Uncl./ant.

There are those who seek intoxication -- "symptoms and side-effects" -- as a moonlighting expedition, as a job, a culture, a lifestyle, a pastime, for kicks, and there are those who seek experience in other ways, who guard against intoxication, who avoid it. Who seek conversion from "using" to "sobriety" are "members." Who are visited by intoxication without seeking it -- "symptoms" -- are "patients." Do they then guard against it -- all of it -- or let it be? If drugs bring remission and side-effects to the patient, what does conversion bring?

Alcoholics and drug addicts and gamblers and debtors and sex addicts who enter 12-step Recovery (alternatives to that, namely 16-step Recovery invented by Charlotte Davis Kasl and Rational Recovery and Christian Recovery) admit they are "alcoholics" or "addicts" and refer to themselves as such during meetings. The members in alternative recovery do not necessarily define themselves as addicts nor addiction as an illness, but they all agree to abstain from the addictive behavior while they recover. Recovery lasts for life and is also a movement, not obviously a "health kick," that includes families and friends of the affected.

In the 12-step branches, recovery is a religion. The 12-step groups themselves deny their existence as a religion and refer to themselves as "a spiritual program," as if spirituality and religion were neighbors, not related as by uncles and aunts, but as by fences distinct. The Big Book written in 1939 claims that many members also participate in major religions, but in my experience in AA, few members participated in major religions, and this created the condition of "religion" in the place of religion, or, if not "religion," then "cult." It becomes a cult when members are not allowed to leave "recovered," "cured," or "reformed" without facing grave consequences to their social survival. One AA member, an observant Jew who had lived for decades in Japan, described AA as "secular religion." Understood that way, there was a miraculous calm in the room. Then he left.

At my visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1998, I learned that Hitler had massacred the mentally ill wards or the wards of mental asylums, depending on how one looks at it, in 1933. (In Anton Chekhov's "Ward No. 6," the inmate beaten by guards is a family man and debtor, and the doctor in the provinces risks his rank and livelihood in befriending him and in advising superiors to close the hospital.) References on the internet (at ADL, for example) place the date of the hospital gassings at 1939. When I mentioned my visit to the museum during an AA meeting, I wanted to know whether the framers of The Big Book had been aware of the Nazi hospital massacres. The senior woman in the meeting leaped involuntarily in her chair, as if suddenly gripped by a horror too severe to allow for conversation. At the museum, where all manner of horrors are historically documented, my friend that day had not been willing or able to look at that one glass case where a half-length bed with stirrups was displayed. (I had leaped involuntarily in my chair in AA when a man sitting next to me had said during "new business" that he was drunk.)

Manic-depressives are named in The Big Book as being perhaps the hardest of all to understand, but since the name of the illness had changed to "bipolar disorder," heads tilted in my direction during the preamble where "grave disorders" appears (and so I longed for the Doxology): "But they, too, can recover if they have the capacity to be honest." "Recover" meant "stay in the group" for life, defined as sobriety, and "disorder" signified mendacity, yet I had not been hauled in for mendacity in 1991; I had not complied all those years with prescription drug treatment for deceit. I was of the type: "candid, frank, or honest to a fault" when I was diagnosed with a biochemical "mood swing" disorder.

AA is a religion of reformed "bad" boys and girls, who used to overindulge, party, go out, go to bars, buy drugs, seek intoxication (or be promiscuous, gamble, get stuck on porn, etc.). As "reformed" people who outgrew their interest in pleasure of that kind, their joy at shimmying out of inhibition like an old snakeskin, who "came to believe that a power greater than [they] could restore [them] to sanity," they begin to live as upright men and women of God who invite the approval and cooperation of religious groups, hospitals, doctors, courts, police, jails, schools, and employers. Not all AA members think as "citizens" or think women are citizens. The lead women in particular didn't tolerate talk of "rights." I started out thinking of civil rights, such as separation of Church and State, and ended up deep inside human rights; they (privately-educated Catholic women) preferred an order that metes out privileges, such as jobs and sexuality, to those they see as fit and deserving.

The 12-step members believe addiction is a disease, that they have it, and that it is a spiritual, not a mental condition. They "had their fun," and they make AA "fun." They have the fun disease. There are no doctors, surgeries, or medications for it and no clergy; health insurance pays for its treatment, and the higher authority is God. Once drunk on their faces or higher than kites, now repelled by intoxication, they make do with daily meditations and prayer. The biggest gift is fellowship. It is believed in the fellowship that alcoholics are smarter than non-alcoholics, that they are better off than they used to be and than people without sobriety. They have the steps -- the greatest spiritual invention in 500 years -- and a place to go.

AA is like secular Congregationalism with a hook on its penis -- to the squealing cat who flies out of a tree from it and the dizzy free bird who lopes lonely home.

. . .

[May 6: I had been a Congregationalist. The difficulty eventually had to do w/ Catholics in AA -- who were chameleon-like in their casting off their former religion but who all acted as one force in shunning non-Catholics at meetings. My group refused to take a "group inventory." There were literally human rights violations, something I reported to A. who has volunteer leadership status in NY where AA is headquartered. In the AA framework -- when it is applied this way -- there is an exaggerated sense of self-blame for problems outside of one (problems that are cultural or political), poverty, for example, or job loss, etc. So, another example, in AA "date rape" is as much the fault of the woman, if not more so since she mentioned it.]

. . .

In the end, before the end, there will be indisputably physical conditions of the brain: epilepsy, schizophrenia, depression. Psychiatrists and neurologists will be those specialists who treat those conditions. Perhaps the rift between psychiatry and neurology will mend. Treatment will be at will, never forced, never violent, never more harmful than beneficial, never more dangerous than refusal to treat. And there will be a test for the illnesses, to prove ahead of time that treatment is warranted. Religion will be religion. Art will be for its own sake. The state will be the state. Freedom will be the stake.

Mental notes

• She was mad to be glad-o.
• She was glad to be mad-o.
• She wouldn't diagnose her.
• She was a born digresser.
• She was a bored cross-dresser.
• She was a hired class-crosser.
• She was a hip engineer.
• She worked just for her welfare.
• She was an organizer.
• She was a class-conscious hire.
• She was an urgent seer.
• She met a transabled sire.
• She preferred werewolves and ghosts to 1990s vampires.
• A sign of bipolar is "snappy dresser."
• "Fen you god a gompleggs, zum dimes id giffs you an eddypuss. You zpeak a bisl Yiddish?" Mosiac Man by Ronald Sukenick (Normal, IL: FC2, 1999), p. 138
• The collective nouns for OTTER are bevy, family, lodge or romp.
• Mentalism is to the general public and the medical establishment as sexism is to patriarchy or racism is to slavery; the term has variant and unstable usage.
• Psychophobia is literally "abnormal fear of the mind."
• Transabled is a person who wishes to be (or who perceives him- or herself to be) (but who is not or would not need to be) disabled. What is a person who is newly disabled?
• Ableism is discrimination against persons with disabilities.
• Dual-diagnosis refers to persons who are both chemically dependent and otherwise mentally ill.
• Mental illness diagnoses have negatively replaced profession and assimilated European immigrant groups and branches of Christianity as sources of belonging and identity.
• Labeling, branding, mark(et)ing, targeting, scapegoating, victimizing, pigeonholing, programming.
• Revising, rewriting, reworking, rephrasing, researching, drafting, editing.
• Readings

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MEMORANDUM:

RE: �Go Gay (or Not) & Make a Mess of the Mess We're In�

[...] I'm writing prose drafts at Ana Verse for the month of May for Mental Health Month. Diagnosed people, who are sometimes (mis)represented by "advocates" and not organized and often isolated or closeted, are finding it difficult to "join up" with any other group: Even disability has its hierarchies, starting in the top half with physical disabilities. The "recovery" community of drug addicts and alcoholics rejects mental illness as false labeling if it applies to them and shuns people who take medication and so forth. The Mad Pride movement rejects conventional medical treatment for mental illnesses [based on mistreatment by that system] while the news media play "good doctor" in reports on the "bad doctors" of psychiatry and Big Pharma and the lay population goes about "de-diagnosing" friends (armed with news articles) and "diagnosing" others using the DSM-IV in a system where it is perceived that ---> outside dx = freedom and inside dx = captivity.

The best word I've found to apply to this state of affairs is "psychophobia," which literally means "abnormal fear of the mind." "Psychopharmophobia" may have its uses as well.

"Straight but not narrow."

GLBT(Q) plus O

Today is my 47th birthday. I woke thinking of my 50th birthday. I have three years in which to do something before I turn fifty -- to do something -- but what? Today my mother, sister, and I are going to Como Park Zoo and for dinner at W.A. Frost in St. Paul. There's a flower show in the conservatory at Como Park, the "old zoo." It is a little early in the season for the other zoo, the "new zoo," in Apple Valley. As I described it to my friend, the "new zoo" is "a safari zoo," where the large game animals roam wide swaths of wooded and prairie lands. Visitors do not always glimpse the elephants, lions, and wolves from the tram or from the walking paths. He thought I said: the "old zoo and the Sephardic zoo."

. . .

Rights for mentals, rights for queers. If LGBT(Q), if GLBT. But GLBT(Q) needs a vowel, not another consonant. M for mentals (and medicated); D for diagnosed (dx'd); P for psychiatric case. What if the diagnosed were to call themselves something starting with a vowel: "A" "E" "I" "O" "U" or "Y" but what?

A friend's mother -- (she has or had "multiple personality disorder" renamed "dissociative identity disorder," MPD renamed DID) -- doubted the accuracy of my bipolar diagnosis during our week-long visit up north. One of her three sons had been diagnosed with bipolar, but he'd been too busy with life to seek treatment (tx) for it. "My son is Hemingway, Ann," she said. "The other son is a trained assassin, Ann," she said. "You were an overachiever," she said. "I was never sexually attracted to women," she said.

Bring "O" to the table, the imaginary table where diagnosed p-cases meet collectively, the discos that they frequent in their exclusive sexual attraction to one another: What if mentals were to agree to be called "Other" or "Over" or "Out"? Over it. Overboard. Overcooked. Overdue. Overly dramatic. Over the hill. Over the top. Over and out. Over the limit. Over easy. Overdosed. Overlooked. Over estimated. Out of bounds. Outnumbered. Out of it. "Orange," "Odd," "Old," or "Open"? Open minded. Old before their time. Orange has no exact rhyme.

Just as the words "gay" and "queer" were appropriated -- taken aside for everyday use, outmoded in their other connotations -- Gaelic and happy and odd -- and the word "crack" transmigrated, though most people seem hardly to notice it -- a word for mentals would take a common word or phrase out of ordinary use. What "O" word would do it? The "o" could be the "o" in psycho or wacko. "O" for a pride word: Orange. Take back the fruits! Off our backs!

Then GLBT might accept the diagnosed as the "O" in their herd. (It would look almost like an anagram of my name.) Or keep things as they are and borrow the "T" for "touched" and "nut."

During the Holocaust, the mentally ill who were institutionalized, sterilized, and "euthanized" didn't wear triangles or badges. The code name for the Nazi Euthanasia Program was T-4.

What is the word for internalized psychophobia? Or for people who are psychophobic?

There are those who feel that mentals ought to be "put away" and not allowed to have sex or do other things queers (at last) and normals are (theoretically) allowed to do. For that, we would have a custom. We need a Mario Cuomo for it. Would Obama do it? QUO.

Death by Comet

Yesterday I was sorting through boxes in my mother's garage, and I came upon an issue of a literary journal in which the violent boyfriend (from Cedar Falls or Cedar Rapids, Iowa) had published an essay in art criticism. In the first paragraph he used the word "adventitious." His name was nestled on the table of contents page beside Julio Cortazar's and Ann Beattie's and Dana Gioia's. I imagined the essay slipping into the landfill or going to the city shredder. Ship it! I said and separated it for the trash.

I am realistic enough to know that I don't look like Audrey Hepburn. I am more likely to realize that I admire Katherine Hepburn -- as if the choice must be between two women of the same name or between a married couple: Paul or Jane Bowles, Leonard or Virginia Woolf, Ted Hughes or Sylvia Plath.

Truman Capote got the idea for In Cold Blood from an article in the newspaper. I had wanted to model a book after it, based on an article I had read in the Minneapolis newspaper about a tornado. In the tornado one elderly man died. Tornadoes ought to be named as hurricanes are named, this one after its one casualty. I thought of researching the book about the man, as if unburying him from the rubble of the basement in what had been his house. We all have basements here. Even my St. Louis Park apartment has its own unfinished basement. I use it for storage and it's where I do the laundry, where the furnace and hot water heater are. If someone says "basement" in Texas or in New York, people are likely to imagine a torture chamber; the literati think of Kaspar Hauser, not of a whole state or region of basements where law-abiding citizens report for duty during severe storm warnings. If a single elderly man dies in a tornado, the newspaper readers sigh with relief: at least no children died. They don't think of the damage to houses, trees, roads, and businesses unless they live near that town, and they don't stop to imagine what it might be like to be him -- THE ONLY ONE to have blown out in a tornado -- at the end of a long and one presumes virtuous life. It's like being chosen by a lightening bolt or dying by COMET; it's like being the one candle on a cake to go out when the birthday child misses; but readers are just glad to read he'd been old. What if one of the man's grown children, plied with a little weed or tobacco or alcohol, were to say, "He got what he deserved" or "Couldn't have come at a better time"? Wouldn't that be a story?

It might have won the Minnesota Book Award for non-fiction, but I didn't do it.

I didn't call the police when the violent boyfriend (from Cedar Falls or Cedar Rapids, Iowa) "blew up the house."

Would Avery believe that my poetry was "glad to be female" if I draped each noun with a lacy little bra or tightened it in a string bikini? If I put a touch of black (not brown) mascara on every verb?

Southern Man

It's "wrong" to be depressed. One friend chortled when I said I was in my spring depressive episode. It means that I daydream about death, wake thinking of it, want nothing more than it, and read jealously of people who have had the temerity to quit this landscape, temerity I lack. Seasonal affective disorder occurs in winter when days are shorter, but bipolar depression occurs in spring when birds are nesting and favorite flowers peek through the soil.

Avery, I'll call her, chortled, but I still don't know how to interpret her laugh. Avery is also the brand name of office labels, something I feel I function as in the work world. She'd been diagnosed recently with "borderline personality disorder," diagnosis she pursued. What you hear about "borderline" is that it's worse than mood disorders, because it cannot be treated successfully with medication, but Avery is glad for that because medications have side-effects and are wrong and dangerous and so is Big Pharma -- to a drug-free so(c)(br)iety. Avery no more believes that she has or is "borderline" than she believes her hair is purple, but it gives her a luxuriant feeling to be pampered in a borderline therapy group. She can't afford much salon work these days, so she's taken to this group.

She said, by way of critiquing my poems, that they are -- I am -- not "glad to be female" because I live mostly outside her logic of lingerie. I felt transgendered by her remark. I got mad at her -- she goes secretly to a therapy group for "borderline" as for years she has attended AA w/o being an alcoholic -- without realizing that she volunteers to be a nut. She thinks it's one more thing -- like cocaine, like shoplifting -- she can get away with as an adult -- to sneak around seeking "treatment" without being listed or dismissed as a mental case. Many women admire young Audrey Hepburn, place posters of her near their coatracks or inside their closet door, but Avery is more like Holly Golightly than any of them: What if she is not mentally ill? What if she is a creative intellectual?

Avery's issues related to law-breaking relate to being Catholic. Catholics didn't write the laws: why obey all of them? I used to believe that the law had gotten certain things wrong -- such as the (re)criminalization of marijuana -- but I realized (a little late) that the law still applies. Mental illness and lawbreaking are intermittently connected, but diabetes and allergies and obesity may also lead to selfish preoccupations, even to taking what doesn't belong to one. There is something not right that Avery desires to have an(other's) illness -- has even said she desires to be in a mental institution -- and chortles when her friend says she is depressed. There is much to interpret in it.

A violent boyfriend before he became violent had diagnosed me with "borderline" myself. I had not entered the mental illness labyrinth, had not been put there yet by "concerned persons" -- one of them a man who didn't believe I had any business writing even a short essay about "my" theology -- among his reasons the day he dragged me in to see the authorities at a psychiatric hospital in Houston in December of 1991 where violent men were held and where I was to be locked, not because I was violent, but because my violent boyfriend, whom the other man (Sonia's boyfriend) had promoted at work after my boyfriend had been violent -- after he had threatened to kill me -- reasoned that he would threaten to kill someone, too, who (later) wrote a short essay about theology. It silenced me. It was like an introduction to murder, though I'm still alive and take medications for it.

I read poems at websites during NaPoMo and admired the spontaneous talents of the poets without wanting to join in myself. I don't know if it is that I am a "case" that I like the unfinished work of talented writers -- or something else. I don't know if in the whole analysis mental cases are allowed to have an aesthetics or if their aesthetics are simply worth less: a loan as compared to savings -- and it comes back to that day when the Southern Man decided -- for the rest of my story -- that I'd had no authorization to write creatively, thus shaming his superiors who had originally approved of it. There is no diagnosis for abstract expressionist painting or "rock band," but there is one for writing.

... I was not a lapdog, something the Southern Man, Sonia's boyfriend, was. I figured I was too tall to fit comfortably in a lap. The Southern Man was tall and big and got in laps wherever he went. His bearded face nodded "yes" to everything. It didn't matter what another person was saying to him, he vigorously nodded and nodded "yes" to it. I wouldn't have dreamt that a mental institution would be interested in that tic of his, but he dreamt that a mental institution would be interested in me.

To diagnose "bipolar" is in some ways like no-fault insurance or divorce. The medical establishment cares less about the details of what happened and more about the results. Later it was uncovered that I have a psychiatrist uncle with the genes for it.

I should have realized what kind of "player" environment poetry was in that place. It manifested as an affirmative action beauty pageant, and many of the men ended up feeling passed over by it, not chosen, as they would have been chosen had affirmative action not gone into motion when it did. Punishing white women for it was a remedy, and no one would halt them.

If it's sadly true that I "think in essay," then this is my month for offering daily rough drafts: MeHeWriMo (Mental Health Writing Month).

May is MeHeWriMo

Entries at Ana Verse (Jan. 16, 2006 to April 12, 2009) that relate to depression and diagnosis:

*What is a blog, what is a bogle? 1/16/06
*Subj: re: doing time … 1/16/06
*Father-time, 1/20/06
Journal Entry, March 1, 2006, 2/28/06
*“Rule out Euthymia” (short story pub’d at Mad Hatters’ Review, issue 10, fall 2008) 3/08/06
Hype and Melancholy, 3/12/06
*“Cigs,” (short story pub’d at Mad Hatters’ Review, issue 10, fall 2008) 6/5/06
*“The Gift,” (short story pub’d at Mad Hatters’ Review, issue 10, fall 2008) 7/24/06
*The Cool Report, 8/3/06
*Growing Up Normal, 8/5/06
“Red Squirrel” (pub’d in Minnetonka Review) 8/8/06
*Honest Life, 11/1/06
*Substance at Stake, 12/19/06
Chagrin (def.), 1/4/07
*Ms. Sandman, 1/21/07
Equity, 1/22/07
Being on the outside, 1/31/07
*“Basal Distance,” prose poem aired on MiPOradio, 2/8/07
“Wish for the Left Hand,” 2/16/07
A poet from San Francisco, 3/6/07
International Women’s Day: Work, 3/8/07
Stripped of all precious illusion, 3/12/07
*Waylaid (1999), 3/23/07
*Love, 5/24/07
*Diagnosis, 5/25/07
Dial-on, 5/25/07
Disability and the United Nations, 5/26/07
*Millness: On a stretcher, 5/28/07
*The recent death of Poet Sarah Hannah, 5/30/07
*Dr. Abuzzahab, 6/9/07
*Depression & poetry, 6/11/07
*Visiting in New York, 6/17/08
“Fish,” 6/24/07
*My Jane Eyre, 6/30/07
Housekeeping, 7/16/07
Other letter (excerpt), 7/23/07
Small party for an excuse, 8/4/07
Wisdom of Dr. Abraham Low, 8/9/07
“Vital signs: Hysteria is calmer than you think,” 10/6/07
Driving years, 12/12/07
*My obsessions, 12/7/07
*Caregiver, 7/9/08
*Why do they stay?, 9/7/08
*"Hoss Men,” 10/11/08
*Punctuate, 11/8/08
Christmas Letter, 12/25/08
W’assup with Edward Albee? 3/18/09
Acceptance is to her a phenomenon, 3/29/09
Lolita: a pyramid story, 4/12/09

*I have deposted all those entries marked with an asterisk, but they appear in the hardcover b-l-o-o-k.