My Recovery from Psychosis

What this Substack is all about

Hi, I’m Clinton.

You may have read my writings on famous Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan or computer history on various websites, like Katherine Dee’s Default Wisdom or my own website Concerned Netizen. You might have heard me interviewed for various podcasts on these topics, or watched a presentation I have given over these past years at conventions for the Media Ecology Association or Free Software Foundation.

I tend to make an entrance into various scenes, play around, and then take off again—I don’t really stick around or engage much. Maybe I come off as a bit of a flake. Actually, I’m sure that I do.

The thing is, I’ve been dealing with a whole lot these past few years. I mean, we all have—I get it. But after several preliminary, small-scale psychoses I’ve had in my life, the first of which occured in 2009, I had the big one in the summer of 2017.

I’ve only started talking about it candidly with friends and family in the past few months. That was a huge step. I’m was able to do this because, finally, I felt like it was really something in my past. This sense of distance is what I’ve been hoping for—working toward, striving and yearning and pleading the universe for—for a very long time. It feels, frankly, miraculous—and I am indebted to everyone who has helped me, often just by being my friend.

At this point, I’ve decided that it’s time to share that story. What I write here complements all my other work, as a means of framing it and explaining my particular passions and interests—what they actually mean to me and what studying them has done for me.

It’s taken a long time to figure out how to negotiate the line between talking about this publicly, and respecting everyone’s privacy—not the least of which is my own. My intention isn’t to be some exhibitionist or gossip. This isn’t a tell-all. My intentions is to share enough in order to share all the things about my recovery which, I think, may help other people.

I’m not a doctor and this isn’t medical advice. I can’t tell you what to do, and I don’t want to either. I’m just a guy who has journaled, in excruciating detail, the worst ordeal of his life. And now that it’s over, I would like to share my own idiosyncratic, first-hand strategies for sense-making which I believe got me through it. Maybe my reasoning can help you, or maybe you just find it interesting.

To begin with, let’s consider what I mean when I say that my psychosis was the big one.

The Hell of It

It began slowly in the summer of 2017, carrying through into much of 2018. It demolished me into pudding. It hurt everyone I was close to. Heavy costs were borne by people close to me; people who least deserved it.

Every paranoid and grandiose delusion you’ve ever heard of? I had it.

I suffered every cliché with an unshakable conviction—songs lyrics and television shows and street ads were addressing themselves directly to me, people were following me or being paid to spy on me, vast conspiracies were directed against me. My thoughts were being surveilled.

I often could not follow what my closest friends, speaking slowly and simply and directly to me, were saying. At the worst of it I was often catatonic, unable to make sense of anything outside me, trapped in tight little loops of gruesome thoughts and images in my head. For many days, I formed no memories at all, and couldn’t recall what had happened mere hours prior.

I awoke every morning completely empty, and by every evening my mind had ballooned to fill the freezing vacuum of the cosmos. The light of constant revelation burned and blinded me from out of every surface. Sometimes was the purest emanation of the divine, the fulfillment of the perennial philosophy. Sometimes I was the opposite. I was the incarnation of characters historical and fictional. My coming was foretold, and somewhere my way was being prepared by some cult of unknown and unknowable moral valance. My becoming would be like that of Tetsuo from Akira, meaning I was morally obliged to make like Kaneda and kill myself to save the planet (maybe I was supposed to do it in Kanata, Canada, hahaha). My experiences oscillated violently and without a sense of linear transition. I danced with the angels and I dined, with worms, on dirt—often minutes apart from each other.

My dramatic sensibility in writing is seldom this forced, but you oughta know: it was real bad.

Holding On

Through it all, I clung tenaciously to the knowledge it was all nonsense—which doesn’t really help that much in the moment, to be honest. It’s hard to believe the part of yourself saying “you’re crazy, this can’t be true” when it stands against all the evidence of one’s direct sensory experience. But maintaining that paradoxical state was ultimately very important. The diligent work of constructing for myself a dispassionate, critical, “outside” view of my inner state became a habit. It was often unbelievable and futile, but the practice of it was enough. It allowed me to keep as much of my experience as I could to myself, private and inchoate and uncrystallized, as I groped my way back home into social and material reality.

The funny thing is, I didn’t go into it wholly unprepared. My friend Aaron actually made a short documentary back in 2010 on my first psychotic break. Of course, that little episode was a trifle compared to 2017, but I do think my prior experience made all the difference in my recovery.

I say I’m recovered, anyway—I’ve got no credentials to claim so, but whatever may be wrong with me today is peanuts compared to that year of hell. I may be disordered or radical or conceited or pompous or narcissistic or anything else you might complain, in all sorts of ways. But everything I am is 100% human scale and within the bounds of generally accepted reality.

I’m sociable and have made lots of wonderful new friends, and am becoming reacquainted with old ones. And I’m not unduly frightened or suspicious of them, or of strangers. When randos express an unusual interest in me, my first assumption is that they do so because of my niche eceleb status, not because I’m magically special in some cosmic sense or because they’re agents of some conspiracy. I’ve held down my part time job of six years and to be brutally honest have gone from a functionally inept pity-hire, to competent, to—I’ll dare say—a very good employee. The growth I’ve had at my occuptation has been one of the most consistant and reliable markers of my recovery, and that has meant the world to me.

I’m generally reliable and demonstrate good intentions and a realistic perception of the world to myself and those who like and love me. Point is: I’m not psychotic. I was, and now I’m not.

Is it Schizophrenia?

Psychoses are events. But diagnoses can be more like traits.

In his book Malady of the Mind, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman tells us that the clinical view of schizophrenia is like that of twelve-step programs. That is, in the same way that AA members maintain vigilence by always identifying as alcoholics, schizoprehnics are schizophrenics for life. That is, schizophrenics are always in recovery, but are not ever said to be recovered.

I have not ever been diagnosed for schizophrenia. The tentative diagnosis I have been given, actually, is schizotypal personality disorder. I have never hallucinated or heard voices. Regardless, whenever I say that I have recovered, I am referring to the forid experience of psychosis, not my diagnosis. Which is not, I reiterate, schizophrenia.

A lot of what I’d like to examine and talk about on this blog, however, exists in relation to our modern culture and its many ways of understanding psychosis—and schizophrenia is the catch-all term in this more casual sense. The internet is full of “schizoposters,” Deleuze and Guittari popularized “schizoanalysis,” and many authors over the years have characterized the post-modern subject with their own term ending in “-phrenic.” New Age consciousness-raising cults often claim there is a potential for enlightenment in psychosis and schizophrenia, and use those terms liberally.

So I’m probably going to use the term schizophrenic pretty often, especially to discuss these cultural matters—but I also need to make it clear up-front that nothing I say ought to be applied willy-nilly to you, or to anyone else you know who with a diagnosis of any of these conditions.

But this is not a blog about schizophrenia. It is about the event of my psychosis, and what I think I learned from it. And drawing from that experience, I will talk about cultural conceptions and depictions of related phenomenon to the degree which I feel I am justified in doing so. I’ve many critical things to say, for instance, about New Age mysticisms which, had things gone differently, may have driven me even More Mad than I was.

So we will discuss Gregory Bateson and R.D. Laing and everyone else who has turned “schizophrenia” into a buzzword. But I will strive to do no disrespect to anyone whose life is impacted by this debilitating condition in doing so.

A False Sense of Privacy

When the primary problem of my psychosis was a feeling of being watched, or having my thoughts read, modern technology certainly didn’t help. Being surrounded by machines with microphones and cameras, and news articles about mind-computer interface devices are probably, in my view, the cruelest thing in the world to inflict upon someone suffering these delusions.

As you’ll see, a large part of my recovery has been building up a way of putting myself out there—making myself public, so as to justify the sense of being watched by making it to be true. This blog, then, is an extension of that.

Cultural norms since the launch of social media have emphasized sharing as much of yourself as you can. I think that’s sick. We’re not just going to regret it—we all are regretting it already, just imprecisely in a vague, anxious, unplacable way.

And so, I’m not an open book. At least, not to you, dear reader. As dear as you are to me, my friends and family and everyone else I know and meet in the flesh are the only people who are going to get all of me. (That’s actually central to the metaphysics behind my recovery—embodiment has to be, you know, embodied. So being online will always be partial; the real you physically can’t be online).

So what do you get? Well, the free readers get a lot of what of me can be put into words, and paid subscribers will get even more. Often the parts that I’d rather not be completely accessible to absolutely everyone in the planet. It’s not exactly air-tight, but it’s better than nothing.

And it doesn’t mean I don’t want you to read it. Please do subscribe, and read. Not just to help me pay my bills, and supplement my part-time job, but also to get on the inside of buffering myself from total exposure. I’ll make it nice and cozy—we’ll have a private comment section on the paid posts where you can share the same imperfect peace of mind.

Thanks for subscribing. I’ve got a bunch of posts already in the pipeline, coming throughout the next week. :)

What to Expect

I’m going to talk about my recovery from psychosis, and share some of the ways I framed my relation to the world which I think could help people going through something similar. What I say should, I think, work fine alongside whatever professional medical assistance they may be receiving.

I’m also going to explore ideas regarding mysticism and consciousness raising cults, and talk about both the ways I was vulnerable to these ideas, and how I came to resist and neutralize most of their ill effects on myself.

There will be lots of books mentioned—mostly non-fiction. I’ll describe the way I rebuilt my worldview, and my relation to myself and to others. As I’ve done in my other writings, I’ll continue to explore issues of post-modernism, cybernetics, internet history, etc. When I do it here, though, I’ll be making explicit mention of my experience of psychosis. I’ll continue to write on these things elsewhere too, and give you all links in some kind of digest.

Once we get going, there could be more growth on the horizon.

If this sounds interesting, please consider subscribing! And if you like what I’m doing enough to consider paying for it, I would be very grateful for your support.

Thanks!

Clinton