March 5, 2007 - Monday

March 5, 2007 - Monday

some psillychosis splatism

There is this guy named Mark who periodically comes to the bar where I'm working. There is something not quite right with Mark. Mark looks fairly normal. The weirdest apparent thing about him being his drifting in and out of a British accent; a thing I find very annoying.

Mark stands at the end of the bar and speaks to me exclusively; studiously ignoring everyone else in the place by turning his back to them and staring out the window.

One very quiet day another guy came into the bar: a red-faced older fellow who looked blood-shot and haggard. We spoke a little bit and he told me that he'd just returned from Afghanistan and was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; namely, shell shock. He spoke bitterly about his time there and his fragile mental state. A mental state that eventually drove his wife and kids away and made him unsuitable for most work.

That day Baker St. Café was empty –just the three of us. I was behind the bar and they were positioned at either end. Neither of them acknowledged the other and addressed only me.
On my way back from the kitchen I happened to notice a receipt on the ground near Mark's feet. I picked it up and handed it to him. A bit flustered, he thanked me and returned to staring out the window while nursing a beer. Ten minutes later Shell-Shock was onto his third bottle and developing momentum. I decided to go to the toilet. When I returned the receipt was on the floor near Mark's feet again. I picked it up and handed it to him. He thanked me, again flustered. I tried to make some small-talk with him but soon recognized, via his mono-syllabic grunts, that he was in no mood to chat. Odd, because he was pretty eager before Shell-Shock arrived. I turned to Shell-Shock and we continued our conversation. He bought another bottle of beer, the time being about 16hr.

Suddenly I had a suspicion and moved from around the bar to clean some tables. I used the opportunity to glance at Mark's feet. Sure enough the receipt was on the ground again.
"Mark, if you want me to throw that out, I can."

"What? No. If you don't mind just leaving it there for the time being, I'll get it later."
"Sure" my response.

After I returned to the bar Shell-Shock told me he was going for a smoke and headed outside. As soon as the door closed behind him Mark went peculiar:

"Thank God he left!" he blurted, suddenly facing me, "Okay, let's see here…You can throw this out", picking up the offending receipt and handing it to me. As I was tossing it in the basket he marched over to Shell-Shock's recently vacated chair and sat in it –three times: Up and down, up and down, up and down; counting. He stalked stiff-legged to a folded newspaper on the bar and flipped it over. Taking a step back he did three turns and flipped the newspaper back over again. He stood to the left of the paper and then stood to the right. He then executed a sort of robotic dance associated with cartoons from the 60's. He returned to his position at the bar and took a long drink of beer.

I was staring at him open-mouthed when Shell-Shock returned from his cigarette and walked past Mark who was again focused on staring out the window with his back to myself and the rest of the bar.

Essentially I was manning a bar that had suddenly morphed into a home for the mentally dubious. The only two patrons at that moment were tripping various degrees of insane. Mark (as he would admit to later when I asked him point blank) has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Shell-Shock has shell shock. I was caught between a rock and a hard place –or a straight-jacket and rubber room. I could have hosted a minor carnival right then.

By way of reassuring Mark I told him that we all have varying degrees of compulsive behaviour, whether it be me with my odd psychosis surrounding masturbation or a very dear friend's eating disorder.

He quickly replied with, "Not like this, you don't."

Well, that may be so.

Turns out that his case is so severe he can barely function in normal society. His mother has to keep an eye on him, and day-to-day tasks take hours to complete due to him having to go through very specific ritualistic motions for practically every activity. Roads need to be crossed three times to get to the other side, If he misses the commode when he pisses he's got to equalize on the other side (Which is great for me because I have to clean it up. He's a nice guy though, and dumps a lot of money in the bar so we tolerate that little indiscretion.), and he wears an idiotic hat. That last I'm not sure is OCD, but could be.Thing is, the most nefarious aspect of his particular mental condition is that he's totally aware of it as he's going through the designated motions. It's not like schizophrenia or Alzheimer's where the person affected is ignorant of their mental lapses. When Mark is scratching both armpits while touching his teeth to a wooden surface whenever he sees a cat he's completely aware of it. He cannot control himself.
But I am dubious. I think we, as humans, are born with the capacity to solve all of our mental problems short of stark raving insanity –the kind of insanity so brutal it has one standing naked in the middle of a downtown street singing "Hey Nonny-Nonny" while attempting to arc a stream of their own hot urine into their ear. Also exempt from my (doubtlessly controversial) self-treatment theory are people whose brain degeneration can be mapped out on a CAT scan; like epilepsy, brain tumours, and the flat-headedness of people in the deep end of the Slavic gene-pool.

I'm going to go further out on this very precarious limb and say that psychiatry, as a profession, is a sham. There seems to be more and more conditions that have recently (within the past 50 years) received a name and have therefore legitimized and exacerbated what is essentially normal –albeit, slightly odd– behaviour. This, I feel, is another means by which people are being relieved of their fundamental personal accountability.

A scan of the internet lists over one-hundred different mental disorders. A quick glance at a random few tells me that the authorities should be alerted because –not only am I threat to myself and others, but– I get freakishly giggly about having these mental blips:

––Avoidant Personality Disorder, which has this clever memorization scheme you can use: A–Avoids occupational activities, V–Views self as socially inept, O–Occupied with being criticized or rejected, I–Inhibited in new interpersonal situations, D –Declines to get involved with people, E–Embarrassed by engaging in new activities, R–Refrains from intimate relationships.
Thank you Dr. Freudscheissen for finally providing me with a handy acronym to describe myself at a job interview.

Here's a few more:
––Hypersomnia, also known as excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS): an excessive amount of sleepiness.Look, anybody that has a regular job has
Sorry about that…I believe I was talking about dubious labels for certain mental disorders. Or was is certain labels for dubious mental disorders?

Well, whatever:
––Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is defined within psychiatry and related psychological fields as a disorder characterized primarily by emotional dysregulation, extreme "black and white" thinking, or "splitting" (believing that something is one of only two possible things, and ignoring any possible "in-betweens"), and turbulent relationships.
…Which either describes me fully, or just completely. I'm not sure which.
––Affective Flattening: a loss or lack of emotional expressiveness.
Example: Men.
––Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD): The essential feature being a pervasive and excessive pattern of emotionality and attention-seeking behavior. These individuals are lively, dramatic, enthusiastic, and flirtatious.
Example: Spain, Italy, and large parts of Greece
––Bibliomania: An obsessive-compulsive disorder involving the collecting or hoarding of books.
Oddly the obsessive-compulsive hoarding of porn is not listed anywhere. Makes you wonder how Psychiatric Researchers are spending their evenings, huh?
––Cyclothymia is a chronic, but less extreme, form of bipolar disorder that consists of short periods of mild depression alternating with short periods of hypomania. The onset of each phase is separated by short periods of normal mood.
Or to put it simply, without the clever use of Latin: people behaving like people.
––Echolalia: the repetition or echoing of verbal utterances made by another person.
"Echolalia: the repetition or echoing of verbal utterances made by another person."
––Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED): an uncommon disorder of the brain characterized by explosive outbursts of behaviour (throwing, breaking things, inflicting physical harm on others) that is disproportional to the provocation.
'Uncommon'? Obviously Dr. Freudscheissen has never dealt with Islamic fundamentalism.
–– Joubert Syndrome: a disorder that affects the area of the brain that controls balance and coordination. Features include ataxia (lack of muscle control), an abnormal breathing pattern called hyperpnoea, sleep apnea, abnormal eye and tongue movements, and hypotonia... There may be mild or moderate retardation.
Latin: Clubgurn Intensualis
––Folie à Plusieurs: psychiatric classification referring to the syndrome of a shared psychotic disorder.
English: British Football Fans
––Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD): 1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance;
2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love; 3) believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by other special people; 4) requires excessive admiration; 5) strong sense of entitlement; 6) takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends; 7) lacks empathy; 8) is often envious or believes others are envious of him or her; 9) arrogant affect.

1) I am great 2) but believe I can be better. 3) However, I doubt you could understand that Dr. Freudscheissen. 4) So, if you're going to waste my time with your cheap psychobabble 5) you might as well give me some Zoloft 6) otherwise I have no use for you. 7) And you can fuck right off 8) if you think you're better than me 9) because this is what someone with a real job looks like.

––Transient Tic Disorder: sudden, rapid, recurrent, non-rhythmic, stereotyped motor movements or vocalizations.
See Dick go to the disco in the Czech Republic. See Dick spot the gorgeous Zaneta in the disco. See Dick ask Zaneta to dance. See Dick and Zaneta dancing. See Dick stop and watch Zaneta dance. See Dick's face drop as he realizes his bowels have better moves than Zaneta.

––Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD: also known as winter depression is an affective, or mood, disorder. Most SAD sufferers experience normal mental health throughout most of the year, but experience depressive symptoms in the winter or summer.
Which would cause me to say: "SORT IT OUT YOU FUCKING PUSSY" and qualify me as having
––Tourette syndrome (also called Tourette's syndrome, Tourette's disorder, Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, GTS or, more commonly, simply Tourette's or TS): an inherited neurological disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by the presence of multiple physical (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic most often associated with the exclamation of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks.
Ah, a famous and humorous condition. Although not quite as funny as:
––Boanthropy: a mental disorder where the victim believes he or she is an ox.
––Dyscalculia: Suffering specific arithmetic disabilities as a result of damage to specific regions of the brain. Recent research suggests that dyscalculia can also occur developmentally, as a genetically-linked learning disability which affects a person's ability to understand, remember, and/or manipulate numbers and/or number facts.
So with this list of 47 various mental disorders –some of which you yourself exhibit the major symptoms of– I hope that I have illustrated that someone needs to put a stop to excessive Psychiatric nomenclature.

Unlike positive medical evolution which can increasingly identify –and therefore find cures for– ailments, psychiatry seems to be finding more elaborate and new ways to pigeonhole every single one of us into some rarefied classification of weirdness. This bothers me because although I exhibit all or any number of the symptoms listed above ("Moo.") I still kind of like myself. If I'm not hurting myself or anyone else with my quirks, foibles, and compulsive nuances why should I hand over the reigns of my piece of mind (so to speak) to some quack who gets accolades for every human condition he/she can slap a label on?Fact of the matter is, where would Dr. Freudscheissen be if we were all 'normal'?

Or maybe it's just me…

––Ganser syndrome: characterised by the individual mimicking behaviour they think is typical of a psychosis; usually by providing nonsensical or wrong answers to questions, and doing things incorrectly. It is also sometimes called Nonsense Syndrome, Balderdash Syndrome, Syndrome of approximate answers, and Pseudodementia.