Hey, student nurse. Yes, you, the girl who recently did a rotation on a psychiatric ward. I don’t think that while you are riding on the bus, you are supposed to be telling detailed stories to your friend about the patients in the hospital. You know everybody else around you on the bus can hear you, too, right? But you don’t care at all, do you? Of course not. Most mental health workers I’ve seen don’t give a damn about patient confidentiality, so why should you be any different, student nurse? I bet you think that since you didn’t mention any names, everything is cool, right? Well, guess what. It’s not. By the way, those were human beings you were poking fun at. I understand that dark humour has a place among health care workers, to help them cope with the things they have to deal with in their work. That place is not on the bus, however.

Hey, guy from the bus a month or two ago. I overheard you when you were saying, “It seems like everybody I grew up with is dying. One guy died of a drug overdose. Another friend of mine killed herself in jail in Ontario.”

I wanted to say, “You were friends with Ashley Smith? Man, I’m so sorry about what happened to her.”

But, of course, I didn’t say anything.

I just spent over two fucking hours writing a post about Howard Hyde, a man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia who died in a jail in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia thirty hours after he was Tasered by police, when Wordpress ATE IT. Or my computer ate it, or something ate it. It just disappeared while I was working on, I swear, the last sentence of it. It should have been autosaved, of course, but somehow it’s still gone.

How about you read a couple of news articles while I curl up in the corner of the room and cuss at technology in general for a while?

• Police informed of tasered man’s psychiatric illness - widow
• N.S. orders Taser review after inmate’s death: Halifax police reluctant to link 45-year-old man’s death to weapon
• Man jolted with Taser needed help, widow says: ‘I really don’t want this to happen to anyone else’
• Panel urged to include mentally ill person: Taser review report will be examined by experts: province

My original post had actual opinions! And more links! And quotes from articles! But I’m not going to bother trying to reconstruct it, because that would just annoy me.

I’ve also been working on a more personal post on an entirely different subject, but it’s been difficult to write because it’s painful for me. Luckily, the draft of that one is still intact. Don’t expect it to be an insightful work of art when it’s finished just because it’s taking me so long. It’s hard enough for me to write it; it would be impossible for me to write it well.

Here’s another one for the “What the Hell Is WRONG With People?” file. I’m not sure there’s much point in linking to this entire article, since it’s from the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, and Canadaeast.com doesn’t seem to keep archived newspaper articles online for a very long time, but here you go. It’s about a New Brunswick teenager who committed suicide in an Ontario prison.

Mentally ill Moncton teenager Ashley Smith, whose death in a segregation cell in an Ontario prison a month ago has sparked several investigations, was often kept in restraints with her cuffed hands chained to a body belt that was attached by another chain to her shackled ankles, Canadaeast News Service has learned.

“We are well aware that these restraints were quite often used in the staff interventions with Ashley Smith,” said Kim Pate, a specialist in prison law and advocate for female offenders.

The restraints may have violated Smith’s human rights and raise questions about why she was in a prison at all, said Pate, national director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

“I can’t imagine a scenario where it wouldn’t violate her human rights, and even if the correctional service perceived it as lawful in order to protect her from self-harm, if they felt the need to use it in segregation, she should have been sent for a full psychiatric assessment,” said Pate, who knew Smith and last saw her alive less than a month before her apparent suicide Oct. 19 in the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont.

Ashley Smith committed suicide by asphyxiation in her cell. Several prison staff members are facing charges of criminal negligence causing death, others are being suspended without pay, a new warden has been appointed, and a number of official investigations are being conducted, but it’s all too late for Ashley.

Smith’s odyssey through the prison system began when she went to the Miramichi Youth Detention Centre as a 15-year-old who had thrown apples at a postal worker. The offences that led to an accumulated six-year, one-month sentence were nearly all committed while she was incarcerated, says Pate, who is speaking publicly on behalf of Smith’s parents. Smith’s convictions were for assaulting a peace officer, falsely reporting a fire, uttering threats, theft and assault.

Yes, you read that right. This kid first went to jail for throwing apples at someone. And then it seems that she just didn’t get out. Almost all of her offences were committed while she was in jail, and her sentence just got longer. I can’t say that nobody tried to rehabilitate her, but I can say that it obviously didn’t work. They must have given up on the rehabilitation idea eventually, though, since soon Ashley Smith was spending up to 23 hours a day in segregation.

From an article in the Globe and Mail:

At the time of her death, Ms. Smith was on suicide watch, which called for her to be under constant surveillance, both by prison guards and by a set of video cameras. Her psychological breakdown was not a surprise: For nearly two years, Ms. Smith had been confined to segregation cells, where she lived alone, in conditions that appalled the few outsiders who knew about them.

“Her human rights and her Charter rights were violated,” said Kim Pate… “She was being treated in ways that were inhumane.”

Ms. Smith spent time in several institutions. One of them was in Saskatchewan; a male guard there was later charged with assaulting her. Ms. Pate visited Ms. Smith several times, and complained to prison officials, apparently to no avail. The last visit was on Sept. 24, when Ms. Pate saw Ms. Smith in a bare concrete cell at Grand Valley. Ms. Smith had no shoes, and her only clothing was a security gown, a prison garment that looked like a horse blanket. Ms. Smith’s mattress had been taken away, forcing her to sleep on a concrete slab. There was no blanket.

In Ms. Pate’s view, Ms. Smith was spiralling downward, trapped in a cycle of self-defeating rage against the institution, which reacted with punishments and deprivations.

“She was cold, and she was quite distressed,” Ms. Pate said. “She had been that way for several days when I saw her. Anyone being treated in that way, if they did not have mental-health issues, certainly would have developed them.”

After a suicide in the prison in 2004, an inquest was conducted and recommendations were made to prevent further suicides from occurring. A couple of these recommendations were followed. Others weren’t. A team of British prison inspectors also advised the prison to stop shackling women in leg irons, and this recommendation wasn’t followed, either.

From the Telegraph-Journal article:

CTV News, citing unnamed sources, reported last week that guards had watched her place a ligature around her neck but did not intervene immediately, believing she was not seriously harming herself.

“Rather than receiving treatment, this mentally unstable teenager spent most of her sentence in segregation,” [Kitchener-area Liberal MP Karen] Redman said in question period. “Segregation cannot be confused with treatment.

“The government has ignored several reports calling for a mental health strategy in our prisons. When will the government take action and implement a mental health strategy in Canadian prisons?”

Not that I’ve got a mental health strategy for Canadian prisons up my sleeve, but I think it’s pretty obvious that forcing a suicidal girl, prisoner or no, to sleep on a concrete slab in solitary confinement isn’t going to turn her into a productive member of society.

Speaking of productive members of society, I am working normal hours again and will finally have time to regularly update this blog.

Some brief thoughts, most about the Virginia Tech shootings. Most are interrelated, but some kind of aren’t.

• Postmortem diagnosis of someone you’ve never met is stupid and pointless. This doesn’t mean that I’m entirely uninterested in it (hey, I have a copy of Touched with Fire, too), but I doubt its usefulness.
• I’m a good Canadian girl and I like gun control. I am not very interested in discussing this point any further in general, and I’m certainly not interested in doing so right now.
• I am shocked and appalled that Virginia Tech didn’t lock down campus and cancel classes after the first shooting incident at 7 a.m. I have a hard time imagining that a university wouldn’t do that. It’s terrible. I know the police thought they had apprehended the perpetrator, but shouldn’t the university have done something more just in case there was more than one shooter or the police had the wrong guy, which just so happened to be the case? I disagree with a lot of things that one of the universities I attended has done, but I’m positive they would have cancelled classes and done a better job of warning people.
• It is fucking hard to be mentally ill in university, but I think that might have had surprisingly little to do with the Virginia Tech shootings. I’m crazy, I was really ill in university, and most of the treatment I received only made me worse. But I’ve never killed anyone. My mom thinks that better mental health treatment for university students could prevent further mass murders; I don’t necessarily agree. I do think that mental health on campus is a very serious problem, though, and solutions like threatening to kick me out of residence for cutting myself superficially don’t help anyone.
• People have talked about how the people around Cho should have reached out to him. It seems, though, that some people did reach out to Cho while he was at university. He merely ignored and brushed off any attempt at friendliness. It was pretty nice of people to try to talk to him at all, since he scared the shit out of plenty of other people. I like to think I’m a generally nice person, but if there was some guy who followed girls around and repeatedly sent them emails or whatever after they’d asked him to stop, and surreptitiously took photos of girls and blamed it on other guys, and ignored people who spoke to him, well, I don’t see that there’s any problem with me being too scared of him to try to “reach out” to him. (As a side note, one of the guys who raped me, I later found out, had a previous history of stalking other girls when he took classes at the local university. This was not at the same university I have referred to previously, we were not on campus when he raped me, and he was not even a student when he raped me… but he did later get a part time job on that campus, despite the previous complaints that he was a stalker.)
• I do think, however, that Cho really could have used some compassion when he was younger. Maybe if his peers and other people had been kinder to him in high school, or junior high school, or elementary school, it would have helped him and he wouldn’t have become the twisted person he eventually did become.
• Since I’m very fond of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, it doesn’t bother me that Cho Seung-Hui’s plays were violent, profane, and bizarre. It bothers me that they were poorly-written and pointless as well as being violent, profane, and bizarre. This is not me poking fun at bad writing; this is me writing badly myself as I fail utterly in my explanation of why I do agree that they were somewhat disturbing. Mainly I guess, they seemed like the kind of thing that someone who’s 23 should have moved way beyond.
• In theory, I have absolutely nothing against the idea of briefly hospitalizing someone involuntarily if she is judged to be in imminent danger of harming herself or others. In theory, I am all for this. In practice, sometimes it even saves lives… but other times it’s extremely damaging. I could go on and on about this, but since it wouldn’t fit into point form, I’ll have to get back to it another day.
• People are responsible for their actions unless they are so completely psychotic that they honestly can’t tell right from wrong. You know, the legal definition of insanity. This doesn’t happen all that often. I have been that way only once, and this one time where I had zero chance of controlling myself lasted only for minutes. I had been psychotic nearly constantly for several months at that point, but the actual insanity lasted only minutes.
• At that point, I snapped back to being 99% out of control. And at 99% out of control rather than 100%, you are responsible for your actions. At that point, it’s extremely difficult to talk yourself out of things you’re about to do, but it’s not impossible. At that point, psychosis is an explanation for your actions, but it’s not an excuse.
• I am generally harder on myself than I am on anyone else. Additionally, not being in anyone else’s head, I don’t know how I’d judge whether they were 99% or 100% out of control. But if I did have a way to judge that, I’d hold other people to the same standards of responsibility to which I hold myself.

The challenge of coping with a mental illness while in university is one of the issues I’m most concerned about, since it’s something I spent eight years doing, sometimes well, other times not well at all. Since I don’t want to write a half-assed post about such an important subject, I’m not going to do any thinking tonight and instead provide you with a few links:

Susan posts about The College Mental Health Crisis and luckymud mentions an interesting tidbit re: same.

Syd and Nurse Ratched worry that the Virginia Tech shootings will, in Nurse Ratched’s words, “feed into the belief that everyone with a mental illness is a danger to society. This belief is the farthest thing from the truth, but unfortunately, many people suffering from mental illnesses are going to suffer as a consequence of yesterday’s tragic events.” I would be very surprised if she and Syd were wrong.

Note to self: on the subject of protecting students vs. civil liberties, I must remember to blog someday about How I Almost Got Kicked out of My University Residence for Cutting Myself. It’s a much less interesting story than you’d think, barely a story at all, so don’t get excited.

But I’m still bitter about it.

As for basic information on coping with mental illness throughout your post-secondary education, especially in Canada, there is Your Education - Your Future, a guide to college and university for students with psychiatric disabilities from the Canadian Mental Health Association. It was created in 2004 and isn’t entirely up-to-date, though — for instance, I noticed that the information about grants for students with disabilities is out of date. Try this page for correct information about the Canada Study Grant for the Accommodation of Students with Permanent Disabilities and the Canada Access Grant for Students with Permanent Disabilities. Yes, people with bipolar disorder are eligible for the second one even if they don’t have any learning disabilities or stuff like that. And it can really come in handy when you’re on a locked ward and the person in the registrar’s office that you talk to on the phone says if you drop two courses when you get out of the hospital, you can get your money back for them even if it’s after the official deadline, and then when you get discharged the day after the deadline, you drop the two courses but still have to pay $1600 for these courses you aren’t taking, even though the person you talked to said you wouldn’t have to.

Stephany at soulful sepulcher listed my blog as one of her five choices for a Thinking Blogger Award. Thanks, Stephany. Since I know that some blogs have been mentioned multiple times in this meme, I’m going to attempt to list five blogs that make me think, but that I don’t believe have already gotten Thinking Blogger Awards. If I’m wrong and they have received them, well, they’re all excellent blogs, which is why I’m listing them, of course, so go visit them anyway! Oh, yeah, these are in alphabetical order.

1. Bipolar Wellness Writer - Eloquent, and focuses a lot on two of the things that interest me the most — healing and writing. Don’t get me wrong; I love good writing about illness, but there’s so much less good writing about wellness out there in any format that I really appreciate it when I find some.
2. my pockets hurt - Juniper is engaging and honest in her blog about coping with borderline personality disorder and life in general. I love reading her posts on any topic — working for a tutoring company, running into annoying people at the laundromat, whatever.
3. Pole to Polar: The secret life of a manic-depressive - I don’t know how she does it. Seaneen’s posts are so long and so frequent, but they still manage to be jam-packed with interesting, thought-provoking content. I like to imagine that I would write posts like she does if I had any patience or attention span.
4. Roller Coaster - Honestly, I’ve only skimmed over some of the posts in Marja’s blog, because I just discovered it today, but I’ve owned a copy of her book for years and I love her book, so I already know I like her writing. The book is actually one of the main inspirations for the title of this blog! Many of Marja’s posts are about bipolar disorder and Christian faith.
5. Spanglemonkey - Speaking of “I don’t know how she does it,” Jo is one of the most prolific bloggers I’ve ever come across. Multiple posts every day and she has been doing this for years. About bipolar disorder and BPD, parenting, writing, life, the universe, and everything.

These are the rules of the Thinking Blogger Awards:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

Marissa at depression introspection posts about the Virginia Tech shootings, bullying, compassion, and prevention. It’s titled The Most Controversial Post You’ll Ever Read Today, but it’s hard for me to see it as controversial, when I agree with much of what she says, especially the parts about Columbine. When I was in junior high, I never considered killing the people who bullied me, but I certainly understood where Harris and Klebold were coming from. What I’ve never understood is why school shooters also tend to kill absolutely anyone that’s around — why wouldn’t they just target the bullies? Why do they also kill people who’ve never done anything to them?

Gianna at Bipolar Blast posts about labels: Patient, Client, Consumer, User, Ex-User, Ex-Patient, Psychiatric Survivor, the Psychiatrized. My big problem in finding a term to use is that I’d like for there to be an umbrella term for those of us who are “mentally interesting” or who don’t believe they are but who have been in the psychiatric system anyway. I am currently in the psychiatric system and I’m not looking to leave it, so for me, that rules out a bunch of those terms like ex-patient. I’m not technically anti-psychiatry, but I’m definitely against bad psychiatry, and there’s an alarming amount of it out there. I’m not a Psychiatric Survivor, I’m a Survivor of Bad Psychiatry. Anyway, all of these terms focus on the relationship between the individual and the psychiatric system, and I’m more interested in finding one for just the individual, who, in his or her search for wellness, relates to many other people and institutions — family, friends, work, school, society as a whole, etc. — and isn’t defined solely by his or her relationship to psychiatry.

The thing that really bothers me about the term “consumer” is that it makes it seem as if we purchase a product and then do nothing else to further our wellness, that we aren’t active participants at all. Of course, this is what some people do — take the drugs and don’t think about eating and sleeping properly, having good relationships with others, expressing themselves creatively, and all of that. “Consumer” takes the fact that I work damn hard in all areas of my life and reduces it to a simple financial transaction, and that is grossly inaccurate.

You know you are hypomanic when…

…you have thirty-two tabs open in your browser window because you keep jumping from topic to topic, page to page, yet you can’t bring yourself to close any of them.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had a few job interviews lately. Preparing for them has taken up much of my time. I’ve been pretty enthused about it. Okay, make that REALLY enthused. By which I mean that I stayed awake for over forty hours at one point last week. I’m not worried, though. Maybe I have ideas for a bunch of new projects and I REALLY want to go shopping and one night I purposely didn’t take my pills just ’cause I didn’t wanna, but I’ve been sleeping okay since that forty-hour stretch of wakefulness and I haven’t done anything stupid yet.

Since I recently spent eight years being a mentally ill university student, and also since I’m a human being who cares about other human beings, of course I’m deeply troubled by the Virginia Tech shootings. I don’t know if I’ll have any meaningful commentary on it in the future, and I don’t have any now except to say that my thoughts and prayers go out to those students and their families and friends.