I go to a support group every week, have been for years, same people, same problems. I am struck by how entrenched we are with the particularities of our mental illnesses. I feel like we are unable to outthink the issues that consume us every week, and every week is another variation along the same theme. 

Of course, there are varying degrees of mental illness, I have got mine and they have theirs. What I have come to appreciate is that our problems are deeply personal and we feel mental pain in a profoundly unique way. No one can quite feel like we do. At the same time, we commune with each other and we try and try to establish bridges between our private paths and pains. 

No one knows what it feels like to operate in the same reality as you, and when we use words to explain it, it never quite translates. At the same time, when you do strike a chord, when someone’s experience does seem to match your own, even if only partially, it is felt as total relief, consolation, and even joyful connection. The struggle is personal, but there are other people climbing the same mountain.

I can say without exaggeration that I have suffered from mental illness. I know there are people who have suffered in their own way, and ‘suffer’ is a valid way of talking about their battles one after the next. I do know that there is not a cure for it, it is a lifelong battle, and it keeps coming back, at least for me it does. And there are so many ways that I experience it, it’s never the same. If it was, I might be able to conquer it, but no, it morphs into something different each time. I have written a lot about mental illness, my own experiences, my own stories, my own efforts, my own insights, and the struggle that unfortunately has not dissipated with the years.

Below are 10 ways that I have addressed the issue of mental illness in my writing. I mean to solicit your empathy, but more, I want you to understand the depth and tragedy of mental illness. It is a call for help… for me and the people in my support group, and the people in the mental hospitals I went to, and the people in the street. It is meant to inspire ‘urgent mind care’ so as to ‘help the mentally ill now!’

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1. I’ll start out by using an excerpt about the most God awful example of poor mental health, catastrophic mental illness, apocalyptic in fact. It was experienced in a mental hospital after I was arrested by the LAPD for biking on the interstate. That was a different kind of mental health altogether…

‘Story’ [TEXT]: When the LAPD pulled me over on the Interstate I had lost the ability to speak or comprehend what was spoken. They handcuffed me for my own safety and put me in the back of the police car. I did not know where I was being taken. When I arrived I was put in the void of a white room and when the door closed the expansiveness shrunk to nothingness.

I felt a panic rising in me. Why was I in this white room?  I thought of Michael and felt a flooding of guilt that I had forsaken my friend. Did I not bring sufficient attention to the Hell that Michael suffered from? I had gone about it in the wrong way. The panic rolled downwards as I realized that because of me Michael’s Hell would return. My electric dream was turning into nightmare.

I realized alone in that vacant room that all those who suffer would continue to suffer because of me. The unified world of one that I imagined would never be realized and the world would continue to be divided into billions of private tragedies. Heaven was a matter of perception that would never be seen again. I had doomed the world to Hell. I gasped to myself, “I caused the apocalypse”.

I put my hands around my neck, and began to squeeze the life out of myself with pure hatred. At the most agonizing moment of strangulation it became real to me that I was going to Hell. The terror and horror was so excruciating I began to hallucinate the reality that I was entering a dimension of eternal suffering. Suffocating and the fear of beginning infinite torture shattered my will and I let go.

The relief was so total after releasing my hands from my neck that I momentarily forgot my fate. I walked out of the room to see my wife who had been called by the hospital. Her face revealed how far I had fallen. Anna looked so disappointed in me. Anna felt disappointed because her newly-wed husband had been admitted to a psych ward. Seeing me there out of my mind made her realize that I was not just different, but that there was, in fact, something very wrong with my brain.                     

When I saw her face, I understood that she along with the rest of humanity knew I had caused the apocalypse. When I saw Anna cry in front of me I thought she was devastated that I had destroyed the world and brought hellfire upon everyone. I was the failure of humanity, the most hated and damned being on Earth. I collapsed to the ground in agony. The pain would never go away.

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2. Ten years later I struggled with mental illness once again, but this time I channeled it into coming up with a concept to help people like me get access to affordable mental health support in a different and new kind of way. Here are some excerpts from the writing I did at that time related to ‘WalkTalkNow’, which at the time was WalkTalk.org. It is clearly punctuated by grandiose thinking, which would peak and then begin to unravel…

‘Story’ [TEXT]: I was living out of a hostel spending my days wandering the streets of Barcelona. I had seen very few people. A good friend of mine in Barcelona was concerned about me and sent me a link to the website of a recommended therapist. I had gone to many therapists over the years and felt ambivalent about seeing another. I humored my friend and perused the website. I noticed something on the page that struck me as novel and innovative, “Walk and Talk Therapy Sessions.”

I spent the rest of the week imagining the concept coming to fruition. I drafted the manifesto of my newfound startup:

There is a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary life that has not proven to offer people a stable and happy sense of themselves. We live in a world where there is immense suffering and we are all aware of that. We are sensitive people and no one can ignore that. To be truly happy as an individual we must be happy as a world. We want to connect to each other, but don’t know how. It could be as simple as walking and talking with each other. When we share ourselves with each other in the open air there is an opportunity to take all that is inside and show it to the public. By recognizing the patterns in how we think we change ourselves, others, and the world. The most basic thing we can do to be well and make things better is to change how we connect with each other. The base of the platform would be immense, all the people who are not well with themselves yearning to walk and talk and connect with others. The pain was deep, the potential for growth was limitless.

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3. At the end of that process, a new process erupted that I could have never anticipated. I used every synapse in my brain to go go go over the course of roughly 24 hours until my mind was totally empty and depleted. That left me with a black hole deep inside that amounted to severe mental illness. This was a brand of profound and violent illness that seemed more like a tropical mental disease. Here is a description of those moments when I was consumed by it…

‘Story’ [TEXT]: I was in too deep. The energy had dissolved into nothingness. The rainbow colored neurochemicals that had been swashing back and forth had drained out of me. Now my brain was empty and the subjective experience was an overwhelming, horrifying absence of stimulation.

The day before I was sprinting around the Sagrada Familia with near-inhuman energy. Now I was confined to a hospital bed depleted of all vitality. I began to writhe in fear that the great work I had tried to carry out was suppressed. As I sat in the fluorescent hospital room I felt a creeping darkness envelop me. I closed my eyes and it was like the universe had turned to blackness. I was left for hours to imagine a black hole that threatened to swallow me. I dug my fingernails underneath the skin of my chest in order to feel something rather than nothing. The doctors looked on not knowing what to do.

I journeyed into the abyss where no light shone. I remained a cosmic warrior fighting the nothingness from my hospital bed. It was so dark and the fate of the world was so bleak that I could not find hope. I searched for the light across sweeping chasms of blackness.

Anna came and her presence was like a faint blue light within the darkness, a small hope that the nothingness had not surrounded me. Anna had gotten the phone call and made the trip to the hospital. She found me in the same fevered agony as ten years earlier. Anna applied cold presses to my forehead as I twisted and turned in my bed.

The doctors at the emergency room were overwhelmed by the severity of the situation and I was put in another ambulance and brought to the Sant Pau Mental Hospital in Barcelona. No one knew what happened to me.

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4. There were 4 suicide attempts surrounding periods of great mental illness before and after. It is too depressing to catalogue those times of deep mental illness. What I want to say is that if you are reading this, know that it will pass. As deep as it goes, there will be a place where you cannot go any farther down, and in fact, it is a law that you will go up once again. I tell myself that all the time. I am still sick sometimes, often is more accurate. It feels like chronic pain intermittently, but then for a moment I feel mentally healthy, the pain is gone, the disillusionment goes away, and I am excited and enthused about being a human being in a beautiful world.

What other lessons have I learned about mental illness and suicide? I have said it many times. When you go up, brace yourself because it won’t last forever, be prepared because things will inevitably go wrong. When you go down, reject the notion that things will never change, they always change. When things go wrong, when you have the feeling of a plummeting darkness hovering over you…shift. Do something different, anything different, in fact. Don’t obsess, move yourself, move your mind and your body. It won’t go away entirely, but it can’t hurt, when it won’t quit.

But, the act of suicide is not a function of a person with an unbalance in their particular psychology, it is a social fact and determined by the society in which one finds themself. It goes beyond the personal qualities that can lead to someone’s suffering and the horrible decision to end one’s life. Suicide is not particular to one’s private motivations, but instead global in its explanatory reach, stretching beyond the individual to locate the social causes of our most private actions.

If suicide is caused by society then we as a world have to uproot the pain that is affecting us. Our most vulnerable people are weakened to the point of taking one’s life. Identifying the social facts are essential for prevention and gaining a greater understanding of the underlying meaning behind suicide.

This horrible act has the potential to affect all the people we know and love. No one is immune to the perversity that can press down on us and give us little option to keep going, struggling for survival in a society that damages us.

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5. It was my own brush with mental illness, perhaps more than most, which motivated me to found a platform called WalkTalkNow.org that I mentioned above. It is my hope that this place will attract people who offer support and those who need support, and in doing so, improve the mental health of as many people as possible. My personal hope is that 1 person healed heals 100 more. I see that happening in the following way…

‘Walk-Talk-Now’ [TEXT]: Go outside to improve the relationship to your mind, body, and environment alongside mental health and wellness experts. Receive emotional support from social workers, psychologists, coaches, and those with greater life experience in dynamic and safe environments outside of the clinic. Providers offer and advertise their therapeutic approach here for emotional support according to their own method, philosophy, and pricing. The WalkTalkNow Platform is the space where first connections happen.

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6. My cousin drank himself to death, he was very ill mentally. Before he died I reached out to him with the following lifeline, it wasn’t nearly enough. I told him a glass of water saved my life. Here are the words I shared with him…

‘Spirals.Support’ [TEXT]: I attempted suicide. I jumped off a bridge. I broke my neck and my hips. I could not drink anything for months. When I finally was able to drink a glass of water it was the sweetest most wonderful pleasure I have ever experienced. I had no idea that the downward spiral would ever stop. I got so low that there was only one way to go from that dark place…up. If I had any idea that a glass of water could make life worth living, I would not have believed it.

All of us are walking through the darkness with the light of God’s promise of peace and justice and righteousness–ever before us. Sometimes that light is strong enough to keep us moving forward but other days the shadow of death looms closer and closer, deeper and deeper. On those days when we feel under siege it may be hard to hear/take in words of hope and possibility. But even though we can’t see the light doesn’t mean people aren’t lighting candles for you.

Just who is it exactly who tells people who are vulnerable to suck it up and ride things out? How do you take a stand when your back is already against a wall?

When it looks like all is lost and hope has been gone for a long time we still have a reason to keep breathing and moving and advocating and protesting and declaring that things could be different than they are. In the end, all we can do is dance with the dark…together we can make things brighter and brighter for all of us, but especially for those who struggle alone.

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7. Lost in psychological vulnerability, Ireland is consumed by an epidemic of depression, suicide rates, and alcoholism–all run rampant in this small country.

The Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart (PTAA) is an international organisation that requires its members complete abstinence from alcoholic drink. It also encourages devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an aid to resisting the temptation of alcohol. This isn’t an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting with a room of a dozen people who are in recovery. This is a movement, a social revolution for sobriety and connection for all the people of the entire country. 

‘World-Fair’ [TEXT]: Underage drinking is widespread in Ireland and one of the leading causes of mental illness. The PTAA does not strive to simply stop people from drinking. It also aims to create opportunities for fun and social activities without the need for the presence of alcohol. It organises many competitions, such as table quizzes and sports. Local centres (parishes or schools) compete in these competitions at regional, provincial, and all-Ireland level. 

World-Fair aims to help this old pre-existing organization to spread in Ireland. We hope that bars will be filled with sober people who denounce alcohol for its negative effect on the youth and the mental health of all our communities. The loudest people in the bar, the ones who are having the most fun are drinking soda water, coke, or non alcoholic beer. 

The tables have turned and advocates for sobriety will subtly shame those people in the bar who are devoted to their beer, and not to society at large. 

The other crucial component of a movement for sobriety, is the replacement of this numbing depressant with the joy of spirit. On the drink, life can feel empty and meaningless, and the absurdity drives some to alter their mind. We need something to fill the gap from our reliance on alcohol, we need to figure out another way of having a good time, and we need something to believe in. 

Spirituality is fun and can fill your life with such powerful meaning that you will want to be sober for this, you want to see and feel it with crystal clarity.

Ireland will be a case study, a country that experiments with healing misplaced emotion and mental illness. If Ireland can overcome its state of emergency of depression, suicide, and alcoholism, then the rest of the world can strive for mental health goals with similar methods in a way that is unique to their culture.

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8. We are responsible for cultivating a vision that includes people all over the world, those especially who suffer from emotional trauma and mental illness. These two conditions plague our societies and it is spreading like a plague of nothingness–emotional emptiness–catching it like a cold. Here is an excerpt from an essay about the emotional project we must share…

‘Psyches’ [TEXT]: We are all mentally ill, we are not well because there are so many human beings who are not well, and we cannot be well knowing that others are suffering. We cannot be like hobbits isolated from the rest of the world. We must venture out of our comfort zone and open our eye to the evil in the world. The world must spin in our eye–we must feel what others feel on a global scale.

It is a cold world devoid of anything to bring us together and happiness cannot be found within, it is dependent on our relationship to people. Happiness is shared and when you are surrounded by the people you love who are not happy, you might lose your own emotions that were positive before all that emotional pain happened.

We need a worldwide campaign to address the emotional turmoil that exists in every one of our societies.

It is a state of emergency, there are billions of people who are not well physically and the pain rolls over to mental illness and trauma. It goes untreated even though it is the greatest source of misery in our lives.

There is medicine that can help people, a conversation with a professional can change our lives, a support group can put us in touch with emotion we never knew we had.

Mental health care is as fundamentally important as physical health. We all need something to soothe our soul and we are all bent not broken and our mental can be healed.

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9. Mental Illness can lead to a recognition that your brain works differently than other people’s. You become aware that you are not normal. You do not share reality with the people around you. Normal people may presume they understand reality just as it is, they think, say, and do the same things in all the same ways as the people they know.

The crazy wisdoms come from the individual soul that you cultivate in your lonely connection to a world that you imagine by yourself, always feeling that chasm between you and others. You know that you do not fully know who anyone else is.

That’s what Van Gogh did. He shared his crazy wisdoms with the world, he brought to bear his own insanity and turned it into soul that reflected a vision that helped people to recognize that everyone sees differently. We all have a unique soul and we all love in different ways and that love helps us bridge the gap in consciousness between you and everyone, that is the challenge of love and soul that will never stop.

Thank you Van Gogh.

What is mental illness? Some reflections…

‘EmotionforWorld’ [TEXT]: It is overexposure to light or darkness that washes out all other experience. It is a reaction that causes you to cascade downwards in your mind to imagine the worst your mind is capable of imagining fear that rolls and rolls downwards. It is connections between things that do not make sense or bear any similarity to each other. It is emotion that does not attach itself to reason and logic but swashes back and forth, rainbow colored neurochemicals spilled over oil.

Mental Illness operates on a spectrum…how bad does it get?

It is also anger that does not have a source or a direction but that can only be released by slamming fists against windows pointless violence that is unhinged from reality, and that is pure and hot and cannot be alleviated because it has no explanation. Mental illness is depression so dark and deep that you cannot move because you do not see the point. Mental illness is bulimia where you hate your body with such vehemence that you torture yourself with the agony of vomiting every day. Disgusting. Mental illness is disgusting, the brain gone awry and lived in the shells of life of their inhabitants.

When should you go to a mental hospital?

Sticking 30 to 40 mental patients with acute conditions into a small room to watch television all day is not mental health care, but a holding facility to transport desperate people on their way to group homes, halfway houses, rehab centers or simply a life of homelessness. The attempts at therapy are short lived and untargeted speaking to an audience with vastly different problems from one another.

The contradictions are so self-evident. People in mental hospitals are traumatized by their stay full of loud, crazy people flashing out and causing major disturbances and violence. There is no escape from the mental illness that surrounds you and your grasp on reality deteriorates further. Nothing drives the disease of mental illness more than the insanity of others which creeps into your reality and threatens your own ability to make sense out of what is happening.

The number one way mental hospitals achieve a departure date for patients is by overmedicating them with powerful drugs sleeping and anti-psychotic that patients describe as ¨knocking them out.¨

I have taken these drugs and was unable to walk to the bathroom during the night because I was so overcome with the power of the drugs. I also could not swallow I was so incapacitated and could not stop drooling the next day.

It is this stupor that earns you a ticket out of here because you are ¨compliant¨ which means you do not question anything about the doctor’s choices or the rules established for the hospital that are often arbitrary and cruel. For instance, throughout the day you are not allowed to lay down and sleep, which is the only thing you want to do from being over medicated. Instead, you are stuck in front of a loud television with all the violence and sex that it promotes for 14 hours a day in a small room with nowhere to go. In effect you are stuck in an uncomfortable waiting room all day every day.

Medication is administered on a trial basis with little known or explained about the differences between one psychotropic drug and another. It is given, and although we have the right to refuse, refusing means you never get out of the hospital. Once it is given your mind changes on a neurochemical level and neither you or the doctor understand exactly how that happens. If you misbehave and flash out and punch a window you get put on another drug to try that one.

Whether or not the consciousness and set of actions it produces are driven by the dosage of the medication or the lack there of no one really knows, but the organization of the hospital and the releasing of the patient is based on such circumstantial behavioral patterns of the patients.

What is the alternative to this poorly funded and much needed institution in our society? Psychiatry is in its infancy as a discipline only having emerged in the last 75 years with a very bleak and painful start.

It will take time, a lot of time, before we understand the effects of drugs on the most complex thing in the universe that we cannot peer inside of completely.

As far as the hospitals themselves I’ve been to five of them and some are better than others. Small details like doors that slam can cause a patient who is sensitive to be tormented. The environmental factors are that much more important to consider when the people occupying the space are vulnerable to disturbances and negative stimulation.

The more pleasant you can make a hospital down to every detail the more likely the patients will recover and not resort to violence and aggression from their frustration with the situation.

Another question of money is how many spaces are available to patients that provide an opportunity to choose the people you are around and the activity you want to do. Putting everyone together in a small space is a recipe for explosive arguments and physical violence that disturbs everyone’s mental life.

Mental hospitals can be a saving grace for people in desperate circumstances, and given their downsides, they can be absolutely the best option for someone who is in critical mental health. But we need to do more, we need to wage a campaign against mental illness, alcoholism, and suicide through a mass expansion of therapy and psychological and emotional support.

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10. Necessity is the mother of invention. Mental illness needs to be addressed, we need to help people who are suffering, we need solutions. It is so terrible a thing, that we must be driven to eliminate it completely. It is the pain of people who have been lost that will lead to the ultimate growth. 

‘Hea7en3’ [TEXT]: It is not just the mentally ill that need to be saved. We have the potential to develop medicine that smooths over the rough spots that we all go through, and it could be as simple as taking a pill, like a mental health vitamin. But we are not there yet. Until we cure it, we need to find a way to support those affected.

We must address the root of the problem, which is desperation. We will also develop a more sophisticated understanding of the brain and the effect our medicine has on the brain. We will develop new pills, new therapies, new perspectives, and we will get closer and closer to a world without mental illness. 

We must do it together as a society. Mental illness is not individual suffering, it affects all of us, it has ramifications far beyond the immediate circle of influence. We need to promote mental health by addressing it as a community, it is a social problem. Each place around the world that pushes down on people, leaves in its wake a particular kind of suffering, and a particular brand of mental illness. Even the best pills are not going to make a difference if we do not take a stand as a society to lift people up.

I would like to communicate my own experience of being under the care of psychiatrists on my journey through and around reality–the communication plan being to qualify how this field has impacted my life and understanding the limits of the discipline as an empirical science.

Psychiatry is in its infancy, and disrespected by the mainstream practitioners of medicine. It is deemed to be a field that has few scientific facts for determining treatment. It is at its worse a guessing game to prescribe drugs that we know very little about that have been under researched.

It is impossible to unravel all the factors at work that impact the mind. Psychiatry is a field that reduces complex personal experiences and the unfathomable nature of the mind, into neurochemistry. That science we also know so little about due to its even more dramatic intricacy.

Brain, mind, and consciousness are all three challenging for us to understand alone, but the relationship between the three is so profoundly deep it makes the field of psychiatry seem unlike other empirical sciences.

Still, I would never stop taking my medicine, it is my back up plan in case things get wonky. I have respect for the contribution of psychiatry to gives names to complex experiences with complex emotions. Naming it, “depression” can give you power over it, suddenly it becomes something out there that we can begin to heal.

Ideally, we should develop all kinds of medicine for all kinds of people to enhance and heal all of us, so our minds work at high capacity and we do not feel unnecessarily dark emotions. It needs much testing, but psychiatry has the potential to take the quality of the mind and improve it so we can function in the world with more positive results. That potential is very far away as psychiatry is just beginning to understand our brains.