The Greatest Illusion

As I have freely admitted around these parts, I am bipolar. It's not a medical diagnosis, and I'm aware of the dangers in self-diagnosing such things, but my confidence is unshakeable about it. (I familiarized myself with enough of psychiatry to figure it out. And worse, actually, because the disorders of those around me became obvious.) And without making any official statements, the various community clinic psychiatrists I've tried to see about it have confirmed my suspicions by informing me after an eval that they will not touch bipolar with a ten foot pole, and I'd need a referral and a lot more money to get treatment.

With that caveat aside, that was a bit over a year and two episodes ago. I quit caring even before my manic episode came to a crashing, destructive stop, but before that I had decided to put all my eggs in the crazy basket and attribute to Bipolar my "awakening" and general vicious distaste for the direction the world was going. And this is almost beyond the point, though not quite. This is kind of a post about me, about the world reflected through me. But it's also about the inherent madness of the world we live in each and every day, and the ramifications of being mentally “healthy” in that world. This post, I don't know how it will go, but those are the points I'm trying to convey. Bear with me please. This is a very organic process.

Mania. I get the kind with prodomal symptoms usually, but I've found that partaking of certain unmentionable plants can be quite enough to cause the coin to flip on the spot if I'm in my prodrome. Or it can drive me to a peak in my mania if I'm already there. Or, in large quantity over a few weeks, it can force me to the lower end of euthymia. If I go a month at it, I fall into depression. And, in a way, that's how I prefer it, because it's the closest thing to real control over this thing in me that I have, to be able to metaphorically push a button and decide by that action how I will feel for the next six months or year or more. If I need to get things done and take some chances, mania is convenient. If I need to plod along in one direction without stopping to care how bad my feet hurt or that my job really, really sucks, then a sort-of-mixed somewhat euthymic depression is a useful mental state to be in. But when it comes to the highest highs of mania-- and I always remember them-- I use them for the progress of my soul, because amongst the furious, delirious euphoria, there is clarity.

In the most recent incidence of that forest-through-the-trees clarity, at a peak in my last manic episode, several colliding thoughts produced a realization that has festered in my mind for too long. That realization is pretty damned simple. The world we live in is insane. I had read several articles about whatever deplorable acts of obvious class warfare the upper echelons of the US's economic machine had been getting up to, brown people getting blown up by white men's bombs on the other side of the world for ambiguous but hardly justifiable reasons, and other large, disgusting, and entirely unnecessary problems of the world, and about how most of the Republican party were still on about Obama's birth certificate... The most commentary on the world I could round up from the internet at large pertained to the lavish money-down-the-crapper affair of the royal wedding.

It seemed so incongruous, so improbable, so wrong. People were out there dying, starving, suffering, being killed; the global economy was in utter turmoil because a few white men decided they should be richer than god and couldn't be arsed to care about the ramifications; we had just witnessed a nuclear meltdown in almost realtime on Youtube in March and it was already forgotten... All while the movers and shakers in a full half of the US political spectrum chased after a widely discredited conspiracy in what is somehow still the most influential country in the world, and the general public drooled over the price of Kate Middleton's wedding dress, and mooned over what Pippa had worn.

And it all came together in my head that the world is run and regulated by raving lunatics with obvious psychiatric disorders and no ethics whatsoever, and that they have conspired either by accident or by design to convince almost everyone that this is how it should be, and that everything is fine.

And worse, that those amongst us who cannot bear living in that world are infirm of mind.

Let me put it simpler, and larger.

You Aren't Okay With This
Because You Are Insane.

It was at that moment that I rejected the idea of sanity as a desirable state in the world we live in. What value does such an attribution have when it requires acceptance of all of that and worse as the norm, as desirable states of being, as how things should be, when we could easily live in a complete utopia on this rock without too much effort? Why, in the name of all things good and real, would I or anyone else want to be “SANE” by a f***ed up world's standard?

By all definitions, a person is mentally healthy when they are free from any mental disorder. No PTSD, no depression, no inexplicable feelings of anxiety, and so on. And that is truly disgusting if this is the world we live in. And, to my horror, it really is the world we live in.

To be happy and free from mental disturbance, you would have to be unmoved and unempathetic to the obvious suffering of those around you, unoutraged by the blatant injustices all around us, unbothered by the rape of the human condition perpetrated by people with paper authority and bats in the belfry.

How does that sound healthy in any conceivable way? How could a person legitimately watch the world ripping itself to shreds around them and not have it snatch their heart out of their chest or give them recurring nightmares or make them feel seemingly inexplicable feelings of dread? How could an entire nation watch on a live broadcast as three thousand people were burned and crushed to death on a Tuesday morning in September, and not be permanently scarred by it? How could a generation of soldiers go to Iraq and kill people virtually indiscriminately, and not feel horrified at the direction their hands were forced? How can we read about the death of an elderly black man in his home at the hands of the police for no reason, and not be sickened by it? How, a million things, and more, of the horrors this world callously inflicts upon each and every one of us, how could it leave us anything but headsick and outraged?

So, the System and the Man can label me crazy, can label me broken, can label me Bipolar I with Psychotic Features, can write off my malcontentedness to my illness, can use all the force and words within it to marginalize me and those like me who see the game they are playing at and happen to deviate from “normal”. And I will wear it like a badge of honor, because it means that I am not like them. Because I do not want to be like them. Because their kind of crazy is dangerous and actively harmful, and I give enough damns to speak up and do something and feel things about it heavily enough that they affect me. Because their definition of normal is frightening.

I have no real clencher to this post. I said it would be organic, and it was. There is no more.

The rest is silence.

Love the passion, and thought. Thank you!
I sometimes think it would be soooooo much easier if I accepted the program and watched the football, and celebrities.
Just do your best in this life. Its not a religious thought, per se, but there HAS to be something much better after this.

reply to post by nithaiah


Thankyou for that truly enlightening post

Not much to discuss really when i 100% agree.

You have my Applause.

Excellent read OP. Who says you aren't normal? You think and feel in my opinion that is pretty normal. You are not alone and you are not the minority they have led you to believe you are. Live laugh love and when ever you feel the need go ahead and cry. It is a curse to feel everything but it is better than being one of the soulless walking dead. Welcome to the land of the living and the sane my friend. It's a bumpy ride sometimes but there are bright shinning moments that make it all worthwhile. .

reply to post by nithaiah


Interesting that you felt it necessary to point out which people were white and which people were black and others who were brown.

In my world, it doesn't make a shred of difference because this world if #ed up beyond repair and when the dust settles and the smoke clears it will make little difference what color everyone was.

Good read Op. It reminded me why I quit my psychology study years ago and dropped out after growing absolutly disgusted by the subject and fellow student swallowing everything as undeniable truths. Becoming etiquette brandishing intellectually arrogant moral crusaders unable to form a thought of their own.

reply to post by Screwed


I honestly could not give fewer damns about what flavor of human anybody is until they start genociding, murdering, and/or oppressing people who aren't of the same race (mid-east conflict), or otherwise explicitly discriminate against someone because of differences in skin pigmentation (death of Kenneth Chamberlain). Then it matters to me. A lot. And pointing out race when race is an issue is just my nice, neat way of saying 'YEAH, I SAW WHAT U DID THAR'. And I do view the conflicts in the middle east as White Western Men considering the world a shade too dark. I don't view that as ALL those conflicts are about, but I've heard enough racist garbage from some of those who support the Wars to surmise that it is indeed a factor. And I do view the death of Mr. Chamberlain to be an outrage and an example of racist white cops being an obvious menace to anyone but other white men.

Race will stop mattering when it is no longer a reason people stand behind to kill other people. Until then, it does matter, and I am not particularly ashamed of pointing it out. White men are still demanding deaths of not-very-white people in the middle east. White men with guns are still shooting not-very-white men in the US.

We are human together. But the a-holes in our midst still have color coded hate.

I'm not sure I agree with all your opinions, but I have to say that the diagnostics are made in a very questionable way... I have myself been diagnosed with an unspecified PDT (Persuasive Development Trouble) when I was probably around seven years old. The diagnostic was made around the fact that my mother deemed me apathetic to the highest and that pain didn't seem to disturb me. I also used to fight every other kid and make death threats to my school educators. After telling my mother I would commit suicide and regularly destroying my toys, my mother sent me to a place where they asked me to pick one toy out of three and see how I was interacting with it. After doing so for about an hour, I was being sent back with the diagnostic. I have never understood how they could diagnose me like that only by seeing me play with a toy. Over the next years, I have seen many psychologists and they have all told me that I wasn't at all Asperger (which my mother believed I was) or either PDT. They have cancelled my handicapped license for a review of my folders that would take years to pass, due to the high amount of petitions in Canada (where I live). Now, I am starting to see that the institute that diagnosed me is getting sued for different situations where they apparently didn't do the things correctly and led a kid to murder someone for not giving him the required attention or something like that. My father has also told me that when he called Douglas (the institute) to ask them about my diagnostic, they told him that it was most likely hereditary, due to my father's PDT that my mother told them about. The thing is my father has never been diagnosed as a PDT. I am now in a special retarded program at school and I have met many people that believe they have been diagnosed wrongly in different countries, including Belgium, France, and Canada. It also seems some of them might be psychics. Could this perhaps be a way of tagging psychic people?

Dude its like you feel ashamed for being organic. Seriously fvck these conscious garbage pieces of sh!t that are doing this to you. Worst part is soon you will find out its your entire family. My family for the most part is garbage. They are adulterers, murderers, extortionists, and general overall slobs. My uncle had an organic daughter and conscious, inorganic son. The son got everything-nice life, nice wife, good kids (they are cool people its his father thats the POS). The organic, non conscious daughter was thrown into poverty and homelessness, drug use, and they played with her mind to make her think she was a man. These people did this to their own children, and OP, if hes not BSing about being a non con, will suffer the exact same fate.

Originally posted by Screwed
reply to post by nithaiah

 

Interesting that you felt it necessary to point out which people were white and which people were black and others who were brown.

In my world, it doesn't make a shred of difference because this world if #ed up beyond repair and when the dust settles and the smoke clears it will make little difference what color everyone was.

Racial division programming. OP taught to think this way from his upbringing.

If OP is genuine.

in the words of the comedian,"its all one big joke..its all a joke. SOmetimes i truly beleive we are all insane and the sane ones are locked away in the asylum because they have seen a truth that drove them utterly sane. So is it a stretch to think that we are the madmen? We who kill ,and pollute,and violate the world? Mayby..but who cares when the patients run the insane asylum?

I wont comment on the medical or mental health aspects of this post, but I will help with the case that the world is insane. In fact, I have just started to feel completely stupid, because I am about to state the obvious. Is there anyone who can confidently and knowingly say the world is NOT insane. I have much to say about this but I will try to keep it initially short and hope everything comes out in future discussions.
My 2 main points will center humanity and sustainability.
Sustainability is easy - if you live in a finite world with finite resources and you deliberately seek to use those in an increasing manner (growth!) you must be insane. There is a 100% chance that the non-renewable resources will run out. And you will have mass starvation when this happens. A sane person would seek to maintain or reduce the population and immediately divert all required resources into becoming sustainable - renewable energy, recycling etc.
Humanity. A simple word. What does it mean to be human - what are the basic needs of humans? Food, shelter air and water? Yes indeed, and my point focuses on the denial of these basic needs. I do mean of course clean air and water, non GMO food etc. Lets add to the list: love, sex, self-worth, adventure, anger, freedom... the list goes on of what it is to be human. And we are denying ourselves these basic needs. We are enslaved by debt and fear, controlled by the politically correct army of drones who refuse to let us have fervent debate, to have meaningful jobs, to explore the unknown, to truly love.
This is insanity. To deliberately go about life so that the food, air, water becomes poisoned and live a meaningless existence watching meaningless TV is insane. This does not apply to everyone, and I bet everyone is thinking their existence is not meaningless and that they go to the gym and eat organic food and their job is essential to the function of society.
Ask yourself how truly free you are and what you can do to change things.

reply to post by nithaiah


thank you for that post. It tells me i'm not alone and i'm telling you the same thing.
There is something wrong with the medical profession and its too vast to put your finger on.
I feel in some way, intentionally or not, children who do not fit into the square hole are suppressed and medicated until they fit. I experienced this and now they try it on my son.
I watch a brilliant film on this subject which i would urge all to watch.

here
It’s a documentary about Social Control, examining the history, the philosophy and ultimately the pathology of elite power.