Mental Health and Joining the Dark Side

            I have psychosis not otherwise specified with schizoaffective tendencies. To this day I haven’t a clue what lies beneath this label and it has never been explained to me to my satisfaction. I do know a couple things however. The first is that this whatever it is has landed me in the hospital on two occasions. The second is that a certain dosage of drugs like Seroquel taken daily make it go away almost completely. A third thing I know is that if I do not take these drugs the symptoms return much worse than before. Seroquel withdrawal is worse than the thing one is given Seroquel for whatever that thing is. Further the symptoms of Seroquel withdrawal are the very same thing as the symptoms of psychosis not otherwise specified. In fact, I do not know, and cannot apparently know if pyschosis NOS is even still there whatever ‘there’ means in this context. This is because the drugs control my brain chemistry in a way that replaces my natural brain chemistry. This means that without the drugs I HAVE no natural brain chemistry to fall back on and will fall to pieces. This makes me think I am something of a cyborg or other human/tech hybrid. If civilization were to collapse, I and my brain chemistry would collapse with it and that is one reason I am very solicitous about the potential collapse of civilization. At any rate one of the things I was told I have is ‘insight’ and I think the not otherwise specified part may refer to that. I have no problem sharing this insight with others because I’m 51 years old and past caring and I think there is an important question for others that I can help address.

            My therapist, back when I had one, had a certain angle on things and I had another angle on things. She had much perfectly fine advice about living in the moment and reconditioning one’s thought processes to make them more joyful and optimistic. This would make me a joyful, energetic, participant in the world who could go out there and seize the day and liv e life to the fullest. My position, and I’m sticking to it, is that deep inside me there is literally no person like this. There is a certain tonality to my existence and that is melancholy. In her mind melancholy was opposed to happiness but I don’t think so. I think I am happy being melancholy and not in the negative sense of loving my own misery or being a downer for others. If I were to put this in abstract and not personal terms I would so that there is a shadow side to the human person and this shadow is to be embraced not shunned. I think that mental illness too is not even illness exactly but a sign of underlying health rather as physical pain is the sign of a healthy, functioning body. In short I don’t exactly want to change except that, of course, I need to control certain debilitating physical processes for the sake of my own wellbeing and that of my family. Those things dealt with I have a private place where not everything is alright and I need at some points to be able to visit this place. In fact, I regard this place as a sort of refuge where mourning, guilt, regret and other negative affect are given voice freely because after all, they are part of the truth of being human. In Job it says “Shall we receive good of the lord and not evil also” and I think I have found a secular, modern equivalent of that sentiment. Shall I bask in light and never experience darkness? I can’t actually conceive of such a life though that might be a deficiency of imagination on my part.

            Generations of mystics have told us there are pains of growth as well as pains of decay. Wordsworth speaks of being humanized by sorrow. In short I think the good life contains the negative energies as well as the positive and that being happy is a more complex thing than being cheerful and having the wind always in your sails. We could discuss that in terms Aristotle’s notion of eudemonia (a happy person is in search of the mean though that is the hardest thing to find!), existentialism, Jungian psychoanalysis or any number of such doctrines. Still, it seems to me at least that one of the inner children you should satisfy (at least occasionally) is the mourning child or ‘poor child’ as Canadian poet Jay Macpherson put it in her poem of that title: “Go further back: for these poor children/ruined from the womb still yearn/to swing in dark or water, wanting/not childhood’s flowers but absolute return.” MacPherson, a war orphan banished to St. John’s from a much sunnier England, may psychoanalyze uncomfortably here, identifying the sorrow of the world and the exile from Eden with banishment from the womb but, these lines make me as happy as they do sad and I’ll leave it at that.