Debilitating symptoms of Tourette Syndrome may also fuel creative energy

...crows Times Online. It be cool, but bemusing 'tis as time(s) marches (merches?) on there is less and less of the known world not colonised by mental illness. Dysfunction, disorder, whatever.

This really makes me laugh: "Recent speculation has focused on Mozart as a possible Tourette sufferer, based mainly on scatalogical references in letters and music. However, some experts suggest it may have been more the exuberance of youth than a clinical condition." Yeah, and the funny thing is(n't) that at the moment overly exuberant youth are often being diagnosed and medicated for being overly exuberant.

On Being a "Survivor"

While I was swimming this morning - exercise=recovery yada yada - I reflected upon the term "survivor". Before its current vogue in a different context I associated this word, as a child of post-Holocaust Jews - with hobbling out of Dachau alive, or being rescued from some Japanese POW camp with bamboo still growing under my fingernails or, say, beating cancer.

Now, of course, there are new kinds of survivors. You can be a survivor of almost anything. For example, I am a survivor of 25 years of Eastenders ;) The word does have new meanings and associations and they're not all devalued. What caught my handsome reflection, though? I thought: Many survive many things that cause, induce or increase their mental illness. But as far as I know all I have survived is myself. I am at the centre of my psychodrama. Nobody, as far as I know - and Woody Allenesque upbringing notwithstanding - has done much of importance to me...except me.

"I Yam Whad I Yam": Pop-I

Not so long ago someone was saying something to me that involved sources in living for regret-shame-deceit and all that bundle of scum. I snapped, "You have to live!" Look, I've done my share of things I'm not proud of but I'm not 'shamed of them. What might have hurt my kids I care about, and as for the rest it's like combat, we're all on the field, there will be casualties, no free lunches abound.

Recovery, to some extent - and maybe a great extent - is about acceptance and self-acceptance. But I say, it's about defiance, too. In order to have meaning recovery has to include a degree of "I-don't-give-a-****(of yer choice)". It's gotta have guts. Apologies are nice, you should say your sorries and then move on. My attitude is that you have zero obligation to spend your recovery feeling sorry for the people you hurt. They'll take every opportunity, given a chance, to remind you of what a monster you were (and still are, if they can fit that in). Don't spend the life you have saved killing it with undue kindness. Recover, but for life, not some lukewarming of the hearts of the hard-done-by.

Schizophrenics Call Ho-o-o-o-o-me!

With uncertain reference to the above post, this UFO contactees' blog goes into some detail on how hearing voices is not just characteristic of mental illness. I guess not, seeing as Moses did it. Joking aside (inside?) the previous post has some great power in it, some truth, but I'm damned if I can reach it. When I do, I'll tell you...right here.
(Image courtesy of this fruitcake Flikr site.)

The author, possibly two.

The author, possibly at three. Or four?

Victim of Dreams - Civil War in the Soul
By
Jeremy Gluck

ISBN: 978-1-84747-613-5
Published: 2008

“I've read your book and I am impressed - and obviously I relate. I hope it sells well because I am sure it will help many people.” - By Katy-Sara Culling, The Bipolar Foundation

Description

Novelist, poet and musician Jeremy Gluck draws on his experiences of growing up in post-War Canada in a breath-takingly beautiful and poignant account of his battle with bipolar disorder (manic depression). He contrasts a depiction of his descent into depression and madness with the narrative innocence of his childhood.

Victim of Dreams can help others to understand what it is like to develop, have and/or survive a severe and enduring mental health condition. More than anything else service users want empathy: Manuals and guides are essential, good medical support crucial, medication crucial of course, but those with serious MH conditions are so plagued by feeling misunderstood and isolated that empathy is the key. Exploring in anecdotal and lay terms the genetic and environmental genesis of the disorder in me, the book is written in a highly professional literary style, including vivid memoir and especially penetrating accounts of depression and manic delusion – drawn largely from journals kept at the time and therefore vivid in their evocation of mania and depression - and is a new kind of survivor book that eschews “misery” for memory and asks, again and again, searching questions about the nature of our lives, minds, memory and capacity to endure what is, after all, a part of ourselves seemingly set to destroy another, more benign part.

The book is in three parts or "lives". The first part is my innocence, when the illness lies dormant but shadowing. In the second part, I wrestle with madness as the illness reveals itself. Coming from a more balanced and objective viewpoint, in the final part I review both having brought myself back. I can now show myself as someone different, neither the innocent nor the madman, and importantly not the person I have been accused of being.

A Definitive Guide To Mental Health Recovery

A Definitive Guide to Mental Health Recovery by Jeremy Gluck is a unique, experiential guide to recovering mental health. Based on trainings to mental health services staff, supplemented by thoughtful and very original reflections and explorations of this momentous new development in attitudes to the successful transformation of mental health, and including new and unusual articles and interviews with mental health professionals and service user mavericks, this book is indispensable to a more profound and penetrating understanding of what it is like to recover, what it means to recover and why recovery is necessary and indeed the right of services users.

About the Author

Jeremy Gluck is an expatriate Canadian who, with a parallel, successful life in the arts, is now working in the voluntary mental health sector in Wales as a mental health information and research worker. His lifelong experience as a published writer and author has equipped him ideally to write this companion volume to his memoir “Victim of Dreams”.