Dots of light flew in the dim light before my eyes from the rotating disco ball in the ceiling above the dance floor and danced across the dirty walls and the worn floor. I could just sense the bass of the music pounding in my chest as AC/DC’s song Highway To Hell raged out of the sound system, the only new equipment in the place, as it stood out in relief against a backdrop of the outworn and outmoded accoutrement of the rest of the bar. Around the edge of the dance floor gut high, scarred, and dented wooden tables with patches of the finish worn off the tops punctuated the otherwise empty room. The stools around the tables stood largely empty and expectant awaiting the patrons that would not come. There might have been six people in attendance besides the staff in an establishment that could easily hold a hundred. The place smelled of cigarette smoke and stale beer. The walls were covered in pictures of rock superstars of a bygone era. The bar appeared long in decline and held a worn look of a place well past its heyday. In my youth I would have called the place a dive. Today I just called it a place to get cheap beer.
July 13, 2014
July 5, 2014
Share Your Favorite Posts With Your Friends. It’s Quick And Easy!
Find an interesting post on the blog? Want to tell your friends about it? The blog now has the functionality to share posts with friends on social media. There are four social media links at the bottom of the post page with Face Book being the most popular. To share on your Face Book feed simply click on the blue share button at the bottom of the post, enter a comment on the pop-up window that opens, and click share link. Just two clicks gets the job done. It’s that easy! Let your friends share in the stories you find interesting. Share with them now!
June 29, 2014
Medicated For Your Protection
In my post, “Coping With Hearing Voices,” I mentioned that one of my coping strategies was the use of prescription drugs. In this post I am going to discuss in more detail my use of prescription drugs to treat schizophrenia and some of my thoughts around the use of drugs to treat this supposed disease, briefly discuss the medications I take, and finishing off by noting a couple of the side effects of taking the medication.
As it was explained to me some time after my diagnosis of schizophrenia and the beginning of medical treatment for that disease, in the simplest sense, my condition was brought on by a chemical imbalance in my brain. The use of anti-psychotics then was meant to correct that chemical imbalance. This view takes almost no interest in what has happened to you in life and focuses solely on treating the disease. The prognosis indicated that my affliction would last a lifetime and therefore the use of medication would necessarily last a lifetime as well. Without medication I would be unable to function and further, I could be construed a danger to myself or others. So sayeth the medical model. Halleluiah. Amen.
June 28, 2014
Subscribe Now!
Tired of checking back on the blog again and again for a new post? Want to be the first to read new blog posts on A Life Interrupted? A new subscription function has now been added to the blog. There is a subscription link at the top of the right hand panel under the pages heading. Simply click on the link, enter your email address, click subscribe, and an email notification will be sent to your inbox every time a new post is added to the blog. Its simple, fast, and easy. Subscribe now!
June 14, 2014
Don’t Kid yourself. There Is Always Another Voice Telling Me What To Do.
My analytics on the blog indicate that the most popular of my posts to date is the Die!Die!Die! post in which I discussed the die command, a pernicious voice in my head that persistently and over the years periodically commands me to die. As the discussion of the experience of being in the head of someone who hears voices seems to be a popular one, I would like to return to it and discuss further the experience of voice commands in an effort to give my readership more of what they seem to find interesting.
March 15, 2014
Coping With Hearing Voices Part 3 of 3
In this third and final part of a three part series of posts on strategies for coping with hearing voices I share a final four strategies that I employ to keep functioning at a high level.
7. Keeping occupied. While I am a strong proponent of having down time to think and reflect or pursue pleasing hobbies, I am a firm believer that a person needs meaningful occupation to be well balanced. I know I do. Consequently, I have chosen to remain employed instead of going on disability when it was offered and having nothing purposeful to apply myself too. It is my belief that without something purposeful to apply oneself to on a regular basis one goes into decline and the condition that caused the disability worsens. This has been true for me. And for me, much of my sense of self-worth comes from the fact that I work full time and am financially independent, especially of the state. My experience has taught me that I do better with my condition when I am working than when I am unemployed and left with nothing but time on my hands. While I do believe that there are times when it is necessary to take a step back from employment when one is in crisis because of a condition, it is essential to return to steady employment, or, as an alternative, possibly volunteer work, on a full time basis as soon as possible. In my last episode 2.5 years ago I was back to work in 6 weeks after persuading my doctor(a general practitioner) that I was ready even though she prescribed at least a four month recovery period. The mind that is occupied with a worthy undertaking has no time to occupy itself with lesser things, particularly the unending chatter of idle voices in my head.
March 11, 2014
Coping With Hearing Voices Part 2 of 3
Last week I shared three strategies for coping with hearing voices: detachment, acceptance, and self-restraint. In this the second part of a series of three I discuss three more strategies I employ to cope with hearing voices.
4. Support Network. Having people who I trust and respect to talk too about what goes on inside with the voices and other matters is a more recent strategy. After some failed attempts to communicate my experiences to professionals and some friends leading up too 1994 and beyond, because of the negative responses I learned to keep my troubles to myself. However, in recent years I have discovered, or rediscovered, a psychological benefit in being able to enter into open discussions with select trusted peoples I can create an environment of emotional safety and support where I am not judged, medicated, or ‘fixed.’ When the voices are at their worst I find a release in talking with trusted people instead of bottling it up inside and becoming overwhelmed. I attend a weekly men’s support group and have a small group of trusted confidants of which one is a licensed therapist. These exchanges help me stay grounded and keep life in perspective, which lessens the impact of the voices. As well, I keep in regular contact with friends and family on a daily basis, which helps me avoid becoming isolated with the voices and my issues. In my experience, psychiatrists have proven untrustworthy and my exchanges with them have been largely unproductive if not injurious. Beyond writing prescriptions they seem to have little else to offer. Besides target practice I have little use for them. I use a General Practitioner to prescribe any medications I might need and help me manage the condition from a medical perspective. At present, there are no psychiatrists in my support network and I figure that I do just fine without them.
March 4, 2014
Coping With Hearing Voices Part 1 of 3
Voices in my head never go away. They just fade in and out, which is to say that some days they are less active than others. I have been hearing voices in my head in some shape or fashion for over twenty years, and so I have devised some coping strategies that allow me to function in the outer world and attend to my day to day. In this post I would like to share some of the coping strategies for living with voices in my head that I have used to varying degrees of success through the years and continue to employ in the present.
February 22, 2014
Die! Die! Die!
In my last post I provided a description of what hearing voices can be likened to for the uninitiated’s apprehension of the experience. In this post I would like to further discuss hearing voices by focusing on a specific voice that has haunted me since the voices became more intense in 1994. Specifically, I refer to what I call the die command.
The die command is a voice that commands me to die. The command is the essence of simplicity. The voice simply tells me, or a part of me, to die. The voice says nothing else to me, just the word “die,” and I hear the command in the same way I hear other voices. The voice wants me dead and, as mentioned above, began in 1994. Since then the die command has been with me off and on for 20 years. Sometimes I go for weeks or even months without hearing it and then I go through days and weeks where I hear the command throughout the days on a regular basis. The command seems directed at a part of me that I am not always aware of but is usually received with a literal physical response in the form of a despairing snort that escapes my mouth that I cannot control. In the past, the command has prompted me towards suicidal thoughts, thoughts which obviously I did not in the end act upon.
February 17, 2014
The Voices. The Voices. They are A’Calling
In my experience of schizophrenia the active symptoms are or were delusions, voices, hallucinations, and, to a much lesser extent, suicidal thoughts. While the voices and hallucinations persist to this day, the delusions were perhaps the most difficult to grapple with but were the first to go, and suicidal thoughts that were brought on by despair passed when the feelings of despair passed. The hallucinations proved to be of little or no consequence in my experience being similar to the hallucinations brought on by the street drugs I ingested in my youth, but the voices continue to be a part of nearly every waking day to one degree or another. I would like to talk about the voices here and leave the rest to another day.