Tag Archives: Health

I Will Not Be Sick Forever…Schizophrenia is Not A Life Sentence!

September 7, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 2 Comments

In reality, my doctor is a woman, and would never sleep on the job..So i wonder what this picture means unconsciously...The following one is turned upside down so you can read the book's title! — In reality, my doctor is a woman, and would never sleep on the job..So i wonder what this picture means unconsciously…The following one is turned upside down so you can read the book’s title!

Title Revealed: Natural Treatment of schizophrenia is what I want and need...But will anyone listen to me? — Title Revealed: Natural Treatment of schizophrenia is what I want and need…But will anyone listen to me?

Dear Everyone,

I spent more than three weeks at Yale’s psychiatric hospital in August being tortured, if not by seclusion and mechanical restraints (my PAD restricted the use of those and at least at Yale they listened) then being held down by armed security guards (only their guns removed) and injected innumerable times with a multi-injection cocktail of drugs: Haldol 10mg, Ativan 2mg, and Benadryl 50mg, despite my objections that I have a paradoxical reaction to the last one. They said I could not refuse because I would have side effects to the Haldol without it. Understand this please: They deliberately injected me with a large enough dose of Haldol (without any basis to know I needed any more than the usual 5mg or even 2mg) as to knowingly cause side effects, side effects they knew in advance would be so distressing as to not allow me to refuse medication for them before they even happened!

What sort of dastardly drug is this that it hurts as much as it “helps”? Ah, yes, let me remind you, lest you have forgotten, that Haldol is the medication political dissidents in the 1970s were given in the Soviet Union to subdue them after they were diagnosed conveniently with “sluggish schizophrenia,” an illness “everyone” in the West “knew” didn’t exist except in the Soviet political playbook, designed solely for the dissidents. The American Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike objected then vehemently to Soviet treatment measures, calling Haldol injections the dissidents were given nothing less than “torture.” None of the members of congress ever mentioned the widespread use of Haldol in American mental hospitals, though, for that wasn’t torture, was it? “Those people” – American “schizophrenics” need Haldol, they were told by establishment psychiatry, “they aren’t like you or me and don’t feel the same way when they take it…”

Now, I ask you, how can a drug torture one group of human beings but be a decent and humane treatment for another group? Answer: It cannot. Haldol IS torture, pure and simple, for nearly everyone who takes it. Just ask people! You cannot label one group tortured by a drug and the other “humanely treated” who endure the exact same effects. In truth the only group of humans who like Haldol are hospital personnel, who no doubt appreciate the fact that it in fact it does subdue patients into docility…usually. This means they have less work to do and thus they consider it an effective “treatment.” (Alas, in my case, I confess I was more likely to respond to forcible Haldol injections by stripping naked, defecating on the floor and smearing feces on the wall as by becoming more pliant or compliant. Why they managed not to see the resultant worsening of my symptoms and do something about it I do not know but they persisted in “treating me” and made things worse and worse…Indeed, I screamed more each day than not, for most of the three weeks-plus that I was at Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital this past August. So how good a “treatment” was Haldol? Aside from causing me exquisite mental and physical torture, I mean? In point of fact, despite megadoses, no injection made me more compliant, made me into a “nicer,” better patient, and easier to handle. The Haldol, even when probated and regularly forced upon me, didn’t work to their purposes…I was an impossible patient for most of the three-plus weeks I was there, Haldol notwithstanding. So what was the point? And why couldn’t ANYONE see that they were making things worse?

However, that is over with, and what I want now is to tell you that things are going to change, and change radically. I may not have your support in all of it, or any of it, perhaps, but I an attaching the video below as a link because the book it is related to was deeply influential both on what I wanted and did not get at Yale, and on what and why I am doing what I am doing now. The book, as I have mentioned before is Anatomy of an Epidemic, and the video gives a good hour long summary of it. It is a good place to start if you have difficulty reading a whole book on the subject or simply would like an idea of what you are getting into.

But first of all, the video doesn’t tell you this, “Mad In America” does — Robert Whitaker’s earlier book on the treatment abuses of the mentally ill in America — the foxes are guarding the chicken house. What I mean by this is: the Big doctors, by and large the influential ones who affect how our doctors treat us, are in cahoots with the Big Pharma drug companies in developing and promoting drugs that never worked and basically never had a chance to “work” because they were pushed into production and sales before any real research was done.

Maybe you don’t know this but listen: Thorazine was never a real “anti-psychotic” drug. It was a tranquilizer, a major tranquilizer. That’s what they used to more honestly call it. It calmed and tranquilized patients so they were more amenable to hospital treatment or the lack thereof. This was good for all, because the fact that patients were quieter meant that the nurses and aides got to show their kinder, nicer, nursier nursing sides to these “sick” patients, and the “drugged up” patients stopped fighting and finally appreciated being taken care of. It seemed a better situation for all, all ‘round, at least in the big state hospitals where megadoses of Thorazine were routinely handed out to “chill” patient populations into complacency. Less violent/resistant patients meant that the nursing staff could act a bit more like their job descriptors.

But now, suddenly, because someone was calling Thorazine an “anti-psychotic” drug as a marketing ploy, as if it treated the actual psychosis itself, they began to believe that it did something “anti-psychotic,” which in fact it never did. Not really. Not if you asked anyone who was treated with it. It never really helped anyone’s core symptoms. It just dulled you so profoundly you didn’t give a damn, or worse, it made you so mad with akathisia that you forgot how crazy the voices could make you feel, because you were literally wild with internal restlessness and other “antipsychotic” side effects and you had to pace all day or rock in your chair or do other “really crazy-looking shit” the doctors told you was just a part of your illness. Once Thorazine was thought of as a treatment drug, rather than as a behavioral modification drug, it changed the game altogether. It changed everyone’s thinking about schizophrenia (and by extension all mental illnesses) in a way that seems to have altered the course of American history itself. Certainly it changed American psycho-active drug-manufacturing for good, though I can only wonder at those involved with the actual design of drugs and how they can do what they do, surely being aware on some level that what they do has no foundation in science whatsoever. Let alone in honest research…

What am I talking about? Well, if Thorazine, which was originally used for anesthesia, was really just a behavioral modification drug, really, honestly and truly, and did not, if truth be told, treat or remediate any so-called schizophrenia symptom, then what the hell was all this dopamine hypothesis and research all about in the first and the last place? Because any supposed honest research started with Thorazine’s mode of action on the neuron’s dopamine 2 receptors. Supposedly, said those brilliant researchers, looking to explain how chlorpromazine/Thorazine “treated” schizophrenia symptoms so effectively, the drug works by blocking D2 receptors on the post synaptic neuron (Don’t worry if you don’t know what I am talking about…just keep reading).

The point is, Thorazine and dopamine have been inextricably linked for and to the next four decades of schizophrenia research, and all subsequent drug development stemmed from that link. Once that connection had been made, ridiculous and wrong as it was (schizophrenia and dopamine being related, or even correlated, simply was never shown), the stage was set for the “revolution” in brain illness research that has brought us such travesties as “bipolar infants” as young as 2 years old, and the H-Bomb-mushrooming of ADHD cases that threaten themselves to cluster-bomb into more bipolar disability cases than the country can conceive enough SSDI for…And thence to such further travesties as doctors using a brutally potent “atypical” “antipsychotic” (which is in truth no more “antipsychotic” in action than thorazine) like Zyprexa for “off-label” uses like anxiety disorders. Why? For fear of using benzodiazepines, perhaps, but just as often in conjunction with those drugs from hell. Drugs like Ativan and Xanax and Klonopin that are prescribed for people with “major mental illnesses” and the walking wounded as well, both like water, prescriptions that cause devastation in their wake and much more anxiety than they resolve.

It seems to me that for every MD who knows never to prescribe a benzo for anything but occasional use and refuses to, there are 40 who say, “take this three times a day and don’t call me unless you have problems”…expecting no calls.

But I am side-tracked a bit. Or have never quite gotten to my subject, which as you know is me, my own “illness” and my own future. I do not know frankly what was done to me in the past vis a vis these drugs, that is, what was caused by what. As my good friend Josephine says everyone now says, It is what it is and you can’t change it…So I am me, with whatever I am or have. But at the same time, i cannot continue to accept the premise that medications are the only and best way to treat me.

After all, I take meds every day and you all know that I have ended up in brutalizing hospitals regularly, quite despite this. I was hospitalized just this past August, in fact and this past winter too…So what good has been my taking meds, including 2, not just one but two atypical antipsychotic drugs, if they do not work to keep me out of the hospital? Not much, I venture to say. Not much…

Well, but…If they have enabled me to do art and write poetry (when I did that) then they were very good drugs for me indeed. For that is my fear: That I can only do art or write, even if just in my journal, when I take these medications. If so, those would be two very good reasons for me to feel it necessary to keep taking them. I cannot live without something worthwhile to do, and I have no family, no children, no purpose, no career, nothing else but art and writing to live for…

That said, what is the proof that my medications are what make me ME? That they make me write and do art? Essentially and absolutely? None at all. And there is much suspicion that the meds can do harm both in the short and long-term. Nothing at all is known about what happens when people take these drugs for decades. I am not sure I want or need to be that particular guinea pig. Now, “Dr Angela” is, as you may or may not know, a psychoanalyst as well as a psychiatrist, so I told her that I wanted essentially what Joanne Greenberg’s “Hannah Green” got from “Dr Fried” (in reality it was Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, the renowned psychoanalyst who successfully treated Greenberg’s schizophrenia) in I Never Promised You A Rose Garden…No promises, perhaps, no rose gardens, but at least the opportunity for cure, recovery, and an end to treatment. And NO MORE MEDICATIONS, WHICH WOULD TIE ME TO HER PERMANENTLY more or less.

I am off the first drug, Zoloft, and have been for more than a month. But it is not easy. I am bone-weary and feel like crying every day. Feel like I have never NOT been tired, never not fought off hopelessness and the feeling that if I were told I had leukemia I would cheer, “Finally! Thank god it’s over!”. That’s the truth, people. I sit in my chair, the same one I sleep in, and I sit in it virtually all day long. And though I am not addicted and do not need to (most of you know how easily I quit smoking when I need or want to) I occasionally smoke a cigarette just to ease the pain…which is physical as much as it is mental and emotional. I may not seem depressed to those of you when you see me, because I rarely “let them see me sweat” and would never burden you with me if I can help myself. But there is also the fact that if and when I see you, just that fact cheers me, lifts my spirits, thank god, and is a rescue and a blessing, so thank you for that much! The nights are hard, but sometimes the days are harder…Nevertheless, Dr Angela has agreed NOT to speak to me of going back to the Zoloft, not unless I ask for it, because she understands that I want to tough it out, and that i believe that antidepressant drugs cause more depression than they cure. I believe if this is a relapse it is solely or largely because I started taking Zoloft again in 2007, when forced to at Mt Sinai, even though I told them I was grieving Lynn L’s death and because of Joe C’s illness and they ought to let me grieve! If I had been taken off it promptly, or never put on it, maybe I would not be such an easy prey to despondency now.

Nevertheless I am going to go on the record of the past predicting the future, and NOT take Zoloft (as of now) and “get through this somehow…” because despite everything, I haven’t died yet, not of despair, and while i have done a lot of damage to my body, I have managed NOT to kill myself so far…Chances are, then, that I will not. Of course the future is unknown, but all I can say is that I do not want Zoloft or any AD drug at this moment, and can take the pain.

I have cut down on the Topamax, to 200mg but because of recurrent migraines need to keep that where it is for now. The next drug to go will be Abilify. I would rather we stop the Geodon next, but I do not think I can tolerate taking Abilify sans Geodon — not without being incredibly irritable — whereas Geodon without Abilify basically does nothing for me. A steady reduction, not too slow, but not so rapid I cannot tolerate any symptoms that develop. The whole point, in the end, is that should I develop symptoms (and that is not a certainty) we are supposed to be able to deal with them in therapy and not go running to the hospital or back to some drug.

(Okay, this is the point in the argument where even I start getting nervous. But I am determined to do this…I want it, I want it, and I need to try it ONCE in my life before I die. I need to know what I know, what I can know about what I need and do not need in terms of psychoactive medication, if that is even possible… Some much depends on placebo effects you know, and on influences of that sort that I wonder if any of it can be sorted out, and how much is going to be sheer determination?)

Oy, it is getting late, or I would continue. But I need to sleep and so do you. I am certain there is much more I ought to have said or explained and did not. Feel free to ask questions or query me about your own concerns if you have them…I am open to any thing, except anger.

Thank you all for your love and concern and if for nothing else than for simply being there to listen and read this.

Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgS79hz1saI

Love,

pam

Art

Today’s Art Journal Pages:West Farms Mall: You are Here…PLUS

Image August 30, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner Leave a comment

Near the Apple Store, sketching all day at West Farms Mall, West Hartford CT.

Sketch after Mary Frances Berry Phd. Ballpoint and Colored pencil (from television image)

Otheriwse Known as Pammy but trying to be known as Miss Wagner, so the boundaries remain professional, even if they never stay firm and strong.

Despite the MALFUNCTION picture above, there was nothing at all wrong with my ipad…I simply didnt understand the three finger tap function. But once i did, all was well. And the geniuses at the Genius bar were blessed again. I left to do the drawing of the West Farms Mall, rather than waste the 25 minute drive it had taken me to get over there.

That said, I need to add that I did one thing this weekend that Martha, my youngest sister picked up on immediately and knew at once was the wrong call, so to speak. She is an emotional genius of the highest order, and I dunno how, but somehow wrote me a text message that gave me permission to solve the problem…

To make the story clear, let me explain that it has LONG been part of my ethic that if I treasure something, especially a THING, I make a practice indeed a habit of giving it away. This is in part so I do not get attached to things, and so that I am not ” allowed to have any particular beloved items” that I need too much or covet too much. A form and practice of self-denial that runs very deep and started when I was remarkably young. I won’t go longer into this practice now except to add that as I wrote in my art journal on one page, one summer a few years ago, I took my very first vacation that was not a “hospital vacation” but was instead a planned stay at a Arts and craft camp called Snow Farm up in Florence, Massachusetts, where I signed up for a metal jewelry course. I already knew how to do the basics, but what this course promised was to teach sawing and riveting and soldering of metals, something I could not do at home.

Martha, who is five years younger than I, lives very close to Snow Farm, and without her support I never would have survived my weeklong stay. Partly because it turned out that I was much too paranoid to eat in the dining room, so she supplied me with enough food to make do with “canned” that is to say mostly fresh and decent food in my single room in the sleeping quarters. Late at night I would creep down to the emptied dining room and make myself a large PB sandwich to supplement these as well, from the supplies that were left out at all hours. But except for the one time the APRN who was then the manager of Snow Farm actually came and got me for supper and the other time that Martha also went with me to eat, I made do alone…

An equal hardship, one I am less able to explain, is that during the entire weeklong course, no one in the class of mostly women, more or less my age, spoke to me. They were a chatty bunch and talked a lot among themselves, but not a person said a thing to me, except I think one woman, towards the end of the week, offered the use of her tools or something, which became the occasion of a final breakthrough. But for the most part it was a lonely awful time.If it hadn’t been for the teacher herself, Abigail, who spent time with me (she knew my background from my application). I’d have withered from sheer isolation, both self- and other-imposed.

The final hardship was that I was very thin at the time, and using a metal saw required that one hold it against the chest wall while tightening any replacement saw bands and at other times as well. For some reason, I kept breaking my saws, which were delicate enough that if you twisted it while sawing a copper sheet, it could snap in a second. But holding the saw in a vise against my chest wall was simply impossible: It caused me exquisite physical pain, and I could not withstand the pain long enough to replace a single blade. So I had to give up learning to saw, and thus never learned to rivet either. Anything that involved the saw was simply beyond me. Either nobody observed the problem, or all decided that it was not worth coming to my aid. In any event, I was left with no alternative but to do the only thing I was able to finally do: to solder silver rings.

Yes, when it turned out that I could with ease hammer silver half-round sterling into a ring shape and solder it together into a permanent ring, and no one placed a limit on how many I made (since we paid for silver materials as we went along) I simply made silver rings for the rest of the week. Then the one woman who was semi-friendly with me gave me a few sterling silver pre-made bezel cups that would hold a 3 mm cabochon, were I to obtain them. And the teacher showed me how to solder the bezel cup onto a couple of my rings finally as well, (I could never learn to make my own bezel cups because that involved sawing…)

I left Snow Farm with about ten rings, two of which had soldered-on bezel cups. Some were big enough for men, the others were varying women’s sizes, but all were 100% sterling silver. None were anything mind you but amateurish, but that mattered little to me or anyone I gave one to. No one knew the difference, and if I did, it ceased to matter. I ordered little cabochons of grade A lapis lazuli, the lovely blue stone that is so famous, and managed to secure two of them into the two rings with bezel cups on them in a fairly decent if untutored manner (no adhesive used, that much I was proud of).

But of course, one of these lapis lazuli rings was in due course given away to a friend who was on and off not a friend. and who verbally abused me in such fashion that it was from her that I learned the awful language and names that I called the nurses and aides at Natchaug and Yale. (I hate the fact that I even have the c__nt word in my working vocabulary. I never did before this friend who is no friend of mine used it on me…But once heard as an name-calling term of verbal abuse, it became “valid,” it became part of my language…much as I wish it had never. And now I confess that when enraged at the people at the hospital, but ONLY then, I call them c––nts and variants on the terms rather freely, because I know what a terribly word it is and what effect it will have on them. (Chip my brother roared with laughter when I told him I called the single nurse restrained me for walking away from the quiet room at the IOL a “snarky little c––nt” and praised me for being able to laugh too. but in truth I wish I did not even have the word in my working vocabulary at all. I would prefer a lack of insults to use on people to being able to hurt anyone with this word…)

Now this “friend” is out of my life and I have the single ring left,..my single remaining treasure from that troublesome perfect vacation.

But what happened at the end of that vacation? Well, the last night, we were told to make something for the camp auction and so I brought earring making equipment and starting making a slew of those, and that, plus the fact that I’d brought over a copy of DIVIDED MINDS, finally just to introduce myself (I think the woman who had given me the bezel cups had asked me a question and elicited the fact that I had written two books…wanted to see them). Well, this was what finally broke the ice. And it did it in a major way. People were really interested, and curious. And they now asked me questions and seemed less scared to talk with me, as if the book’s subject matter somehow explained “everything.” I dunno…Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. But the last day there , with the auction and the final dinner went fine. and I would say that I “love Snow Farm” despite everything.

Which is why I treasure that one remaining lapis lazuli ring. It means that I actually made something from a situation that could have been unmitigated disaster. I made lemonade from lemons, and I survived a vacation all on my own. SO when I managed to practically beg Martha, my compassionate genius of a younger sister to take this ring from my finger…she was dubious to begin with. For one thing, she has her own two important rings. One is her own gift to herself for surviving Breast Cancer…and it is her most important ring. But I practically made her take my ring from me. I think I have done this to her before…And she didn’t want to take it then either….She KNOWS things, this wonderful sister of mine, and either it is in part that she has these other rings of her own, or that she has inklings about my propensity to give my treasures away to others (I love) she is not and has not been a willing taker of my ring on either occasion.

What a good egg, This night I received an email from her saying she wanted to “trade it back to me” or at least have each of us wear it so she wasn’t taking it from me…But she knew, she knew. I dunno how, but something told her that it was not just ANY ring I made. God knows I have made her things, and she had accepted them. So she isn’t just refusing to take anything I made. no. I made the papier mache hummingbird JUST FOR MARTHA after all. And in point of fact she knew that I didnt want to part with Christobelle or the Using Klimt collages, but felt okay about taking them as long as she paid me the full price that I was asking…. (Actually I feel like shit, not just giving the collages to her! But that is another story.)

But the ring, oh the ring is so different. HOW DID SHE KNOW that the ring was different? It is not that my offer was false. I wanted her to have my treasure. I did. I loved giving it to her. It is just that I also know that I missed the ring, and wanted also to have it too. And in that sense alone I regretted my impulsivity. And the need to impoverish myself and deprive myself just because i had to. WHY? WHy am I not allowed to keep my ring, symbol of so much? Would it kill me to keep it? Would it be such a terrible mortal sin to allow me to keep my ONE treasure? It isn’t that precious, after all. The solder seam is visible on the bottom not under the bezel and it is a pretty shoddy piece of handmade jewelry. Not worth a nickle to anyone, in reality. Even the lapis cost me all of a dollar or two. So why does it cost me so much emotionally to keep it??????

Martha gets it, though. She really did and does. She KNOWS. She knows the real value of the ring is not the monetary value, but what it means to me. And that is why she is uncomfortable keeping it. The ring aint worth shit, not qua ring. It is only worth something as memory and as symbol and then only to me…and to Martha by extension and because of her depth of understanding.

Martha, if you read this, i hope I understood you correctly. You certainly got me on the dime. Thank you from the depths of even my impoverished dried up little heart for understanding. You deserve a ring far better than any crappy lapis ring I could ever make…You are a sister beyond dreams. Thank you…I really love you more than I can say.

Art, Health

The Voices in my head: Collage art made At Yale Psychiatric hospital 2013

August 26, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 5 Comments

But in truth I screamed all three weeks and never stopped. I am still hoarse!

I just was released from the Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital and i regret to say that it was far from the kind and gentle “soft place to land” in a crisis that i remembered. Partly this was my fault, for wanting to not take the meds that i already knew would be forced on me, quite despite Dr Milstein’s assurance to my outside psychiatrist that he would never force meds or Zyprexa on me as “it doesnt work.”

No, I did not know that meds would be FORCED on me…Not until Robert Ostroff MD took over my care and made it clear he did not give a damn how I felt. He decided to punish me with massive doses of Haldol when I refused Zyprexa, and I know he is of an age to understand what he was doing. One, he is a Yale Physician, so he knew of the hearings in Congress back in the 70s where the Russian dissidents were complaining of TORTURE by Haldol injection, and where Congress actually decreed that the drug was in fact an instrument of torture when use on Russian citizens…He KNEW what he was doing to me, PUNISHING me. He just had the power to do it and could. So he did. He NEVER saw me to talk to me, NOT once. No, he just oversaw torture, and while Robert Milstein, MD (basically a good guy, if deluded into believing that psych meds are good for people) was supposedly on vacation, he too was available and did nothing to stop this. For that I do not forgive him…Or, I forgive him, but will never trust him to treat me again. No, I will never go back there.

In fact, I’m here to say that no hospital psychiatrist can be trusted when they promise not to force you to take drugs…that is what they are paid to do and are largely paid to believe in. It did me little good to try NOT to sound like i was ranting and raving esp when attempting to persuade either doctor or social worker in hospital to read Robert Whitaker’s ANATOMY OF AN EPIDEMIC or even borrow my copy of his MAD IN AMERICA, both books i find life and mind changing in a major way, even a year after i started reading them for the first time.

I dunno what to do though, in terms of meds. I function fine in between times in hospital, mostly. And so are the Abilify and Geodon helping or simply not Not preventing a relapse when it comes? There is reason to think that Geodon may be damaging my heart, slowly but surely. My EKG said something Dr Milstein refused to explain about a “probable infarct” but was that me, my heart or some general info on the EKG sheet? I wasnt allowed to look at it long enough and NO ONE answered my questions about it. Probably fearing i would stop taking the offending medication, which was true and i did anyway so they ought to have talked to me honestly.

But honesty is not a general policy in brutal psychiatric units where they restrain you, holding you down and bruise you to give you injections of Stat meds that are really ordered only because someone with the power to order them got angry and resentful…

I cannot sugarcoat my own demeanor during this stay. I was not a pleasant patient to anyone most of the time. And at the worst times i was likely considered horrendous. I screamed daily at the top of my lungs, i resisted their treatments physically and violently, i defecated on the floor of my room and even put handsful of shit across the walls, and apparently i even threw a cup of coffee at someone…though i do not remember doing this and the report may have been distorted by second hand information about me, coming back to me. But i was a horrible patient and one aide even called me, every chance he got, a dog, a pig, a swine….in covert secret ways, audible and openly but when no one else was around to hear him except the other aide who would back up his story that it never happened.

On the other hand, there were a few kind and compassionate understanding people who did not throw my smearing shit in my face or even take my calling them horrible names (bestowed on my vocabulary by a former friend who called me them) personally.

I need to enlist just such people for private duty help for the next relapse, if it should happen…but how? Ads on hospital cafeteria walls? How to vet the sign-uppers, so i do not get attendants that will abuse me in my own home? How to trust, and when, what they or references tell me? So many references are positive and therefore lies that they are tantamount to useless unless secretly negative!

Decisions decisions….must be made well before anyone is needed to help me at home….one to one, constant observation-plus!

Well, i am still recuperating, and worried about deep hip pain though seemingly improving is scary, reminding me of the avascular necrosis bout i had about five years ago. Was it meds induced? possibly because it healed magically in a month post radiographic dx, with a stay in psych hospital and change in those meds. But if i dont withdraw abruptly from, say, topamax or geodon, but slowly, will the hip pain continue, or evolve into worse than just, say, pain, but real bone destruction ans disability? Can i take any risks at all at age 60 with drugs that have no proven track record research wise, and seem to help me but may only being doing harm?

Art

New Art (2)

July 23, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 1 Comment

Small acrylic portrait of an African-american man in glasses and a winter scarf, 3" by 5" — Small acrylic portrait of an African-american man in glasses and a winter scarf, 3″ by 5″

Small acrylic portrait of a white man in front of streetlamp at night. 3" by 5" — Small acrylic portrait of a white man in front of streetlamp at night. 3″ by 5″

Am working on continuation of the blog post from a couple of days ago. Sorry to take so long, but things are very stressful at the moment. The east coast heat wave broke yesterday at least, but I survived it largely without air condtioning, and that wasn’t easy. Thank heavens the downstairs community room has A/C so when I could stand other people staring at me or giving me the evil eye, I could go there to cool off.

I tried sleeping in the parlor downstairs as well one night, but someone found me (ah, an easy target!) and kept me up till 2:30am talking at me, until I finally went back to the 12th floor where I live, under the heat-absorbing black roof, to try to sleep in my 94°F-98°F (not including heat index) stifling apartment. Yes, I have 2 fans, but they only blow the heat around at such temperatures. In any event, sleep that night was not very successful. Even after the end of the heat wave, i have been waking every single morning with a pounding headache, dunno why and I cannot figure out the trigger…

Oh pore Pammy, woe is she! (Shut up, Pam, with your litany of woes! Others have it so much worse!!!!!) Sorry folks. I did get carried away a bit there and I am not generally a complainer about such circumstances…The sky is clear and cooler today and this bodes well. Every day is a new day and I am 60 and well and I thank gosh for each day that is granted me.

Anyhow, a new air conditioner is arriving today, along with a week of cooler weather! PBTG. But the truth is, the stone facts are, even when the temps are in the 80s, we bake, up here on the 12th floor with all the heat rising from the other floors. I asked the building manager when they were redoing the roof why they could not coat it with a white coating, but I think he just laughed at me. To do something so “different” seemed to him unthinkable. I dunno why, it would save everyone energy costs, one, and two, it is a very effective and efficient way to reflect sun rays and avoid heating the building in the summer.

Not to be listened to or heard is something I am very familiar with. It is why I want to write about the Dr Mary B. O’Malley’s deliberate misdiagnosis of BPD in 2003 and the damage it has done and continues to do to me for more than a decade. In fact it can be traced directly to the torture I experienced at the Institute of Living last winter.

I will be writing more on that in the days to come. But due to PTSD issues, this causes extreme stress. Even as I write this my fingers are trembling and I can feel my heart race. So I need to do it in small doses and carefully. Thanks for understanding.

Health, Institute Of Living, Seclusion and Restraints, Trauma

My Challenge to the IOL: Stop Using Restraints and Seclusion NOW

June 25, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 1 Comment

Well, how did it go yesterday? All in all, I would say it was a very successful meeting. Certainly it went better than I expected, and better than the disastrous meeting a year ago at Middlesex Hospital with Dr Grillo et al. I fear I irritated Dr Mucha a bit at least at first. Why? Because I think he felt defensive and tried to tell me how much he did on my behalf and my mobile facial features (I don’t hide my feelings behind a good psychiatrist poker face) let him know at once that I didn’t believe him. Why should I? One, it was completely self-serving for him to tell me — as if he had been some sort of knight in shining armor behind the scenes — how much good he had done for me, when he let them restrain me day after day for many many hours at a time, and keep me in what he himself acknowledged was on-going seclusion for the majority of the hospital stay. How dare he tell me how much he did for me, and then when I said they “tortured me” actually scoff, “Restraints aren’t torture!”

Ask my brother, Phil, an extremely humane psychiatrist who would disagree, and would rather die than be restrained, but I went one better. I quoted Juan Mendez the Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council at the UN who just this past March spoke/wrote specifically about psychiatric patients and how the use of solitary confinement of any duration and any use of restraints, forced medication and forced ECT is torture. He didn’t say tantamount to torture he said that are torture, period. And I would remind Dr Mucha and Mrs. Blair that until you have experienced these things — and I defy you to try any of these modes of your so-called treatment– you have no way of knowing. All you have to do is look at the expression on the face of the woman in the picture I did yesterday.

From the way I was treated, under Dr Mucha’s supposedly magnanimous supervision, at the IOL (depicted in that drawing) anyone could tell that the people “caring for me” did not consider that I was truly human or “felt” their torture in the same way they would have. Because if they had believed that, they never would have done what they did to me, unless they really did deliberately, maliciously want to torture me. I don’t know which it is. Dr Mucha and Mrs Blair say the Donnelly 2 South unit staff are good people who wanted to help me….So which is it? That they didn’t consider me a real person, just a diagnosis and not really human, so they thought I didn’t feel the torture (this despite my exquisitely lucid PAD that spells everything out in detail) they inflicted, or they were actually malevolent and wanted me to suffer? I tremble to have to choose between the two!

Either way, the torture was inflicted and despite numerous calls to Carmen Diaz, the patient advocate, (another name for the Hospital employee who works FOR the hospital not the patient, really) no one, not a soul, came to help me. I called outside sources too, but except for my advocate at the dept of Protection and Advocacy, who is not a lawyer and has little power besides that of complaint, there is not an agency or organization in this entire state of CT that can or would help me. Not a legal aid group or a lawyer besides the court appointed one to fight commitment that would even come in and talk to me about what was happening. I was ALL ALONE, yet Dr Mucha’s knickers got in a twist because I didn’t praise and thank him for all his work behind the scenes on my behalf.

Well, I am sorry, but 1) Dr Mucha is the Director of the IOL and he is IN CHARGE. He did not need to work behind the scenes. He could have spoken to Dr Taylor about her treatment of me at ANY time. If he thought she was not treating me well or using restraints in an unnecessary or wrong-headed way, he ought to have spoken out at once, openly. Period. 2) I needed someone on my side OPENLY. I needed someone to come to me and tell me that they were going to stop this nonsense and get me some real help that no one was going to restrain me again. That they knew my advance directive was meaningful and that things had GONE TOO FAR.

None of that happened. None of that happened. And while plenty apparently did behind my back, I am not responsible for what I was not told and did not know. Though I do appreciate it now that I do know. For instance that Bev, the voodoo princess, who I was terrified of, not because of her voodoo, but because she was dangerous to me as a staff member, having taken an intense dislike to me, indeed such a hatred of me that she was conspiring to kill me…she was removed from D2S unbeknownst to me for as long as I was there. Simply because I had expressed such intense fear of her. That was something I did not know about, but I am very grateful they heard me and did something for me in that regard. Took my fear seriously rather than tortured me with her presence. On the other hand, if only, if ONLY they had told me that she would not be back for the duration, I would have slept better! Why not tell me? For nights I slept fearfully, since I had no way of knowing she would not be on the night shift!

I wish Dr Mucha et al would look into the Open Dialogue method of dealing with psychosis. It will never be implemented in full in this country, and certainly not in hospitals. It is not a hospital-based method in any event. In fact, it is anti hospital and empties hospitals rather quickly. But some parts of it would be eye-opening, such as always including the patient in treatment planning, how that helps bring clarity to even the most disturbed person. How it involves their being NO secrets, nothing hidden, not even disagreements between treaters as to how to proceed. How wonderful it would have been for me to have actually heard Dr Mucha in conference with Dr Amy Taylor et al discussing the use of restraints or seclusion…Do you really think anything would have continued to happen, or that things would have proceeded apace if I had been included in those case conferences about me? I highly doubt it! Oh, if only I had been….I could have told them so much, but of course they didn’t even think to include me when talking about me! How stupid of them, how completely stupid. But I wasn’t a person, just an animal, just a diagnosis.

Anyhow, at the end of our meeting, which did go well after we got off the torture topic, Dr Mucha asked me if there was anything I wanted to end on. I thought a minute and said, “Well, you know, I want to go back to the subject of restraints and seclusion. You continue to use them because you won’t stop using them. You say it is a slow process, that it takes time. But it isn’t a slow process. You cannot stop using them as long as you allow their use at all. All it takes to stop using restraints and seclusion is to STOP USING THEM. Period. Once you don’t have the notion that, Oh, well, we can always use restraints on that unruly patient, so it’s okay, we don’t have to plan in advance about how to deal with her or him if things get out of hand…once you can’t resort to restraints at all, then you must think imaginatively in advance about how to deal with patients and you will find a way. You always do. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

So that is my challenge to the Institute of Living. Stop dillydallying around and pretending that you are reducing the use of restraints and seclusion. Don’t tell me that you are only using them in the geriatric population to reduce falls, because that is not true and that is not really the sort of thing that I am talking about and you know it. You don’t use seclusion and restraint to reduce falls for “an hour” anyway…THree times a week is not a reduction. Once a year is a reduction! But I want you to NEVER use restraints or seclusion again. I want you to understand that to restrain a patient or to use a show of force is to torture someone. Get this one thing straight, to deliberately frighten a patient with a “show of force” is an act of terrorism and has no place in a hospital. (In a prison, maybe, though I would argue against treating any human being like that even in prisons…) And when you torture someone esp a patient who is already suffering and frightened, you make her or him worse, sicker and likely to be MORE violent and less predictable and traumatized, with the subsequent behavior that is known to result after trauma. NOTHING good comes from treating a patient with violence.

I don’t know if the IOL will listen to me, a nobody, a nothing worth less than the paper I am printed on. Not worth a red cent or a paper nickel. No lawyer gives a sh_ t about me, I am not worth their time or effort because I am not worth a stinking dollar. So why would the venerable IOL pay attention to anything I have to say? (I am not stupid for all that, but genius IQs are a dime a dozen, alas… and Mucha and Blair too are no slouches, even if they persist in the delusion that to treat patients with violence is acceptable, and not torture, really.)

LISTEN to ME, LISTEN TO ME! I know what I am talking about. if you don’t you will continue to cause more harm than good. If you do, you will break new ground and start a revolution that cannot but do good. That’s all I have to say.

Health, Writing

Wagblog Nominated for the Liebster Award – Wow!

May 29, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 10 Comments

Note that this is a two part posting. First half is my Q and A part of the Nomination, and tomorrow’s will concern the nominees that I select for the Liebster Award. (I see no other way to do it, as I have already spent four hours on this and it is midnight now).

The Liebster Award is given to up and coming bloggers who have less than 200 followers. So, what is a Liebster? The meaning: Liebster is German and means sweetest, kindest, nicest, dearest, beloved, lovely, kind, pleasant, valued, cute, endearing, and welcome. Isn’t that sweet? Blogging is about building a community and it’s a great way to connect with other bloggers and help spread the word about newer bloggers/blogs.

Here are the rules for receiving this award:
1. Each person must post 11 things about themselves.

2. Answer the questions that the tagger set for you

First half is done here. Second half of the award will be done tomorrow in the post then.

plus create 11 questions for the people you’ve tagged to answer.
3. Choose 11 people and link them in your post.
4. Go to their page and tell them.
5. No tag backs!

FIrst things first.

11 Things about me.

1) I am a twin, most likely identical, though there are some questions about it. I guess that has to be said first, though I am pretty certain it is not first and foremost on my twin sister’s mind much these days. In fact, I am pretty certain that she cannot stand having me in the world.

2) I have never been able to work a full-time job.

3) I recently taught myself to use my left hand for a lot of things, including using scissors. I write exclusively left handed, though I would be naturally right-handed.

4) There have been four miracles in my life, field botany, poetry, Zyprexa (an anti-schizophrenia drug) and art. Each miracle involved my mind more than my body and each completely changed my life for the better in ways I could never have anticipated.

5) My idea of a great meal would be to forage for berries and greens and wapato tubers during day and prepare and cook up what I gathered that evening…

6) I love eating vegetables and fruits. I love healthy foods, like quinoa and flax meal, and amaranth and yes, brussel sprouts and jerusalem artichokes.

7) I am teaching myself Italian. Come stai? Sto abbastanza bene.

8) Tuletko ouiman? (If I remember the spelling correctly, that should mean something close to “Do you want to go swimming?” in Finnish…but I am reaching into deep down memory banks because I learned that when I was 16 and spending the summer with a Finnish family in Helsinki. That and “kitoksia palmin” or thank you very much, are the sum total of all the Finnish I remember from that summer of 1968.

9) I quit smoking two weeks ago. Blimey!

10) I like new shoes, though I never buy them.

11) Generosity, kindness and honesty are my core values.

11 questions for the nominees:

1. What food do you eat that people around you find extremely weird and/or disgusting?

Sorry, I hate to be boring, but I don’t regularly eat much that is weird or disgusting, except maybe brussel sprouts. I love those….Yes, okay, I have eaten grasshoppers. I even made a youtube video of that.

2. Why do you choose to blog?

I was first asked to blog at schizophrenia.com. and I would still be there writing the original Wagblog except that they experienced a most unfortunate server crash which made the site go down for more than a year, devastating all their blogs. Wagblog was their first, and for many months the only one, so I had a great deal of traffic in the early 2000s – and to my knowledge, while the site is back up and running the blogs remain still only archives of their former selves.

I waited about 6 months, hoping that I could return to my schizophrenia.com “homebase” but no word ever came from the webmaster, so I decided to start Wagblog elsewhere, that is, here at WordPress.

I know that’s only a partial answer. I could have chosen not to blog at any point even after they asked me to do so, and especially after that devastating server crash, but I have always, always been a writer, paid or unpaid, and it never occurred to me to quit just because I had no sponsor. I have never needed outside motivation to write. I write because things just need to get written down. Period.

3. Where do you get your inspiration for your posts?

Hmmm. Inspiration is a tricky word. I believe that if you need something as insubstantial as inspiration to trigger your writing or any other art, you are going to be on shaky ground and had better rely on something else for your bread and butter, better choose a different career. Not that I am anything like a career writer, or a professional journalist, I have no career or profession at all. But I do know that I can and could write on demand, mostly because I have practiced it. If I want to write on a subject, if I am asked to write on a subject, I know how to approach it and all things being equal, I can and will do an okay, and even a bang-up job most of the time.

That being said, I do pick and choose what I want to write about in my own blog, and I don’t write all the time or even regularly, mostly because I am too busy with my art projects. OTOH, I have plenty I could say and plenty to talk about. So I would never be at a loss for things to write. I guess it just feels like a weird question, The entire world is out there so how could there ever be a dearth of subjects to be “inspired by”?

As William Blake wrote in Auguries of Innocence:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

That’s the key, that’s the mindset one must get into. Then everything is a source of inspiration, and you never again need to worry where the next blog post inspiration will come from because everything will inspire.

4. What was your favorite subject in school?

School? Yeowch, that was, what? 40+ years ago now…I can scarcely remember what I gave a damn about in school. In high school I was good in history, mostly because the teachers understood never to call on me, but to let me decide when I wanted to volunteer a comment or question. When thus permitted to choose, I would come out with something worthy of being said…I could not be badgered into speaking. In all other classes if called on, I would be mute, but the history teachers hit on the right solution, and so we got on okay. I did not know how much I would love ecology and botany at the time. Not until college. But I wish I had learned field botany in high school. I wish we had been introduced to natural history and ecology in my day. It wasn’t a subject of as much interest in the 60s.. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” had come out, yes, and other books, but there were so many social ills and protests going on then that “eco – anything” was just one movement of many that needed attention. Plus, I was already getting ill and unable to attend to anything beyond my own little world. Eventually my own little world did include field botany and ecology, mind you, it just didn’t include much of the rest of the world in addition.

In med school, by the way, my favorite subject was probably hematology, but that was because it was a little like field botany and natural history, using my visual skills to identify blood on slides.

5. If you had a million dollars, and could NOT use it for charity, what would you buy?

Ah, what a lovely question to have to ponder…I would buy, I would would buy…I know exactly what I would buy: land somewhere in New England, with a big old house, nothing too fancy but with potential, and turn it into a eco-friendly Wholeway House and Healing Community for me and other recovering (or getting older) so-called “mentally ill” persons who need a permanent home. Ideally, it could be built into the side of a hill so as to take advantage of natural geothermal heating and cooling properties, or a would love to do that…and be as green as humanly possible.

6. Biggest pet peeve? You really shouldn’t ask me because I will only irritate people by admitting that “my biggest pet peeve is when” 1) people who should know better say things like, “I should have went” instead of “I should have gone” 2) “I think I will lay down on the bed” instead of “I think I will LIE down on the bed.” Oh, you know I am SUCH a language snob!!!!! Beat me, beat me, beat me with that wet noodle! 8p

But you know I cannot help it, I really get peevey when people say, 3) “I would have been rich too, if I would have had your luck…” instead of “I would have been rich too, if I had had your luck!” You know, it is only a matter of knowing the proper use of conditionals. But we don’t teach conditionals any more in this country, the US at any rate. I don’t know about England, but proper grammar seems to be a problem here – at least to my ears. No one cares any longer, maybe no one understands that there are rules in the first place.

Lordy, Lordy, where are the English (Language) Teachers of yesteryear?

7. Are you one of those people who keeps focused and organized, or are you one of those that keeps open and a bit messy?

Here are a few photos of my apartment, which should be answer enough.

8. One word to describe your blog. (I almost wrote “yourself” instead of “blog” but remembered that is the most cliche question EVER and that I absolutely HATE it!)

Enduring (I cannot think of the word, the one word I want to say to mean, “Not temporary” but one that has lasted…I started the first Wagblog in 2003, at schizophrenia.com and here it is, still going strong ten years later at WordPress.

9. First book you ever read (or remember reading)?

Black Beauty…I had no idea what it was about, and was disappointed when I found out it concerned a horse. Read it through to the end purely out of duty and a sense of competition with Los Bender, who had told me only that she could not put it down. She was an “equinomaniac” so to speak, so I should have anticipated the subject but having never read an entire book before then, I didn’t know that one could write nearly 300 pages about a single horse . (It is possible that I misremember, that this was not my very first book per se. But at any rate. it is the first book I recall being disappointed by, and that stuck in mind more strongly apparently than whatever the very first book was.)

10. Do you blog only when you want to, or are there times when you feel you need to post something to keep a routine?

I confess I do literally nothing by routine. I do not even eat on a routine or at regularly scheduled hours. Sigh. Oh, yeah, I do see my psychiatrist at set times, because she keeps a regular schedule of appointments, and I cannot exactly subject her to my sort of whimsical lifestyle, but otherwise I cannot think of a single thing that I do on a regular, literally routine basis, the same time every day, on my own by choice.

11. What is your real job? (Yes, the answer can be blogging, Mom or Dad, nothing, etc. No judgement, just curious)

No real job, alas. Not for pay since I suppose that’s what you mean by “job” is what do you do for a living…? I have been considered and designated officially “disabled” by ther federal government since 1980, I believe. Since that time, I have been in and out of hospitals, halfway houses and lousy apartments…until and even after, I landed here in this “safe” elderly, disabled HUD-subsidized housing complex. Very nicely kept up, 250 people or more live here. Community living in a way, though I keep to myself. And while I am not hugely unhappy here (I just used a figure of speech called a litote, if anyone cares) I do not like it, and want to move out someday if I can, before I am really too old to be able to…And I want to be UN-disabled before it is too late.

Truth is, I was always too ill to work, all my life until I became an artist five years ago by a stroke of happy accident. But now that I am able to do art I think I could actually earn some income from it, and in that sense earn my way and a living by hook or by crook, and get off some of these programs, if only I had a chance. It is just that so many people are worried that I would lose my actual living, housing situation and be out on the streets if I left here and couldn’t earn enough…As am I, as am i. I am too old to fend for myself as a homeless person. I never did have any savvy even when I was homeless. Luckily, I was always rescued and hospitalized by those who knew the street was no place for me…I was not someone who would have survived there, or would ever have preferred the street to the hospital…That said, I have had it with hospitals in CT and the abuse heaped on me here. And I do not want to be disabled any longer. I want to make it on my own. And regarding my last twenty or so years or however much time that may perhaps be granted to me, I would love to know that I would have some freedom to use the time as I chose. That’s why, purely selfishly, if I had that Mythical Million I would buy a big house on land in New England, preferably Massachusetts or Vermont where there is universal health care already set up in a liberal state, and create a Wholeway House and Healing Community.

Blog

100,000 hits…Thank you!

May 28, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 2 Comments

I saw that the counter was reaching 100,000 late on Sunday, but it wasn’t until after Memorial Day that i had a chance to check again and see for myself that, wow! Gee whiz, Thanks! I’ve actually had more than 100,000 visits to my blog. That impressed me – for all of about three seconds. Then i checked my stats and reality’s cold wet towel smacked me in the face. Not that i hadn’t been aware of it, but here’s the thing, and whether it is a problem or not i don’t really know: my blog is supposed to be about schizophrenia and mental illness or at the very least about art and poetry and therapy. However, one day i wrote a WordPress Daily Post challenge – trying to get into Freshly Pressed – for the uptick in traffic that might bring, nothing more. It did not succeed in that mission, but it did bring me by and in itself a whole slew of new visitors. In fact, each and every day i have many more visits and searches for my blog post from that one day, that one post, in specific, than i do for the entire rest of my blogs combined, by far!

On any given day the breakdown could go like this, percentage wise, 90% for that single post, 10% of the searches and visits for all other posts. Strangest of all, it was a very atypical post, having nothing to do with any of my usual topics but about technology. Weird, in the extreme. Now, mind you, i never mind any visits to my blog, all readers are good. And in this case i believe the post has been helpful to a lot of people. But if they searched for the terms they did, they did not find me with any particular interest in the subjects i usually write about, and may not be inclined to return for more.

Or perhaps i am wrong. You never know, do you? After all, MI strikes every family in one fashion or another, and we deal with it in varied ways, some adequately, some not so, and often some very badly. It is just possible that someone landing here, via a search for that DIY posting, actually took a look around, liked what he or she read, and learned something helpful. I would like to think so at any rate.

And, in any event, you, whoever you are, are reading these words now so you did find me, somehow, via whatever search terms or deliberate whim of fate or fancy brought you here. Maybe you will come back to read some more of my words, see a painting or drawing or sculpture you like. In 2014 i may be legally able to sell them, and perhaps you will like that. Whatever is the case, dear reader, thank you for spending the time here long enough to read this post. If you feel like it, click the like button to show me you’ve been here. It is always, always hugely appreciated.

Muchas gracias, grazie mille, danke, kitoksia palmin (not sure how to spell that, my Finnish is rusty…) merci beaucoup, and so forth. Thank you, thank you from the bottom, and the top and middle of my heart…and from the rest of me too.

Art, Health, Mental Health

Therapy Puppets: An Art project

May 26, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner Leave a comment

Traumatized Tiffany — Although all the puppets/dolls are handmade, and each takes four hours to complete from start to finish, Tiffany is the only one that is clearly in trouble. She has a black eye and is screaming in pain or outrage or something…She is also the only doll that I decided to leave unreinforced, though I may change my mind after I finish the others. For now, though, I have left her in the simple form, frail and fragile, utterly vulnerable…though for all that, it is only an illusion. These doll puppets aren’t easily breakable. You would have a harder time than you think, trying to tear the heads off.

Beatnik Bob- therapy puppet/doll from 4-6 inches high, like the others. — Therapy Puppet, Bob is completely handmade with a pliable bending body and an exquisite, handmade clay head with hair of embroidery thread.

Beatnik Bobby, another view — Beatnik Bobby completely handmade with a pliable bending body and an exquisite, handmade clay head with hair of embroidery thread.

JailHouse Jummy — Jimmy is also completely handmade with a pliable bending body and an exquisite, handmade clay head with hair of embroidery thread. I have him fighting his way out of a jail made from a bingo counter bin. (Knew that would come in handy one day!)

Baseball Willy — I call this one BaseBall Willy only because of his cap, but he could be doing anything in his whites. You figure it out for yourself, because that is the point! Willy is also completely handmade with a pliable bending body and instead of hair, he sports a clay baseball cap.

TigerWoman — What else could I call her in such get up? I see this one as confident, even too confident…that’s the story I give her. What do you see in her? completely Like all the others she is handmade with a pliable bending body and an exquisite, handcrafted clay head with hair of embroidery thread.

What do you see in her? — She looks haunted but strolls the avenue like she owns it nonetheless…Or not? Tigerwoman is completely handmade with a pliable bending body and an exquisite, handcrafted clay head with hair of embroidery thread.

A Band of Beatniks — Cute, no? A Band of Beatnik therapy puppets, all handmade, each one takes about four ours to make, from start to finish. even each drum takes at least two hours to make.

Miss Whatsit — Although I did make this figurine female, as opposed to the more clearly male one, that is the only characteristic I gave her. Otherwise, she is supposed to be “blank.”

Female and Male Whatsits — The female has pink lips and the male has brown lips…Otherwise there is little difference. Skin tone is neutral and no race is specified.

He whatsit — Brown lips but neutral skin color, and no noticeable emotions or characteristics. completely handmade with a pliable bending body and a clay head, with recognizable but blank features.

Leather Drum — The drum was made from a piece of a roll that came inside a tube of plastic wrap. I cut off about an inch. Then I cut apart a used leather pocket book I bought at a thrift store and with a piece glued a small piece around the once inch round. Then I tucked the flaps inside on both ends. Finally I sewed a round piece with a running stitch, using a sewing awl, and after I attached it with glue to one side of the drum, pulled the black cord together like a drawstring. I glued a tiny bead to either cord end and voila, a drum for the beatniks to play.

I have created these small creatures, every one of them individually handmade, for use by therapists in counseling. They range from about 4 inches to about 6 or 7 inches high. I started with Beatnik Bob, just for fun, but when I actually found myself comforting the little green girl-like figure with the black eye, which I call for shorthand, Traumatized Tiffany, it was a revelation. It is hard not to want to play with them, in fact. That is what friends tell me when they see them. Weird, because we are all way way too old for dolls and playing with toys, and yet these figurines seem to elicit something in us that made me think therapists could use them in their work.

If any therapists or psychiatrists out there are interested in obtaining some of these creatures, please contact me to discuss fees and shipping. I can make them to specification sort of, but after that, each piece is unique and cannot be replicated. Let me know if you prefer characters or the hairless, non-specific Whatsit figures.

Art, Health, Prisons

Breaking Icons

May 11, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 8 Comments

My second human sculpture, Dr John Jumoke, holds a prescription pad that reads,

Rx: Art, Poetry, and Music.

I think that is a pretty good first line defense for much of what ails the human condition. That and a good dose of empathic understanding from people who eschew employing violence, sarcasm and undermining skepticism in their efforts to help others. Too often people who are diagnosed, as I was, and still am, with “schizophrenia” are rushed into treatment that degrades and humiliates, even as it inflicts terrible effects, not to mention side effects…all without curing the so-called illness. I am not convinced that a person with “schizophrenia,” given the simple luxury of TIME, and a safe place with really good, caring, kind and intelligent people who know how to help without hurting her or him, would not heal better and more effectively than with any of all the so-called miracle anti-psychotic drugs our billion dollar medico-pharma industry has foisted on us. And I say this even though I still feel that Zyprexa was a “miracle drug” for me, once upon a time, (though also the miracle drug from hell…) and that it gave me a life I had never known before. I say this even though I take Abilify and Geodon and do more art and writing than I ever have…I say this even though I am better now than I have been in decades. I think the drugs are only fixing problems that the system largely caused. And had I had the chance, way back when, I wish I had had the chance to fight back without them…

If I could do anything to fix the mental health system, in Connecticut or this country or the world, one small thing, it would be to end ALL use of seclusion and restraints, period. Violence begets violence, in all cases. In ALL cases. In fact, get this, I would change the prison system as well, so that punishment qua punishment would be a thing of the past. Punishment is only a form of revenge and it does nothing to change a person or make them better. It only makes society feel better the way a bully feels better when he or she smacks a victim upside the head for smiling lopsidedly. I mean this. Sure, people can do very bad things. Yes. And certain people may be so damaged that they are too dangerous to safely release into “normal” society. (I maintain that this is largely because of how we, as a society, treated them, either at large or in prison.) But prisons and penitentiaries, especially in America, should be seen as an abomination on God’s green earth.

They say a society is judged by how it treats its dead? Well, I think we are judged by how we treat our prisoners, and if so, we will be judged poorly indeed for we treat our prisoners like hated animals…Not like cats and dogs that is for certain, nor even like horses…No, because we generally treat cats, dogs and horses well. Rather, we treat prisoners like vermin, like roaches…and then we blame them when they behave like the vermin they have become!

Have I gotten off the subject? Well, some mental institutions are largely prisons to their populations of involuntary or coerced patients, and most patients, involuntary or not, are cowed into doing as they are told for fear of the consequences. So to a degree the prison metaphor is valid. But if you have been restrained and secluded, brutally, and for hours upon hours, for many days, as I have been, the notion that you are a prisoner becomes more reasonable. That said, I will advance yet another idea: that bad behavior should be treated, not punished. Yes, I mean that. We should treat the person guilty of repeated criminal offenses as if he or she has a treatable behavioral disorder, and not punish them.

I know this will earn me some outrage. But think about it. What good does it do to punish a person repeatedly? Does it do anyone any good to torture that person with “the hole” or with repeated cell extractions and mace in the face? Clearly it doesn’t rehabilitate them or teach them the ways of kindness. It only makes them worse, and in our system an in-prison offense can add years to what started as a short sentence. So we create hardened criminals inside our prisons. I ask again, what good did it do?

But if instead we took that person, guilty of an offense and treated them as if they needed help — help learning how to behave better — and all that might entail, perhaps we might end up not only with someone ready to leave the institution at the end of the shorter stay, but someone ready to stay out afterwards! It only makes sense to treat everyone, including prisoners, with kindness and understanding and education, and if you don’t believe this, you should for one reason only: it would cost less money. (Of course, the owners of the private prisons don’t want you to know this, because they MAKE money on all the prisoners who keep coming back or who never get out, in fact there is a whole industry based on keeping as many people in prison, their private prisons, as possible…)

But I don’t believe in prisons either. I think the institution is a nightmare. You put bad people together with one another and what do you get but people learning how to behave worse together! It is a truly ridiculous idea. Analogous to the hospital, which is currently the worst and most dangerous place to go when you get ill (because that is where the most dangerous infections are and are often out of control). In the “old days” prisons were merely waiting stations. Penalties were sure and swift, and brutal. But no one waited for decades in a crowded prison with society pretending that it was humane. Now, we pretend it is..I dunno. Do we pretend anything, or just not care?

Do we care at all that we warehouse so many millions in dead-end lives that only get worse by the day, and then deprive them the more if they manage to leave prison eventually and not return? Oh, we have three strikes laws to put a person in prison for life, but no one gives a damn that there are three strikes against any person who actually earns his or her way OUT of prison. Nowhere to live, no job, no money, and no safety net whatsoever. (Unless you happen to be a former governor of Connecticut, and then you have it made in the shade.)

Enough for now.

Disability, Health, Health Care Reform

UNFIT FOR WORK? Or simply Forced to be Disabled?

May 6, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 1 Comment

NPR’S “UNFIT FOR WORK”

The startling rise of disability in America

By Chana Joffe-Walt

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/trends-with-benefits

In One Alabama County, Nearly 1 In 4 Working-Age Adults Is On Disability (click below to play audio)

https://phoebesparrowwagner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/20130322_atc_05.mp3

In One Alabama County, Nearly 1 In 4 Working-Age Adults Is On Disability

Expanded Definition Of Disability Created Million Dollar Opportunity For Lawyers

Moving People From Welfare To Disability Rolls Is A Profitable, Full-Time Job

Kids May Stay On Disability If Their Parents Rely On The Check

Americans On Disability Play An Increasingly Important Role In The Economy

Thanks to Donna for pointing out this story at NPR. You can get the written story by Chana Joffe-Walt if you prefer to read it at: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

If anyone feels moved to comment on this story or add to the discussion that I started yesterday under the video of Reshma’s recovery from schizophrenia, and Donna added to with her comments, please feel more than welcome to do so. If I get enough, I will create a new post out of them.

NOTA BENE: if you are a regular or even intermittent follower of Wagblog, and think that you have something to add here, and would like to contribute a post regularly or simply once in a while, please contact me. I am in the process of inviting contributors to Wagblog, but do not know everyone who might be interested in doing so. So if you are a human, and interested, let me know who you are. Send an introduction with your best writing as I cannot accept contributions I will have to edit to the point of rewriting…and umm, we have certain standards here, ahem, ahem, ahem. 8)

Art, Health, Schizophrenia

Sunshine Story of Schizophrenia Recovery…plus

May 5, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 7 Comments

When I saw at the end of this film, part four, before the depressing note that stated all that Indian law might not permit Reshma to do in her life, how she was making a living by painting, all I could think was, WOW! Go for it! At the very least, she is not being held back by the strictures of disability law and Medicare and Medicaid earning limits, or being forced into a permanent sick role because of same, simply in order to have a roof over her head and food to eat. No, she was lucky enough to have a family that both really and truly took care of her in her worst moments and fought for her in the best sense of the word, and also one that let her go when she needed to fly free. Most of us are not so lucky…alas. I think the support that she got all through her illness played an enormous role in her recovery, frankly. And I dunno how many of us get that sort of community or family support, but I wager that it is not many. I certainly did not. I wish I had, but it was very much to the contrary. Instead of support, I was abandoned entirely, both financially and emotionally. Left high and dry, to such an extent that people who met my parents after the break, never knew I existed, not for thirty-five to forty years. Some are only just learning of my existence now, as they meet me when I visit my mother. They didn’t even know or understand that all along Lynnie had a twin!

But I do not wish to dwell on that, except to say that things did not have to be as they were. And we do not have to live as second class rejects in society, except insofar as we accept that role. And take it on, along with the disability status and payments that we are told we should apply for at the first psychotic break. I disagree. If a person has a work history (and history is the single best predictor of the future, if anything can predict it) and has shown that he or she can hold a job, then why after a psychotic break should they be told they will never work again and that they should apply for social security disability? Disability signifies Permanent and total disability, that’s what it is for. You are not supposed to get better, and it’s meant to be “for good.” No, it is not impossible to get off SSDI and you can in fact earn your way off it. But how many people do? Not a single person I know who ever obtained SSDI payments ever got off it or ever even tried to do so. The best they did was earn just below the legal limits of what one can earn before they start counting against your disabled status. Which is to say, they worked, yes, but only a little, and only to the extent that it never threatened their standing as a disabled person.

What a crappy system. Someone a few months back when I was in the hospital asked me why I was so angry at the System, and why I counseled anyone under 50 not to go for disability…and this is why. Because it paralyzes a person into doing nothing with his or her life, it keeps them mired in permanent poverty, and it encourages lethargy and breeds depression and recurrent illness. I believe it does NOBODY any good. Frankly. True enough, I cannot say that I am not grateful as hell that I have had a monthly income for all my adult life, as I have never been able to work an 8-hour day regular job. But if, instead, there had been creative rehab or job counseling and creating, maybe someone would have discovered my artistic abilities earlier in my life and got me going, and using them earlier in a more productive and income-earning capacity.

I was never, and never claimed to be, unable to do anything at all. I simply could not follow a routine of any kind or go into an office or workplace from 9-5pm. Since that made me unemployable in their lights, I was “disabled” and put on the SSI and SSDI rolls. But in truth, while it guaranteed me an income, it also sidelined me for life, because I didn’t have to do anything to survive or even to get ahead. And in fact I was not allowed to get ahead or I would have lost the very disabled status that I now needed simply to qualify for housing and food. It was a terrible catch 22 situation that only perpetuated itself once I was caught in it. I could never get out of it once I accepted the first check…

And it only got worse when I moved into the cushiness of subsidized housing. Now, not only can I not move (it is HUD housing not Section 8 so it isn’t even portable) but I am “used” to a piddling rent of 1/3 of my piddling income. I have stopped knowing how to scrimp and save and live on pennies a day…because I do not have to. Everything is guaranteed here. Everything is safe. But I am suffocating, because I have no life, and no prospects for any change or growth or movement because at age 60 my life is at an end…I will live and die in these measly 2 rooms, living on SSDI and SSI, earning nothing, doing art and storing it away for nothing and no one…What good is that?

That, my friend who wanted to know why disability is such a bad deal, is why I counsel anyone who is not close to retirement not to go the disability route, not unless you want to do nothing and live in poverty for the rest of your life, and are content with a life of watching TV and a strict budget, using food-stamps and coupons. Because it will come down to that, that is, if you have a TV. And lucky you if you have a car and can afford to keep it on the road….If not, think about whether or not you can get rides, because the bus can be a drag when it is raining or snowing and you have a lot of groceries to carry. You better keep the car in tip top shape in any event, because you won’t be buying another anytime soon on disability from Social Security…I dunno about you, but no one I know gets much more than $1000.00/month from SSDI and usually we get hundreds of dollars less than that. One car repair bill can rip a monthly check to shreds.

I dunno what most wage-earning people think a life on disability is like, but it isn’t a cushy life of luxury, not at all. I haven’t bought or been able to buy new clothes in nearly ten years. (I wouldn’t want to anyway, because I like to buy used clothing and not generate new carbon, but do you really think I could afford on my SSDI check the price of any clothing except Walmart’s, that abomination of a store?) I cannot even afford to get food at Stop and Shop, let alone new clothing anywhere. I buy literally everything used, at GOodwill, or I barter or get things free through Freecycle. Or I do without. The only new purchases I make are art supplies, when I cannot get them at tag sales, or through other outlets. And I do not replace my erstwhile beloved pet Eemie, because I know I cannot afford a cat. You make choices in this world. If you choose to go on disability, I believe they should tell you precisely what sort of life you are choosing. Or give you options so that disability is only one of several equally feasible ones. It ought not be simply: go back to work at the same job, at the same level of stress, or go on disability. That is stupid, especially if one has been psychotic. But it also ought not be, You have been psychotic, and we are certain it will recur, so you will never be able to work again. That is double nonsense. NO ONE can predict the future, or tell a single soul that a psychosis will or will not recur. Only time will tell, and predicting a good prognosis has been shown to pay off with better outcomes than telling a patient that the future looks dire.

Okay, enough for now. I hope I haven’t been too oldy and moldy-sounding. I’m just very discouraged about my own limited and stagnating life. I do not feel as old as the system is making me behave. I could have a good life for the next two decades or more and maybe even a career. After all, Grandma Moses didn’t start painting till she was much older than my mere 60 years, and she had a long painting life ahead of her. No one told her she should just hide her head in the sand and wait to die. Or if they did, she ignored them and went ahead and painted and painted. I won’t give up on art, but I am frustrated and feel utterly stymied by a system that has clipped and cauterized my wings.

Finally, this is the large Turtle that I owe Tim, as it looks at present. I am going at it very slowly but surely.

Health, Life, Photography

Too Many Anniversaries and Too Many Memories

April 21, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 3 Comments

One of the anniversaries is my little Eemie’s death last year, at age 17. She was only about 14 in this picture, maybe a bit younger. But she never looked much different from this. Even the day she was “put to sleep” the vet thought she was a very sick 5 year old and not the elderly kitty she really was…She was my all time favorite cat, but i won’t try to replace her, or get another. I cannot do it, and will not try…

This photo is of Joe Cornelio and me in 2006, just after he was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, which would finally kill him, or complications thereof, two years ago today. I stil miss him dearly.

At the height of Joe’s illness, when he was completely paralyzed except for his eyes, and could not speak or move, he was able to use an eye gaze computer known as ERICA to speak with. ERICA registered the glint in his eye and allowed him to spell out each word by looking at the letters of the alphabet, which you can see on the screen in the photo, and then he could ask the computer to speak what he spelled by looking at the “speak” function. It was laborious, yes, but it worked well enough that we could actually have skpye converations by phone when I could not get in to see him in person, and I would set up my computer by my paintings and do some artwork by “videophone” so that he could watch me work while we talked.

This is Joe — weird how I never saw the changes in him in life but always saw him as “my old Joe” except in these photos — using the ERICA.

Pam and Joe, smiling at one another…

The other anniversary of this month is that three years ago, I was sadistically restrained (the first of several such incidents) on April 24th at Middlesex Hospital, absolutely traumatized by it and have not forgotten it yet. I tried to get redress, and we had JCAHO go in to investigate, but it did no good, because the Joint Commission largely doesn’t care about how often general hospitals use restraints and seclusion on patients in psychiatric units and doesn’t even track their usage. Try and find out about it. It is impossible. They track use of R and S in psychiatric hospitals, pure and simple, that is to say, State Hospitals, and private psychiatric hospitals, but not in general hospital units. So what good is that, I ask you? Most people who have severe psychiatric illnesses (chronic) are not hospitalized in this day and age in private hospitals but on psychiatric units in general hospitals, where the treatment can be tantamount, as I know all too well, to what the UN in March called torture.

Finally I was going to upload a bunch of photos of my tiny apartment but in one fell swoop I erased everything in my iPhoto library, including all the new photos. and, well, that was that! All I have left is whatever was saved in the ipad Photostream, which was precious little when it comes down to it. Stupid me!!

So today is the anniversary of Joe’s terrible death and I am trying not to think about that and all the other anniversaries coming up…It looks like it is going to be a bright sunny day here in Connecticut so I will try to take a walk and maybe do some artwork if I can get up the energy to do so…

Art, Health, Mental Health

April Blahs?

April 18, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 3 Comments

I realize that doesn’t exactly illustrate the “blahs” but it represents the sum total of all the artwork I have done since I got out of the hospital in mid march…and I did it in one night, on a whim, as a gift to the wonderful social worker who just left a position in our building for the directorship of the community center in town. (I miss her terribly but she needed to move on…)

Anyhow, the point of my post title is mostly to explain why I have not written all month: I have not felt much like doing anything at all. I haven’t done any other art or writing, and all I managed to accomplish was to clean up my apartment, which only serves to paralyze me the more.

I will write more eventually, but for now I just wanted to assure you all that I am okay, just not feeling up to much and so not writing. When I am back up to snuff I will write more. (I might even film a tour through my apartment in desperation, just for something to post here, that is how bad things are…i am scraping the bottom of the barrel!) In the meantime, please don’t give up on me. I’ll be back…SOON.

Health, Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia Video: UVA and DIVIDED MINDS

March 30, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 1 Comment

This video was made during our “book tour” of 2005-6 after DIVIDED MINDS: Twin Sisters and Their Journey through Schizophrenia was published. I had not seen it for several years when my good friend, the poet Mizzy Hanley, located it by chance on YouTube. I am surprised, frankly by how eloquent my speech is, though I cringe, today, at some of the things I said. How differently my talks today are! In any event, much of it still holds true, though now I would couch things in somewhat different language, and might not so readily give the voice of certainty to such statements as “I suffer from schizophrenia.” Nevertheless, the comments underneath are certainly encouraging, and if it helps anyone for us to have said what we did then good.

Art, Health, Mental Health, Mental Illness

Donna’s Story and More Art

March 29, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 1 Comment

This picture is Tim’s sister in law, Dawn, whom I drew at Christmas, in 2012. It took me about an hour. The elephant below is remarkable only in that it is my first painting, in oils, that I have ever done. And for that matter, almost literally the first time I have painted anything, except for a few portraits. I usually draw, in pencil or oil pastel. I have painted some acrylic portraits, in the past, but none recently, as I told myself I’d better learn to draw a few years back “before I go any further with painting.” I never ever did anything with oils at all. So if I achieved any success with the elephant it was completely by chance. I find oils very difficult. I do not know how to work with them, nor how to manipulate a brush or the colors, or how to do anything at all with paint. So this is an interesting journey, and transition, if transition it be. I do not know what will happen. Whether I will switch to oils completely, or simply use them desultorily…We will see. I am now working on another elephant painting, just for practice. Both of them started with the use of oil pigment sticks, which enable a sort-of drawing technique, very bluntly, and ended forcing me to paint, using either my fingers or real brushes. So it seems I am being led willy nilly to the brush and paint pot!

This last picture started as a doodle that I did of another patient at the Institute this winter, but I liked it so much (and the patient hated it!) that I finished it by changing her to make her unrecognizable. I would have given it to her otherwise, but she didn’t want it, so I said nothing more. But I gave it to my friend Bill, who loved it. In the mean time, I figured I would finish it as I wanted to and did. I love it myself, and would gladly have kept it, had no one else expressed interest in it. But once I knew Bill loved it, well, I knew I wanted him to have it. And it meant I took extra care finishing it when I did. I never really knew much about this patient’s story, nor about anyone else there. Nor did they learn much about me. I do not believe they ever knew what the staff was doing to me that last ten days, when they kept putting me into four point restraints. That was the point: I was in seclusion so no one had any idea I even existed by that time. No wonder I ended by screaming non stop and blood curdlingly that last night when they restrained me the second time for no reason. Everyone who had known of me had left by then. All the patients were new, and no one even knew I was there. I was aware of it, and I knew that if I didn’t scream, they would simply four point me for another 8-10 hours and get away with it…Well, enough of that. This patient did not mind my drawing her, for the few hours that I was allowed to be in the general population. In fact, I think she was flattered that I wanted to. Unfortunately, she was not pleased by the results of my efforts when she saw the drawing…and made her feelings clear when she saw the drawing.

___________________________

One of my loyal blog readers, Donna, wrote a long comment the other day, and I asked if I could post it on the blog proper, as I felt it was important for her story to be heard. She said Yes, and so I am reprinting it here.

“I have many personal arguments against taking antipsychotics. First of all, I endured schizophrenia since I was about 10 yrs old without anyone knowing anything about it. Without being diagnosed, that is. Yes, I had been thought of as weird and even retarded by my peers, mostly because of social anxiety and being an extreme introvert that were a result of or in addition to the schizophrenia. But my sanity hung on the fact that I was creative and could physically exercise to the point of exhaustion. I think that exercise (running) was the most potent antipsychotic I have ever experienced, probably due to the release of endorphins and the subjugation of ongoing anxiety for a few hours. The hallucinations never really bothered me because I couldn’t remember being without them. Nevertheless, once doctors knew of the hallucinations, that became their excuse for medicating the hell out of me. And subsequently robbing me of my creativity and the ability to exercise. You can see where this is going.

For one thing there was exercise equipment in the hospitals I began to frequent (after starting on antipsychotics, of course.) but I could not use it without a doctor’s prescription, which was never forthcoming. I guess they didn’t put much stock in exercise. It can’t be patented and marketed and sold as a pharmaceutical. Once I began taking Zyprexa, the option was moot anyway, because I gained so much weight there was no possible way to run anymore.

Although I had schizophrenia, as I said, for many years before diagnosis and treatment, I was always able to read voraciously, retain what I had read, and use that as grist for the mill of creativity. Once I started taking mood stabilizers (which, btw, never stabilized my mood) like Lithium, Depakote, and Tegretol, I began to REALLY suffer mentally. Yes, I could tolerate hallucinations, but what I found intolerable was the side effect of being unable to be intellectually stimulated. I was laid low. I could no longer read and understand the combination of words. I couldn’t sit through a movie because I could no longer process the sensory input — what I saw and heard became separate entities rather than combining seamlessly into a meaningful whole. It was a frightening, assaultive experience. Even music ceased to be soothing. All I wanted to do, and practically all I DID do was to lie in bed just trying to think one clear thought. It couldn’t be done.

After the antidepressant and mood stabilizer failure, ECT was tried. Again, that only made things worse. Then came antipsychotics. The first one I took, Trilafon, was a nightmare. Kind of like what you said, Pam — I then had an inability to tell dreams from reality. The scary kind of hallucinations started, like seeing a gargoyle when I looked in the mirror. And the parade of multiple antipsychotics drifted ineffectually past the window of my consciousness. Finally, when I was given Zyprexa, I “awakened.” Would I have needed awakening if I had never started taking these medications in the first place? I had my doubts. But on Zyprexa, I could read again. I could tolerate movies. I could write creatively. But the weight gain that started with Lithium began to really pile on with Zyrpexa. My weight doubled within a few months. I had always been extremely weight and diet-conscious. With Zyprexa came mind-numbing sedation and a tremendous 24×7 appetite. So I was eating and sleeping, but I was also reading and writing.

Talk about the horns of a dilemma — I could take the medication and regain my ability to think and create but be a slave to the fork, spoon and pillow, or I could stop taking medication and keep my appetite and weight within normal limits and be insane. What I’m wondering now is whether any of this would have been a problem if I had never taken the medications to begin with. I became much more insane after being medicated and stopping the medication. To my way of thinking, medication had stopped the positive symptoms but had made me especially prone to relapse every time I tried to ease back on it. And the hallucinations had never been much of a problem — not nearly the problem of weight gain and intellectual poverty. Zyprexa did at least give me back a portion of my mind. Medication giveth and medication taketh away; blessed be thy name pharmaceuticals.

SInce then, I have tried just about ever atypical on the market, with the exception of Invega, hoping to find the “right” medicaiton. They were all promising at first, but each with an array of intolerable side effects. Anxiety. Hypoglygcemia. Hypothyroidism. Akathisia. Pruritis. Mania. Severe insomnia. And for a long time, I could return (somewhat relieved) to Zyprexa and what had become my standard of recovery — stabilization and the ability to think and sleep again.

Now, however, I refuse to take the previous 40mg of Zyprexa. My psychiatrist seems to believe the higher the dose, the more effective the medication. I have weaned myself down to 2.5mg which is enough to keep me out of the hospital but apparently not enough to keep my appetite so revved up. It does not allow me to lose all this weight, no, but at least I am no longer gaining. I am writing again. And reading. The problem is, this dose of Zyprexa does not solve the problems of anxiety and insomnia, which are pure torture. So I take the minimum dose for several days, then double that for a couple of nights in order to sleep, then back again. I used to just stop taking the Zyprexa completely because the weight gain frustrated me so much. The stigma of mental illness is bad enough without the stigma of obesity. Schizophrenia is bad enough without metabolic syndrome or diabetes.

The real kicker, to me, is that yes I was having problems before I ever started on the psychiatric medication rollercoaster. I had some psychosis, depression, hypomania. I heard voices once in a while. I had a roster of impossible people renting space in my head. But I lived a close-to-normal existence from all outward appearances. I could hold down a stressful job. I managed to keep a marriage together. I was winning regional poetry contests in my spare time. I had my own home. But it was not until I began taking all of these medications that it all went to hell. And now, from what I’ve read and what I have experienced, my body can no longer tolerate being without the medications. Life is worse off of them now than on them. I have to take Zyprexa or go back to the hospital. I have to take it or I may end up living on the streets. I have to take it or risk killing myself. My doctor says oh, but the medication has SAVED you from these horrors. But am I where I am today — on SSDI, unable to work, a slave to my fat-bound body — because of antipsychotics and antidepressants? Or am I able to be independent, sane, and creative again because of them. Or both? Somehow, something doesn’t seem right.

Art, Health, Schizophrenia

Art from Yale Psychiatric Hospital #3

March 27, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner Leave a comment

This was the third picture I did at Yale. During the three weeks I was there, I often had a difficult time when I heard another patient yelling or getting angry. At one point, a young woman (younger than I at any rate) did a fair amount of screaming and complaining. And I heard a lot of noise that I thought portended or suggested violence was happening. I became very scared, terrified in fact, not because I thought I would be hurt, or that she would somehow hurt me. I am never ever afraid of other patients. My only fear at any time, aside from fear of the staff behavior towards me, is fear that another patient will be hurt or traumatized by staff use of seclusion or restraints or other violence on them.

Christine Simpson, the LCSW assigned to me on my team, recognized that I was panicking, and at least three times that day sought me out and just sat with me, talking to reassure me both that I was fine and that the other woman was fine, whatever was going on. She even came back before she went home to check on me and make sure I was okay before leaving, well after 5pm. I don’t think I ever thanked her enough for her support in the other posts, so I hope this does so. She was wonderful and I think she went out of her way to make sure I was not only “just okay” but that everything was as good as it could possibly be.

I am so profoundly grateful and remain astonished, both, that YNHPH has a philosophy of patient-centered care, of dignity and respect for the person, and also practices it so well that it doesn’t need to preach anything to the patient at all. You know, I believe the Washington Square 2 unit “advertises” itself online using the words Dignity and Respect, but I did not know this before I wrote my first blog post about yale or went there. I simply understood it from the way they treated me and everyone else. It was also perfectly obvious to everyone who visited me there.

I have donated picture #2, the one with the red bird of fear (“oiseau de peur”), to Yale Psychiatric Hospital, because of Chris Simpson and Dr Milstein and everyone else on the team and all the aides and counselors on the unit who work so well together. A huge thank you, to all of you.

Brain, Health, Medication, Mental Health, Schizophrenia, Uncategorized

Schizophrenia Medication: Should I or Shouldn’t I?

March 24, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 3 Comments

This is from a 2011 entry on my About Schizophrenia blog. However I have changed it and updated and added to it, so I thought I would post it here. Dunno how many of my wordpress readers might not have seen the first version at all. I have also added a discussion of Xyrem, my sleep medication to the “mix” as I consider it a “minor miracle” that has been underreported and never before used.

Okay, I admit it, I have had my conflicts surrounding schizophrenia and the issue of medication — whether to take it, when to take it and what, if anything, I will take. In fact, I admit that this remains an issue, though less of one so long as there is a medication that I find inoffensive. But more on that later. First let me address the problem of that conflict itself.

In the “old days,” which is to say, during the 1980’s and early 90’s, I was treated with the so-called “typical” neuroleptics like low-potency Thorazine and Mellaril (in doses as high as 1500mg which left me with an eye problem known as chorioretinopathy, which activated once and could reactivate at any time and potentially lead to blindness…). I was later treated with high potency, lower dose drugs like Haldol, Trilafon, and Prolixin, either orally or by long-lasting depot injection. Although I was compliant with these meds for a while, I eventually found them so troublesome that while hospital doctors insisted they “helped” me, more often than not I would take them in order to be released from the hospital, only to stop them again.

This became a pattern that led, familiarly, to what was called the revolving door in and out of psychiatric units. While I understood this only vaguely, I found the dulling side effects, not to mention the physical discomfort of these medications so terrible that even if not taking them meant yet another hospital stay, nevertheless I often refused — in fact I could not bear to take them despite the psychosis that resulted. Had anyone bothered to ask me why, I would have told them that the drugs’ side effects were simply worse than the illness; they were hell and there were no two ways about it.

All the hospital staff and outpatient doctors and nurses believed that no one could possibly wish to choose “madness” over mere drug side effects, but I was someone who frankly preferred the former to the agony of the latter.

Now, while I speak as if I knew I was psychotic, that is not altogether true. All I knew was that I was being hospitalized a great many times, that I had been told that if I took the pills I was given, I would be able to stay out. I did not at the time believe that I had any illness at all, and did not for a very long time believe it. However, what I did want was to avoid the often brutal treatment of various hospitals, and their use of four-point restraints, sometimes for days at a time, spread-eagled tied to the corners of the bed, in the 90’s , and that was what sometimes persuaded me to take them, not the understanding or agreement that I was ill.

But surely I was not alone in feeling that the side effects of the meds were worse than the consequences of not taking them. There would not be so many people with schizophrenia who like me refused them, if so. Whether I believed I was ill and needed to take medication or not, it hardly matters when the pills I was given caused unbearable pain, or so deadened me, I felt, that my life was scarcely worth living…

I know those meds in particular– the older drugs both lower potency and higher potency, at almost any dose, caused me physical side effects and physical suffering. That alone was enough to make me ambivalent about taking them. What I never knew, and still do not really know for certain, was whether the drugs themselves emotionally deadened me, or whether what I came eventually to appreciate might in fact have been illness after all was the cause of my feeling deadened. Did I lack enthusiasm and passion because of the illness or because of the medication side effects?

Through the early 90s, I was on Prolixin as the least distasteful anti-psychotic, and having been more or less forced to take the long-lasting depot medication, I could not “stop” taking it, not once my weekly injection had been given. Then finally, Connecticut’s Medicaid program started paying for Clozaril, and I was among the first people in the state to try it. All went well at first, and I seemed to be off to a good start. But unfortunately, once discharged to home, “all hell broke loose” with devastating side effects that were if anything worse than anything I had experienced on Prolixin or any other older neuroleptic. This may have been unusual, I do not know, but I had horrendous and immediate side effects: sensations of impending doom that made me afraid of falling asleep; then an inability to swallow even my own saliva; a kind of uncontrollable jerking, seizure-like, while I was conscious; and when I was awakened — nearly forcibly — in the morning, I experienced an unbearable sedation that took hours to wear off…

I gave the drug several trials, but I was not disappointed when I developed a very low white cell count and was no longer permitted to take it. After that, it was back to Prolixin, and back to what had never really lifted, not even with the so-called awakening miracle drug of Clozaril: the deadened feeling. I felt hopeless, as if nothing would ever really work better for me, but then again, why should it when I didn’t really suffer from an illness like schizophrenia to begin with?

My therapist, the one who had tried me on Clozaril so many times, left her practice, and I was shunted to a nurse-therapist at the Clinic, one who took an immediate disliking to me. I felt a similar antipathy for her and so with no love lost between us, it was a huge surprise to me when, after she gruffly suggested I try this new drug, called Zyprexa, that I woke up only a few days later feeling, well, not only awake and better, but awakened. Awakened, alive, even reborn. I could read, I could remember what I read, I could study and I felt enthusiastic about it all in a way that before then I could only dream of.

Oh, I knew that I wanted to feel that way, but it had literally only been a dream or a wish before then. I had been vaguely hungry for this, but until I took Zyprexa, it seemed that I had been completely unable to grasp or fulfill my wish to do any of it. On the drug, I could pay attention and concentrate for longer than I had in decades, and learn things and retain what I learned. I felt that I had a whole lifetime to make up for, and started to make up for lost time. What is more, I was so confident in my ability to read and study now that I had found a drug that helped me, it seemed entirely possible to do so.

Why do I tell you this? Because while Zyprexa was the real miracle drug, a medication that did not so much give me back my life as give me a life I truly never had, it was, as I may have said before, also the side effect drug from hell. As I would soon discover, my weight started to increase almost from the first week, and it kept going up and up, despite my longstanding history of strict weight control and a vegetarian diet. Also, it is a very sedating drug, so that I had to fight off sleepiness that added exponentially to the sleepiness that my narcolepsy had caused for years.

Luckily my psychiatrist soon thereafter was also a sleep specialist; she had no problem treating this with the appropriate drug, Ritalin, and so it was not the problem it might have been, but the weight issue was, and is in fact, one of the reasons I have on-going conflicts over taking that particular medication.

Side effects of any sort remain 1) the major reason I will not take a given medication, and 2) the major reason I do take the medications that I take. If this surprises you, let me explain. First the latter: Of my present medication regimen, the salient ones for this discussion are Abilify and Geodon, and I take them not for the reasons my psychiatrist may have prescribed them, but for their “side effects,” at least as I perceive them. For instance, it was only once I started taking Abilify combined with Geodon — I could never tolerate Abilify by itself — that I found myself able to do art, and to write so fluently and so abundantly as to be unable to stop once I start. In fact, I call these two my output combo, medications that make my creative productivity enormous, whereas Zyprexa is just as literally my input drug, my intake drug, insofar as I can read and absorb information, and also eat, eat, eat.

For the same reason, though, I will not take Zyprexa because of its intensely dispiriting side effect of causing obesity and with it diabetes and and the concomitant conditions that go along with that. I wish I could take it: I miss reading terribly, miss the heady feeling of intellectual confidence and the ability to learn and remember and such.

Unfortunately, despite my early paean of praise for Latuda, I have to admit I have reconsidered it, as I found that though I cleaned my apartment regularly, I slowed down on my drawing and writing, and at the same time had not found myself interested in reading, nor even in watching my usual documentaries…It felt like a kind of straitjacket. I had weathered the psychotic crisis, but after that its usefulness seemed to be limited, and limiting. I agreed to take it, if necessary, in a crisis, but aside from then, I did not find that it helped beyond attenuating the worst symptoms.

Actually, in the two years since i took Latuda that one time, i have come to believe that the drug did little or nothing for me. I think that i simply managed to pull myself out of a bad time by myself… It can be done, and most especially when i am not facing that critical six month vulnerability time. And this was in fact in between the six months – during a period of relative strength. So my sense is that the latuda functioned mostly as a placebo, and that i myself pulled myself out of trouble.

In truth, given my druthers, in a crisis and forced to choose between one hell versus another, I might prefer Zyprexa over Latuda, since the benefit of the first outweighs the complete lack of any positive benefit from the latter. Which is to say, even if both happened to treat psychosis, only the Zyprexa has any positive side effect in addition to that. Latuda only has the negative side effect of strait jacketing me in the process.

The next two paragraphs were in my original post…i keep them as is here only so that i can follow up with a “but now” discussion of how things have changed:

One other “benefit” from taking Zyprexa, discovered within just the first week or so, was the realization that a medication made a difference, a huge difference. The conclusion I began to draw from this was not so sudden, and it was reluctant, but eventually I had to decide that perhaps, if a medication made such a radical difference, and a medication, Zyprexa, supposedly “treated an illness called schizophrenia” perhaps, whether it was schizophrenia or not, I did have some illness. Surely, if this medication, which did not help most people, made such an enormous difference for me, it must mean something…

I was reluctant for a long time to answer that further, and still cannot say a lot more without cringing. But if indeed there is a real entity, a real singular illness of schizophrenia, as opposed to a syndrome, and if Zyprexa really is a treatment for it, an effective and appropriate one, then god bless it, I will accept the diagnosis. I might still refuse to take the drug, but I would accept that I have the illness and continue to say that Zyprexa was the best miracle drug from hell I ever took!

But now i still cringe and cannot use the word schizophrenia without wanting to say, Psychiatry is an art of making an opinion…and even more often of making judgments. Two worse things to base a field of so-called medicine on i cannot conceive. Yes, Yale diagnosed schizophrenia, and did NOT decide to diagnose a personality disorder on top of it, which was, truth to tell, a huge relief*, because I KNOW that it is only the abusive hospitals that do that, and they diagnose an Axis II disorder largely to blame the victim, blame me for PTSD behavior that they induced! You simply cannot seclude or 4-point a vulnerable patient, viciously and brutally, and expect that person not to respond with traumatized behavior, which is predictably unpredictable…But can be described and has been.

In any event #1 how interesting that Hartford Hospital, in the 90s, when it was independent of the IOL, and often kept me for months, never saw any personality disorder in me when Sharon Hinton was head nurse…ONLY “schizophrenia, chronic” as I would read upside down on my admission papers. Personality disorders are lifelong and chronic. You do not suddenly develop them midstream in your life. It makes NO sense that Hartford Hospital as the IOL would now suddenly “detect” an axis II borderline disorder that they never did before. No, in fact, what happened was they traumatized me, and then blamed the victim for TRAUMA behavior…Or actually, for no behavior at all, since I never even resisted the restraints except once. And then the last night when I screamed bloody murder. And I did not even know that I would be released the next day. That was purely chance…and good luck.

In any event #2, I also took Zyprexa at Yale Psychiatric Hospital in February and March, and this disturbs me, because while I did some reading, my art output was tremendous as well. And Zyprexa was supposed to be only an INput drug. Of course, I gained ten pounds in two weeks…Worse, ever since I left, and got back on the Abilify and Geodon, and am taking NO Zyprexa, I haven’t done a thing, no poetry, no artwork of any sort. Not even a single trading card.

I do NOT believe in schizophrenia, not for me at any rate. I do not think I even need Zyprexa. But on the other hand, I wish I could take it, because I feel so much better when I take it and I do not know why. I mean, even when I am not fighting voices, I feel better on it. WHy is that? That doesn’t make sense…You should only take Zyprexa for symptoms that’s what I have always felt. Once the voices go away, forget it. Yet, yet, yet…I know my brain works better on it, and always has. It doesn’t seem fair. (Not that life is or should be fair…But I mean, really, my single most hated drug in the arsenal, and it is the one that works best and not only that it works really well…???) CRAP! My biggest fear is gaining weight. I understand how petty that is, and I should be bigger than that spiritually, but I am not. I simply cannot do it.

So there I am, and that’s the picture. Now you know how two-faced and hypocritical I am about medication. I tell people to take theirs. Or not. And I wont even take the one medicine that I know helps me, because it will make me fat. That is really the only reason I do not take it. The only reason. It is that petty, and that simple. But that impossible.

One additional drug that I take now, in addition to Abilify and Geodon and Ritalin is Xyrem, sodium oxybate, an anti-narcolepsy sleep drug, that helps me get delta sleep at night, slow wave deep sleep and to need less Ritalin during the day. As far as I am concerned the less Ritalin I take the better. I have never liked needing it or taking it, but I have always needed it just to stay awake during the course of a normal day. I haven’t gotten through a single day without several periods of sleepiness since college, when I would fall asleep at any time of the day, very unexpectedly.

Now that I take Xyrem at night, twice a night, though, I need fewer pills for alertness during the day, which is great. I also find that my appetite is vastly reduced, which might help with the Zyprexa, except that I could not take the two drugs together, as they are both very sedating and cannot be combined…What it does do is prevent any confusion of dreams with reality. I simply do not remember any dreams, and do not confuse the two any longer, I do not know why. I am not sure if this effect would hold true for all or if it is just for me. It is possible that dreams would increase for others. I only know that I used to have a huge problem, before the Xyrem and the other meds, with nightmares every night and being unable to tell dreams from reality…but now that I no longer dream I simply have neither problem at all.
——————————————————————–

*A huge relief: When I write that I am glad and relieved they did not Dx a borderline personality disorder, I must tell you that I am aware that in the hospitals where I have been abused, they dx such Axis II disorders as a way of communicating to all the staff that a patient is “manipulative and devious” and basically you cannot trust anything they say. I KNOW this to be the case because I have two psychiatrist siblings so I have gotten the lowdown, ie the truth about such terms in hospital REALLY mean. And to be called “A Borderline” in a hospital, is not a good thing. It is shorthand for being called a Royal Pain in the Ass.

Now, having Borderline Personality Disorder is something different from being called A Borderline…And having the disorder means you are suffering a great deal ALL the time. But in the hospital, when they claim to “suddenly detect” borderline personality, it is something wrong with the hospital, not the personality. And my point is that when they have brutally secluded or restrained a patient, that is NOT the time to suddenly be detecting anything except iatrogenic PTSD…

Art, Health

Art Trading Cards at Yale Psychiatric Hospital…plus

March 20, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner Leave a comment

These are the trading cards I made at YNHPH…each is only 2.5 by 3.5 inches. I think most need little explanation. I originally offered them for sale, though I usually just give them away, until i read about the new tradition (started in 1996) of artists actually trading these cards and never selling them. So if anyone would like to send me a card they made, in the proper proportions, 2.5 by 3.5 inches, i will send you one back. No requests for any specific cards please, as many are already spoken for or given away. You can ask for a specific subject but no guarantees. B) That is an emoticon for me in glasses with a smile!

I also wanted to repost these two pictures for staff members who wanted to see them…finished. The first has been renamed and is now bound with light brown origami paper on the edges so it is finished and no longer rough.

Reflection on Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, it is approximately 5 feet by 4 feet.

The other used to be called In Her Hands, and still is, but is also clearly a version of the well-known tradition of Black Madonnas as I ought to have recognized all along. but was too dense in doing my own thing to see…

2.5′ by 3′ approximately, with built on papier mache frame (work is made of papier mache, collage, painting and the kitchen sink…)

BLACK MADONNA

Art, Health, Hospital, Psychiatry

At Yale Psychiatric Hospital: Respect, Dignity and Kindness

March 19, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 9 Comments

Large picture I did at Yale Psychiatric Hospital, the second one.

The pictures below are actually only 2.5 by 3.5 inches and are artist trading cards. I drew many of them, especially when I did not feel like working on my larger drawings at the hospital.

In mid-February, after a week out of the hospital (and you can read about my hospitalization by scrolling down to the previous post, but, in brief, this had been at Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living, during which I was kept in seclusion for the larger part of a four week stay and put multiple times, sometimes twice a day for many hours in 4-point restraints. Why? Why? Although I ONCE threw a chair, they told me it was for “not following directions.” To add insult to injury, every incident in which they restrained me was accompanied by three injections in the buttocks of Haldol, Ativan and Benadryl, despite my policy of passive, completely non-violent non-resistance.)

In any event, in mid-February, after I had spent just a week at home, I became acutely psychotic again, and in consultation with the only doctor I trust, a friend drove me to Yale New Haven Hospital’s emergency department. There, after a very long and arduous wait — alas, I cannot say much that is good about Yale’s ED. It felt like the psych/alcohol patients – and there were no discriminations made between the drunks and anyone else — were lined up on their beds in the hallway like buses at a terminal for what felt like “miles.” In fact at one point there was probably a line 15 gurneys long snaking around the corner until I could not see the end.

I was there for two and a half days, maybe longer, I do not recall. In fact, I remember nothing about my ED stay after I was finally “admitted” to the actual psych portion of the ED, as opposed to the hallway. I believe I was finally given medications, but also that I was no longer permitted access to my artist crayons, which meant that I only wanted to sleep and likely did until I was admitted to the Yale Psychiatric Hospital, a street or two away.

To say that my experience at YPH was an order of magnitude better than it had been at the IOL or even at Natchaug Hospital is truly not to give YPH enough credit. I scarcely want to mention the other two hospitals in the same sentence, that is how different Yale is and I say that even though I once considered Natchaug my “gold standard.” No longer, no longer. I think Natchaug was decent once, but only because of the civilizing and humanizing effects that the director of nursing, Sharon Hinton, APRN, had on the hospital. Once she left, the whole place went to pot, as evidenced by my experience during the last two stays, which went progressively from bad to terrible without her there…literally without her protection I was brutalized by a dehumanizing medical staff that had been left to do whatever it wanted to on its own, to hell with the consequences to the patients.

Be that as it may, and we know that the Institute was never humane, Yale took me completely by surprise. I was hard to surprise, and hard to convince that they were for real in their gentleness and kindness, let alone in their determination to treat me and everyone there with respect and dignity. I was certain that they would prove me right, that SOMEONE would be put into restraints, that someone would be violent enough to push their buttons and get 4-pointed. But it never happened, not in the entire three weeks I was there. Not even when a patient threw a punch or a push. Not even when a patient screamed bloody murder or used foul language. Nothing that earned me or anyone else seclusion or restraints elsewhere even came close to pushing the staff’s anger buttons at Yale. Instead, they persisted in using persuasion and gentleness and kindness…and if anyone lost it, if anyone became angry and could not keep it together, so far as I could tell, that staff member took themselves away from the situation to cool down, and did not take it out on the patient.

The most amazing things happened. No one forced me to do anything. Not even to take medication. I agreed to take it, after some discussion with the doctor and social worker…but when I evinced some doubt about the side effects, instead of pooh-poohing them as the doctor had at the Institute, Dr Milstein agreed with me, saying that the Zyprexa definitely increased appetite, and that it was not imaginary or something that was in my control, the way Dr Banerjee did at IOL. Instead, he and the other team members not only agreed to help me control what I ate, but went out of their way – I believe they actually went “Stop and Shopping” – to provide me with my own private supply of raw vegetable snacks in the staff refrigerator to eat at any time of the day…just so I wouldn’t have to be tempted by the hospital snacks of Doritos etc.

Dr Milstein asked me not to worry about what they did or did not do “extra” for me, and I tried not to. But when two large bottles of brand name Diet Coke kept appearing for me every day, and when the resident was sent to buy me batteries for my personal pencil sharpener (with a grinder not a blade), just so I could continue to do my artwork and not rely on the staff to sharpen my pencils in the back, well, I knew 1) they were truly watching out for me and treating me with TLC, or what certainly felt like extraordinary care, and 2) they were in fact spending “extra” money, if not indeed their own money just to supply these special needs…All of which – or NONE of which would have mattered at any other hospital or to any other staff. If I had no pencil sharpener, who would care? If I had to eat hospital food, who gave a damn? Dr Banerjee basically said it was MY fault and only my fault if I gained weight on Zyprexa, that none of his other patients, the good ones, ever did. But at Yale, all these matters were important to me, and so they were important to Dr Milstein to to Chris Simpson the social worker and to the other team members. Not just as a matter of words, but to be taken care of so I could both take the Zyprexa and do art.

Just as important, Dr Milstein took at least a half hour every single day, and I think sometimes it was more than that, simply to talk with me and listen to what I had to say. Even if it was only to rant about how badly I had been treated at the IOL. He repeatedly told me that he just wanted me to learn to trust again, to believe that not everyone was against me or would hurt me…And if I did not learn that precisely, I did eventually come to believe that the staff at Yale were trustworthy and kind and meant what they said about their NO restraints and NO seclusion policy, for everyone. I may had still had frissons whenever someone screamed or threw a fit, panicking, believing that 4-point restraints were finally going to be resorted to. PTSD is not that easily overcome after all. But I grew more trusting, and by the time of discharge, I was able to thank them all for everything, to know that they had gone out of their way for me, and not feel too guilty.

I did a fair amount of art while I was at Yale Psychiatric Hospital. I will post more in the coming days.

Art, Health, Mental Health, Mental Illness

Update: All is well

March 15, 2013 Phoebe Sparrow Wagner 4 Comments

This is the drawing I finally finished that I did at the horrible torture chamber of the Institute of Living. There are all sorts of hidden things in it that you must rotate it to see fully…

Hi Everyone, Sorry to worry Lady Quixote and anyone else. I was in Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital for last several weeks. A much better stay by far of which I have much to say. But I am recuperating for the next few days as I just got home a couple of days ago. Forgive me for being so out of touch, but even making a long distance phone call was nearly impossible from there…Luckily, the staff and doctor treated me and everyone with immense kindness, gentleness and dignity and respect, so I got what I needed, which was some weeks of healing. Praise whatever force of the universe you believe in for that! More to come as soon as I am able to write more and many thanks for all your concern and your patience.

Pam

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Tag Archives: Health

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At Yale Psychiatric Hospital: Respect, Dignity and Kindness

Update: All is well

"While I breathe, I hope"

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NPR’S “UNFIT FOR WORK”

In One Alabama County, Nearly 1 In 4 Working-Age Adults Is On Disability (click below to play audio)

In One Alabama County, Nearly 1 In 4 Working-Age Adults Is On Disability

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"While I breathe, I hope"