Eye of the Needle

THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

We cascade into a survival mode of thought where you must protect yourself with a heightened sense of values you become extremely agitated and distressed by everyday events that others can find hard to understand. What they do not realize is your basic self is threatened all the values and beliefs you have are still present, outside of the symptoms of any mental condition you are experiencing and you are forever chasing yourself behind in some dark self-driven world where there is so much that needs to be done before you could consider that you have risen above these problems. It is like a wall or a mountain the point where you truly lose control of your place in the world.

It could have been that moment when all things became too much and you find yourself trapped inside another world. Most of us have had these moments and for many this can be an impossible thing to overcome. Because if you were strong and basically well when you had this experience or your first moments of illness what hope do you have of overcoming, firstly the immediate problems that drove you into the moment inside yourself, then the list of accumulated problems that occurred after you broke over into yourself to get back to that first fundamental problem that was the beginning or source of the problem.

What is the eye of the needle in us that sees us at some point in our lives emerge into a different world where we seem to be responsible for carrying the weight of responsibility of our own lives but also an almost a god like responsibility of carrying a driving urge to understand the meaning of life? It seems all of us at some point will be confronted with these deep inner most questions and some of us will not survive this rigour in combination with the lives that we live. This is either thrust upon us at times in our lives when it is least expected many recover from these times although many will be thrust through the eye of the needle.

In essence it is not so much an eye of a needle rather being taken beyond a certain threshold that could be termed our limits that sees us ascending over the top of some peak never to return to what we consider a normal range of thought. This is not some horror story but something that we will all confront at a very specific point in our lives. Many can find ways around these dreaded thoughts and move on with a life somehow without as much of a natural joy, a natural and driven lust for life that in some way extinguished by the rigours of life and for others there is no easy way to return nor understood because of the complexity and deep underlying truth of all of our nature.

Put simply this is the dawning of the time inside ourselves where we find that nothing last forever’s and like life and the universe itself may exist for what seems an immense amount of time. When we realise this awful fact of time it can be the last straw in our capacity to resolve issues and slug us well over this peak thought the eye of the needle which almost demands answers for this peculiar condition that could be the fate of all things.

If we consider the lives of some of the smaller creatures in nature we think of life in terms of our years months weeks or even days. Some fly’s will not know longevity beyond a few weeks and coupled with the immense difficulty and danger of life will probably be ascribed a life of hell. And when we consider that the larger animals amongst us tend to live much longer lives one could almost be drawn into the trap of thinking that something of greater mass enjoys so much more of life. But this is not so much the case if we consider that all of us as life forms will shoulder a similar burden at some point and be faced with the deep inner question of why? Is there really a purpose.

At this stage the reader may find themselves a little disillusioned as to what book they may have picked up as most of the content is a very serious appreciation of mental conditions present in today’s day and age. I assure the reader at this time there is a reason for this somewhat new age fling into a deep philosophical mindset as I will attempt to build from the ground up some plausible reasons to fill these voids after association with the graver side of the human condition.

EARLY EXPERIENCES

During my own experiences with modern psychiatry I can honestly testify that like many sufferers of mental conditions I did have a degree of resistance to treatment. In many ways it is the nature of the beast not only the usual deeply personal nature of mental trauma but the naive approaches used by many medical professionals who seem in many ways probably understandable to keep most of the analytical understanding of mental illness well within the realms of standard medical practices which general shun any what could be termed fringe sciences or the psychology of the speciality of our species.

It was not always the case in my life and I was never someone who would accept all facets of modern psychiatric treatment but at different periods in my life I believe I must have experienced close to every modern technique of treatment including being prescribed a wide range of medications especially new and expensive anti psychotics that became very popular especially in intravenous form for regular depot medications. I have spent many years on government enforced community treatment orders usually lasting each time for a period of 12 months where these depot injections are administered every 2 weeks. This is a far cry from my young adulthood where I slowly progressed working from a very young age in automotive repair and maintenance to military service where I eventually reached the Special Forces. I can only begin to describe the intensity of the mental physical rigours one must undergo to first be accepted and then serve in the Special Forces but can say it involves hundreds of hours of physical and mental testing to ensure that the calibre of individual can be found to be an effective team member. Not foregoing psychiatric testing where at one time for 5 straight days we were put through every manner of psychiatric testing including thousands of questions to build a psychological profile.

I can say on leaving the special forces it was only a period of a couple of months before I began to exhibit manic behaviour and since that time I have been hospitalised 7 times and placed on community treatment orders for a total period of 5 years most times in an involuntary capacity. Surprisingly during that time I rose to the peak of achievement in the field of software development and was a leading problem solver in this field. Eventually obtaining my master’s degree and other academic qualifications before deciding to teach in these fields all the while having a deep interest in human behaviours. I can testify that during my relapses I have always retained a reserve in most circumstances where I could call a stop in many cases to what was going on inside me but sometimes you can get so deeply entrenched in a condition there can seem like no way out. This may sound a bit odd how one could say they can reserve a degree of control but the lure of manic depression is the incredible lust for life one gains when fully immersed in the illness. I am not talking a lust for life that is a release or even a distraction or bypass from the horror of the deepest points of this illness described in previous chapters but the immense elation leads one to a fantastic place of meaning and purpose to all things albeit at the price of losing touch with reality.

From this I have accumulated massive range of experience with not only the intellectual sides of the psychiatric condition but also the actuals experience of being of the receiving side of treatments of all kinds and been diagnosed with a large range of illnesses from my condition. So those that may see me as unqualified to discuss or even comment on modern psychiatric practices it may simply be a matter of understanding that the forefathers of modern psychiatry have said the only way to really understand the mind was to induce in themselves mental trauma to experience this first hand. I will not at this stage begin to discuss the host of pharmaceuticals that I have taken to treat my psychiatric condition. Primarily because I do not want to discourage the reader from the mindset of a sufferer is a sufferer and has little useful valid input what is an effective treatment. And secondly because in many ways we are all qualified to evaluate ourselves in relation to the human condition and in most cases can see described what is best for us. Where the mysteries of the mind remain creating a black box of many modern mental conditions in saying this I would like to delve deeper into some for the treatments at different levels available and how effective these have been in the treatment and perspective of an actual sufferer that can honestly testify to the affects rather than attempt to inconclusively interpret these from observation.

Mostly gone are the days of the psychoanalyst even in the private sector these practices are mostly only used for hype or sensationalised in movies or handled with kid gloves for the rich and famous. So too are many of the experimental practices of the past as described form the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and possibly in lesser cases earlier than this in different cultures. Most of the work that is now carried out in laboratories and clinical environments where tests are performed on the host of pharmaceuticals available and in realm of the analytical where theories are put forward as to the ultimate cause and symptom driven experimentation of medical professionals. Yet one should be clear that many of the areas of this science are still unknown, untested or as yet unproven as to the cause and ongoing progression of many of these conditions. It is highly fraught with theories and conjecture and it is amazingly apparent that in most cases modem psychiatric practitioners follow closely what is described in text book in their diagnosis of modern sufferers and rely less on personnel intuition and their own intellectual findings. In my experience some of the diagnoses and notes prepared on myself have been so far off the mark and in some cases proven with actual facts. I say this as in one circumstance I was classified as having grandiose delusions of having a master’s degree and having served in the Special Forces. Another time I spoke of sexual frustration and in an open and honest joking way described I would be better to cut it off or become a priest, to this the serious conjecture was I was most certainly likely to castrate myself and could be seen as definitely willing to harm myself. This could not be further from the truth and highlights the naive mental processes that can be found in many a modern psychiatric practitioner.

I am most certainly being as minimal as I can in my critique of modern diagnosis and prognosis of psychiatric practitioners to be as objective as I can in evaluating modern treatment but also in most cases these are archaic and poorly understood. Today we are losing to a large extent the excuse where there is limited time in evaluating patients as there seems to be such a rise in the number of professionals available to a community or within the hospital system. It simply comes down to in my opinion the limited information available in analytical circles, and the inherent potentials that the practitioners themselves may be open to suffer the same conditions and the lack of real dedication to the successful treatment of individuals on a longer term basis. I will say though that the professionals are combating individuals that can display a degree of selfishness and difficulty in the eventual treatment of these condition that can make the role both personally and professionally very difficult for much of the staff involved form occupational therapist through to the nurses and doctors within the system to treat these conditions.

In my opinion the first thing that really needs to takes place in this industry is for psychiatric practitioners drawing on older practices of psychoanalysis on an individual basis and not relying so much on patient notes written from an entirely different professional. This seems to be where a lot of contention exists widely in one’s diagnosis and in some cases compete with previous patient notes but the same time use this blindly to assist in short cutting the process of one’s own analysis. That is to say there should be a far greater focus on trying to find the roots of the condition in any individual this may be chronologically as to when it began and the patients understanding of the state of minds present when they can remember themselves as been happy and well to when they remember become mentally troubled. All the while the professional has to be aware of the human condition, the emotional content and the fact that their patient is likely to bias the information towards hiding certain facts for ego, embarrassment sensitivity to try and make the story fit into their lives or sound plausible. It may be the case the practitioner is never going to actually get to the root causes in the short term but it is where the best information can be found in relation to the patients overall diagnosis. They have to realise that what follows form the initial inception of the condition is likely layered and exacerbations of the initial condition so can become so twisted and convoluted over the years that it becomes naturally nonsensical. I give the case of someone I know closely who is an obsessive compulsive hoarder of primarily rubbish in talking to her she will state that she cannot throw out the rubbish because there may be diamonds she will throw out. Now listen to the actual facts of the inception of her condition. She was a pathology nurse who was working closely with aids patients every night she became increasingly anxious as to receiving a needle stick form surrounding nurses working in close quarters. She would take all of her surgical gloves home each night search for needle pricks in the gloves and accumulated masses of gloves in rubbish that she would not throw out, to recheck at some point. Now this is sounding pretty interesting when one considers the final state that she is in from the convoluted twisting of the initial conditions. To go further to this she was once referred to as a diamond by a previous boyfriend and became emotionally attached to diamonds. She does not own any diamonds but somehow miraculously they appear in the rubbish. One should be able to draw so much for this layering and twisting of information also the way she guards her condition to bypass logic in that she does not own any diamonds.

Heaven and earth could not sway her thinking and highlights quite markedly how her eye of the needle rests quite firmly with the gloves but getting out of this is so much more difficult. That no one could imagine but regressing her and continually reminding her of the inception during her treatment is the only thing that makes sense rather than trying to cope with the layered symptoms.

This is not an isolated or extreme individual case as I have described in another section of this book I describe a delusion of another close friend that he was paid a million dollars by Russian spies to stop world war three. Knowing psychiatrists this is as far as it would go and the patient will be appraised ad diagnosed on these statements and thus treatment would begin based on this. But the treatment and long term prognosis of this patient will be extremely vexed. If the doctor had examined the patients background spoke more openly with the patient about their past they would have revealed he was a local tough guy who had been in many a scrap and had been known to be a bit of a protector of those less abled in fighting. I don’t know about you but the obvious layering and twisting of the mind in the ego would see one arriving at the delusion that would be described to treating professionals. Yet if you can imagine it would be almost trivial to associate this and focus treatment on the individuals activities in the community all the while trying to identify that eye in the needle that saw the sufferer begin to convolute the story and combine this with his own human condition and emotional state and you could find the delusion almost supports and protects his place in the world.

In essence I could go on and on about