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Impressions
43. Dear J. Michael Mahoney, I am the grandmother of a 23 year old grandson who is going through a gender transition. He is taking female hormones to grow breasts and has decided to take medication for chemical castration as well. He says he has been under the care of two therapists and a psychiatrist(?). I am very concerned, and I don't know where to seek help. The reason I am so concerned is not because of the transition itself, but because of his behaviors. He has been carrying a kitchen knife (chef's knife) and says he wants to kill someone. I believe he was sexually molested by his stepfather as a child, and I know he was physically assaulted as well. He is saying he hates all men and wants them dead. He talks about drinking a certain man's blood and barbequeing his flesh to eat it. Mind you, he is a vegetarian. He talks to a voice or voices in his head, and believes that he and God speak on an everday basis. He makes strange noises as well. I want desperately to find the help he needs in a long term facility. He was hospitalized a few times, but was always discharged within a few days. Unfortunately, money is a factor. I am fearful he may carry out his threat(s) to do harm to someone. Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated. Sincerely, [name deleted for privacy reasons] 42. Dear Sir, Frankly, I cannot comprehend how you arrive at this theory of yours, that schizophrenia is somehow connected with "unconscious bisexual conflict/gender confusion". I am very glad that the medical team at the hospital I stayed in eight years ago - who by the way helped me to stay symptom-free since then (despite that time being my third episode already) - was not acquainted with any of your obscure theories. I am sure that one might be able to incorporate gender confusion in their psychotic delusions, just as some incorporate religious experiences, etc. In the case of schizophrenia, the knowledge that a hormonal imbalance in the metabolism of the brain is the most critical precondition for the disease, has been around for some time. Let me tell you, I have no "bisexually confused" bone in my body, although I have been diagnosed with a schizo-affective disorder at the age of 21. And thank God for that. I would not want to be in a position where I would have to live a life of continuous inner turmoil with regards to my sexual self-conception. Best Regards, 41. Mike, Thanks for your help. I've done tons of research in the past few years and find the contradicting views of doctors on schizophrenia frightening. Many seem to have a schizophrenic view (repression and denial) of the role of homosexuality in schizophrenia. "A Beautiful Mind" is one example. After loading the book with many examples of Nash's repressed homosexuality the author denies that this played a factor in his illness! The film version ignored it altogether. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, which is why I commend you for compiling in one book all the quotes supporting this obvious theory. My harrowing first-hand experience only validates your compelling argument. A quote about alcohol making the patient aggressively homosexual and aggressively violent mirrors my experience exactly on a two day Russian train trip with my friend, who had previously never acted this way before. Schizophrenia is indeed a nightmare for all involved. While I ended up in a foreign emergency room with broken ribs, I am now healed but my friend is still not the person he was before the onset of his severe condition. Perhaps your book will help him. Thanks again. [Pls reference Impressions # 40.] 40. Your Schizophrenia book is great! I've been helping someone with severe schizophrenia for three years now, and your book explains EVERYTHING. Is it available in the Russian language? [name deleted for privacy reasons] 39. Hi Mike, I just finished reading your book again. I made notes of all that really got my attention. I especially like # 262 that I think catches all that can be said about schizophrenia. I noticed another article in the Austin American Statesman today with the heading "Study: Gene Variations Raise Risk of Schizophrenia" By Benedict Carey of the New York Times. The obvious seems to be overlooked in every way possible. My stepson is still showing all the symptoms. He is going to a community college but only for monitoring. He is going to a call for casting in a movie today accompanied by his mother. He hopes to be cast as [deleted]. Some of this is so obvious that I wish she could see it. He still hears the voices that never lie to him and promise many girl friends sometime in the future. He also claims to have received a Nobel Prize for something. He has written a short book that is complete nonsense and unintelligible. And of course claims to already have many degrees and that is why he is just monitoring the classes he attends. He doesn't want to intimidate the other students with all that he knows and is. I have almost no contact when he visits us to avoid further controversy. I am still looking for a psychologist that understands what is going on and that his mother would approve of. [name deleted for privacy reasons] 38. [Message A.] Mike maybe it means that I envy men a penis I would like to have it. Maybe it points to my homosexuality and that I would like to have relations with women with it. I don't know you are an analyst. Mike thank you for staying with me when I was ill and that you were writing emails with me all the time. I miss you. LOVE [Message B.] Mike in that dream I dreamt that I masturbated (I shouldn't be telling you this) and I felt frustrated and I wished that I had a penis. I think that it points to my bisexual conflict that I would like to have a masculine part of the body and that I didn't dream that I would like to have a feminine part like my own breasts. [Message C.] I have just had a dream that I made love with a woman. I felt really fine after the dream. [Message D.] I had a dream today that I was dancing with a woman and later with a man. I think it points to my bisexual nature. [Reprinted with permission by the sender, who is a 33-year-old female who has been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady disease." Please also refer to previous Impressions # 37 and to New Quotations/Comments # 720.] 37. Subject: dreams Mike I don't remember. The first one was that I had no breasts and in that dream I saw [name deleted] and [name deleted] with a baby. The second one was that I made love to a woman with breasts and a penis. When I was ill I thought all the time that I have a GPS attached to my clothes (gloves, shoes, jackets, bags, watch - which I threw away because of this) and that I am followed by the whole town. I read almost everything in the online Truman library to "decipher" in my mind the coded messages I thought you were sending to me for our secret meeting. I thought also that you were sending me coded messages via email. I would act under the influence of the moment and go to a different town or very far in the mountains to meet you. I was afraid of the cameras. I thought that people were taking photos of me. I thought that everybody knew me and that everyone was talking about me. I was also afraid of numbers. Anything which seemed illogical to me like this mark and a number: #111 or long numbers. I also thought that some things which I watched on TV were untrue or done on purpose to send me some sort of message like the fires in California at the end of last year. I thought that people did that on purpose. I also saw at that time a program on some plane - which they built (the biggest in the world) which could take several hundred people on board. I thought that this was untrue. I thought that the people were trying to send me some message. The reminiscence of it all is very painful for me. I have made a huge recovery thanks to you when I think where I am now and what I think. I love you. P.S. When I was ill I once went to a telephone booth from which I wanted to call you. I noticed some woman who was sitting there. I was convinced that you were dressed up as this woman. I think that this points to my bisexual conflict. [A personal communication approved for release by the sender. She is presently also under psychiatric care and taking anti-psychotic medication.] 36. Re: The Bearded Lady - Personal Story about MY Brother - Firstly, I wish to thank you for writing a book on schizophrenia, as it is a disease few people undertand. I have a twin brother who suffers from the illness. My family has over the years done what we could to get him help & attention. Recenly, his living situation has deteriorated in Seattle. The organization is threatening to leave him homeless if we do not come up with money to support his on-going care. This is cruel. We are trying to resolve this as best we can, but as we aren't wealthy, we realize this is a dilemma that will get worse. Also, over the years, we've seen a total decline in my brother's care at [name deleted] Family Services and we believe they are "pushing him out" as we are not one of the "wealthy" families who can afford to give them money. This organization is supposed to help those in need but in reality it really only helps those with money. I write to you in hopes you may direct me to what you know of positive and safe housing, care, assisted living situations for the mentally ill. The immediate family, my son and I as well as my sister and her two children wish to return to the eastcoast. We are in Seattle but plan to relocate and will seek housing in the NY State vicinity. I am simply seeking guidance in this from intelligent, caring, educated folks as yourself in hopes I will be directed to the proper channels. I've appealed to various organizations but thus far haven't been successful. Thank you for any information you may have and your time and consideration of this matter. Sincerely, (A Fellow Advocate for the Mentally Ill Rights & Education for the Public on this Issue.) 35. Sir: Although Sigmund freud was right about almost everything, he could not find the cause of schizophrenia. I have read one fantastic theory after another about it's origin, but I have not read anything about the real cause. Schizophrenia is not inherited, it can be cured with psychoanalyses and the cause is quite similar to the 1948 Fromm-Friedman about the cold mother. This theory is only 50 per cent correct, since it has a missing link (It's quite simple, there is no riddle, no mystery.) I am tired of all of these fantastic theories that are portraying these people as some kind of deformed monsters or some kind of creatures from outer space. The madness has to stop. The treatment of schizophrenia is a trillion dollar business, and the forces who are profiting are the ones doing this and many, for profit, have joined them. Having 4 close members of my family with severe mental illness, has given me insight and I discovered the cause 35 years ago. [female - no name given] 34. January 02, 2008 3:07 pm What a great thing you have done!! I am only up to #65, but surely I will finish, as you have done such a wonderful job. (I might hesitate to say, only a man could get someone to take his scribbled notes and make it into a book!) I have just spent the last 2 years of my life editing and publishing the works of a man who is paralyzed on one side from aftermaths of a stroke after years of alcoholism. First was Times Queer, then several other chapbooks, and a novel Vienna Dolorosa (www.ViennaDolorosa.com) but the one I'm working on now, Holy Communion, is really his first novel and by far the most revealing. His conflicts with homosexuality and being sexually used as a child come through, of course, in much of his writing. I wrote an Afterword in the first two; I think I'll leave HC alone to speak for itself. Very powerful stuff. I was trained in sex therapy by an ego-analytic sex therapist in Berkeley CA, and tho I haven't practiced for a number of years, I still find it all fascinating (as I did with Kinsey in my teens, Kraft von Ebing in my twenties, etc). Btw, I found you looking up dysthymic in Answers.com for my author/friend (he seemed particularly under the weather today). You were very clever to include your book on that page. Again, thanks for all your hard work and that of your colleagues. --Sally Miller The rights of the best of men are secured only as the rights of the vilest and most abhorrent are protected. 33. Mr Mahoney, I spotted the ad for your book in the PAW (I'm from class of '64). Have only had the chance to read excerpts, but hope to find and peruse the book shortly (I don't usually pay new-book prices, but may have to make an exception in this case). By any chance, do you know Leonard Frank of San Francisco, a brilliant ex-patient now in his 70's who has also published quotations - you could google him and his Quotationery, which is on the net? Are you otherwise in contact with any members of the (sadly, extremely feeble politically) ex-patient and dissident professional movement? In response to a description of your book by the publisher, I submitted the following to a Medical news site. with best regards, ------------------------------------------------------------------------ First, I want to get out of a minor 'straitjacket', for I am neither a "health care professional" nor exactly a mere "member of the public" either. I am a former voluntary mental patient (1964-66), an alumnus of McLean Hospital who had the same psychiatrist as Sylva Plath - Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse (then Ruth Beuscher) who, to my immense (but then utterly oblivious) good fortune, neither subjected me to, nor advised me, to undergo either insulin treatment or shock, both of which were endured by SP, voluntarily and involuntarily. What is truly frightening is that if Barnhouse had advised either one, I was in such psychological and physical pain that I would have demanded them immediately, to my probable permanent physical and psychological injury (never mind the effect if I had been attacked with these procedures). Independently of the relative and partial success of my voluntary semi-psychoanalytical therapy, I later became a longtime (1986- present ) opponent of any psychiatric forced treatment, or, more accurately, the use of force IN THE NAME OF TREATMENT (this more exact phrasing is to acknowledge that the use of force may sometimes be unavoidable in madness situations, but that we should not, and doctors should not, lie to themselves that the exclusive or primary reason for intervention is to 'help' the person whose behavior is suppressed. I am also - and have a long resume to back this up - a critic of the fundamentally flawed theory (which has become dogma) that 'now we know ' The universal acceptance of these two dogmas has done enormous harm not only to countless individuals, but to our basic knowledge of Human Nature. And so this book, although it may involve some seemingly bizarre and even surrealistic readings, starting with its title, seems to be an enormous breath of fresh air and humanistic good sense. I also, for a number of reasons, basically agree with the underlying theory offered by author Mahoney. Last, if his theory is right, it should be noted that like any other great truth about human nature - such as the theory of the "inalienable rights" of all human beings - it can never be proven by strictly scientific methods. Like the value and necessity of the concept of inalienable rights, we will either come to just know it ...... or not. For these reasons I give the review a 5. 32. Please, a short comment on your book... I am so sure that your book and those who contributed to it have been served well by its publication. I can absolutely agree that within this culture sexual orientation and sexual expression are so terribly repressed and distorted, and I've had friends who have been so abused for their same-sex love - that of course the trauma of the abuse and the resulting sense of powerlessness as far as effective rebuttall creates a need for a separate reality. I myself created this separate reality within myself and I understand. But I am not ambiguous about my need to create loving nests with men. My dissatisfaction with my own sex has to do with the distortions around what being a woman is supposed to look like and a pressure to endlessly and brutally enforce a preoccupation with appearance and child-rearing. I hate women's arrogance to women in these areas. What a waste! So it is not gender, but power that I feel strangled in expressing. But much love to you. Sheil Blinn 31. Dear Mr. Mahoney, Your book has a challenging thesis relying on observations and writings of many eminent psychologists and other thinkers of the 20th Century. Whether your main thesis is to be disputed or accepted, it should not be ignored. Yet I have not seen any reviews by psychologists or psychiatrists. If your book has been shunned because you are not in their "guild," that is deplorable. Of course, restricting actual practice to those certified in a legitimate way in some fields--such as medicine, surgery, pharmacy, nursing, and to a lesser extent, law and engineering--can be justified. But what you are offering is a theoretical understanding of the etiology of a mental condition, and it deserves discussion in a variety of fields. Contributions from "outsiders" have long been important for science, historically. If a thoughtful and informed person's ideas are ignored only because of a lack of "standing" in a "peerage" or status system, this does not bode well for future intellectual discourse. P.D. Moncrief Jr. 30. Dear JB, Many thanks for you email. I am very sorry to hear you have been struggling with schizophrenia for some time now. I hope my website has been of some help to you. If you have any questions I might be able to help answer, pls let me know. In the meantime take the best of care and never give up hope. Very best regards, --------------------------------------- On October 3, 2007 at 3:36am -0500, you wrote: Dear Sir, I have been struggling with writings for some time. I came across your site while researching an illness that took 20 years for me to discover. I surely have it and now understand my writing. I am somewhat elated to have found your site. Not to go into much detail at the moment. I hope we can communicate. I thought no one could understand the insanity my life is. It has become very serious as of late. My fears aren't haven't been for myself but those I care for. I too can explain my illness and why I have it. From reading your site I also see that the world may not hear my words simply because they'll mistake their deafness for my madness. In hopes of collaboration, |
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