A Dictionary

    I remember an elderly Chinese man.  When I first met him, he was so afraid he barricaded himself in a bedroom.  I bought him a Chinese/English dictionary.  He wrote a letter to his doctor and advocated for himself.  That's what I would like to do for myself.

    My doctor was giving me samples given to him for free from drug companies.  I asked if we could change my meds.  He yelled at me.  I changed doctors.  My medications changed.  I moved out of my aunt's house.  Also, to compound matters, I had a small identity crisis.  This all lead me back into the hospital.

    Three weeks later, I was feeling fine.  I decided I would like if my mom had guardianship over me, so she could admit me to hospital if I was not capable of making decisions for myself.  It would take one to two months to clear this administrative hurdle.  I had to be in the hospital for legal reasons while they processed the paperwork.

    A week later, a nurse passed me a furtive note telling me that I was not crazy, based on my writing.

    She was fired.

    For two months, the rest of the nurses treated me like a madman.  I was perfectly sane (but addicted to the cigarettes that gave me regularity -- I've since quit those).  Now, ten years later, I have cognitive dissonance: I am afraid of the side-effects of my medications, but even more afraid of going against the wishes of my doctor.  I know that it doesn't make sense.  A sane person, weighing the side effects against the benefits, would not take these medications willingly.  I recognize my trauma.  I was gaslit by nurses who didn't know any better, and given sparce encouragement from the doctors who should have known better.  This is how you treat enemies, or convicted felons.  Not fellow citizens.

    I gave a dictionary to an old Chinese man who could barely write.  That holistic treatment saved him weeks, months, years in the hospital.  How come doctors and nurses don't think about the true needs of their patients?  Are they all afraid of being fired?

Drug-Seeking

As a bit of a content warning, I would like to say that this essay contains frank descriptions of drug use. It may be triggering to some people, myself included. Drugs are commonly used and abused by people suffering from mental illnesses, sometimes as a reprieve from the symptoms of their illness, and other times as self-punishment for unwanted thoughts and behaviours. This means that drug use can be motivated by anything from self-medication to self-harm. For me, it was both.

At a young age, I never considered that I would use drugs. The war on drugs was loud. It wasn't until symptoms of schizophrenia appeared that I questioned the establishment view on drug use. It was a bit of an embarrassment for the established view that even the most cursory examination of the actual, unbiased literature on intoxicants – from people who used the substances they talked about (chemists like Aldous Huxley, psychonauts, and shamans) – showed the drug war to be extremely misleading. It was not based on facts, but politics.

This isn't to say drugs are safe. For someone suffering from schizophrenia (a class of people most susceptible to the use of artificial stimulants), they are certain to lead to a full-blown psychotic episode. But for most people, the average person, light and moderate use of drugs is not abuse, and the mind and body rebound after the person outgrows the habit.

My poison was crystal methamphetamine, also known simply as “speed”. Relatively safer amphetamines, such as Dexedrine, are uncommonly used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. Dexedrine was also used by pilots to remain focused on long flights; metamphetamine was used by factory workers in Hitler's Germany to increase production. A white powder that dissolves into a steaming glassy puddle when heated, methamphetamine is inhaled as a gas, injected, or snorted up into the nostril. It causes the heart to race, the attention to be hyper-focused, and removes exhaustion. I know someone who was awake for three weeks straight due to his constant abuse of meth.

Although highly addictive, meth is less addictive than nicotine. Once I started coughing up blood from overuse, it was easy to cut the habit. Unlike cigarettes, it is easy to pair the specific health effects to the use of the drug.

A few months later, I was institutionalized; because I was forthright about my drug use, my initial diagnosis was drug-induced psychosis. However, it is clear to me that my drug use was a symptom of the psychosis, not the cause. I suffer from schizophrenia and thus I used drugs, not the other way around.

Talking to others with schizophrenia, I learned that drug use and abuse is common among those living with psychotic symptoms. It is a common opinion that drugs – even those as seemingly benign as marijuana – can cause a psychotic break. However, my unsubstantiated opinion is that a psychotic break can just as easily be the trigger for the drug-seeking behaviour.

Tabula Rasa?

John Locke suggested that we are blank slates (tabula rasa) at birth.  We come into this world without any knowledge.  The alternative is that we have some inherent programming.

For example, Carl Jung believed that we have a sort of "collective unconscious", a set of primordial myths that we are born with, and that are remarkably similar across cultures that have never met.  From these myths, we form archetypes that appear in dreams and in wakefulness and which help us interpret the world.  For instance, the archetype of the Mother is an idea that all humans are aware of to some extent.

Sigmund Freud postulated that we are born pure id, unchecked desire, and ws develop an ego (personality) and super-ego (conscience) over our pre-adolescent years.  This Super-ego is basically the Holy Spirit that talks to us.  Jimminy-Cricket.

Myers and Briggs took Carl Jung's archetypes and created four axis that define human personality.  These axis are Introverted/Extroverted, iNtuition/Sensation, Thinking/Feeling, and Perceiving/Judging.  Combined, there are 16 personality types, each one a primordial archetype.  I am INTJ, a "Mastermind", which presents in about 1% of the human population.

These are, as I said, based off of our collective unconscious, and are therefore definitively not conscious.  The first goal of consciousness is to become aware of these factors and dismantle them by thinking logically and consistently about them.  The collective consciousness is found in logical reasoning -- deductive, inductive, and hypothetical-deductive.

A common theme in literature is something known as the "hero's journey", which any fan of fantastical or mythological literature has seen in action.  Stories follow definite patterns, and every writer of sufficient creativity has accidentally stumbled across this formula, and angrily tore out their hair trying to get around it while still creating an engaging tale.

But I might be wrong.  Are we blank slates at birth?  Do we come into this world with no prior conception of anything, including myth and religion?  Do these themes recur because they are a logical and inevitable direction of thought, or is it a pre-programmed and instinctive consequence of having to survive in this world of human relationships?

There Is No Hope Without Despair

The grace of Terry Fox is in the possibility of his failure.
It's what makes him human;
We relate to his weakness and find comfort in his strength.
Hope and despair are two sides of the same coin:
There is not one without the other;
Each is the necessary condition of both.

Day to day, we decide that not everyone's struggle is so noble,
But this is deception.  Ease is another word for practised.
We relate to Terry Fox because we struggle, not because we win.
One-in-five people suffer from a mental illness,
One-in-five that need to struggle with hidden prosthesis
One-in-five are challenged by invisible demons.

Who is the Terry Fox of schizophrenia?
Who has enough hope to survive the despair?
Who can look the label in the eye and say "Yes!"?
Who doesn't pretend it is nothing at all?
Who sees the reality and doesn't hide?
Whoever that is is a champion.

Schizophrenia and Eudaemonia

When treating mental illness, it is important to ensure that the patient remains capable of living to his full potential.  All too often, inadequate education and misdirection of the true facts of the illness causes the patient to see himself as nothing more than a patient, often unwillingly.  If the patient does not submit to the will of health professionals, the temptation is to break the patient down to a state where treatment acceptance bears a similarity with agreement.

The dictates of practical ethics, besides being prescriptive for human flourishing, should be seen as identical across the board.  There are no different, separate, ethics for the mentally unwell.  A schizophrenic can be -- indeed, should be -- a potential candidate for the exploration of eudaemonia.  There is a difference between medical suffering and human angst, but it is benefical to treat these as one and the same.

Carol Ryff's Six-Point Scale of Psychological Well-Being is a solid questionaire that measures the reported well-being of humans.  It is based on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and is a quantification of his ideas about eudaemonia.  The six categories and a sample question from each are as follows:

1. Autonomy
I have confidence in my opinions, even if they are contrary to the general consensus.
2. Environmental Mastery
In general, I feel I am in charge of the situation in which I live.
3. Personal Growth
I think it is important to have new experiences that challenge how you think about yourself and the world.
4. Positive Relations with Others
People would describe me as a giving person, willing to share my time with others.
5. Purpose in Life
Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them.
6. Self-Acceptance
I like most aspects of my personality.

Those without disabilities that prohibit them from working may perceive not working as a benefit to being disabled.  They may feel that the the mentally ill don't deserve to be treated well.  They believe that disability welfare is theft.  It is a catch-22.  It is exceedingly rare that the mentally ill are qualified for gainful labour, and in a labour-intensive society such as ours, nobody wants to hire the ill.

Consequently, for example, it is difficult for the mentally ill to find purpose to their life.  Something that many people derive their life's meaning from -- work -- is denied, and thus the potential to know human flourishing is denied.  This is unacceptable.  An enlightened society should recognize the suffering of its members.  Contrary answers to the big questions of life need to be recognized as valid.  A common alternative to work is religious piety.

Schizophrenia is a mental illness, not an ethical one.  It is possible to live a full and complete life while suffering from the effects of the sickness.  All it takes is an awareness of ethics beyond the scope of the symptoms of madness, as well as the keen observation that very few people, sane or insane, manage to live a life conducive to human flourishing.  Happiness is not automatic.

To measure the efficacy of a eudaemonic (happiness) focus, we need only look to cases of suicide.  Those who are unable to be happy with their diagnosis have an increased chance of suicide.  Acceptance of one's weaknesses and recognition of one's humanity leads to greater self-acceptance, and fewer suicides.

Written Word Therapy

Illustration by Emily Wright


The following is a presentation written for the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta in May 2017:


Hello, I'm Trevor.  I'm pleased to be here.

I believe that one's earliest memories shape one's entire life.

As Vladimir Nabokov said, "I think it's all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."  It is the curse of the philosophic mind that these memories are memories of people, and people do not live forever.  In my case, my cherished memory is that of my Baba.  I remember her round belly, her sky-blue dresses that reached to the floor, and her suicide.  Even today, the room she died in makes me uneasy.

At the time, when I was four-years-old, I learned that she thought the police were after her.  That was my first encounter with schizophrenia, the disease that steals the soul.  From that moment on, I was fascinated with what I viewed as a different sort of breakdown of reason: religion.  If that's where the core of one's soul is, certainly it would be there where I could find my answers.

I may have been young, but my problem was serious.  I'll steal Albert Camus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”, I drifted through school, intentionally getting high enough grades that I could pass, but played without any stubbornness of character.  Thus, I was educated without being bothered by petty concerns.  The specter of my Baba's death lingered, and her death was a real insurmountable problem.

Within my twelfth year of school, there was a radical change.  I can blame it somewhat on the literature I was reading at the time:  Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.  It seemed that the answer was there within the confidence of these brave thinkers, and the reason I had not already found the answer was because of government scare tactics promoted so liberally in schools.

The last three months of school were hellish.  I was balancing mild drug use with school work, and the thought of another 4 years of post-secondary was not appealing at all.  I asked my grandfather to lend me the money he had earmarked me for university use to just give me the money and let me sort life out a little.  Of course, he said no.  He was a professional radiologist.

I graduated with an 87% average.

But my rational years were over.  I decided that, in the worst case scenario, participating in the tradition of drug use would cause me to have a mental breakdown, but that was still only in a minority of cases.

Drug users develop a keen sensitivity to their inner state.  It's something that cannot be learned without experience.  In certain spiritual practices, the careful controlled use of drugs pushes someone into the desired receptivity to spiritual ideas.  Outside of therapy, it's a matter of luck and experiment, which is unsafe.

I kept a log, which encompassed everything from nutmeg to cough syrup to marijuana to ecstasy to crystal methamphetamine.  Simultaneously, I kept a journal of my thoughts, a proper philosophical journal that is forever lost to time.  Within my drug journal you can see a mind desperate to hold onto sanity, but only in retrospect.  If I had known that there were treatments for my suffering, I would have skipped the experimentation.  I found solace in crystal meth, finally.  It settled me down and helped me get on track with my other spiritual pursuits.

Four months later, I was coughing up bloody chunks of lung.  That was enough to get me to stop.  I abruptly ended all contact with my drug-using friends.  That phase of my life was over. The only leftover was cigarettes, which I found a lot more difficult to quit than harder drugs.

I opened up to my Mom about my activities, and admitted that I might be depressed.  It didn't come as a surprise.  At the time, I had progressed to reading any philosophy I could get my greedy hands on, and found a spiritual message in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism.  I admit I didn't understand it all at once, but my final message is this: seek for Right Mindfulness (be in your right mind) for sanity, unblock your chakras for enlightenment, and see the necessary duality that all in the world has its opposite.  An Enlightened person is the Eastern equivalent of a Rational person.  Having been labelled insane, the quality of my sanity is important to me.

Anyway, I felt that I was being watched.  In this case, it was true.  My friends and family were all trying to figure out what was wrong with me and what to do about it.  It got to the point where I fled my house and ended up at the University of Alberta.  I disrupted classes and got sent to security.  I wasn't wearing shoes since I left by way of my window.  Security managed to get my information and they held me there until I got picked up.  When we arrived back home, a pair of nurses were waiting.  They talked to me for a while and then took me to Alberta Hospital.

By the end of the first full day in the hospital, I was locked in solitary confinement.  I had yelled at the nurses for their mistreatment of patients, and everyone sort of looked away while I had my breakdown.  Solitary is not fun.  I'd say it's like prison, but it's identical to prison.  It's not pretty being in a cage.  I rubbed faeces on the wall just to get moved to the other solitary room.  That was when I was eighteen.

I was initially diagnosed with drug-induced psychosis.  Although I hadn't touched meth in over eight months, it is one of those drugs that set off alarm bells.  I thought that I was dead and was in Purgatory.  I took three months until I understood anything of anything again. My family was very supportive, and I know they know more about my illness than I do since I still have trouble with basic activities of life.  I've been admitted four times, and my current diagnosis is schizophrenia.  What this means to a regular person is anyone's guess.  I barely understand it, and sometimes I feel like I've gotten over it and then straight back to the hospital.

I've been out of hospital for three years now.

After so long, I'm so used to schizophrenia that I don't bring it up in casual conversation.  There's plenty of other things people can hate me for.  I did have a period of self-stigmatization.  It almost lead to my suicide.  It came about after I tried to go back to school and found that things that were normally easy for me were now ridiculously impossible.  Getting to school.  Staying awake in classes.  Making lunches.

Currently, I'm thirty-two years old.  I don't work, go to school, or volunteer.  For a while, I tried to check out the Mormon church, but it was not my brand of religion.  I don't need any more guilt in my life.  I do, however, practice karate and attend the SSA.  I keep good relations with my family, and I've got a few high school friends that managed to survive through my incidents.  That's the limit of my socialization.

What do I think can be changed?

I dislike when people use words like "bipolar" or "depressed", "autistic" or "schizophrenic" outside of the context of the Diagnostic Statistics Manual.  As Soren Kierkegaard said: "once you label me you negate me."The challenge of finding a way to speak openly about mental illness without stigmatizing those labeled as such is real.  Depression is not simply sadness; schizophrenia is not simply fear.  In the future, I would like to find a shared vocabulary that allows doctors and lawyers to speak intelligibly to one another without frightening those they are talking about.  It feels too much like a witch hunt and not enough like medicine.  I'm not the first to make this comparison.  As Albert Camus had said, suicide is the prime philosophic problem of philosophy.  In this sense, my problems had a spiritual solution.  I've considered using the spiritual languages of Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism to describe the same events in clearer terms.

I'll share with you how that might work.

There are seven chakras which can be blocked, and a blockage in a chakra leads to an illness.  For example, the lowest chakra, the basal one, is blocked by fear and leads to poor survivability, just as someone afflicted with schizophrenia is walled in by his or her paranoia.  It makes sense primarily because Hinduism is a meditative language, which has given names to all the different states of consciousness.  Western medicine misses a useful tool when it ignore the discoveries of the East.  Taking all seven chakras as real allows us to quantify degrees of mental unwellness, in the same way that an IQ test allows us to quantify the rarity of relative intelligences.  Living with schizophrenia is better than not living at all, and there is always the possibility that one opens the crown chakra and becomes enlightened.  But this is beyond the scope of this presentation, so I'll finish my thoughts another time.

For the moment, this image should suffice:

How do I respond to Camus' problem?

Although my medications are certainly better than meth, they still do not answer all the problems of the illness.    I suffer from excessive fatigue, sleeping 12-14 hours a day.   My hygiene could be better.  My hands quiver frequently.  No matter how often I try to focus on these, it never seems important.  I've had 4 different diagnoses with 4 different pill combinations.  There will never be a perfect one.  As it stands, I prefer the negative side-effects of my medications than the side-effects of street drugs.

But I certainly no longer have the urge to kill myself, through drugs or otherwise.  Suicide, the problem that my Baba introduced to me at an early age, is no answer.  If I could talk to her now, I could give her the ultimate advice: be patient.  Even at my worst, it was going to get better.  What I had was patience, as it took ten years for the psychiatrists to find an acceptable medication cocktail for me.  The solution meant I had to trust others to do what was best for me when I was incapable of making these decisions.  It's hard to swallow a doctor's drugs if you have a history of drug use.

My family stuck by me, and showed me by example that life was inherently worth living.  Above all, my mother always tried to reach me on the far side of consciousness.  She is able to admit me into the hospital if I stop making sense.  And others believe that what I say makes sense, which is all I really desire.  Telling the truth and being believed is important for anyone who has gone through any form of suffering.

In closing, I hope you enjoyed this journey into my mind, and appreciated the humble perspective of someone living with schizophrenia.

Contradiction and the Absolute

There are two types of beliefs: absolute and empirical.

If two beliefs are true opposites, then if x is true, then -x is false. This form of contradistinction only appears absolutely. Most opposed beliefs are not true opposites, meaning that if p is true, q can either be true or false, and vice versa.

Because it is sometimes difficult to determine if two different beliefs are true opposites, we add a couple of truth values. In total, we have: (1) x, (2) -x, (3) x and not-x, and (4) neither x nor not-x.  Thus we shift from thinking in dilemmas to thinking in tetralemmas.

If (3) or (4) are possibilities, then we are not dealing with absolute beliefs. For instance, if it is possible for theism and atheism both simultaneously to be false, then belief in God is empirical. This is alright for everyone but those obsessed with finding truth at all costs. Most truth is permanently provisional.

Another example of empirical belief is the belief in selfhood. It is possible for the self to both exist and not exist. We break formal laws of logic establishing this, but paraconsistent logic allows us to consider such true contradictions as non-explosive. The Buddhist tetralemma kills metaphysics.

One book that forms the core of Buddhist theory is the Diamond Sutra. The whole book is one extended lesson in thinking beyond dualistic dilemmas. Four-valued logic, the tetralemma, requires a bit of restructuring of the mind to apply consistently.

The advantage is that we also avoid the circular logic behind the law of non-contradiction because we get to selectively choose when it does and doesn't make sense to obey the law of non-contradiction. We can distinguish between absolute beliefs and empirical beliefs by how they measure up to the four values of the tetralemma, rather than the two values that we are trapped with in regards to dilemmas.