I'm blessed.

I’m Mad and I’m proud.  Maybe some of you are, too.   I’d define Mad Pride as an international movement which celebrates the achievements and experiences of those who acknowledge their mental, spiritual, emotional, cognitive, psychological and behavioural Otherness.   We’re not about diagnoses or psychiatry: some of us are against these things, while some are not.  Fundamentally, it’s up to individuals to find themselves and represent.  Some of us Pridesters are very political, while others have adopted the badge of “Mad” merely in defiance of social convention.  It’s all cool, it’s all mulligatawny.  Like Queer, Mad means many things to many people.

Now, while Mad Pride is international in scope, it originated in Toronto.  So you’d think that we Canadians would be the be-all and end-all of the movement, right?  Er, perhaps not.  And some of us want to know why.

My great friend, fellow Pridester and blogger/activist/cartoonist extraordinaire Sarafin sent me this link to an Australian Mad Pride event.  It was surprising for several reasons, not the least of which was that it indicates a more comprehensive and diverse approach to Mad Pride than you might get close to home.  And it’s not just Australia.  Mad Pride is huge in many other parts of the world.  Take a look.

WEAVE Mad Pride 2011

Our Pride events are somewhat different.  (This is us, from last year, doing the closing Bed Push up Queen Street.) Toronto Pride, to the best of my knowledge, seems to have emphasized the political aspects of Madness — legal issues, poverty, housing, social justice.  Of course, that’s not a problem.  The problem is that under the title of Mad Pride, the Australian video shows many enthusiastic, engaged people participating in a whole range of cultural activities. And while we don’t neglect creativity, it seems that this year’s Pride is in fact going to be a landmark in that it aims to be far more artistic and celebratory of our culture than ever before.

Then note the demographics.  If Australia is to be trusted on this, there are quite a few John and Jane Q’s, out, about and proud to be Mentally Interesting.  This is nothing like the Toronto experience, which is that of an ardent, but small community, principally of local activists.  Case in point: when I attended Mad Pride last year, I was met with pleased astonishment by more than one participant.  Seems I was the first out-of-towner to attend since, well, since they could remember….

Yours truly as The Ritaler, with Sarafin as Harley Quinn.

So, what gives? Why are we so modest? Where’s the full range of Mad experiences? Where are the media? Where are the parents walking hand-in-hand with their kids?  Where are the teenagers, testifyin’?  Where are the craft tables?  I’m not talking about commercialization or trivialization: quite the opposite.  I’m talking about spreading our bird-of-paradise wings and living up to our Pride.

I thought deeply on it, and came to the following realizations/conclusions.

1) Outside of a tiny handful of specific issues (the environment, for example, or power generation, or labour relations), Canadians are utterly apathetic. We only seem interested in glamour causes or things which mess with our chequebooks, and anything grass-roots is looked upon as hippie-punk-youth-pinko bullshit. Note that in Oz, voting is mandatory: you’re kind of confronted with politics no matter what. Doesn’t mean they’re more interested or informed, but I suspect that Aussies just might be, if only marginally.

2) Australian Mad Pride obviously has backers, or powerful allies.  The video is by Reach Out, an Australian youth mental health campaign affiliated with an organization started by this man.  Sure, we too have campaigns like this.  The most “famous” is mindyourmind.  But how many governmental and non-governmental orgs want to hitch their cart to the Mad Pride pony?  Canadians are too wussy and repressed (innate social conservatism?) to ever associate the word “Mad” with any part of a big-time mental health initiative. Our public education campaigns are about “stigma,” bullying, suicide prevention, etc. (more on that below), and officialdom doesn’t want to even consider the idea that some of us have reclaimed the term “Mad,” let alone think of Madfolk as having a culture, let alone one worth celebrating (see above, under “hippie-punk-youth-pinko bullshit,” or below, under “strident, extreme, grubby and too damn weird”).

3) As far as the Mad community is concerned, given that the network of strong, independent, funded and/or assisted(!) grassroots activist organizations was destroyed as part of the restructuring of the various service delivery schemes (i.e., the onset of the notorious CTO), we’re left with OPDI and stuff like that.  Not very conducive to independent action. CMHA and OPDI just kinda do the “Relax, we’ll take it from here” thing, and anyone who wants to start a new organization that doesn’t toe the offical line is destined to scrounge. I long for the days when Irit Shimrat, Pat Capponi and their cohort first burst on the scene, kicking asses and taking names.

Sure, many people still have that fire.  But I think that it’s a completely different battle now.  My fear is that the whole culture of mental health is pitted against us in a more subtle way than before, in a way that we have yet to successfully combat.

Regent Park. The complimentary chocolates will run you a cool grand, but at least the bedbugs are free. Courtesy Wikipedia.

In the past, before there was any attention given to Mad issues, and all hospitals were effin’ dungeons, and when you got out you went straight to a rooming house and pretty much automatically lost your job and had to fight like a bastard just to get Welfare and couldn’t expect to qualify for Disability unless you were all-out incapacitated, there were a manageable number of identifiable,  substantive issues that hardcore activists could sink their teeth into. But what’s the story nowadays?  The old problems are still there, of course, but there are two new fangs to this rattlesnake:

A) The impact of officialdom, or “divide and conquer.” Once the grassroots Mad activists dispersed, the official, officious, technocratic groups were all but  installed, with a whole different demographic as a constituency : the “Consumer / Survivors” (ouch!). In other words, the mandate of these groups is not full-on political and legal reform, or social justice, but the fighting of “stigma” and the provision of public education on conditions and symptoms.

Nothing wrong with that – indeed, it’s important. But it’s not a replacement for what we Madfolk devised, and it doesn’t respond to what we need! We represent the poor. The non-conformists. The questioners. The free thinkers. The rejecters who wish to Occupy Psychiatry. The ones the system doesn’t like, can’t figure out, doesn’t know what to do with. Or the ones who want a better system all-round, one which is more progressive and healthy for all of us, should we chose to use the system or not.

B) The impact of the public. The growing awareness of mental health issues has paradoxically hurt those of us who identify as Madfolk, because that awareness is based on psychiatry, which is a very conventional paradigm of health.  More than ever, people are talking about mental health issues, and reading up on all their conditions.  But they are also being blitz-marketed by Big Pharma and DSM-addled shrinks who are putting everyone and their gerbil in treatment.

But note that the heyday of activism, not uncoincidentally, was during the days before the Net and before the recent explosion in diagnoses. As a result, when once those who identified as Madfolk were pretty much the only ones saying anything at all about mental health, nowadays it’s on everyone’s mind, and with the veritable “normalization” of mental illness, those who identify as Mad activists now come off as strident, extreme, grubby and too damn weird. To use a likely inappropriate analogy, in the world of Queerness, we’re not the fashionable, handsome, perfectly groomed yuppie. We’re a bear. A tranny bear. A diesel tranny bear.

4) Getting back to Canadian Mad Pride.  Clearly, if we want to have any breadth, depth, and wow-factor impact, we’d have to become strange bedfollows to someone. We’d have to hit up OPDI or MIAW. Or CMHA. Or CAMH. We’d have to go corporate, and hit up Bell (which has an active programme for mental health issues: it’s one of their pet causes: ferpetesakes, that’s pretty golden, for how many corporations even want to touch our issues?). We’d have to hit up local colleges and universities – York University got the whole Mad Student Society ball rolling (and their faculty includes this man, Geoffrey Reaume), U of T has clout out of sheer size, and Ryerson is the home of Disability Studies (and this man, David Reville). All colleges have nursing; Humber even has a program in Psychosocial Rehab, as does Durham. Even school boards can be brought alongside.

"I couldn't fly under the radar if I tried." Wilson's bird-of-paradise, stylin'.

In the end, I’m left only with questions.  How should our bird-of-paradise fly?  That is, what do we want Mad Pride to be?  How FUBU (for us, by us) do we want to be/remain? Is there some sort of standard of authenticity to which we must aspire?  Are the Aussies (and others who have backing) sell-outs?  We are by definition outside the majority of paradigms. Can we be a part of them, bending them to our will? Do we have the critical mass to Occupy Psychiatry? Is there a solution to toiling away in obscurity?  Frankly, I have no answers.  That’s because I never have answers, only questions.  Yes, that may make me annoying, especially because I really would rather be part of the solution than simply be a gadfly.  But of course, there are a lot of mysteries that stump the Ritaler.

http://ssbprod1.aac.mycampus.ca/pls/prod/syzkcrss.P_Course?term_code=201143&dept_code=DECT&assc_code=MHNR

Fellow mental health advocate Melanie Knapp and I are working on a Project for Positive Change in Mental Health Care in Grey and Bruce. We aim to inform people of the nature and context of mental health service delivery in the region – particularly at GBHS – and to improve things.

GBHS is a Schedule 1 facility: a hospital with both an outpatient psychiatric ward and an inpatient psych ICU (including lockdown for people in crisis).  Over the years, Mel and I have heard many of you – service users and allies alike – express concerns over some of the things you have encountered there.  These range from such details as the unavailability of toiletries for emergency patients, to systemic issues like failure to notify the Provincially mandated rights advisor, to the attitudes and institutional culture of the place as a whole.

Sadly, many residents of our area are unaware of these issues, or remain silent in the assumption that amongst the Ministry, the LHIN and the hospital itself, nothing can get done.  We believe otherwise!  Granted, this is not Toronto, where CAMH (Canada’s main psychiatric hospital) has a programme wherein psychiatric “Consumers”/Survivors conduct information sessions to advise staff on the patient experience.  GBHS only has a general complaints department.
But we’re not here to complain.  We’re here to educate, inform, and change.

And so we need your help.  We need to HEAR YOUR VOICES.  Our intention is to solicit advice and obtain accounts of your experiences, in order to learn of any and all concerns you may have.

All information will be held in the strictest confidence.  Anonymity is guaranteed.  In fact, I expressly DO NOT want to know names and identities (neither yours, in so far as this is possible, nor any staff members).

Please leave me an email at r_sitoski@yahoo.ca or leave a comment here.

We would be very pleased to share more details about this project with you, and we’re looking forward to hearing from you.
Thank you,
Rico

For now, I want to share some stark, cold numbers with you. Oh, sit down, will you?  It’s not that bad!  I want to show my fellow Ontarians — and anyone unfamiliar with our social services — what it means in absolute terms to both work and receive Ontario Disability Support Program payments.

He'll guard my cash! GRRR! No?

In fact you should thank me.  I did this for you. It took me all night to do it (I suck at Excel), but this was something that started nagging at me as I was walking home, braving the cold of a January night. I really had to get it down. And what would “it” be? Nothing less than a quick ‘n’ dirty boo at an ODSP recipient’s wages, should he or she obtain employment earnings.

An ODSP recipient who lives in a single-person household, such as myself, will max out at $1053 a month from the Province or from a combined Federal CPP pension and ODSP support. I’ve got the $1053, thank you very much, but it’s not my only recourse. Recipients can also work for wages, and are encouraged to do so.

Well, sort of.

Setting the Table

People on ODSP can keep 50% of what they earn. The other half is clawed back in the form of a deduction from one’s monthly support cheque. But it’s not all bad news. I mean, the government makes sure that so long as we’re employed, we get an extra $100 tacked onto our cheques. For example, if your gross earnings from employment in one month come to $100, the Province claws back half of that ($50), but gives you back $100. So you wind up with $150. With our minimum wage of about $10/hour, $100 would represent nearly 10 hours of work – but if you get paid $150 to do 10 hours of work, that means that you sorta kinda made the equivalent of $15 an hour. Pretty cool, huh?

Actually, pretty weird. Because if you had only worked for one hour, you will have worked for $105 an hour! Think about it – or better yet, consult the crazy chart I made up, as found below. One hour gives you about $10. Lose half to the clawback but snag the free $100 and you end up with $105!

Take a look, right there in our number table, near the beginning.

ODSP Numbers

Breaking Even

A little elementary ‘rithmetic points out that the break even point in that trend is reached at $200. Anywhere below that, you come out ahead. Anywhere above that, and you endure a net loss. Check out the following graph of the break even point. Column A (blue) represents your gross earnings from income, column B (red) what you wind up with after the Province adjusts. As earnings increase (the horizontal axis – in this graph, as in all of them, the horizontal axis advances in increments of 10), your advantage from your gross income earnings diminishes until they and your adjusted earnings intersect at about $200. Then you actually start to lose out on the clawback.

Now, why would this be? Methinks it’s because the bean counters don’t expect you to work more than 20 hours in a given month. After all, if you could work more than 20 hours a month, then why would you be on disability? I need not go into detail as to the various possible scenarios, especially as regards recipients with psychiatric diagnoses. Some of these would be incomprehensible to people with little or no experience of psychiatric conditions. There’s often a huge gulf between our bare capacity or skill at a task, and our ability to exercise those skills and capacity. So I’ll just say that ODSP, at least, is a significant help to those who are only capable of working a few hours a week, or can only find jobs with limited hours.

Adjustments

Now, let’s look at the second graph.

This graph extends your gross-versus-adjusted earnings trend right up to $1000. If you make $1000 in one month (column A), you only wind up keeping $600 of that. Well, what’s the big whoop, you say? After all, the recipient is getting free guv’mint money and some earnings! He should shut up and be grateful, right?

Not so fast. First off, if you’re on disability, dollars to donuts you have some sort of health requirements that are not covered by our Provincial health care plan (which, let’s face it, is half-decent, but nothing to brag about – sorry to burst your bubble, Americans). Many meds and procedures are not covered, and these can get expensive. You might have special dietary requirements. You might not be able to qualify for subsidized housing, and might be forced to pay market rates in places you can’t afford. And in the end, that whole “50% + $100” thang really just pads out a measly, subsistence-level pension.

How Measly?

The next graph tells us.

Here is your net monthly income, in column C (yellow). It starts off at the left with the base amount of $1053. Sure, everything trends to the right with a nice steady rise. But here’s something funny here. Though I didn’t illustrate the full projection, see how the blue line of your gross income from earnings could intersect with the yellow line of your adjusted net income? That would happen at $2303 dollars. At $2303 a month, ODSP and your earnings would cancel each other out.

So what, you may say? Well, chew on this. You’re disabled, and the most you can hope to make is $2303 per month. But that’s not likely to happen, as those of us who do work usually do so for minimum wage, and part time at that. Not too many “able” folks can make $2303 per month on minimum wage (that would amount to four 57-hour weeks). And yet, $2303 per month amounts to a whopping $27,636 a year: opa!, as they say in Greece.

Which brings us to the next chart.

Slumdog Thousandaires

For reference, your monthly gross earnings are still in blue. Now the red line of column D represents your total annual income: the combo of your net adjusted employment earnings and your ODSP support payment, over the course of the year. Column E in yellow is the poverty line for small communities with fewer than 30,000 inhabitants and column F in green is the poverty line in cities with a population of 500,000 or more. At this point the graph is a little crowded, because we’re in the tens of thousands. So I’ll refer you to the number table way back near the beginning.

According to the stats I used, the poverty line for the small towns – and Owen Sound, my new old sod, with +/- 20,000, is just such a one – was set at $16,273 per year – and remember, this is for 2006! The level for the large cities was set at $20,778.

To make $16,000 per year in 2012 dollars, and so concievably live above the 2006 poverty level, one would have to gross $400 from employment income, which will adjust down to $300. Right now, that’s about what I’m making. I’m only good for a maximum of about 10 hours a week, averaged out.

But in a large city, I’d be toast. That’s because I’d have to make over $1000 per month gross, thus $600 adjusted, in order to get that. I’d need to put in 25 hours a week, which is something I’m not quite capable of at this point in my life.   Oh, and ever spent time in Toronto?  It’s like they charge for the oxygen in that town.  So good luck.

In Sum

What to say, in the end? To me, the conclusions speak for themselves. And sound all the louder when you consider that the support payment amounts, as with all government assistance, rise sporadically but never at a rate even close to the cost of living.

Oh, and we have a $5000 asset cap. Yup, you read that. You can’t have more than five grand in your account. Ever. Indeed, there is such a thing as the Federal Registered Disablity Savings Plan (RDSP), which allows for disabled folks or people on their behalf to save up until the age of 59, then cash it in like an RRSP (similar to a 401K) but not everyone on Disability is eligible. For this taxation year I shall investigate whether I qualify – I don’t think I do, because the feds have a whole different set of criteria, and they are tuffer. But then, if anything can stave off premature rot in some Dickensian Nursing Home of Decrepitude, I’ll try to hit it. Until then, I shall be cagy and crafty, and I advise you to do the same.

Just don’t go hiding your cash in pillow cases or coffee cans in the fridge. There’s no need. Your savings will probably fit nicely in a piggy bank.

© 2011 Sarah Griffin

Hit it!  Mad Pride Flag Design Campaign.  It’s going to have PRIDE of place on the Blogroll!

Here are a couple of my rather pedestrian attempts, done in Paint.  You can tell why she’s the artist.

A bit obvious, as I was trying to keep things soft.  Maybe too soft, and too obvious.  Hospital green contrasting with hospital white.  I figure both should be on there somewhere.  But this scheme does not allow for transcendence.  So I came up with the following:

You’ve got the green ground — something we all value and miss “on the inside” morphing to the institutional green of the inside.  There’s the blankness of our empty lives when warded for long periods, dead centre.  This is followed by a blue, which is paradoxically both the colour of the sky above us yet also an institutional colour.  Finally, we’ve transcended upward beyond that into a bold, bracing, pure firmament whence we can never fall: full circle, back into a free, natural world.  Questions?  Comments?  Criticisms?

With “Psi” characters, you get the following:

Or the following:

Then there is this:

This is the same as the above, only I’ve added the red of struggle and bloodshed between the outdoor green and the ward green, just as I’ve added “Yellow Wallpaper” yellow between our institutionalized glimpses of sky and the real thing.  Personally I think it’s too busy with 7 stripes.  Compare with the Gay Pride flag (below), which has but 6.

My next 6-striper is the following:

The narrative is as follows.  From the “jaws of the black dog” we rise up to the purity of white, which is something we’ve reclaimed from the institution: formerly the colour of the ward, it now indicates full acceptance of oneself.  The intervening grey is that necessary area which inhabits the space between our rises and falls, our successes and failures, our concepts of what constitutes morbidity and health.  The hospital green represents our individual struggles during institutionalization; the “Yellow Wallpaper” colour stands for our individual struggles in the community; and the red which crowns it all is nothing less than our collective fight for dignity, respect, independence, and self-determination.  I think this one’s pretty tight.  I’d only suggest perhaps a (winged?) psi in optimistic sky blue to crown it.

Hmmm… at the very least, this stuff needs a lot of tweaking!

]]> http://wundernutbar.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/mad-pride-flag-campaign-and-some-ideas/feed/ 3 wundernutbar mad_pride_flag6 mint green flag blue green flag better red psi green yellow psi green 7-colour rainbow gay 5 colour Copy of 5 colour http://wundernutbar.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/1041/ http://wundernutbar.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/1041/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:26:04 +0000 Richard-Yves Sitoski http://wundernutbar.wordpress.com/?p=1041 ]]> For five days I have been holed up in my apartment, incapable of facing the outside world. And in an odd twist, my social anxiety doesn’t apply so much to strangers as to my friends. How effed up is that? I can go to the corner store and buy some overpriced tomatoes, communicating with the clerk with only minor discomfort, yet I am no longer capable of even making eye contact with people I know and love.  What’s up with that?

To elaborate: requiring groceries, and feeling up to a stroll, I thought I’d head to the Metro. I did so in fear of meeting people I knew, but I also figured the chances for this were slim. Little did I know. I was still in the parking lot when a friend pulled up and honked her horn. It took me a pathetically long time to recognize her. I just stood there in some sort of slack-jawed daze, and at length I responded by waving a timid hand. She drove off, doubtless confirmed in her opinion that I’m a nut.

And so I am. I entered the store, now fully on edge, praying that nobody else would be there. And of course that was not to be. As I was checking out, in quick succession I bumped into two of my very best friends. It was too much. I started to shake and stammer and felt their eyes like pokers burn into the back that I kept carefully turned and hunched. I was in a full-blown panic, and had one of them touched my arm I would have jumped. As it was, I was fortunate enough to escape, quivering, before dizziness and fear could overtake me. So how the hell did it come to this?

A bit of backtracking. On Friday a whole whackload of stress – of the kind that people, in their honest concern and out of a sincere desire to be helpful, always probe the wherefore – came to a head. Here are some of the issues.

Can’t Concentrate
I’ve been riding a wave of intense creativity, composing what appears to be some half-decent verse in advance of a full collection. But the effort of doing so (of thinking, concentrating, working out connundrums, even doing basic research) is something I’m incapable of sustaining. Plus, I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Folks around here seem to like my performances, but I really want to write for the page: and my mind is too scattered to allow me to think deeply and abstractly enough to be credible as a poet. This isn’t sour grapes, but an extension of the inadequacy that I’ve demonstrated since day one.

Can’t Think
The aforementioned distraction is pure hell. I can’t sit still, can’t focus. I only have the wherewithal to read jejune little Maclean’s articles on the crapper. I haven’t read a book – a real, honest to goodness book – since mid-summer. Mid-summer! How pathetic is that? I used to have two or three on the go at all times. How can I ever go back to school? Assuming there’s a program that would appeal to me, and which would lead to a feasible and remunerative career…. But I digress.

Raw Nerves
I’m hypersensitive to the people around me, and it seems as if there’s tension everywhere. I do not wish to reveal details, but my nearest and dearest both in the community and at work have unitentionally subjected me to a lot of stressors. They’ve been going through tough times. They also make me feel uncomfortable, through no fault of their own. My morale at work sucks. My boss is great and has been most accommodating. But recently I’ve had a lot of difficulty sticking with punctuality, partly because I live in a weird, aleatory, timeless world, partly because I’m finding it harder and harder to be functional in the workspace.

A Cluttered World
And why would that be? A vicious circle, ratcheting stress ever upward. Historically, I’ve always had difficulty functioning in work environments. This difficulty has got to the point where I cannot, in fact, work unless I know there is nobody in the immediate vicinnity. I’ve mentioned this before. But it’s more than that. It’s fully environmental. The lights in the workplace are too bright, the sounds too loud. And (though perhaps I shouldn’t mention this), I’ve never felt comfortable at any time, in any circumstances, with any of my co-workers.

Various Paranoias, Work-Related
Then there’s the nature of the work. It’s hard to reconcile what I’m doing now – I’m a dishwasher, folks – with my former white-collar aspirations. My primary source of income is Disability. I defy you to imagine a circumstance whereby I won’t end up in some Dickensian nightmare nursing home. I’ve tried to do more ambitious things at work: helping with catering, doing the soups and the muffins. But it never worked. I’ve had breakdowns in the kitchen, classic social anxiety crumbling, in the face of instruction and supervision. It doesn’t matter that the boss is a good friend. I have not ever, at any time in my life, been able to multitask or think past the step I’m working on. FML.

Addictions
Social media is messing me up, big time. I have a bit of an addiction to it. Well, quite a large addiction, and this is one of the worst stressors I feel at the moment. And what the hell: in the spirit of disclosure, I’ll admit to my two other issues: problems with food and hypersexuality. Of the three, I find the use of the computer the hardest to manage because I’m fully and completely mired in the Facebookiverse. So much so that I feel nauseous and sweaty-palmed as I try to make my way through my news feed more quickly than updates can come in. And woe betide me if the chat window should pop open! Between the ticker and chat, I’m like an air traffic controller jacked on amphetamines. The food and the sex thing I’ll leave be for now. Neither has got me into trouble recently. I’ve temporarily disabled Facecrack, and I’m actually feeling a sort of withdrawal.

Nocturnal Missions
I have to go out during the day, despite the fact that my natural inclinations damn near command me to be active at night. At night – and especially alone at home during the night – I feel what you might call normal. Our circadian rhythm slows us down naturally as part of the sleep cycle. This slowness brings me down to your daytime level of activity. What provokes torpor in you provides me with simple relaxation, something impossible during the day. And then there’s the fact that sunlight is often too bright, illuminating far too much in the Jackson Pollock world I live in. I rely on the darkness to hide things, to filter out disturbances in my perceptual field. Sadly, I also love the sunlight and feel claustrophobic at this time of year (more below).

Sonic Assault
And as for sound…. Sound is becoming increasingly painful, and perhaps one day it will be intolerable. It’s wretched, because this is a town that runs on music. Many of my friends are musicians, and all of my friends are music-obsessed. I used to be, yet I’ve listened to music only sporadically in the past two years. I doubt I will ever attend a concert again. But that’s gravy compared to the bigger issue of day-to-day navigation. Traffic noises used to disturb me, but now even regular automobiles cause me to jump and tremble as they pass by. Semis gearing down or using air brakes, car horns, loud motorcyles, the bloody factory whistle they installed on top of the Tourism building – all put me in a full-on panic and rage. Hence another reason for going about at night when things are fairly quiet. This evening I bought foam ear plugs from Shoppers Drug Mart. They’re good for 33dB. Not much, but I hope they’ll dampen things sufficiently for diurnal egress. If not, I’ll go as far as I must for silence – all the way to industrial headphone-style ear protectors. I’ll look like an idiot. But I feel like one already.

President’s Choice Memories of Trauma
As the stressors combine and snowball, I am now becoming exceedingly easy to frighten. My amygdala is pissing me off, as I can’t walk down the street without feeling like I am back at school and about to get the snot beaten out of me. Anyone who may be a threat is assumed to be one. Given that Owen Sound is pretty rough and tumble, that means that I perceive a lot of threats. Every butcher-boy faced, baseball-capped lout on a stolen bike; every male entering, exiting, or in the vicinnity of the Harb or the Coach. I’ve frequently had to stop dead in my tracks and prevent hyperventilation. ‘Nuff said.

My Son
I’m having huge difficulties dealing with separation from my son. On this I shall say nothing, other than that it constitutes a suffering I never thought possible.

I Love You So Much I Have to Run Away
For the first time in my life I have a posse of friends. It’s a safe bet that almost all of you take the fact of having friends for granted. I cannot, for I have never really known what it meant to have more than one or two people in my circle at a time. And yet, and yet…. Just as a large city would overwhelm me (for which reason I am content in a town with fewer than 30,000 inhabitants), I think my friends are overwhelming me. I love them so goddamned much, but I’m feeling burned out. I don’t know if I have the stamina for social activity. It’s just like sound, light, trying to function in an enclosed space, trying to work in the presence of others, and Facebook. So much going on; even if I go nowhere and see nobody for days, my head is positively aswim with social stimulus. People simply drain me. The feeling of weariness you carry across the threshold as you come home after a hectic day is the feeling that I, knowing I must interact with even well-disposed individuals, have as I leave the house. Hence my assertion that I can never, under any circumstances, live with a romantic partner (or anyone else). I despise myself for it, for I truly, truly love people.  And of course, a major reason why I’m unemployable.

Happy Birthday to Me
That said, the final provocation came on Friday when, in addition to all of the above, it was bandied about that some friends were planning a birthday dinner for me. I cracked. The period between November and January is one I thoroughly abhor. I despise everything to do with it, including my birthday and Christmas. Most of my hospitalizations and cutting happen at this time. Call it Seasonal Affectivity Disorder, call it the memory of my dad’s epic boozefests, call it the realization of incipient mortality (there’s a reason why more people commit suicide around Christmas than at any other time). It’s hard enough for me to attend social gatherings in general, and parties in particular; parties for me are just about unthinkable. I would enjoy a modest, “spontaneous” gathering of a few of my nearest and dearest in an intimate setting (the evening we planned for one of my friends before he left for a monastery in Toronto comes to mind), yet the moment plans are openly discussed, I become ill. I really don’t know what to do, because I desperately want to do something for my birthday… but what? And how? And I haven’t even mentioned the discomfort of receiving gifts.

Enough Already – You’re Depressing Us
And there’s more. But you don’t need to know the specifics. It’s late (early!), I’m exhausted, and I apologized as best I could to my friends from the supermarket via electronic means. It took me almost seven hours to calm down enough to write this, and I’m thankful at least that I can communicate this way.

Facebook, however, is off-limits.

Here’s comic artist and survivor extraordinaire Sarafin‘s proposal, prepared in advance of Toronto’s Mad Pride 2012.  Let’s take a closer look!

© 2011 Sarah Griffin

First off, you’ll notice that in its overall structure that it’s readily identifiable as a community flag.

Here are some community flags you may or may not recognize:

They’re not just pretty as hell, but denote affiliation with vital cultures and subcultures.  I myself am a member of at least two on here (not saying which!).

But we Madders are a community which has lacked the flag we have so long deserved.  It was about time somebody addressed that, and what better time than during the current planning for Toronto’s 2012 Mad Pride celebrations, and what better person than Sarafin?

First, what’s Mad Pride? 

Well, it’s our time to shine.  The Mad Pride movement started in Toronto in the early 90′s and spread around the world, taking off like wildfire in Europe, the US and in Australia (among others).  It’s an affirmation of who we are as people (anyone who has had an experience of any kind with psychiatric treatment, and who so chooses to self-identify, is among our number).

We may not all share common values and experiences — indeed, a more heterogeneous lot you will never find — but we all have one thing that unites us: the need to be acknowledged, respected and listened to by those in the medical community and indeed by anyone in a position of power.

And so our celebration, Mad Pride, is usually not all fun and games, even though the spirit is one of levity.  We stick to our political roots, holding discussions and working groups on lobbying, policy and current issues — not the least of which concern the horrible conditions in metropolitan subsidized housing.  In Toronto Mad Pride week is crowned by our parade, wherein we defiantly push a gurney down Queen Street, symbolically escaping the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health grounds (formerly the old Provincial Lunatic Asylum, which was built, in part, through the forced labour of “inmates” [patients!]).  (Click here for a look at the poster from 2011.)

In an effort to broaden our scope, this year the planning committee has decided to include more arts and entertainment, and emphasize the cultural festival component.  Planning is in full swing, so you’ll have to watch this space for a fuller picture.

And so, the flag.

There’s currently a contest on to design the Mad Pride logo.  Sarafin, enterprising artist that she is, was excited to tackle the project.  She and I (and my contribution here was principally as a sounding board) bounced around a variety of ideas and principles.

• It had to be readily identifiable and distinct.
• It should if possible suggest other community flags.
• It would require iconography that emphasized the psyche without any references to pathology.

The colour yellow seemed like a given.  Not only does it looks good in various shades from eggshell to canary, as the brightest and most visible of colours it refutes the notion that we are an “invisible” minority.  We’re everywhere, and you all know more than one of us.  It’s optimistic and cheerful (as we often are), but it is also a colour which can apparently cause people to become irritated and uncomfortable (once again, as we often are).  Best of all, yellow has a history among us.   In 1892 the American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman published “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a short story that has become a landmark work in the Mad cultural canon.

The number of stripes was an issue.  Should we base it on the international ICD 10 classification of 10+1 categories?  Or the DSM-IV’s 17-and-change?  Either would have been unwieldy.  And wrong.  We’re not who we are because of some pseudo-empirical 3rd-party system of categories and rubrics.  We simply are.  Thus, the number of stripes was established essentially on aesthetic grounds.  But note the way the bars lighten and deepen.  This is a depiction of how some conditions may be comparatively severe, mild, or intermittent.

Then there’s this guy:

This is the Greek letter Ψ (psi).  The psychological profession has pretty much adopted (co-opted?) it, though the symbol has long held broad associations with mind, soul, spirit, intellect, emotion, and parapsychology.  Nothing in life is value-neutral, and so the closest thing we could find was something that could be fully reclaimed.  Maybe this is our pink triangle?  Or lambda?  The red Sarafin selected doesn’t just show up well against the yellow ground, it’s also the universal colour of struggle and bloodshed.  And let’s face it, many of us have bled.  Finally, look at how the symbol is oblique, off-kilter, askew.  Pretty self-explanatory, no?

All right, then!  We need your input!  Is this our final design, or can we refine it?  What should we add or remove?  What are we missing?  Let’s open this up so we can perfect our symbol!  We want this to go worldwide!

Address your concerns here or at Sarafin’s main blog, Asylum Squad Side Story.  (You’ll note that she’s rather modest about what is a damn fine piece of design!)

Nonetheless, holed up in my apartment for two days and incapable of speaking to people — trapped basically in my own head — I can at least string a few words together (thank goodness) on my favourite subject, painting, and in so doing address a subject I should have treated long ago.

Pace Kay Redfield Jamison, I don’t think Madfolk are any more or less creative than anyone else.  At best, we’ll come up with some off-kilter notions, some provocative outside-the-box thinking, that will translate to some unexpected content and if lucky to some bold formal advances.  But in the end I’m not sure how strong the correlation actually is.  Creative Madfolk might stand out more than the non-creative, but I doubt they stand out more than the creative non-Mad.

Wassily Kandinsky

Courtesy Wikimedia

Case in point.  The man painted the freest, loosest-looking canvases anyone had ever seen in the inter-War era.  Yet he did so usually while wearing a jacket and tie, fastidiously avoiding getting the tiniest drop of paint on his sleeve.  So much for the image of the unkempt, unshaven, greasy-locked, tobacco-fingered, sleep-deprived romantically tormented genius.  If there was anything crazy about him, it was that he gave up a sinecure as an established law professor.

Yet this was the man who developed the paradigm for what would later evolve into pure abstract art: painting which sought to make literal Walter Pater’s dictum and “aspire towards the condition of music.”  That, even at the turn of the Century, in a world which had a rough handle on Fauvism (e.g., Derain) and other Post-Impressionist styles, was simply crazy.

Back then, you could not possibly, no matter how much you distorted (abstracted from) Nature, ever do away with Nature itself.  But the writing had long been on the wall.  For all that Turner, for example, was blotchy, his blotchiness could be reconciled with adventurous new and (R/r)omantic ways of representing and seeing Nature.  But the Impressionists set about killing that notion, by making of paint and its application the unabashed subject of their paintings.

To hear Kandinsky describe himself, the unwary would think him a synaesthete (someone who receives one form of stimulus and interprets it based on another sense’s apparatus: touch eliciting smells, taste provoking auditory responses, etc.).  Rather, he truly did see that colour, form and line held the potential for the visual equivalent of music — something which was indeed abstract.

Impression III (1911). Courtesy abcgallery.com

But the formulation of this theory was no more than a very sensitive person’s ambitious — and highly rational — response to the aesthetic dead ends of the day. For let us not forget the “how” of music!  Music can only exist as the explicit creation and manifestation of strict rules (Pythagoras on up!).  There’s nothing arbitrary about intervals, scales and other aspects of theory.  Kandinsky wanted full formal freedom, but a freedom defined — in other words, created — by a set of rational rules.

The rules he laid out for painting would nonetheless strike some as flaky, as they are based on an arbitrary “psychology” that as mentioned borrows analogies from musical theory, and also on a belief system of the day (part philosophy, part religion) called Theosophy.

As to the former, there’s actually something rather disappointing in his complexly articulated, yet rather obvious conclusions that dark colours suggest profundity, in the manner of minor chords; while a composition can have its adagio, andante and allegro moments based on the “quickness” or “gravity” of stroke and line.  Artists had pretty much been intuitively working these principles since day one, and Kandinsky’s conclusion that colours and shapes had direct effects on emotional states was just conjecture.  Where Kandinsky succeeds is in the sheer fact of regarding colours and shapes as direct, subjective outgrowths and expressions of emotional states.  Thatwas liberating.  And it was wholly reasonable.

Composition VIII (1923). Courtesy wassilykandinsky.net

As for Theosophy, this was a belief system which sought to reconcile all spheres of knowledge — religious, philosophical, scientific, what have you — into one great pure synthesis of true wisdom.  It was essentially the template for the entire subsequent New Age movement, and offered answers to those who were dissatisfied with conventional religion yet sought a mystical spirituality which had room for empirical science.  For the spiritually open and curious artist, it provided a fertile source of inspiration at a time of intellectual, spiritual and philosophical crisis.  Outlandish, perhaps, but less outlandish than many of the other myriad belief systems which popped up in the period between the mid-19th and mid-20th Centuries.

Yellow - Red - Blue (1925). Courtesy wassilykandinsky.net

Sure, Kandinsky had his moments.  But his tendency to fall to his knees and weep before objects of great beauty is remarkably common: average Joes and Janes off the street report bursting into tears before the sombre profundity of Mark Rothko’s paintings in his eponymous Chapel.  Kandinsky was an extremely sensitive individual, highly intuitive, profoundly rational, a voracious reader, very organized, ambitious, and a champion of the marriage of strict form and caprice.

We should all be so lucky.

Coming soon: Paterson Ewen: Maybe the Best of Us Are Crazy.

They've clearly mastered Stage 3. (Courtesy stock.xchng)

You might wish to jump directly to the technique below, but I think the setup and backstory bear reading.  To wit:

• I absolutely require human contact and the company of my brothers and sisters to feel fully alive, fully connected – yet I cannot function as a social being unless I obtain vast amounts of time unburdened by even the thought of human interaction. I jealously guard my personal time and space, neurotically avoiding the telephone unless very specific arrangements have been made in advance, etc. By this token, I could never consider for an instant living with anyone or in shared accommodations. The prospect of finishing my days in a nursing home is one too terrifying to ponder.
• I am touchy-feely – yet need a lot of personal space. I am indeed a very tactile person around those with whom I’m comfortable. Yet in the main, I feel best when people stay at a distance of no less than the length of an extended arm. The more anxious I become, the greater the radius, until I can find myself upset even if the nearest person is a good 10 feet away.
• I am extremely sensual and sexual, and fortunately there I have few problems. That’s because anything of a carnal nature is only going to take place with someone whom I trust implicitly, and in circumstances wherein I am in a pretty secure frame of mind. Sure, when I’m stressed, I’m as useful as a bag of marshmallows – but when I’m happy, I’m very, very happy. (Sorry!)

Recently, I’ve been undergoing a few reversals. It’s been a particularly stressful time in that my job has become a little too overwhelming, and my personal safety has felt compromised. In the first instance, I have been attempting to adapt to the pace of preparing muffins in my café. In the second, I have had to take the initiative in dealing with some impossible tenants in my building. Both situations were not just unsettling, they were profoundly disturbing.

As regards the café, I am a master at knowing how to do manual tasks but something of a dunce at doing them. I don’t get the hang of procedures, and my mind only allows me to process and act on one thing at a time. I’m classically social phobic, a champion ‘unitasker,’ and meticulously, painfully slow even at things I’ve done repeatedly. Being in the presence of business-like, no-nonsense colleagues is guaranteed to become an exercise in anxiety and self-hatred.

In the matter of my neighbours, one of those couples in a constant state of breakup and reconciliation, I feel unsafe because the sheer volume and violence of their arguments puts me – and keeps me – in a state of hypervigilance. I’m brought back to the unbelievable situations my father put my mother and me through. Further, the male neighbour is fairly burly, and hence intimidating plain and simple. This brings up memories of being the school punching bag. The whole PTSD thing…. Unable to take their 4 am screaming matches, I delivered a note informing them that I would summarily call the police at the slightest disturbance after 11 pm. It was an absolutely unwonted example of self-efficacy on the part of the least confrontational human being on the planet, and one about which I am extremely proud. It also made me scared sh*tless on account of possible reprisals. My person and space are, as you have seen, sacrosanct.

So I have been running around, not just thin-skinned but positively skinless. Every nerve exposed. Jumping at every sound. Necessitating the 10-foot pole. Grinding to a halt even when doing dishes at the café, panting, panicking, arguing out loud with myself, and being a right nutter.

At a time like that, a body needs hugs. Badly.

But how to obtain them, when proximity brings distress? How to encourage intimacy at this or any other time, when every part of my being seeks to withdraw?

Well, in a flash of insight I devised something that works well for me, and which you might wish to try if you have sensory defensiveness, social anxiety, paranoia, or any such condition that makes it difficult to be touched, held and encompassed. It allows you to ease into a hug, de-escalating as you go.

I call it the 4-Stage Hug. It’s not hard.

The 4-Stage Hug

1. Back to Back: Begin by standing back to back with your partner, not touching. Shut your eyes if necessary. Slowly allow your partner to approach (or “back into”) you until your backs touch. If you are anxious, practise breathing until your heart rate goes down. Once you are comfortable, allow your partner to slowly and gently increase the pressure. If at any time you feel anxious, have your partner stop in order that you may breathe into relaxation. When you feel ready to move on, the partner may withdraw.
2. Front to Back: The next step is to allow your partner to repeat the above, only with their front pressed to your back. The same procedure applies – and note that at no time is the partner to embrace! Hands at your sides, please! We’re not there yet.
3. Shoulder to Shoulder: The same approach is to be followed, only with you and your partner standing side by side. Either one may approach the other, depending on how you feel. Enjoy the press. If you are on very close terms, either of you may wish to lean down and in to rest your head on the other’s shoulder. You may also wish to place an arm around your partner’s shoulders. (I often start with this Stage, going 3, 1, 2, 4).
4. Front to Front: By now you should be ready for the hug proper. This shall require your partner to stand still while you approach them, and that you begin by hugging them. This act of taking the initiative is important. It’s empowering, as you are the agent of the conquest of your anxiety. It also means that you can stop the proceedings then and there if that’s all you want. Sometimes hugging someone else is as therapeutic as being hugged! If you want the full-on hug, then allow your partner to reciprocate in so far as you are comfortable.

And that’s that. Who knew a hug could be so complicated?

Well, as a matter of fact, I long suspected. Let’s face it, nothing in life really is simple – especially not the simple things.

My Spoken Word career has taken many turns recently.  I tried to make it as a Slammer, but I now realize that while I can indeed memorize and retain several 3-minute pieces, my ability to throw down on the day is severely hampered by my old nemesis — stress.  I can do my whole routine for friends and family, but put me up in front of an audience and I am swamped by distractions.  I did manage one very good public performance for the NDP earlier this year, but that consisted of a single piece that I had pretty much pounded into my head relentlessly, remorselessly, for weeks leading up to the rally.  I tried the same approach before the Wordstock literary festival in Collingwood this summer, and went down in flames as stuttered, stammered, and completely lost what I was trying to recite.  Right in front of John Robert Colombo and members of the Toronto Slam Team.  Bugger.

But my shrink isn’t likely to start prescribing me beta blockers, and I’m the type of guy who carries around the same level of nervousness and anxiety on a daily basis as most folks do when placed under pressure.  So I have to re-evaluate my modus operandi.  Ash Dickinson, I ain’t.  But I’m a damned good reader of my own stuff, and I figure it were far better this cobbler stuck to his last and did prose fiction, “page” poetry, performance art and sonic sculpture rather than straight Slam.  There will be fewer social conscience pieces, though I shall always be fiercely political.

Besides, to quote hipsters everywhere, I do have to finish that novel….

All right, then.  On to the festivities.  Thanks as always to Robert and Caroline Menzies for their work putting on SOUNDS, and of course to my homeskillet Karen Houle for the great media work.

This barrage of exasperation is pretty self-explanatory.  I might deploy the Sergeant in future exercises, but for now he has been recalled from active duty.  This was as exhausting to perform as it was to listen to.  I could barely talk the rest of the evening, and required a good pint of Creemore Springs lager to anaesthetize my very volcanic larynx.

ADVISORY: ONE HELLUVA LOT OF PROFANITY!

This piece scares even me.  You’ve been warned. 

And what bleakness it is. Medieval cloisters had better Feng shui. Not a poster or a print, of course, because picture frames can be broken into weaponry—but damn it all, could they not have got some second-graders to come around and splatter a few clumsy murals of rainbows and daisies? Here the dominant theme, with no variation, is beige. The walls are beige, the floors are beige, the ceiling is beige. It wears on you, this beige, for as I’ve heard it sung, beige is the colour of resignation. Here and there I note the odd change. Faceplates are missing from thermostats, so that now there’s exposed metal plaques and tangs: perfect for fucking yourself up righteous when you’re inclined to headbutt some hardare. And they still have acoustic drop-ceilings, with acrylic lenses and fluorescent tubes. Wheel your pallet under the light, hop on up, and voilà! More blades than a Gypsy wedding. They really don’t think this shit through.

Wonder of wonders, today I get a vegetarian meal. They’ve taken the chicken breast off the plate and doubled me up on ball bearing peas and overcooked rice. Swimming in chicken gravy. Sweet Christ, I’d hate to ask for kosher.

I try to make conversation with Colonel Kilgore.

“You know, you’ve been here too long when you start to like the coffee.”

He ignores me loudly.

The lounge used to have a nice table and four captain’s chairs, a dusty rose formica cylinder piled high with Chatelaines and Motor Trends, and some comfy plush chairs for reading. I also remember a plastic tub of Michael Chrichtons, Maeve Binchys and dog-eared sudokus. I tell you this because the beigeness has taken over. There’s no longer even the vine pattern of the upholstered reading chairs to mitigate the beige, for they’ve taken everything away. Everything. Because they determined that our grubby little crazy person mitts have turned the ratty old Yosemite Sam puzzle with the missing pieces into a vector for hoof-and-mouth. So there’s nothing at all now but four vinyl waiting room chairs surrounding the bare cylinder like a plastic camp fire. As a result, there’s nothing to do now but try to tune out the TV, barely audible, Aldous Huxleying us from its bracket on high.

That, or saunter over to the open linen closet and get some bedsheets to rip into strips for self-garroting. Like I said, they don’t think this shit through.

Gomer Pyle is hovering over his platter. We have them on our laps, as the cylinder is barely big enough for a single tray. I’m trying to be sympathetic. I remember my days as a chainsmoker and beer swiller. Nic fits command respect. But there must be something wrong if after this time they haven’t allowed him 10 escorted minutes in the courtyard. It’s not all me here. He really does have this negative charisma that could harsh San Francisco’s mellow.

I’m about to leave him to shovel home his Sodexho goodness when Nurse Face walks in with the kid.

“Buenos tardes, homeskillets!”

And realize that I totally misread it. My usual precious bubbliness didn’t just bounce off, it impacted. Face is holding him by the hand, giving him that barely perceptible, fully unauthorized human contact, rubbing the back of his bone-white hand with her warm dark thumb.

I’m fighting several urges, for I am my brother’s keeper.

The kid is choking back tears. He’s so pale he’s bluish.

And all I can think of, is what the fuck did they say to him? Do to him?

Do you know what happens to kids when they get exposed to shrinks? Damned if they don’t tell him he’s got both ADHD and Autism. Then, when he’s a teen, they will say he’s Bipolar to boot. And that’s what will screw him up, because he’s really just weird. But he will become sick because the whole damn world will be fussing over him, incapable of letting him go, simultaneously pussy-footing around him and stomping on his face, jack-booted, forever. And the more meds he takes, the more meds he needs; and the more meds he needs, the more meds he takes, until his neurochemistry is Love Canal and he’s insulin dependent and his liver turns into a hackey sack and he has permanent shakes and has 19 nervous breakdowns and he becomes a lush and everybody he will have ever known will treat him like a walking Chernobyl and eventually, after due consideration and the weighing of all the options and with the analytical indifference of an accountant, he determines that suicide would, indeed, be a positive lifestyle enhancement.

And I have nothing to offer.

Because I am just as fucked as he is, in here, desperate to be held by my mother Gaia.

I want the earth so bad.

And I want to get together with him and Face and even Sgt. Slaughter, and just hold hands, on our backs, head to head like petals radiating from the centre of a daisy. On the earth, of the earth. And with eyes fully open to take in all of the sky. I want him to be the child he is, so he can point to the swaying branches and rustling leaves and tell us that the trees are dancing. I want to return to him an innocence that they’re taking surreptitiously, restoring it before he even suspects it’s missing.