I am sorry

Apparently, my “good-bye” post offended all sorts of people who practice meditation. In fact, not only did I offend some people’s sensibilities, I am being harassed about it in emails sent to me.

I didn’t want to apologize. Because one thing I have come to learn about people in the self-help and mental health community is a kind of sense of “specialness” about one’s personal journey, and mental conditions. And much of communication about mental illness or spirituality involves dancing around the things we want to say and communicate, by going out of our way to appear to be sensitive, compassionate, worried about “eggshell-stepping” on other people’s triggers, sensibilities and personal issues.

In short, the desire to come across as sensitive and informed creates a space where I am worried about your feelings and reactions to my thoughts and feelings. And frankly, this very much does work in person. In one-on-one or group social encounters. But in blogging, I want to speak my personal truth, my opinions, my thoughts and feelings, and not worry about whether or not my ideas rattle your cage or your mindset or emotional balance.

I very nearly died during the late winter of 1994, because of my mental health issues. Recovering from that suicide attempt, made me realize how precious and short life can be. I’ve read elsewhere that people who find out they only have a week, or a month, or a year to live, become liberated from the need to act out social niceties and just speak from the heart (or the hip) their thoughts, because they are running out of time, and they no longer want to waste time, going around and around, speaking words whose sole purpose is to cushion the blow or impact that our thoughts might have on another person’s personal arrangement of delicate eggshells and triggers, and, well, too bad if you feel upset, at the least a personal truth was spoken honestly. That is how people dying of terminal cancer often feel about their remaining conversations on this earth in this life.

When I attack psych meds, I annoy people who benefit from them. When I attack supplements and nutrition scams, I annoy people who benefit from them. When I toss out my honest opinion about meditation as it is understood and practiced by a great many people, I annoy people, and I get attacked for it. There is no way to win the Ms Super-Sensitive and Popularity Award. I am always going to anger or upset one group of people over another, by weighing in on my thoughts about something that flies counter to their own personal experience of it. The truth is, you can not make everyone happy, all the time.

What I said about meditation, reflects my experience with people who claim to practice it. I am humble enough to admit, that for years, I practiced what I truly believed was “real” meditation, but, somehow, all this meditation practice, didn’t really do anything for me, in the long-term. Sure, I felt better sometimes, I had “peak experiences,” and thought this meditation stuff was great! But then, another year would go by, and I really was not healed or changed all that much. Symptoms came back. I became uncentered, ungrounded, unstable, sooner or later, once again.

Why?

The answer is a combination of three factors.

• Proper practice
• Length of time of practicing
• Consistency

When I learned how to meditate properly, and gave myself over to serious practice, hours a day, and practiced (almost) every single day, something amazing happened!

I did heal. I did change. I became clearer, more calm, less symptomatic. The rest you know from reading my mini-bio, and my other writings. In time, I healed everything that was wrong with me. The PTSD, the mania, the depression, the inner voices. These same meditation and dissolving techniques helped me heal again when I was sexually assaulted back ’03 or ’04 or whenever it was. And I got over that, too.

While I have never claimed to be a meditation master, here, on my vlog, or in my book, I have invested over twenty years of my life practicing different techniques and traditions, and in all humility, I do know a few things about practicing correctly and incorrectly, and what constitutes “proper practice”. So when I offer my opinion on why you may not have healed yourself with your meditation practice, you can either,

• Blame me for being super-insensitive to your special feelings about your special practices. Or
• Ask yourself if there may be any truth to what I say, if maybe, just maybe, this woman might know what she is talking about.

I mean, come on folks, how many other mental health memoirs exist today about someone using meditation to permanently heal from not one, not two, but three mental illnesses? There are none, which makes my work unique among its kind. So why blame me for saying something that makes you feel wounded or uncomfortable, and assume there must be something wrong with me for saying so, when you are the one still suffering? Does that make any sense? No it does not. Not to me, at any rate. Eggshell-stepping is about preserving your ego and your feelings. And in my goodbye post, I chose not to let being fearful of being criticized create self-censorship.

If I die tomorrow or next week I can rest easy in my grave, knowing that I gave you people the most honest advice I could, even if it did not make you feel all special and spiritual and glowing inside. At least I was honest.

Being Ms Sensitive and Popular means not speaking my honest opinions and constantly worrying about other people’s special egos and delicate feelings, and gaining their approval and being seen as being all “ultra-compassionate and enlightened,” and all that jazz.  Frankly, life is all too often, way too short for some of us, perhaps many of us, to waste time egg-shell stepping for +sensitivity points.

I do understand that a lot of people are not in a place in their life, where they can practice the way that I did when I was healing. I completely empathize with having so many commitments, that one can not simply hit “escape” and bail out of their life and go meditate for six hours a day, until they are healing or healed. I get that. I feel for your life circumstance. I am sorry for your circumstance, and if my good-bye post offended you for that reason.

Please bear in mind, much is being made these days, about the wonder of brain scans and brain imaging. From what we know about meditation, doing “hard-core” meditation, makes changes to your brain. These changes also happen to novice meditators, but these changes are not as “cultivated” to use a spot-on word. The neural development is not the same for novice meditators, or those that only practice a little, compared to those that practice a lot.

At the same time that we have universities doing brain scans on people who meditate, we also have mental health scientists performing brain scans on people who present with mental health problems. While the complete and final word is not in yet, on either the brains of meditators or the brains of those with mental illness, at this time it appears as though people who practice the real deal meditation actually grow and develop the very same brain structures whose neuronal firing or executive duties appear to be “underdeveloped” or compromised in people who present with mental illness.

So regardless, if you do not think of me as a meditation master or some spiritual guru or some enlightened sage whose words drip with grace and compassion like so many of the new age teachers out there these days, I am willing to put my money where my mouth is, and take a brain scan. If I still have mental illness, then my brain would likely scan a color pattern like those people with depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or ptsd have in their scans. Or. It would scan like a Carmelite nun or a Tibetan monk.

My bet, my “money,” my gamble here, is that my brain scan will not only, not remotely look like the brain scans of those who are experiencing mental illness, but that my brain will reveal the advanced cognitive and neurological development that lifestyle meditators and monks demonstrate. Given that I haven’t been symptomatic for years, that makes perfect sense.

How many of you who are currently still symptomatic, and who practice meditation, are willing to compare your brain scan, to mine? People these days seem so into having “evidence-based” results to point to. So why not brain scan me, and any one of you who has taken me to task for acting “arrogant” and “dismissive” and “elitist” about my meditation practice, can get a brain scan too. Then we can compare results, and see who really knows what they are doing in the meditation arena, okay?

Then you can apologize to me, for doubting me, for straw manning me, for putting me on a pedestal, and then tearing me off it, when I say something that makes you feel bad or inadequate about your meditation practices, when we find out who is really blowing smoke here. What say you?

Here is an example of what has come into my inbox after my good-bye post.

From: Pixie Song [edited]@yahoo.com
Date: Sun, May 22, 2011 7:09 pm
To: janealexander[at]possessingme[dot]com

Your last post was arrogant and extremely angry. You seem almost resentful of those who do not meditate like you & those who do not share your success must be “doing it wrong”.

For someone who claims to have mastered meditation and her depression you fail to show evidence of this in your final post. Either that or you have replaced intense depression with utter contempt and arrogance.

I have a standing meditation challenge to compare my brain structures to those of who currently suffer from mental illness. The challenge is to compare my brain firing patterns to those who have ten, twenty or thirty years of meditation. It is my belief that the proof will be in the brain scan.

That is, I don’t really care if your feelings are hurt. My pissing you off has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I have been depression free for over fifteen years. You can not invalidate my achievement, simply because you don’t like what I have to say on my blog.

Good luck with your healing, and your attitude problem.
Cordially,
Jane

Jane Alexander
www.PossessingMe.com

From: Pixie Song [edited]@yahoo.com        
Date: Sat, Jun 04, 2011 1:35 pm
To: janealexander[at]possessingme[dot]com

Your last post was arrogant and extremely angry. You seem almost resentful of those who do not meditate like you & those who do not share your success must be “doing it wrong”.

For someone who claims to have mastered meditation and her depression you fail to show evidence of this in your final post. Either that or you have replaced intense depression with utter contempt and arrogance.

Is there something I can do for you, sister?

You obviously do not like me. Clearly, my goodbye post upset your sensibilities. You’ve already vented on me your righteous anger once, for making you feel upset about (I am assuming) either your meditation practices, or the psychiatric drugs you take, or both. I assumed that your venting on me, would make you feel better. But you clearly do not have a clue, nor can you take a hint, or you need to vent even more on me, because here you are replying to my last email.

You do not get to define and redefine my personal journey of healing. You do not get to invalidate me, by telling me what my mental health or spiritual ability is or is not. That makes you just like the terrible psychiatrists who abused me inpatient. It also makes you sound just like my abusive parents. You are an invalidator, a blamer, and a shamer.

The fact that you tried to strawman, invalidate, remote-diagnose and judge me, and set your own goal posts about what meditation is, without even telling me your real name, your meditation past, your teachers, anything relevant at all as to why I should take anything you say about meditation seriously, tells me you’ve got personal issues. Issues, that I don’t have.

One of those issues, appears to me that you think you are really special, and now, you want to tear me down because I hurt your super-special and sensitive self. Not narcissism at all, right?

So, unless you are ready to give up psych meds, and unlearn everything you think you know about meditation, and learn meditation the way I do it, from me, I don’t see there is any value in our back-and-forth.

For the record, I have not stated anywhere on any of my blogs, my old vlogs, or in my book, that I am a meditation master. You just pulled that out of thin air, for the purpose of shooting it down. This is very poor argument form, and you disappoint me by resorting to hyperbole, instead of reality.

Assuming that you are happy with your idea of mental health treatment and recovery, and that you already hate my guts enough to try to tear me down, I don’t understand the point of your replying back to me, except to lash out at me, (again!) to make yourself feel a little better, about your super-special injured feelings.

I am very sorry if you suffer from mental illness and you have no cure for it. Maybe psych meds or faux-meditation techniques are the best you can expect or hope for. Maybe you just don’t have time to practice at the level that I did. That may be out of your control, and I am sorry for that.

Maybe you have a vested interest in practicing a certain way, and you feel I insulted your favorite meditation practice, that, I don’t feel sorry for…

There is real meditation, and false meditation. You are either doing one, or the other. But not both at the same time. That is my opinion, informed from two decades of practicing both real and false paths. If you are doing it right, you will heal. If you are doing it wrong, you will spin your wheels, and years will go by, and you won’t really be all that different, or healed.

And that should be a clue maybe, if you have any humility in you at all, that perhaps you might be doing something wrong, or at least, not as effective as it could be, with more training (or more time to train).

I feel for your pain. I am sorry I offended you. Here is wishing for your eventual healing.
love,
Jane

Jane Alexander
www.PossessingMe.com

Good Bye and Good Luck

Hello everyone,

I’ve been writing and blogging and vlogging about alternative healing/treatment/cures for mental health problems since 2006.

I am done. At least for now.

For twenty years I suffered from the symptoms of severe manic depression, mild schizophrenia and intense PTSD.

I have been free of all of those problems for closing in on FIFTEEN YEARS.

I wrote a book about how I cured myself, using meditation. See my sidebar column and my dotcom for more info.

Uncomfortable Reality CHECK:

Most of you people who think you are doing meditation? You are not. You don’t know what you are doing. You just think you do and talk like you do, but you do not. I know this, because meditation has been my life’s work and I happen to know a few things about doing meditation right, and doing it wrong. I’ve made many mistakes, gone down many false paths, and I have called myself an experienced and serious meditator, even when it was clear I still had depression, self-hate, confusion, etc.

I was a hypocrite and a newb (beginner) and I can admit this.

Consequently, I can smell New Age cluelessness when some people talk about meditation. You don’t know what you are doing. Just admit it. Okay?

Have fun with your faux-meditation practices, because, when years and years go by and you are still not healed/recovered/cured of your depression, mania, anxiety, tumultuous and deceptive inner voices, self-loathing and self-confidence issues, you will maybe realize that you never had any clue what meditation is really all about.

Instead you are investing in some personal stake on what you think meditation should be, to you.

Also. I can’t stand this climate of Big Pharma.

It borders on self-harm, self-psychological torture for me to read about mental illness, mental health suffering, ECT sessions, Lithium treatment-induced kidney failure, Tardive Dyskenisa, etc. I can’t stand it anymore. I don’t want to know about this stuff anymore.

IT IS DEPRESSING. And I am DONE with being depressed.

It is no longer healthy or beneficial to me to keep stressing myself by reading about all the incredible horrors of modern, biological reductionist mental health treatment.

The way I see it is, you pop pills, talk therapy all you want, get your colon hosed out, take vitamins you don’t need, take up gluten free diets, whatever.

None of this stuff compares EVEN REMOTELY to the power of real meditation when done correctly for even ten minutes.

You can waste your time with New Age psychobabble and nutritional pseudoscience and scams.

Or.

You can buckle down and learn how to do real meditation and then really go practice it, for real.

Then, watch your mental and physical and emotional and spiritual health come back.

And.

Gain a life-long skill that you can tap into to destress and continually heal and recover from the struggle, strife and trauma of today’s existence.

You can either, listen to me. Or. Not. Your choice.

I apologize to all the MH bloggers I pissed-off with my high-handed crap, but, you know what? I wrote a book about how to DIY-heal yourself without psych drugs and psychotherapy.

That is my contribution to alternative and organic mental health recovery.

This is my attempt to get really RADICAL and anti-patriarchal establishment.

And Big Pharma is patriarchy, with a capital “P”. You had better believe it, if you don’t already know this.

I feel DEEPLY for all women who have had their minds and bodies enslaved to worthless psych ‘treatments’.

I want you to be free, like me.

That is why I wrote my book.

I will bet you all, any amount of money that:

John Hopkins, Harvard, Biederman, Jamison, et al, will never find a “gene” for ANY mental illness.

The reason I know this? Because I healed myself of mental illness, which IS IMPOSSIBLE IF YOU REALLY DO HAVE A REAL GENETIC DISORDER.

That would mean my self-healing is either a calculated deception, or it was freaking MAGIC.

You decide which. I don’t really care anymore.

But I am willing to take a brain scan, MRI, CAT, PET, whatever, anytime, anywhere to prove it.

If you are from a Uni and you have enough research grant money so you can fly me out to your lab and put me up in a hotel for awhile, while you test me, then email me, and we will make it happen.

In closing.

This world is sick. And no where is it any sicker than in trying to treat and “heal” those with mental, emotional and spiritual health issues.

I am just tired of it all.

I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to be another Byron Katie or Eckhart Tolle. I am going to fade away into intentional obscurity.

Let only the most intelligent minds see the wisdom of MY TRUTH and decide, now or later, if you want to be free, or if you want to be a slave.

Best wishes to you all in reclaiming your bodies, minds and souls from the horrible, terrible mistake of biological psychiatry and bio-genetic reductionism.

Thank you for reading this.

Relaxing Into Your Being, a review

Relaxing Into Your Being is an introduction to the Water Method of Taoist taught by lineage holder and Taoist master Bruce Frantzis. Subjects covered by this instructive book include:

A comparison of Fire and Water schools of Taoism.
Breathing techniques, from the beginner to advanced
The Eight Bodies of Being and their relationship to one’s self and spirituality
The Sixteen-Part nei gung system
The primary and secondary energy channels of the body
The inner dissolving practice
Encountering and working with the mindstream
How to sit comfortably and correct your own posture internally

It teaches the all-important who, what, how, where and why in terms of how meditation works, how to identify internal blocks, where you apply your intent, how to determine whether or not what you are doing is actually working, what to do with problems you may encounter, how to make the most of your practice time, and much much more.

Life changing inner work

This book, along with it’s companion “The Great Stillness: The Water Method of Taoist Meditation Series, Vol. 2″ were invaluable to me during my twenties in dealing with my mental health problems. Prior to starting Taoist Water Method meditation in 1996 I suffered from recurring suicidal depression, bipolar mania, severe anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder resulting from growing up and being repeatedly traumatized and abused both at home and at school, and later in institutions. By the time I was an adult, I was pretty messed up and not very happy.

Therapy and counseling had little effect on me and psychiatric drugs made my life even worse and didn’t help me in any meaningful way. I did not come from a privileged family, so I did not have any kind of support network, or health insurance. As someone with severe and treatment resistant mental illness, the outcome of my life did not look good. In the midst of all this suffering, I found Bruce Frantzis’ Inner and Outer dissolving practice.

I had considerable meditation training before I encountered Bruce’s Taoist dissolving practices. But most of the techniques I had learned had little to do with healing the heart and stilling the mind and were instead more like training for the psychic Olympics, a path which Bruce describes in this book as a trap. Indeed, I was one of those spiritual power junkies who trained meditation to increase my psychic abilities because of my weaknesses and fear and unresolved PTSD and a deep insecure desire to have a scary and unseen advantage over other people.

When I learned Vipassana and Zen, I learned how to listen to my inner world, as well as how to concentrate, but neither Zen or Vipassana came with the tools to literally rid myself of the stuff that was coming up in practice. This is the major difference between Taoist Water Tradition versus other traditions. The dissolving techniques described herein are a way of using intent and awareness to liberate your consciousness of the turmoil that manifests when doing deep breathing or other energy work that brings the unprocessed and destabilizing content of your inner world to your everyday waking awareness.

I made practicing Taoist meditation my personal religion and discipline. I practiced morning and night, every day, for years. Slowly but surely the chaos and noise of my inner world and all my pain began to abate, a little bit at a time, month after month, year after year.

Within the first two years of dedicated practice I found my depression had been cured. Within five years, I had, using the dissolving process and the nei gung system described in “Relaxing”, completely healed myself of the neurological conditioning of PTSD. Gone were the nightmares, flashbacks and triggers that had haunted my life previously. Also gone were manic episodes and racing thoughts and anxiety attacks and I gained an inner confidence and self-esteem that I had previously never known.

This work made me stronger, mentally, physically and energetically. I can say that without dissolving the first four Bodies of Being, I’d probably still be suffering to this day. But thanks to the practice of Taoist Water Method meditation, I have not been depressed in fifteen years. While I’m hardly Enlightened, I am very happy with myself and my life, which is something that was missing when I started this. I cannot praise ‘Relaxing Into Your Being’ enough. The practice of the material within its pages totally changed my life around and gave me a reason to live.

Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals

Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals by Christopher Payne, is not a book of words as much as it is a book of images. A photo-essay, others have called it. And the pictures definitely tell a story.

Asylum contains haunting and classical views of 19th century Kirkbride-plan mental hospitals. The old asylums were closed-off worlds complete with greenhouses, sewing rooms, craft shops, small theaters, even bowling alleys, to occupy and entertain the patient-residents. The hospitals were completely staffed and stocked for nearly every medical contingency. They had the all the facilities and devices of 20th century psychiatric care including straitjackets, ice showers, immersion tanks, ECT units, and one would imagine, lobotomies, for the ‘treatment resistant’.

Entire communities and cultures existed inside those red brick buildings, with their white painted trim around doors and windows, and everything inside painted institutional green. In the old days, thousands of patients lived out their adult lives in these State asylums, with diagnoses like: ‘undifferentiated depression’ and ‘dementia praecox’, and were even buried on the premises after they had expired.

A wistful trip down memory lane.

This book really brought back some old memories. I once lived as a teenager in a residential treatment facility on the grounds of Concord Hospital (originally called: “New Hampshire State Asylum for the Insane”) which is depicted a few times in the book (p45, 47, 143). Looking at the photos of the different institutions in this book, I saw my old room, my old bed, the basement tunnels, the bathrooms we showered in, the chairs we sat in during group, the windows I used to look out of…

On page 201 is a photo taken of a melancholic but poignant poem written by an unknown and unattributed patient on a basement wall of Augusta State Hospital in Augusta, Maine, a portion of which reads:

“I wish that some of these people, who write the books and make the rules, could spend just a few years walking in our shoes.”

Low on written content but high on visual and emotional impact, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals by Christopher Payne is a dreary, lovely and reverent look inside the dimly-lit underworld of State Mental Hospitals.

The Kirkbride Plan was based on ‘moral treatment’

When I was living in residential lockdown, I was not so lucky to live in a Kirkbride Plan building. Because NHH is almost two hundred years old, individual buildings on the grounds show structural differences stemming from differing ideas of how to institutionalize people over the years. At least one of the buildings there, the Bancroft Building, was Kirkbride Plan inspired. For more information on Kirkbride Plan asylums which were designed during the ‘moral treatment’ era in psychiatry, check out these sites.

Kirkbride Buildings *

Kirkbride Plan at wiki *

Bankcroft Building at New Hampshire Hospital *

New Hampshire Hospital Historical Society *

An Unquiet Mind, a review.

***Spoiler Warning in case there is anyone left in the bipolar community that has not yet read Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison***

It’s hard to review a memoir. It’s not the same as reviewing a how-to or history book. I try to remember (and don’t always succeed) that you should attack a person’s ideas, not the person themselves. Why would I want to attack this author (or her ideas)? Bear with me, and I’ll tell you.

An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison is perhaps one of the most widely promoted memoirs of bipolar disorder in existence. I am not drawing that from any statistic, but it is my experience when I am haunting reviews of mental illness lit on Amazon plus my time spent lurking on bipolar support forums. Time and time again I see someone say, “Well X book is okay and all, but the best book is AUM.” And someone will reply to that with “Totally agree. This is THE book on bipolar everyone must read.” So, to figure out why that was, I bought and read, ‘An Unquiet Mind’ by Kay Redfield Jamison.

I have to tell you, I do not at all agree that this is THE must-read book or the best book that I’ve read about a person dealing with mental illness. An Unquiet Mind is one of the few books (along with Prozac Nation) that I have thrown across a room due to sheer outrage while I was reading it.

Everyone says the book is really well-written. I’ll grant that it is. With her education and the people she had help edit her book, I would hope so. But is a well-written book my only criteria for enjoying or evaluating an author’s work? Certainly not.

This woman enjoys a level of privilege I find hard to fully grasp. How many people do you personally know who could afford to buy and care for a horse while they are in graduate school? I can’t help but think of the thrift and poverty I was living in around the same time she was gallivanting about Scotland. I don’t recognize or empathize with her world and the stratosphere she lives in due to the protective qualities of being from a moneyed family. But that is not something a person has control over when they are born. I am not blaming her for it, but I am noting it, because privilege makes a huge difference in quality of life whether you have mental illness or not in terms of the care you can afford, as well the distractions you can buy.

She talks about her purchase of a horse as a ‘bipolar shopping spree’ induced by mania. You can look at something like that and say, ‘Wow, bipolar made you buy a horse! Yikes. How horrible! Break out the meds right away and control that episode!” But now try saying that your bipolar mania induced you to buy a double-shot latte, and most folks would have trouble declaring that a sign of unmanaged mental illness. But apparently buying a horse was not just an impulse to soothe her inner child’s desire, but actually the result of a chemical imbalance in her brain. Sorry Kay, I just don’t buy it.

In the beginning of the book, Jamison is a career-driven woman, determined to be a tenured professor. She flows seemingly from highschool to college without any time-off period to find herself, presumably, because the allure of doctorhood is her overriding passion at the time. But it is during this time, when her world is all about education and learning and teaching and practicing, that she has her first major bipolar disorder breakdown.

From then on her story is one of a person trying to reconcile taking lithium, when it clearly makes her feel like crap, even as she sings the praises of how it ‘gentles’ her. The path of accepting her diagnosis involves learning to pathologize and medicalize all her past behaviors by looking at them through her nifty-new bipolar goggles.

On page 97 she recites her “Rules for the Gracious Acceptance of Lithium Into Your Life” and I think it was there that I flicked the book like a Frisbee across the living room in total disgust. Or it may have been on page 102 when Kay wrote: “I had, and have, no tolerance for those individuals, especially psychiatrists and psychologists—who oppose medications for mental illness…I also believe that, with rare exceptions, it is malpractice to treat it without medication.”

Well, I have something to say to you Kay Redfield Jamison author of Unquiet Mind and steadfast promeds advocate. I consider the unasked-for treatment of my bipolar symptoms with psychiatric medication to be medical malpractice. The treatments you espouse so enthusiastically did nothing but poison me. When I first read your opinion in your book I wondered for a few seconds if it wasn’t possible to sue you somehow for influencing my psychiatrist and caregivers to ‘treat’ me with your horrible lithium.

I also find that you wimped out of the full scope of bipolar treatment. You took the lithium but you never took the brain damaging antipsychotics even though you admit you were ‘floridly manic’. You are missing out on the full ‘bipolar treatment experience’, doc. You don’t know what it’s like to be that patient whom you told,  “You’ve been given a shot of Haldol. Everything is going to be alright.” It didn’t turn out to be all right did it?

Further in, she has the gall to blame the man’s mania on his lack of lithium. I am not joking. Page 107 “Neither the resident nor I needed to see the results of the lithium blood level that had been drawn during his admission to the emergency room. There would be no lithium in his blood. The result had been mania.”

I mean give me a break, ‘doctor’. How you can be so unscientific as to posit this man’s psychotic episode as the result of a lack of lithium,  (and not some other kind of trigger, like, I don’t know, maybe… stress?)  This is kind of like how a headache is the result of not having aspirin in your blood, right? Sure. Makes perfect, logical, scientific sense Kay. No. Not really.

I don’t consider you an authority on bipolar or mental illness or it’s treatments. You are certainly not an expert on my suffering nor the treatments I used to cure it. You’ve spent your whole post graduate life informing others of what mental illness is and how it’s supposed to be treated. Blissfully unaware that your preferred treatment drove me to within an inch of taking my own life. Yes, you read that correctly. Lithium made me want to kill myself—because of how awful it was.

You’ve made claims that are (still) not substantiated by current science (Page 190 “The fact that manic-depressive illness is a genetic disease…”) For all that time spent in academia, spouting about mental illness, you have done nothing, absolutely nothing to advance the real understanding of its causes or possible cures. A whole career spent in an ivory tower fixated with this unshakable belief in manic depression as a genetic disorder and nothing at all to show for it. As a former bipolar sufferer, you do not speak for me and you never shall. If I ever get the chance to tell you this to your face, I will.

Another thing that offends me comes from the back of her book, on the cover, where she is described as having the dual perspective of the “healer and the healed”. In her own book, in her own words, she states that to this day she suffers, even though she is on the ‘proper’ drugs for the condition. And nowhere in her book does she claim to have healed anyone else, much less herself.

At every turn in her illness and career there is a family member or someone with a Dr. before his name to attend to her. How she praises psychotherapy and her support network. Must be nice Doc.

When Kay feels like hurting herself, she gets babysat in her home by a ‘colleague’ instead of doing time at the local psych ward. It’s like she floats over the heads of people who really (I mean really) suffer from bipolar disorder. When she finally does try to off herself, she’s already in a safety contract with friends and relatives and she ODs and leaves the phone right in the next room.

Of course you can probably guess at what happens then. Someone calls, and she is all slurred-voiced and nodding out, and naturally 911 is called promptly and she is saved from herself. For most of us getting admitted to an ER for an OD it’s a guaranteed stay at the psych ward for assessment. But she gets to recover from her attempt in the comfort of home, surrounded by concerned experts, as opposed to acute patients.  She didn’t have to socialize with the sick proles as befits everyone else that goes inpatient for a suicide attempt. She got special treatment—because she is Dr. Jamison.

In her Acknowledgments section, she gives thanks to no less than twenty-eight M.D.s or PhDs. Unfortunately, the medical and psychiatric profession does not know how to heal from mental illness and despite being surrounded by all those highly educated people, Dr. Jamison clearly does not know what I know about how the mind works and how it can be truly healed. It’s almost as if she is too close to the tree to gaze upon the forest that I see when it comes to mental illness and the nature of the mind.

If my tone sounds a little annoyed, it’s because of how many people keep saying how truly wonderful and amazing her book is. While I do not begrudge the woman her remarkable academic achievements (which are many), and I do agree that she can turn a phrase, I can’t see why this book is so highly acclaimed. Maybe someone will explain to me the appeal.

In the final analysis, I find myself in that small bracket of people who do not think that Unquiet Mind is an omg amazing five star must-read book on bipolar. It’s an okay book. Definitely worth a read. But other than at one time experiencing the symptoms of the disorder, I find that I have very little common ground with the author.

My book about spiritual recovery

You know how sometimes you are telling somebody about your life and they tell you earnestly, “You should write a book. I’d buy it.”? Well, that’s happened to me a lot since my twenties and I finally wrote a book and I am pleased to announce the official release and publication of Possessing Me: A Memoir of Healing

The book is the story of my life—from age six, to age twenty six. It chronicles my struggle and seventeen year battle with mental illness and my eventual spiritual healing.

Fair warning, it’s not easy or light reading. Mental illness caused me a lot of problems as a young adult, including homelessness and joblessness and drug dependency. The issues I discuss range from repeated trauma and abuse at home, to being violated and dehumanized when I tried to get help and treatment for my problems, as well as suicide attempts and a near-death experience I had during my last OD back in ’95.

How I recovered from all that confusion and suffering might be of interest to some of you. Namely, that in ’96 I started studying chi/nei gung, nei jia and Water Method meditation from lineage holder and Taoist master Bruce Frantzis. In my early twenties I diligently practiced the material he teaches, in solitude mostly.

During that time, I resolved pretty much everything that was bothering me at a physical, mental, emotional and energetic level. Five years later, I had a wonderful meditation experience which opened my heart and infused me with something I had been missing all my life: self-love, and I have been free of sadness and spiritual pain ever since.

This is my story of how I cured myself of suicidal depression, the mania of bipolar disorder, the voices and delusions of schizophrenia, and the triggers, flashbacks and nightmares of post traumatic stress disorder. My book is now on sale at Amazon.com. You can find out more information and the status of future events by checking out my website, www.PossessingMe.com.

As an aside, I don’t know if there is going to be a book tour. I did not get a juicy book advance from Big Publishing in order to promote my book. I created my own publishing company: Wise Boar Media, to distribute this and future works, so all my promotional efforts are being done on something of a budget.

Possessing Me: A Memoir of Healing

by Jane Alexander

369 pages

Wise Boar Media

ISBN13: 978-0983070900

Supplement free and feeling great!

As many of you know, I am a big fan of personal health experiments. In my book I wrote about several which I conducted in my twenties that had some major positive effects on my mental and physical health. Over the years I’ve tried a good many supplements and I try to be careful of the expectation effect, confirmation bias, the placebo effect as well maintaining an awareness that correlation does not necessarily prove causation.

But I’ve also maintained that we humans, most of us anyway, are probably not meant to take dozens of supplements, year after year after year. That processing all these supplements is actually an additional burden on the body’s digestive system.

Supplementing and the reasons we do it seem to be largely a human concern. I’ve thought about animals like the fussy koala which has a fairly limited diet consisting of mainly eucalyptus leaves. You might think, “Wow there is no way those animals are getting a balanced diet plus everything I get from supplements.” But your average koala seems quite unaware if not unaffected by its limited diet. So how did we humans get to the point where we choke down multi-vitamins, broad spectrum minerals, amino acids, and everything from spirulina extract and melatonin to co-enzyme Q-10 to fish oil?

What were you thinking just now? You were wondering if I had seen the movie Food Inc and if I totally understood just how bad a shape our country’s food system and diet is. Yes, in fact I have.

But for some years now, I’ve tried to maintain an appropriate balance of diet and nutrition and because I do not, by and large, eat junk food or processed food, nor do I have any food sensitives, allergies, or nutrient absorption deficiencies, I can’t really rationalize taking handfuls of supplements. I exercise daily. I manage my stress. I have a balanced and varied diet. I don’t work graveyards or twelve hour shifts. I don’t have any imbalances in my life that might warrant supplements so, I decided to simply stop taking them, and see what happens.

It’s been over four months since I stopped taking my multi’s and fish oil and the like, and you know what? I feel fine. I sleep well. My body feels okay. I am mentally stable. I am not experiencing any malfunctions or diminished state of being or energy and so I am not worrying about it.

When you first get into learning about nutrition there is a lot of stuff to learn about it. There is also a lot of hype and pseudoscience that is touted as fact in nutritional circles and it takes awhile of analyzing things until you can figure out for yourself what you may or may not need or what ‘deficiencies’ you think you are likely to have because of your lifestyle.

It’s easy to forget that our bodies are natural detoxing machines which have evolved over thousands of years to effectively process out of food what it needs to keep it running. You excrete whatever your body doesn’t need within a day or so of consuming it. So, how much money do we throw away in terms of taking supplements that we really don’t need?

If money is not a problem for you, then great. But if money is a consideration, then the supplements you do take should be tailored to your lifestyle needs. As for myself, I have found at various times certain supplements to make a noticeable difference. But that was during a different time in my life when I had a faster paced more demanding and sometimes, (okay, often) out-of-balance lifestyle. Such as when I was smoking one to two packs of cigarettes a day, pounding sixty ounces of sugared and caffeinated beverages through my system and doing a lot of drugs.

Things in my life have been stable long enough that I figured, what do I have to lose? I haven’t lost my physical or mental health since I stopped taking supplements, so I am not hurting myself. It also makes going to bed a lot simpler in terms of remembering if I took my herbs and caps and whatnot each night.