SteRo wrote: ↑Sun Apr 04, 2021 7:15 am
I guess a laugh is some kind of recognition.
I’ll tell you a little secret, SteRo. Just between you and me. This doesn’t leave the forum.
So in my province, there was once a great psychiatric hospital with numerous four story buildings on 250 acres of land. It was established in 1918 and (over time) housed thousands of mentally ill people.
After spending a year in a small hospital in a psychiatric unit, the doctors couldn’t get me the right treatment - so they sent me to the “BIG HOSPITAL”.
So, in 2008, I ended up on this very old, very large, psychiatric facility.
And, in order to get me on the right meds, they decided to take me off everything I was already on. Needless to say, my condition became much worse. I stopped eating. I ate one meal every three days at the behest of my mother who was beside her self with grief. I dropped to 130 lbs.
One day, they said, “Ben (Ben’s not my real name) - they said, “Ben, why don’t you choose your meds”. I said, “I have the exact thing.” Then I listed a mild antipsychotic and a benzodiazepine.
In three weeks I was out of the hospital. In 2010 they had completely shut down every ward on the site except three small units. It was a government mandate to save money. Many of the ill wound up on the street using narcotics.
Fortunately for me, I had met my wife to be and I was working part time in a pizza parlour.
In 2013, I needed another job - so I applied for a security license. Now, one of the questions on that application form was “have you ever been treated for a mental illness?” So naturally, I lied and obtained by Security License.
Do you want to know where I ended up in 2013? I landed a job at the very same 250 acre plot of land with its numerous buildings and wards.
I was nervous at first. There were still three open wards on the site and I was afraid one of the patients would recognize. Hell! One of the nurses would recognize me! That would be it.
Of course, all the staff from 2008 had migrated to other hospitals. However, I saw more than a couple patients who I had once lived with in close quarters.
They would sometimes throw me a queer glance - as if to say, “I feel like I know you”. But the uniform apparently confused them. And I realized that many of these mentally ill people have gone beyond the limits of sanity.
In other words, they had gone so psychotic that something in their mind had snapped. I soon realized that even the one’s who recognized my face were likely going mad inside to try and figure out who this security guard was and why they felt like they’d seen me somewhere. In all honesty, it probably didn’t trouble them more than it troubled me.
The job lasted three years. I moved on to high rise window cleaning. But my wife and I always joke about those poor patients scratching their heads trying to figure out where in God’s name they’d seen that Security guard.
Some of us schizophrenics will endure the utmost kind of bizarre hallucination and paranoid delusion - and STILL come out with their sanity in tact.
Although I often struggle with a demon (and I do not mean that metaphorically) I have fooled everyone and chiselled out a fairly decent existence for my self.
The Unbinding is TRUE!!! But did I go absolutely bonkers after that single night of mind expanding bliss? Oh yea. I surely did. That was when my schizophrenia really started.
Anyhow. I hope you enjoyed that little story. Let’s not let it circulate too much now.
God bless you on the Easter weekend, good aggregate of form, feeling, perception, impulses, and consciousness (conventionally known as “SteRo”).
I know of at least one who’s reached the summit of experience.