposedly had access to a Bushmaster combat rifle it is not clear that he used it for the killings.

Whatever is the case, things will become clearer in the coming days as the police reveal more information.

Perhaps I should be softer and sadder right now, perhaps I should not bring up things like slugs and guns and such at this moment. Forgive me for not wailing and beating my breast or crying but many more are doing that tonight elsewhere, so I am just going to save my breath for rage on behalf of those poor murdered children and the eight others…Any more tears added to that ocean would just be wasted salt and water.

Animals, Art, nature

SAILBOAT PAINTINGS AND A CAT PAINTING

December 8, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 2 Comments

I am posting these four eminently “sane” paintings for a friend who wanted to see them all together here. The first and the third are still available if anyone is interested…Contact me through the About page. Availability of the others is pending.

Three Catboats in cove, in mist. ©Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reservedThis one was inspired from a photo but is not a copy, done in colored pencils and oil pastels. — Three Catboats in cove, in mist. ©Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reserved
This one was inspired from a photo but is not a copy, done in colored pencils and oil pastels.

Health, low-calorie, low-fat, Nutrition, Recipe

UNBELIEVABLY DELICIOUS NO FAT, LOW CALORIE CHEESECAKE!!

December 7, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 1 Comment

Okay, so this is a reprise of something I posted before without fanfare, but I think in these cold winter months we all need CHEESECAKE, so why am I hiding this lightness under a bushel? (I know I know it is ridiculously simple too, but do not be fooled. Try it! It will amaze you. Make you knock your head and think: WHY didn’t I think of this before????) 8D

I post this especially for anyone who takes antipsychotic drugs and has a resulting weight problem, but obviously it is meant for everyone else who needs low cal cheesecake too. 8) Enjoy!

All you need to do is MIX together:

1 container of plain, no fat, Greek yogurt. Yes, you can use regular yogurt but I have found the Greek kind makes this cheesecake extra thick and delicious. Usually these are around 100 calories (also extraordinarily high in protein, if you care).

1/4^th of a package of Jello instant low calorie, no fat, cheesecake pudding mix.

Top with your choice of fruit- strawberries or blueberries, or even a few nuts or three or four semi sweet chocolate morsels (if you can actually eat that few…) et VOILÁ!

Try it, it is really an unbelievable dessert, especially if you have not had one in a long time and really want to taste creamy richness of cheesecake without guilt.

Greek yogurt: 100 cal.

Jello pudding mix 25 cal.

GRAND TOTAL for a whole 8 ounce dessert => 125 calories!!!!!!

Now, that is all I use, but if you really want a crust, Lord love you if you NEED a crust, you can do this: break up a couple of graham crackers and mix them with a little of the yogurt to moisten them and press this mixture into the sides of a custard cup and chill it a while until firm. Spoon in rest of cheesecake and chill again for a couple of hours.

Abuse, Health, Mental Illness, Psychiatry

Where Have All the Multiples Gone?

December 3, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 5 Comments

One of the terrible consequences of the APA’s DSM is the Multiple Personality Mayhem that resulted from that fad diagnosis of the late 80s and 90s. I was hospitalized many times in those years, and I was appalled even then at how this once extraordinarily rare diagnosis was suddenly “popping out of the woodworks.” Somehow, multiples, with their putative history of extreme childhood sexual torture, were everywhere. At any time on a psychiatric unit of 18-20 beds, you might see 4 people supposedly suffering from MPD. It was absurd, but try and point that out to the professionals! No, they were much too busy creating very sick individuals out of the whole cloth of their own — the psychiatrists’– minds!

Even at the time I felt very frightened by what was happening, as I understood how difficult it was going to be, when it was all over, for such patients to come to grips with the fact that their disorders were invented for them by the doctors who wanted to have their time in the limelight. Now that the fad is over, where have all the multiples gone? Have all of them been converted to DID — that is, are they still being lied to? or has anyone decided to be honest with them and admit that the Dx was bogus all along, that they never did have MPD or any other such disorder. That their so called multiple personalities were suggested to them by the therapists and invented for them ditto.

It was a horrendous situation, and one that I do not believe anyone has dealt with completely honestly or fully to this day…Of course not. When did you ever meet a doctor, much less a psychiatrist willing to admit he or she made a terrible mistake, or say, I am sorry, I will make amends. Hah. That’ll be the day.

Art, Health, Mental Illness, Recovery

Doing Art to Save My Sanity

November 27, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 4 Comments

They Love You So Much, You Hate Yourself... — THey Love You So Much, You Hate Yourself… © Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reserved
This one you have to look a little closely at to see what precisely is going on…It isn’t obvious at first glance…

Picture of Health? — Unnatural Still Life or Natura Morte, as the Italians call it. Not your typical fruit bowl, I leave it up for interpretation, but will let you know that the two aqua items are from left to right a packet of Bugler cigarette papers and a bugle cigarette roller. © Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reserved

Green Hands — A left handed doodle © Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reserved

BioHands 1 ©Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reserved

A left handed doodle © Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reserved

BioHands 1 ©Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reserved

BIOHands — BioHands 2 ©Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reserved

Three Catboats, in cove, in mist — Three Catboats in cove, in mist. ©Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reserved
This one was inspired from a photo but is not a copy, done in colored pencils and oil pastels.

As I have been having a hard time dealing with things, I do art and do art and do art…It is as good a way to cope as any other I suppose. Anyhow, I hope to get back to writing here soon. In the meantime, I am investigating more about temporal lobe epilepsy and schizophrenia/bipolar illness. It seems to me very significant, and at the same time strange that so many people who bear the diagnosis of schizophrenia and/or bipolar are also supposedly burdened with yet another condition that is so tricky to pinpoint, so I may also be posting more about that in the future as well.

The more I read the less I am convinced that schizophrenia, as an entity, exists, one, and two, that if there is any such thing as “schizophrenia” no one has yet figured out what it is. Which is the same thing as saying it is an imaginary/artificial illness. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that mental suffering and psychosis do not exist, only that no one has proven, not to my satisfaction, that there is any such illness constellation that can go by the name of schizophrenia and be recognized as such by a preponderance of physicians world-wide… That offers a lot of leeway by the way. I don’t ask for a lab test or even a set of hard signs. Only a reasonable way for psychiatrists around the world to agree on symptoms that constitutes a recognizable disease that is the same thing no matter where you go, just as measles is measles and the flu is the flu…

But there won’t be any agreement, as we know. Because schizophrenia is a cultural construct. It is imaginary and largely meaningless. Except within the society that uses it as a concept in order to disapprove of and stigmatize certain ways of being, speaking or thinking. In that sense schizophrenia is more than just a construct or concept it is a social tool. It is a weapon used to keep people in line. In western society, if one doesn’t keep to the obligatory path, some semi-acceptable social role, the result is the withdrawal of social approvals and the substitution of punishment — think drugs, hospitals, seclusion, restraints — in their place. And yet, in other cultures, the very same “out of bounds” thinking or behavior, rather than being labelled schizophrenic or “crazy” is regarded as the mystic’s path and spiritual, highly regarded rather than anathematized.

This is nothing new. It has been observed before. So why do we keep going back to beating the same old same old drum: “We need better drugs to treat mental illness.” “We need better diagnostic methods to pinpoint mental illness. ” “We need better interventions to help the “mentally ill” who cannot or will not help themselves.”…YOWCH! Yada yada yada. Maybe we continue to bark up the same wrong, wrong, wrong tree. Maybe there is NO SUCH THING AS MENTAL ILLNESS, perhaps all along there has always only been physical illness. Perhaps much suffering, emotional and mental though it may be, is not illness, just part of the human condition, and while we want to ameliorate it, we call it illness at our peril.

More to come.

African American, Art, Health, Prisons, Psychiatry, Uncategorized

Monet or Moi?

November 13, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner Leave a comment

Cove with Sailboats - oil pastels ©Pamela Spiro Wagner All Rights Reserved — Monet or me? Well, okay, I am no Monet and this time I didn’t copy him… I painted this, with oil pastels, my second imagined seascape. mostly from memory. © Pamela Spiro Wagner All Rights Reserved

Better version of the above photo of my art piece is below this post (I managed to capture the entire picture finally and didn’t cut off most of the sky…)

I have just given a speech that I want either to record for putting up here, once I upgrade to Pro, or if it gets published as an Op-ed somewhere I will point you to it. But for now, let it only be a hint of things to come…

Otherwise, exhausted, I don’t have a great deal to say today except to point people to an article that I found in Science Daily, an article that I found both obvious in the extreme, and yet which I believe most people desperately need to read. If it isn’t time now to stop incarcerating people of color, for NO reason other than the color of their skin, then I dunno what time will be right for it.

Systematic Incarceration of African American Males Is a Wrong, Costly Path

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2012) — Mental health experts from Meharry Medical College School of Medicine have released the first comprehensive report on the correlation between the incarceration of African American males and substance abuse and other health problems in the United States. Published in Frontiers in Psychology on the 12th of November, the report looks at decades of data concerning the African American population rates of incarceration and subsequent health issues. The authors conclude that the moral and economic costs of current racial disparities in the judicial system are fundamentally avoidable, especially if more resources are spent on education and treatment.

“Instead of getting health care and education from civil society, African American males are being funneled into the prison system. Much of this costly practice could be avoided in the long-term by transferring funds away from prisons and into education,” says Dr. William D Richie, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Meharry Medical College, lead author of the paper.

Money would be better spent on treatment than on incarceration

The study highlights the fact that with regard to African American males in the prison system, individual States are paying more to lock up non-violent offenders than they are for education, since 60% of incarcerations are due to non-violent, illicit drug-related crimes. The authors also point to a previous study from 2,000 showing that the total cost of substance abuse–be it incarceration, crime or treatment–is over $500 billion per year for the US.

These and other statistics have led the authors–scientific experts often called upon to testify in court–to conclude in the paper that: “Spending money on prevention and intervention of substance abuse treatment programs will yield better results than spending on correctional facilities.”

Need more teachers of color

Even though crime rates have dropped across the country over the past two decades, incarceration rates have continued to skyrocket–with black people accounting for a largely disproportionate 38% of inmates. More alarmingly, incarceration rates for African American males jumped 500% between 1986 and 2004. And while substance abuse increases the chances of individuals’ ending up in prison, those without any previous history of substance abuse have a higher risk of substance abuse once they leave the prison system, and could more easily fall back into the judicial system instead of getting a solid job or education.

According to Richie, much of this disparity is due to a fundamental problem of perception on both sides. For example, negative reinforcement of disruptive behavior is prevalent already in preschool–young children of color are often treated more harshly for behavior similar to their white peers.

“One step in the right direction, would be to have more black teachers during the early stages of development” says Dr. Richie. “From a behavioral scientific perspective, having teachers that look like the students and the parents of students from an early age could go a long way in changing perceptions of authority for black youth.”

Getting more African American teachers means increasing the number of African Americans in the higher education system and getting them out of the incarceration system. In the end, the authors conclude, effective treatment of substance use disorders and alternatives to prison would cost the United States much less and improve the lives of African American males, their families, and the entire country.

————————————————————–

The Original Science Daily article can be accessed here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121112090734.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmind_brain+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Mind+%26+Brain+News%29

And PDF of the original paper (fairly short) can be found at this site:

http://www.frontiersin.org/Forensic_Psychiatry/10.3389/fpsyt.2012.00098/abstract

Health, Poetry

SISTERS OF NO MERCY

November 7, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 4 Comments

POEM IN WHICH I SPEAK FRANKLY, FORGIVE ME

GOMER: ER-speak for a troublesome, unwanted person in the emergency department, acronym for Get Out of My Emergency Room

So many times gurneyed in by ambulance and police escort
“dangerous to self or others,” and too psychotic
to cooperate or scribble consent, you suspect by now
you are just a GOMER to the snickering scrubs in the ER
who whisk you in back with the other disruptives
lying in beds, waiting for “beds.”

One time you dip paranoid into the inkwell of your purse
extracting a paring knife more amulet than effective protection,
they strip-search you, then, unblinking, eyeball you all night
through a bulletproof plexiglass window.
In the morning, 15-day-papered so you can’t leave,
they send you ominously upstairs.

Later, at home, the voices decree your left leg
should go up in flames to atone for the evil within,
and you listen, and you do it, you do it:
the searing flare of cobalt actually crackles.
This time you tell no one, the char too deep for pain,
until fear of worse trumps your fear of being taken away.

This is not the story of your life.
It’s not the story of your life–
but every time a hulking goon squad clamps restraints
around your flailing wrists and ankles, threatening
to prosecute you for biting those hands that shackle you,
you wonder if there will be any other…

© Pamela Spiro Wagner. All rights reserved (Please note that I request that you do not reblog, reprint this poem or save this poem for anything but personal use. The rest of this blog post may be used if you credit Wagblog properly.)

________________________________________________________

A new reader, Rachel, has had training as a nurse, and is not reluctant to share her insights from the other side of the gurney, so to speak. Her comments have been enormously illuminating to me and contain so much helpful information that I have asked her if I might post them on Wagblog itself so others might have the opportunity to read them “first hand.” I have collected all of the ones here at Wagblog (there are others on my http://www.aboutschizophreni.blogspot.com site) and will try to provide some context for each one so they make sense, if they do not by themselves.

This first comment was in response to my post, AM I CRAZY…Nov 4, 2012 — when I doubted the veracity, of fact if not experientially, of what happened to me at the ED last summer.

Here is what Rachel wrote:

“OH….. Pam. I completely relate to this post…

Is anything more traumatizing than not being able to trust your own perceptions? I don’t think so.

I have so much swirling around in my head that I could say about all this, it’s hard for me to sort it all out, but I will try.

15 years ago I went through nursing school. One of the things that was greatly impressed upon us in our training was the fact that medical charts are Legal Documents – therefore, you must be ultra-careful about what you write in the charts! Also, there is so much charting and other paperwork required, to meet the legal demands of insurance, etc., that it is truly impossible to do the charts “right,” and still find time to do the actual job of patient care. So… just because important happenings are not recorded in your medical chart, that should by no means be taken as proof that it did not in fact happen, in some fashion.

As for that security guard…. sigh… I’ve led a strange life… about 20 years ago, for part of one year, I worked as a security guard in a bank. The security guard who trained me was one very scary dude. All he did was talk about his wonderful collection of guns, and his beloved hobby of shooting those guns, and bragging that he would have made a satisfying career out of being a hit man, if it weren’t for these pesky laws against being paid big money to commit murder! I became so alarmed by this fellow’s homicidal rants and ramblings that I told our boss all about it. The male boss, a retired U.S. Marine, dismissed my concerns out of hand. “People who talk about killing never do it,” he said.

A few months after I left that job, the hit man wannabe shot his fiancée. It was an accident, of course, he having so little experience with guns….

I am so sorry for this latest cruel trauma you have endured, Pam. Just being treated so roughly is enough to put any person at risk of losing touch with reality. As the late Viktor Frankl, MD, PhD, survivor of nearly 3 years in Nazi concentration camps, said in his life-changing book, Man’s Search for Meaning: “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”

I believe that is probably what happened with you this past July. You were thrust against your will into an abnormal, traumatizing, soul-annihilating situation, which undoubtedly unleashed multiple memories of similar traumatic indignities in the past. You were being treated, not with the kindness and compassion that you needed and deserved, but with palpable disdain. Harsh thoughts and hateful emotions are communicated, far more than with words, via body language, facial expressions, the eyes, the tone of voice, the “vibes” – even a so-called dumb animal instinctively knows when it is not safe, when the people in charge are not to be trusted.

A nurse, concentrating on giving injections in the proper way and in the proper amount, is not going to be paying any attention to what exactly a security guard is doing, or saying. Also, if she realizes after the fact that she gave an injection for which the order had already been cancelled, I am sorry to say that too many nurses, AND nurse instructors, are NOT going to admit that in the chart. I know this, for I’ve witnessed it firsthand. It’s sad, it’s illegal, immoral, and potentially deadly dangerous , yet it is true.

As for having a run-in with a security guard who has a homicidal attitude? I’m sorry to say that they are not at all uncommon, either.

Did your terrified, traumatized mind fill in the blanks with words he did not actually say, as a way to make some kind of sense from what he had done to you? Maybe. But the fact remains that your autonomy, your power, your rights as a human being, were taken away from you, and you were thrust into a terrifying, traumatizing, abnormal situation. For you to be put into such an extremely abnormal situation, particularly in light of all the old trauma memories it undoubtedly evoked in your mind, an abnormal reaction on your part in such an abnormal situation is, really, truly, Normal Behavior.

Rachel

My response to her comment:

All I can say to these things, Rachel, is WOW! I may have to rethink my blog post. Maybe some of what I thought was not delusional but did in fact happen. For instance, I wrote so often that I got those 3 shots. Now I am thinking, maybe i did indeed get them, because why would I pass out so immediately from a mere 20mg of Geodon and 1 mg of Ativan. But with 5 mg of Haldol added it would make more sense.

As for the guard (I refuse to call them security guards as they provide NO security and are in my opinion out of control thugs) I think he may indeed have compressed my neck, if only by holding me down in such a way as to restrain me roughly. Whether or not he intended to strangle or kill me, I dunno. And I have no idea whether or not he said those words, only that they do echo precisely what those nurses said or I hallucinated they said over the hospital PA system about my phone call, which they claimed to have recorded and were also replaying over the same PA system…So if those were the same words, perhaps it was only a hallucination. But perhaps only the words, not the rest of it. Thank you SO very much for validating as much as you have. I truly appreciate your contribution to this site and hope you will continue to offer what you know and have experienced. It is so welcome!

Pam

Rachel’s next comment was in response to my two new artworks: first the Killer Nurse collage, and then the Monet “take-off” of Argenteuil boats at evening…:

…Killer Nurse, HAHAHAHA! When I was in nursing school, a group of my fellow students dubbed themselves (oh you are going to love this): “Sisters of No Mercy.”

They were, too! By the way, I was elected class president by my fellow nurse students, an honor I did not seek out. When I realized by the end of the first semester that I am not cut out to be a nurse, I thought I could not let down my much-younger classmates who had honored me so, by dropping out! Thus I kept slogging doggedly away, and made it through to the bitter end, making all A’s or 4.0s, I’ve forgotten now how we were graded. Then I took the final big test that determined one’s eligibility to get a license, shocked myself by scoring in the top 1% in the entire nation, gave the big Class President year-end speech at graduation, got my diploma, obtained my license, and…. I worked 3 or 4 days as a nurse, hoping to get my money’s worth out of my costly education, but I still wasn’t emotionally cut out to do the hard job of a nurse and I knew it, so I abruptly quit, and let my license expire.

If you have to be a “Sister of No Mercy” to make it in that profession, you can count me out!

Rachel

Then her latest comment is again in response to my blog entry titled AM I CRAZY? and my response to her first comment.

You are most welcome, Pam, I’m so glad my words could help.

I just want to add this, though: most of the security guards I worked with so long ago were very good people. There was only a small percentage of guards who had that scary macho-swagger itching-for-trouble attitude. You find people like that in every segment of the population, as I’m sure you know. But it truly did seem to me that a higher-than-average percentage of such types are drawn to work that allows them to wear a uniform and carry a weapon and push people around. These types are more like children playing at cops-and-robbers, than adults doing a serious job.

On a typical day, standing around in a security guard’s uniform watching the world go by is the most boring job on the planet. When finally “something happens,” these “Make My Day” gung-ho types come alive, and in the worst way.

As for the job of nursing… that’s a very different thing. I worked for a couple of years as a nurse’s assistant, before I finally went to nursing school. Nursing is HARD. Really, it’s an almost impossible job. There are never enough nurses, meaning most hospitals and nursing homes are chronically understaffed, and therefore there is never enough time to get everything done that needs doing. The work is absolutely overwhelming at times. You can work your entire shift at a flat-out RUN and STILL not be able to do it all, and do it “right.” You need 6 hands, you need a stomach made of cast iron, you need a backbone made of steel, and you need feet that can take an unbelievable pounding.

A person can go into nursing with a heart of pure gold, caring and compassionate and empathetic to the max, and the day-in-day-out unrelenting MISERY you see all around you will either kill you, or make you harden your heart in self-defense. As a nurse in a busy hospital, a nursing home, and most especially in an emergency room, the world is one big gaping aching wound, a bottomless pit of sorrow and need, and nothing you do is ever nearly enough. You need to be in 10 places at once, doing 10 different things, and almost everyone demands and criticizes, if not the patients, then very often their family does the complaining.

Stay in nursing long enough, and it is almost impossible to hang on to both your sanity, and your heart. This is why I could not do it! I only worked one week in an emergency room, this was as part of my nurse’s training, and that one week of non-stop, often life and death emergencies, almost did me in!

As I read your vivid, beautifully written description of what you endured last July, I could SEE it in my mind. In the eyes of the nurses, you were not a suffering human being with worth and dignity and rights no less important than their own, you were merely an unwelcome interruption, a problem to be dealt with, quickly and firmly and with a minimum of fuss and paperwork. This was not YOUR fault, it was the fault of the system, for want of a better word.

But knowing how HARD nursing is, does not in any way excuse the harsh, hateful, disrespectful attitude you were shown.. yet it does, in my mind at least, explain it. I have seen and experienced it myself, from BOTH sides of the medical charts, this harsh, disdainful attitude.

I have witnessed this, both as a nurse-in-training, and as a patient. When you’ve been called from the bedside of a child whose body was crushed less than an hour ago in an automobile accident, and his mother is dead, his father is hanging by a thread, and if the child survives, he will most likely never walk again… and here is a patient who has nothing visible wrong with her, only she is “inexplicably” freaking out – the disdainful, put-upon attitude from the medical personnel who simply do not “get” the first thing about the very real horror of psychological distress, is very real. It’s not your imagination, and it’s not your fault, either. It’s just that they don’t get it, and they are overworked and exhausted and stressed and overwhelmed with the horrors of life in the trenches.

I hope you know what I am trying to say here? To you, in your time of extreme duress and suffering, the snappy bitchiness and cold-heartedness of the medical personnel, coupled with the terrifying physical roughness of the guard, must have felt so very personal. But YOU were not the real target, in my opinion. The nurse was probably (inexcusably!) bitchy because she was already behind in her duties when you were brought in with your immediate pressing needs, and the guard was probably an overgrown boy playing macho-cop-wannabe, who finally got to see some adrenalin-pumping ACTION.

Someday, if they live long enough, that guard, and the nurses, will become old and infirm, and they will most likely experience, in some fashion, what it is like to be the one who is disempowered, hurting, fearful, and in need of compassionate help, while being treated like they are nothing more than an unwelcome interruption, a pain in the ass, an unimportant, non-person. Someday, I believe, it all comes back around. At least, that’s my hope!

Rachel

Finally, the following comment concerns my post “Open Letter to Dr Deborah Weidner (Sept. 9, 2012)”

The memories this post brings back…. I was shaking inside as I read it. It was hard enough going through this kind of mistreatment as a powerless teenage girl in a state mental institution, I can’t imagine going through this now, at the age of almost-60. I’m so sorry you were put through this. Until I read this just now, I thought your emergency room mistreatment of last July was the worst you had gone through recently. But this…. I don’t know how you came through it. I think if this had been done to me, I would have permanently checked out of reality.

Your feistiness is what’s keeping you alive. The very thing in you that the “wardens” of the mentally ill want to drug and shame and torture out of you, that undying spirit of yours is why you are still here, still breathing, still functioning, and still able to coherently tell your story. You are amazing.

Rachel

Art, Health, Uncategorized

Art: Killer Nurse and Placid Seascape

November 5, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 7 Comments

: Boats at Evening, after Monet, 11 by 14″ © Pamela Spiro Wagner All rights reserved.

I do not have a lot to say tonight after yesterday’s marathon writing session, but I wanted simply to share my latest artwork. The first one, the collage, is going to be part of a talk I give to a group in December…I won’t say to whom or where just yet. All I will say is that this is how most psychiatric nurses deal with patients: “You do what I say, or else…”

The seascape on the other hand was simply a doodle I did one day while looking through an art book. I saw this Monet of boats at Argenteuil and thought I would sort of copy it, though not really. I just didn’t have any boats or water nearby to paint, so I figured I would use his painting as a model, a close one, though I clearly did my own thing with it…(And I am no Monet!).

Health, Mental Health, Mental Illness, Schizophrenia, Trauma, Uncategorized

Am I Crazy? Hallucinations, Delusions or Consensual Reality

November 4, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 6 Comments

What is real? Is anything true and factual? Or are we all just deluded and mad as hatters? This is a serious question.

What I recall and what was written down in my chart about a certain four days in July 2012 are so different it is difficult to figure out whether my experience was fact in any sense of the word or, as “they”claimed, simply paranoid and delusional. Of course there is some truth in paranoia and delusion, since even a paranoid’s beliefs are based in feelings that arise honestly and from a foundation, I firmly believe, in true things sensed but unacknowledged. Feelings always have their own veracity. But whatever the philosophers may say about the fiction of facts, still there is, there must be, something more to the consensual world of what happens than mere perception.

I mean, either that security guard in the Emergency Department last July deliberately attempted to strangle me, or he did not. Either it happened or in some fashion I imagined it. It is that simple, isn’t it? Yes or no, red or green, one or zero. Like a digital configuration, there’s nothing vague about it: either it happened or it didn’t.

There are records. I know what the ones they wrote say, as far as they go. But how to interpret them since so little was written down, and unless my memory is so completely at odds with reality as to have confabulated the entire episode – which by the way, is what they claimed all along – how to explain the discrepancies when so much is not even mentioned. That they whisked my gurney into a seclusion room and assaulted me en masse is my version. In theirs, the room change is noted only in passing, and of the IM medication all that is said is that it was given “NOW”. Nothing else of the incident I recorded in great detail in my journal some days later, and raged about from the first day I was admitted to the day I left. In fact, I’m still outraged, months later.

I wanted to go home, they wanted me to stay. That I was abjectly terrified of being kept there meant to them that I was “paranoid.” I claimed I had no problems and had never been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. That was a problem for they had more power than I did as well as my lengthy psychiatric history on their side to prove I must be crazy to make such a claim. Worse, I was loud, demanding, and in my increasing panic, getting angry. They saw my screaming as a threat. Even though I was blind to what was going on, any onlooker could have seen that I could not win and in the end of course I lost mightily.

But let me go back towards the beginning.

It didn’t help that I had arrived at the ED by ambulance and immediately refused to have my “vitals” taken, asserting that I was “fine!” I then accused the nurse of just wanting to get paid for taking them. In short order I was whisked to the so-called “purple pod” where the psych patients were buried for hours until the on-call psychiatrist deigned to come down to see them.

“Here,” someone said, thrusting a hospital johnnie and a pair of pajama pants at me. “Undress and put these on.”

I looked down and saw that I was already wearing pj pants from another hospital. No one ever knew the real nature of what I wore — they simply passed for scrubs — and they were so comfortable that I kept them on day and night. “I’m already wearing pajama pants. I only need to change my shirt,” I said.

“No, you are wearing very nice blue slacks. Now, put on the pajamas, or do you want a couple of strong men to put them on for you?”

“Actually,” I sniped, “they are hospital pajama pants. I pilfered them from –“ and I named the hospital. But I made a show of undoing the snaps so they would see that I was going to comply. The last thing I wanted was anyone touching me or “helping” me undress.

Soon an APRN, came by and I thought, Wow, they are quick here, maybe it isn’t so bad being taken to a big hospital. Maybe I can get discharged from here in no time. Unfortunately, she was there only to do a 15 second “physical exam” that consisted of looking in my mouth and listening to my back with her stethoscope. Period. Pronouncing me cleared for a psychiatric interview, she rushed off to clear someone else. Then I sat on the gurney in my cubicle and waited. And waited.

I remember being cooperative for what felt like a long time. I tried to sleep, and I listened patiently to what was going on around me. I swore that I would simply hold my breath and bide my time until someone saw me, so that, calm, I could present my case and they would see I was safe and sane enough to be sent back home, not admitted or sent to some hospital against my will. But it was taking so long, it was taking hours for someone to see me, and I knew they were doing it to me on purpose. Did they think I, too, was drunk or on drugs just like the others here? I started to complain that I had waited long enough and needed to see someone. I was NOT drunk, did not need to dry out. Where was the doctor? There was nothing wrong with me, I did not need to be here. I wanted to go home!

Things started happening then. Memory fails me however and even the chart, which I just obtained a couple of days ago leaves out way too much. All it says is that I was uncooperative, then irritable, screaming and combative. Meds were “offered”.

I remember this: When I refused to take soul-deadening Haldol by mouth, they descended on me, wheeled my gurney into a solitary room and jumped on me, intending to inject me by brute force. In the struggle, a guard gripped my neck and compressed the arteries, strangling me. I tried to get the nurse’s attention, burbling through forcibly compressed lips that I could not breathe. But her response, attending only to her needles and not even looking at me, was an impatient, “You’re all right!” In a pulse of panic, I jerked away as she started to shove the first needle into my arm.

“Damn!” she cried as a rush of blood spattered us and the needle danced away from my skin. “Hold still!”

I’d hoped to get some respite from strangulation but instead of letting go of me, the guard reasserted his grip on my neck and pressed down harder. I felt the light go black as blood failed to reach my brain. Darkness descended. Sounds grew confused and dim. Suddenly I knew that I could die, that this was how patients had been “accidentally” killed during notorious restraint episodes in Connecticut. I did the only thing I could: I went limp, hoping the nurse would get the injections over with quickly and that the guard would not kill me before she was through.

One, two, and then, astonishingly a third needle punctured my arm. She wiped my deltoid muscle with an alcohol wipe then removed herself from the gurney. “All done,” she said, removing her gloves with a smack and she nodded, indicating the door.

With a cruel leisure, the guard let go of my neck, but he leaned down as he did so and muttered in my right ear: “That’ll teach you a lesson about bringing a JCAHO case against M— Hospital…” Then he and all the others strode out of the room, leaving me alone in what I had already been warned was a soundproof room where you can “scream all you want, but no one will hear you.”

In other circumstances, I would have screamed, soundproof or not, as the door was left open. But nothing was ordinary anymore. A guard – thuggish bully, no doubt a reject from the police academy — paid to protect people, had just partially strangled me in revenge for – what? What had I done to him? My case against that other hospital should have meant nothing to him. But what was clear to me, trying to get a breath and calm myself, was that I was not only not protected in the this ED, I was in mortal danger. I could not scream or rage in outrage, I could not even complain or demand to see a patient advocate. My life was imperiled. Still panting, trembling, in shock, I lay in the semi-dark of that single room and prayed — not to any god, mind you, but simply for my life, prayed to get out of that ED alive. I promised myself that I would not say or do anything “wrong,” would comply with everything they asked from then on in order to survive the night. But it was a long night ahead of me and I had no idea whether or not the guard would come back and finish the job. I was so terrified my teeth chattered. I felt a hollow coldness inside me of unutterable fear. And there was nothing I could do but lie there and hope he did not return.

__________________________________

I did not name the hospitals in the piece above, though I usually do, and I refrained from doing so because I do not know whether what I am going to write now is indeed true or not. But if it is not, then I do not want certain people being alerted to this blog post and reading it and taunting me with “Yehaw, we got away with it!” Read on, and you will see what I am talking about further on.

So as I said, I am in possession of my chart, the entire thing, 60 pp for a mere four day stay in the hospital about which I speak, including an approximately 10 hour stay in the ED. In it, there is absolutely no evidence that anyone ever took me or what I had to say seriously at any time. Everything I said was dismissed as paranoid and delusional, grandiose, disorganized or confabulating. (BTW Confabulate does not mean lying, it means to unintentionally “fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory.” But whatever they thought I was confabulating I have not the faintest idea. Or memory. Alas, the chart says nothing of what I spoke about.)

What has completely upset the applecart is my own statement, written in my journal and elsewhere: “Why on earth would that guard care whether or not JCAHO was involved in that other hospital?” On that thought rests everything, because of course, he had to have cared mightily to have wanted to strangle me for it. Or did he? Did he care, and in fact did he try to strangle me, and did he even say those words in my ear? I am serious.

You have to understand something: Once, years ago, I heard, or hallucinated, hospital nurses announce over the public address system in nearly the same words how they were going to “teach me a lesson” about — whatever it was I had done…and I knew I had heard it, knew I was hearing it at the time, except for the fact that I was on the phone with my sister at that time. I held out the phone in the air so she could hear it too, but she told me she heard nothing, assured me that I was hallucinating. What I described was not only unlikely but so beyond the realm of the likely that she was certain it could never have happened. “Its just your voices, Pammy,” she said, “you have to trust me, you are hallucinating.”

So remembering this, it gives me pause. For why would that guard care about JCAHO and that other hospital in the first or even the last place? What could it possibly mean to him? Security guards are usually hired from outside agencies so his over-involved concern with another hospital’s accreditation suddenly seems to me absurd. And if he did not care, why would he have tried to strangle me? Oh, maybe he did hold me down too hard, and I felt that, yes. But if I could speak, then I know I could breathe, so I was not actually being strangled either.

Perhaps I was simply frightened? And could it be that in fact he never said anything at all? That I “imagined” those words, hallucinated them, and then continued to believe that I heard him say them and that he wanted to kill me, all the time since then? Could it possibly be that some of what the hospital personnel said was true — NOT all of it, but some part of it. That I was in fact hallucinating and delusional? It doesn’t make their behavior right. It doesn’t justify throwing me into seclusion and injecting me with IM meds when I was not a danger to myself or others. It doesn’t even make admitting me to the hospital the proper thing to do in the first place. But, but, but…if I have heard people say things, visible people say things that they simply have not said, when they have not said anything at all, and I know this has been the case, then it is, I admit, just possible that what happened at the ED this summer might be another instance of the same…It pains me to think this. It frightens me to think that I could have been so mistaken for so long.

But what’s more, I worry that I am wrong to believe I might be wrong! That the guard DID say what I think he said, did intend to strangle me, and that I am giving him what he wanted: I am letting him drive me into believing I was/am crazy!

I do not know what to think. And I may never know for certain what happened. Not about this. However, one fact that I can corroborate in the record I am painfully aware I “knew” for months: I was given 3 IM drugs during that episode. Yet you only have to read my chart to see that I was given only 2: Geodon and Ativan. The third drug, Haldol, was canceled immediately after it was ordered. The records clearly state that only the Geodon and Ativan were ever administered. This is so striking an error of memory that it too makes me think again about trusting what I was certain I heard in that terrifying room where they held me down and injected me.

I don’t know what to do with this…I don’t know how to handle it or deal with it. It doesn’t feel good, or give me any sense of relief. I dunno how I feel. Just shocked, I guess. And perturbed, because I don’t know what else I have experienced that never “really” happened.

Happiness, Health, Life, Memory, Mental Health, nature, Reflection, Uncategorized, Writing

Miracles: Four Life Changing Events

October 26, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 2 Comments

512px-Common_self-heal_(Prunella_vulgaris)_--_flower_head_closeup — ©Jesse Taylor (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Okay, so as a friend suggested, maybe there have been five not just four miracles, with the most recent miracle having occurred, and ongoing, about three weeks ago. But more on that later. First, a definition of miracle, so we are all clear on what I mean here.

CS Lewis, a popular Christian writer of the twentieth century and still known for his Narnia Chronicles, wrote that “a miracle is something that comes totally out of the blue…” Now, he meant something extremely unlikely, like a virgin female giving birth to a child. Now, apparently, this has been observed at least once in modern times. If you don’t believe it, and can understand the technical language, you can read the following abstract as proof. Then you can decide whether or not virgin birth still counts as a miracle:

Fertil Steril. 1992 Feb;57(2):346-9 .

Chimerism as the etiology of a 46,XX/46,XY fertile true hermaphrodite.

Verp MS, Harrison HH, Ober C, Oliveri D, Amarose AP, Lindgren V, Talerman A.

Source: Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Chicago Lying-In Hospital, Illinois.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To determine the conceptional events resulting in a 46,XX/46,XY true hermaphrodite and to report the first pregnancy in a 46,XX/46,XY true hermaphrodite with an ovotestis… (see the rest of the abstract at PubMed)

Another thinker, British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood, suggested in what became known as Littlewood’s Law that statistically individuals should expect one-in-a-million events (“miracles”) to happen to them about once a month. By these calculations, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.

And of course there is the dictionary definition of miracle, which is the one commonly accepted by both religious people who believe in miracles, and those who do not believe in their existence, but who do accept the definition of the word.

mir·a·cle/ˈmirikəl/

–A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is considered to be of divine origin

–A highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment

I myself would add a third, and relevant definition, or qualifier, which is “if it occurs in an individual person’s life, the event produces changes, beyond any that could have been imagined prior to the miracle, in a positive direction wholly unexpected and therefore regarded as miraculous.” To be cured from a terminal or crippling illness is of course a miracle. But so too to my way of thinking would be remission from a future-destroying addiction or mental compulsion. Needless to say, complete reversal of a severe mental illness would count as a miracle. And I can think of others that might be counted as less effulgent but just as miraculous.

Given those broader categories of miracles, then, I will proceed to tell you of mine. I do not know what the Course on Miracles is all about, nor anything of the Miracle classes offered online. If there are similarities, I dunno what it means, except that we came up with our thoughts completely independently. I have spoken of the following things as miracles for many years now without any familiarly with the C.O.M or any other such program.

So, onward to my First miracle. (Alas, I fear I will have to deal with the Second Miracle and the Third, Fourth and Fifth in following posts as this one is already getting long enough and will be longer by the time I am finished.) The first miracle concerned, as some readers may remember, plants, wild plants, field botany, in short, the wonders of the wild green world. But not just that, no, it was the discovery in myself, utterly unanticipated, of a bizarre and wonderful ability to simply know, almost without any idea how I knew it, any plant I came across. In fact, I must have seen them, if briefly, in some plant book or field guide, but it was truly uncanny, my ability to instantly recognize and categorize whole families and genera and then the species within them just by casually looking at any plant, flower or tree I saw, having but glanced at a simple sketch or pencil drawing of a plant the night or even a week before seeing it in the wild.

I once wrote about this miracle in my first blog at http://www.schizophrenia.com. Although the essay has a less than happy ending that has nothing to do with miracles, I will reprint the essay in its entirety here. Suffice it to say that the pivotal moment, the chairotic moment and miracle that surrounds “Prunella,” which I describe early in the piece, changed my life forever.

WILDFLOWERS ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

Thirty years ago, I took the natural history course purely for exercise. I figured, what better way to stay in shape than to get credit for it? At the time, I couldn’t tell a maple from an oak, let alone one old weed from another, and it wouldn’t be easy. But just to keep off the flab would be a benefit in its own right. Since the prospectus promised daily field trips, no mention of love or awe or wonder, the last thing I expected was a miracle.
Showing up for the first day’s trip, I wore old tennis shoes of the thin-canvas Keds variety. I had no idea L.L. Bean’s half-rubber hiking boots were de rigueur for a course of this kind. What god-awful-ugly shoes just to walk in the woods! I thought in horror. Right then, I realized I’d made a huge mistake and it was too late to change my mind — I’d have to stick it out for the whole semester. I knew for sure I was going to be more miserable getting “exercise” than I ever would have with my thighs turning to mush, safe in the college library.

The teacher, Miss G, took off stomping down the path and we tramped on after her. I was last, straggling behind, half-hoping to get lost so at least I could head back to civilization. Before we’d gotten far, she halted, peering intently at something near her feet. She waited for us to catch up and gather round her, then pointed at a weed. “Heal-all. Prunella vulgaris,” she announced sternly and without passion. “Vulgaris means ‘common.’ Learn names of both genus and species. Be forewarned, ‘Heal-all’ by itself will not be an adequate answer on your quizzes.”

She stepped aside so we could take a better look. As instructed, one by one the class dutifully wrote down a description and the two names we’d been given. I was still at the back, waiting my turn without the least enthusiasm, let alone the anticipation of what, in those days, we called a “mind-blowing” experience.
“Come on, now, don’t be shy. Step up and look for yourself,” Miss G scolded me, pushing at my elbow to propel me closer.

Finally the clump of students cleared out and I had a better view. For some reason, I found myself actually kneeling in front of the weed to look at it close up. Then it happened. As if the proverbial light bulb flashed on over my head, I understood what Miss G meant when she’d said: “Weeds are only wildflowers growing where they aren’t wanted.”

Prunella, I know now, is no more than a common mint, found in poorly manicured lawns or waste ground. Yet, with its conical head of iridescent purple-lipped flowers and its square stem – on impulse, I’d reached out to touch it and discovered an amazing fact: the stem wasn’t round! – Heal-all was the single most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The world went still. There was only me and the flower and the realization I’d fallen in love.

Since one of my other courses concerned the history of early Christianity, I knew immediately what had happened. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, I’d been struck by unexpected lightning. I’d been converted. I put away my notebook, knowing I didn’t need to write down a word, knowing I’d never forget “common Prunella” as long as I lived.

There were other miracles in my life after that, but none came close to the thunderbolt that knocked me flat the afternoon I saw, truly saw, that homely little mint for the first time. “Sedges have edges and rushes are round and grasses have nodes where willows abound.” Yes, I learned such mnemonics, which helped me as much as the next person when a plant was hard to identify. But I discovered in myself an amazing feel for botany that was like sunken treasure thousands of feet beneath the ocean. Once I knew it was there, I had merely to plumb the depths, more or less unconsciously, and gold would magically appear.

I went walking in the woods every chance I got and carried Peterson’s guides with me even into town, checking out the most inconspicuous snippets of green that poked through the sidewalk cracks. The first time I came out with a certain plant’s genus and species before Miss G told the class what we were seeing, she looked at me oddly. I began repeating this performance until once she even allowed me to argue her into changing her classification of a tricky species. If I still hung back behind the group as we walked, it was no longer from reluctance. I was simply too entranced, looking at each tree, to keep up the pace.

By December, as the semester was coming to a close, Miss G had begun using me as her unofficial assistant, asking my opinion whenever there was a question as to what was before us. Oh, I confess, I never did get the knack of birds. It was the trees and wildflowers that stole my heart entire.

At the end of the semester, we received course evaluations in lieu of letter grades. I opened mine eagerly, expecting praise. Instead, Miss G was terse and unenthusiastic: “Pamela faithfully attended every field trip, but for most of the course she failed to share her insights and established expertise with the rest of the class.” End quote. “Failed to share her established expertise“? What was she talking about? Did she think I’d already known everything she taught us? How could she not understand what she’d done for me, introducing me to little Prunella, how I’d learned everything I knew after that moment, not before?

It was the worst evaluation I’d ever gotten, the injustice of which struck me to the marrow. I went to her office to explain and found a sign on her door saying she’d been called away on a family emergency and would not be returning until the next semester. But I wasn’t returning for the second semester. I was transferring back to my original school.

I caught my ride home, spending four hours crammed into the back of an old Volkswagen bug with two other students, wordless with indignation that replayed and reverberated through my mind. How could she think such a thing? I couldn’t stop writing a letter of protest in my head as the highway flowed endlessly beneath us.

I did write Miss G, finally, explaining all she’d awoken in me, emphasizing the magic I’d discovered in her class, my new-found joy and amazement. At the end of March I got a reply, but no apology, no hint that she understood she’d misunderstood. Not even appreciation for my gratitude towards her and what her course had done for me. Just a brisk, no-nonsense note, little better than a form letter. I had the impression that she didn’t quite remember who I was, that I was just another faceless student writing to her about a natural history course she’d taught perhaps forty times in her long career as a teacher.

Whether she knew who I was or even recognized what she’d done for me mattered little in the end. What did matter was that when I met homely little Prunella, I discovered the whole world in a common weed.

The next posts, or in the following weeks, I hope to cover the other four miracles. If you are interested in them, and I fail to follow through, feel free to “goose” me with a reminder. My mind is a sieve and I rarely remember anything without a string tied to my thumb! 8D

Death penalty, Health, Health Care Reform, Mental Illness, Schizophrenia

Florida to execute paranoid schizophrenic tonight absent intervention from Supreme Court

October 23, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 2 Comments

Florida to execute paranoid schizophrenic tonight absent intervention from Supreme Court.

Thanks to the excellent blog, Dispatches from the Underclass, we have the post above. It is disgusting but true that in some – too many states! – “we” are still executing the most severely mentally ill…

Acceptance, Forgiveness, Poetry, Writing

Poem about Forgiveness,Translated into Chinese

October 14, 2012 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner Leave a comment

TO FORGIVE IS

To begin 要寬恕的實是太多

and there is so much to forgive: 頭一樁要算

for one, your parents, one and two, 你父母那麼偶然的一或二次

out of whose dim haphazard coupling 於幽暗中的契合

you sprang forth roaring, indignantly alive. 你呱呱來臨,憤然降世

For this, whatever else followed, 為此, 為這帶來的一切

innocent and guilty, forgive them. 無意也好作孽也罷,寬恕他們.

If it is day, forgive the sun 若是白天,寬恕太陽

its white radiance blinding the eye; 原宥它的奪目光芒

forgive also the moon for dragging the tides, 亦要寬恕月亮帶來的潮汐

for her secrets, her half heart of darkness;原宥它的弔詭.它的暗晦

whatever the season, forgive it its various 管他冬夏秋春.寬恕季節的多端侵擊

assaults—floods, gales, storms 水患,疾風,暴風雪

of ice—and forgive its changing; 原宥它的更替變易

for its vanishing act, stealing what you love 它的掠奪行徑

and what you hate, indifferent, 把你所愛所恨無情的奪去

forgive time; and likewise forgive its fickle 寬恕時間

consort, memory, which fades 同樣地原宥它的變易不忠,連記憶也不放過

the photographs of all you can’t remember; 以至你把擁有的拍照忘得一乾二淨

forgive forgetting, which is chaste 寬恕失憶

and kinder than you know; 它實是忠貞和比你所認知的仁厚得多

forgive your age and the age you were 寬怒年齡

when happiness was afire in your blood 原宥當年的你,那時幸福在血液沸騰

and joy sang hymns in the trees; 喜樂在樹叢間高唱聖歌

forgive, too, those trees, which have died; 寬恕那些逝去的樹木

and forgive death for taking them, 原宥奪走它們的死亡

inexorable as God, then forgive God 若感上主不仁,則寬恕上主

His terrible grandeur, His unspeakable原宥祂畏人的堂皇和禁說的名字

Name; forgive, too, the poor devil 亦勿忘寬恕那倒霉的撒旦

for a celestial fall no worse than your own. 他那屬天的失足並不比你的過犯糟糕

When you have forgiven whatever is of earth, 當你把地上天上水裡

of sky, of water, whatever is named, 有名的無名的

whatever remains nameless, 通通寬恕了

forgive, finally, your own sorry self, 最後切記寬恕

clothed in temporary flesh 那包裝在短暫肉體內

the breath and blood of you 血氣正在消亡的

already dying. 悔疚的你

Dying, forgiven, now you begin. 垂死,被寬恕的你,現在要重新開始.

By Pamela Spiro Wagner, “Divided Minds” 胡思亂想

Chinese Recreation/Translation by Kenneth Leung Sep 3rd 2012, Labour Day Scarborough, Ontario

—————————————–

I received the email below very recently, explaining the poem above. The only thing missing is the translation of the title, which segues on purpose directly into the first line, and so it too is essential. I hope that Jackie’s father might one day provide that title line. Nevertheless, I am thrilled that anyone likes the poem enough to translate it. Thank you so very much, Kenneth Leung. And thank you Jackie, for sharing it with me and allowing me to share it here.

“Hi Pamela,

“I recently picked up your book “Divided Minds” and I couldn’t put it down. Thank you for sharing your story with the world. I’m an Occupational Therapist working in community mental health on an ACT team, so I interact regularly with people with schizophrenia. Your story allowed me to see how difficult it is to first accept a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and then the difficulties of adhering to treatment. I especially love your poem on forgiveness and shared it with my dad, who translated it into Chinese. I thought you might be interested in posting it on your blog so Chinese readers can enjoy it.

“Blessings,

“Jackie Leung”

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Chimerism as the etiology of a 46,XX/46,XY fertile true hermaphrodite.

Source: Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Chicago Lying-In Hospital, Illinois.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To determine the conceptional events resulting in a 46,XX/46,XY true hermaphrodite and to report the first pregnancy in a 46,XX/46,XY true hermaphrodite with an ovotestis… (see the rest of the abstract at PubMed)

WILDFLOWERS ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

Florida to execute paranoid schizophrenic tonight absent intervention from Supreme Court

Poem about Forgiveness,Translated into Chinese

"While I breathe, I hope"

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BUOYANT

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Systematic Incarceration of African American Males Is a Wrong, Costly Path

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POEM IN WHICH I SPEAK FRANKLY, FORGIVE ME

GOMER: ER-speak for a troublesome, unwanted person in the emergency department, acronym for Get Out of My Emergency Room

Rachel

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Chimerism as the etiology of a 46,XX/46,XY fertile true hermaphrodite.

Source: Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Chicago Lying-In Hospital, Illinois.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To determine the conceptional events resulting in a 46,XX/46,XY true hermaphrodite and to report the first pregnancy in a 46,XX/46,XY true hermaphrodite with an ovotestis… (see the rest of the abstract at PubMed)

WILDFLOWERS ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

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"While I breathe, I hope"