About This Blog

I honestly could not have gotten through my own trauma as much as I have to date without the dedicated help I have received from well-qualified mental health professionals since the event. I realize daily that I am still very much recovering from that trauma, and I honestly suspect I might be in some form or another for the rest of my life. Part of this ongoing recovery is learning to “reframe trauma,” or trying to answer the following question: What, if anything, have I learned from those experiences in my life?

Obviously, as with anyone else who has gone through a particularly traumatic event in their life, this has been an extremely difficult question for me to answer over the past two years. So much so that for a long time, probably close to a year, when asked that question by my therapist I would reply, “Nothing. It was just some awful shit that happened that I wish more than anything had not, and that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.” Even now when reflecting on that time, I feel an intense sadness and anger, at times at the people involved who had power over me, at times at my family for not advocating in some more effective, forceful way to get me home, at times at myself for “allowing” it to happen in the first place, and at times just in general, that I or anyone else should ever have to go through such things.

However I HAVE worked through some aspects of that trauma and I am committed to keep doing so as long as it takes me. It is in the spirit of sharing this journey and what I learned that I start this portion of the blog, which I have entitled “Lessons Learned.” These posts will focus on precisely what you’d think, the lessons I have learned and that I continue to learn as a result of this experience. For the first of these I will focus on my first post on the blog: Trapped in Hell.

Initial thoughts – the way that I wrote this post. I wrote “Trapped in Hell” in the first person in a stream-of-consciousness manner for two reasons: 1. That is the how I remember it happening to me and how I experienced my thoughts and actions in the moment, as best as I can remember, but more importantly 2. For several months after these events and even now and then these days I had and will have flashbacks of this moment and others from my time in that hospital, and when this happens I quite literally feel it happening as clearly and as vividly as I remember it happening.

This is, as you can imagine, a terrifying thing to experience. Having never had quite as traumatic of an experience before this time in my life, I never knew what flashbacks of an event like this are like. I now feel even more compassion than I could have ever felt previously for others who go through them. I still experience them from time to time, particularly during very triggering events for me, like when I feel particularly disoriented for any reason, or out of control, or in some highly institutionalized or otherwise controlled settings. I have learned several very helpful strategies for coping with flashbacks that I’d love to share at some point, but not in this post.

The main point is that “Trapped in Hell” is written as best as I can to mirror the experience I had at the time. I have since likened this experience to a kind of amnesia, or a kind of “resetting,” if you will of my experience. This was the first major reset that I remember happening in the hospital, but unfortunately it happened many, many times while I was there, and each time was in some ways as startling and disorienting as this first time. And before you think of the obvious question, the answer is yes, I tried many times to speak to the mental health professionals at the hospital about this, but A. I was confused and disoriented most of the time and rarely made sense to anyone, let alone the professionals, and B. they completely dismissed me every time I DID make sense. But this particular time was probably the most disorienting because the room I was in was completely unfamiliar and I could not for the life of me remember how I ended up there.

Even more distressing at the time was the realization that I did not remember where I had left my infant son. Up to that point in my life I had never been away for him for longer than maybe a day or two, so that this feeling was as though I had set him down somewhere, walked away, lost consciousness, woke up and he was gone and I had no idea where he went. It was terrifying.

However the positive that I tried later to take away from this experience and have since reminded myself of in times of distress, is that my love for and urge to protect my son are so strong that even in an event such as this in which I was essentially psychotic, I still had the basic need and where-with-all to question why I was away from my son, even if I had no way of answering that at the time. The fact that I would do anything for my son was completely obvious before this point in my life, but this event (and the weeks after it) solidified this within me more than I can ever explain. I learned in this time what defines the core of me, and it is truly and honestly a desire to provide what is best for my son.

The last thing to mention about this particular event, into which I plan to get much more detail later on, is that earlier that morning I am relatively certain that I was given the drug Risperidone. This is significant because the facility would continue to administer this drug to me for two weeks, despite clear evidence from very early on that I was having very strong adverse reactions to it (perhaps as early as this incident).

Later this reaction would be labeled in the facilities notes as NMS-like symptoms. This is also very important to note because they chose, for whatever reason, to never tell me about this diagnosis, most likely and probably because it looks particularly bad for them, as they caused all of those symptoms from the very beginning and never took responsibility for them. In fact, I originally learned about NMS through my own investigation after my hospitalization several months later, when I was researching side effects of the drug Risperidone since I had so clearly had a terrible reaction to it. I plan to post more on NMS later, but i wanted to be sure that this caveat was added here.

The only other takeaway I could mention from this event is to point to my resourcefulness in attempting to “wake myself” by peeing on the bed. While I’ll admit though that this definitely made me look crazy at the time, in the moment it felt like a very logical solution to this altered mental state I found myself in, and while it didn’t work, I’m confident that this type of thing would have occurred to me prior to my hospitalization – it’s just the way my mind works. (Though I’d hope and do believe that with a clear mind I wouldn’t have actually TRIED it!)

About This Blog

There is a part of me that is absolutely furious all the time about what happened to me in January, 2018… a part of me that is essentially screaming at the top of my lungs, all day and all night, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It often makes everything else I do in my life feel insignificant in comparison to what I feel needs to be done and to be changed with the system that caused my injustice, and it makes me sick to my stomach when I really let it sink in and affect me all the way through.

I think that the main reason I get so sick about it is that what happened to me is by no means an isolated incident in mental healthcare (as witnessed by many accounts I’ve found and read online and even stories from people I met while I was in the hospital), and it is in all likelihood happening on a regular basis throughout our country in some form or another, and possibly and probably throughout the world as well, and that thing is this:

People in mental institutions are being misdiagnosed, prescribed drugs that are inappropriate and ineffective for what is ACTUALLY the issue for them, AND side effects from those drugs are then misunderstood and misinterpreted as further symptoms of some other mental illness (not to mention the hell they go through on drugs they don’t need). Then, once these unfortunate patients are sufficiently confused and angry due to the improper treatment they receive that they start acting out (who wouldn’t?) they are then intimidated, traumatized, and misinformed by those who are supposed to be caring for them, further reinforcing their misdiagnosis and counterproductively making them even less likely to cooperate with treatment. And finally, caregivers are then not held responsible for their sometimes outrageous and objectively cruel mistreatment of those patients.

Okay, so I know I just threw a lot on the table all at once, so let’s break this all down – there are (at least) six issues wrapped up in all of what I just wrote, consisting of three main issues and three sub-issues.

The main issues as I understand them are 1) misdiagnosis, incorrect prescriptions and improper treatment of a mental illness, 2) misinterpretation of the side effects of unnecessary medication and treatment and the acting out that comes along with that, and 3) further misdiagnosis and further mistreatment as a result of the original misdiagnosis, mistreatment, and misinterpretation.

These first three issues obviously create their own vicious cycle, which is the one I found myself caught in for a month at the hospital in Buffalo where my own symptoms were wildly misunderstood, and my previous history of OCD was not only completely discounted, but misunderstood and labeled as other unrelated illnesses.

These three main issues would be bad enough on there own, but then add on top of that 4) the aforementioned vicious cycle inadvertently leading to abuse of those unfortunate individuals by those in authority who feel somehow “justified” in their actions and “above” those in their care, 5) lack of responsibility for those in charge for those actions, and lastly but probably most importantly, 6) the HUGE potential for the pervasiveness of all of these problems given the state of mental healthcare as a whole in our culture today.

In this series it is my goal to explore these six issues through the lens of my own experiences, the implications I have observed, the potential for other related issues in the arena of Mental Health, and what I believe desperately needs to be done about it.

See Mental Health Can Do Better, Part 1 (coming soon)

About This Blog

When I left the bathroom at my sister’s place on the night of December 30, 2017, I had the distinct feeling that nothing would ever be the same again. In more ways than I could possibly imagine or guess at the time, I was right.

I decided I would go to the couch, sit next to my wife, try to watch the movie and act “Normal,” though I was rapidly losing track or what that meant as I continued to sink deeper and deeper into the feeling of being completely disconnected from this current moment and uncomfortably aware of the infinite multitude of possible alternate realities surrounding me. I did watch the movie, though now “I, Tanya” took on a strangely suggestive tone for some reason, seeming to indicate through its entire premise and storytelling method that it, too, was acutely aware of the multitude of possibilities, outcomes, and alternative ways that this, like any story, could turn out. It was almost as if we were in on a joke together, “I, Tanya” and me, secretly laughing at the cosmic joke of our existence and the complete happenstance of it all. For a moment in that realization I felt a sense of relief that someone else, albeit a movie, or the creators of that movie, or the actors, or whoever, understood what I was going through in that moment.

That moment was interrupted, however, by the sound of my 1-year-old son crying on the baby monitor. After a few cries, the movie was paused and my wife, Dahlia, stood up to go upstairs and tend to him. In that moment, acutely and almost painfully aware of the strangeness of everything I was experiencing, I stood up too, said quietly, “I’ll go too,” grabbed Dahlia‘s hand tightly and tentatively followed her upstairs. To say that I was having trouble keeping my balance wouldn’t be entirely accurate – it was more like I felt almost completely untethered from my physical body and experience, hanging on by the tiniest of threads, and I needed Dahlia‘s hand to remind myself that I was indeed still in this moment and connected to my physical being.

When we got to the top of the stairs I pulled Dahlia close to me and whispered, “I think I’m having a panic attack!” Which was true to the extent that I had no idea what was happening to me or what I was experiencing, it was beginning to terrify me, and I was indeed panicking that this might be something very, very bad, beyond my otherworldly interpretation of what was happening. She asked me to explain, and I believe I mumbled something about feeling weird and not knowing what was going on, though my mind was beginning to race at that point, and along with everything else it was becoming increasingly difficult to focus on things I wanted to say, or even form the words in my mouth. She said she had to go in to Jimmy and nurse him, even though I didn’t want to be left alone, but she said she’d be right back, so I sat in a huddled corner near the door to our/Jimmy’s room at the top of the stairs.

After what felt like quite a long time, Dahlia walked out of the room, walked me carefully back downstairs and sat me on the couch. It was then that she and I decided it was time to inform my sister and brother in law what was happening. I did my best to explain, though again talking was becoming increasingly difficult… I mentioned things like “Time” and “reality,” and I kept saying something to the effect that everything was going to be alright, and that the people in this room were the ones I would most want to share this experience with, and that someday I’d be able to explain this all much better and I’d tell them all about it. This was all true of my thinking at the time – I was feeling incredibly optimistic about the whole situation and I did indeed want to share it with my family as best I could.

At some point I asked for (or found on my own) my work notebook where I keep track of all my current projects. I was having so many interesting thoughts at such an incredible rate that I wanted to write them all down so that I wouldn’t forget. They all felt incredibly profound and insightful at the time. I did indeed write down many, many of these thoughts and ideas, but looking back at them now they are almost impossible to decipher. But I continued to write and write, and occasionally say various strange things to my family. Apparently I would also occasionally enter a state where I closed my eyes very tight and held them closed for long periods of time, and I would not respond to anyone when they tried to rouse me…

I vaguely remember all of this occurring, and I remember the times when I was unresponsive: in these moments is when I felt very similar to my first strange experience in the bathroom in that I felt time and experience splitting apart, much more intensely every time, with alternate versions of my life and experience seeming to flash like lightning around me, making it impossible to focus on the here and now. That’s what I remember, and when my family would finally break through my stupor and bring me back, every time this happened I felt as though I had been gone for an indescribably long period of time.

Where at first I had embraced it to a degree and was curious in some ways about it, as it happened again and again with increasing intensity every time, I started to just want it to stop, as though I was trapped on a horrible, mind-bending amusement park ride that continued over and over again to circle by the exit, but the insane operator in charge refused to let me off. I also had the realization, possibly most disturbingly of all I had experienced, that in this out of control tailspin through reality and time, I had no idea if I would ultimately land back in this reality of the here and now, or if I might possibly find myself conscious in some other, alternate existence, in which everything I knew and loved, my son, my wife, all my family and all of my life as I knew it might completely vanish and I might not even remember them when I finally “landed” with all of this. This prospect terrified me above all else, and it then very quickly became my primary goal to STOP this from happening. I WANTED, more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life, to REMAIN being myself, in THIS reality, with everything that this may mean. I wanted off the ride, and I wanted it to be at THIS stop, MY stop.

About This Blog

So, the question on my mind, and perhaps on anyone’s mind who might choose to read this blog, is this: Why would a perfectly sane person (to my knowledge) who is a functioning member of society with plenty of other more important things to worry about, want to dedicate an entire portion of the Internet-space and potentially quite a bit of time to one shitty, awful thing that happened to him, and how he has coped ever since and the events and circumstances surrounding all of it? Hahaha! Good fucking question!

Probably the most obvious answer to me is that what happened to me at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 is THE MOST INTERESTING thing that has ever happened to me (from a merely objective point of view, not particularly to me personally, I.E. I have a family, a son, a work-life that are all plenty interesting to me and that I’d much rather focus my time and energy on in the long run, but there is no denying the objective curiousness of this story). At the very least, there are a TON of aspects to this story, and I want to share them all with anyone willing to listen/read.

Along the same lines as this, I think the first and foremost reason for me personally starting this blog is my own fascination for 1. How the mind works in general, but also 2. How my own mind works and how I can better understand myself. And nothing illustrates all of this fascination more than this one single event and how it has influenced my life.

I have always had OCD or at least anxiety in some form or another for my entire life, and I have always been fascinated with the way I think, act and react, most notably because it always felt so very different than the way everyone else seemed to be thinking, acting, and reacting. And sure, on the surface I am very similar to most people and the things I think and my goals in life are very “normal.” What always struck me as strange was how I got to the same conclusions as other people (and of course different conclusions, as well), by completely different pathways and routes – that is to say if there were a “typical” pathway to a conclusion, for example needing to use the restroom, my pathway always seemed to involve a circuitous route around a swamp and through some back woods, a few backtracks and reroutes along the way, and the path always seemed much more convoluted and complicated than a simple “I needed to go pee, so I went.”

In the case of the bathroom example there might be a few “is this the RIGHT time to go?”’s, or “how do I know that I REALLY need to go?” and maybe even an “Am I sure that someone else doesn’t need to go more and I might be hindering their ability to do so by going first when I don’t really need to, and therefore I might be causing them to get a urinary tract infection and have problems and complications down the road that at this time I cannot even possibly fathom?”

Anyway, the point is that I find my own inner workings interesting, and I want to share them, and there is no more compelling way to explore my own mind than through the events that occurred in late 2017, early 2018. Not only are the events of that time an interesting anecdote to my own personal thought processes AT THE TIME, they have also tremendously and irrevocably changed the way I think and act as a result of those events. Also, not only my thought processes themselves have changed, but also how I THINK about thinking, or just perceive my own existence and presence in everyday life, or however you the reader, yes YOU, want to describe these aspects of one’s being (in I’m sure could be a much more eloquent way than I’m doing right now).

I can’t help comparing myself at the time of these traumatic events to Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly” – while I at times may not like or agree with some of the things that have changed in me since that time, I have no choice but to accept these changes as fact. Moreover, I feel a strange duty to human-kind to document these changes as they are the most significant I have ever experienced, and I’ve actually experienced quite a lot in my life.

In addition, I feel it is just helpful for me to understand myself for my own self-knowing and growth, and if that self-discovery can help someone else in anyway to understand themselves, or maybe show them that they are not alone, then I will consider it a blessing to have gone through what I did, however much I begged it to stop happening at the time.

An added caveat to this is that I DID indeed suffer a tremendous trauma in the events I describe in this blog, and I have learned in the intervening months and years that a HUGE part of trauma recovery is sharing your story, so that is what I am doing. And again, if through my own “selfish” desire to get through this time in my life I can give any kind of help or comfort to those in similar circumstances, than this is a much welcomed added bonus that I will fully embrace.

The final, and perhaps loftiest and probably unachievable goal of this blog(yet ultimately most important to me in the long run) is that I strongly and irreversibly feel that there is something inherently WRONG with what happened to me and with the system that led to my trauma, and I would sincerely like to contribute to some kind of change for the better. If I felt that my trauma was completely isolated or that I was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I might find it easier after two years and a lot of therapy to just move on from this event, but unfortunately for me, and more importantly for everyone else, mine is NOT an isolated incident, as I have witnessed through just the most CURSORY research and even just anecdotal evidence from people I encountered during the very incident I’m talking about – there are people in many institutions all over America and I’m sure the world, who’s mental health issues are not fully understood, treated correctly, or just marginalized entirely (all of which happened to me), and I am outraged that I live in a world that accepts this as “just a fact of life” in an otherwise “civilized” world.

I am not a “crazy” person by any means, and I never have been – I’m also beginning to strongly intuit that the existence of “crazies” as I have understood them might be much more myth than fact, if not entirely myth. I have OCD, which is a relatively common yet severely misunderstood mental illness that is literally on the exact opposite side of the spectrum from disorders which people fear or with which we often associate violent outbursts or huge disruptions in life, yet my life was COMPLETELY disrupted as a result of a misunderstanding of my mental illness. I was hospitalized involuntarily for a month, and as a result of that hospitalization I had the worst OCD symptoms of my entire life, and had the most severe panic attacks I’ve ever experienced, not to mention insomnia that lasted most of the month and peaked with a 4 day span in which I did not sleep and barely ate.

I can certainly get into all of this at a later date, but the point I’m trying to make right now is that everything that happened to me could have been avoided if the professionals in charge of my care had properly understood what was happening to me, and how their own steps and missteps drastically affected what I was going through.

About This Blog

Up until the most intense and unexplainable experience of my entire life, I felt like I had a certain level of control over what happened to me in this world.

There have been certain things along the way in my life that made me feel somewhat out of control or helpless at times, like when my parents split up when I was 6, only to get back together when I was 10, just to finally split for good abruptly and traumatically when I was 13… Another story for another time, perhaps, but certainly a moment that has defined me, and I hope in the end made me more resilient and empathetic and understanding.

And there was the fact that I have OCD, and that I’ve basically had it all of my life, along with some relatively strong social anxiety, though my OCD had peaked (at the time) when I was 20 years old in college, when I had the uncontrollable fear that I might hurt myself or others. I committed myself to a mental health facility at that time because of those fears, because I wanted to be certain beyond any reasonable doubt that I would not be capable of hurting someone, and I couldn’t be. I have since learned to live with uncertainties like this and to even laugh at them from time to time.

Yes, there were all of these things and certainly others, yet strangely I had always been able to see the silver lining, and to not get too caught up in dismay or despair, and after every distressing or somewhat traumatizing event, to always pick up the pieces of my life and arrange them into something new and worth loving and living for, finding another reason to carry on and to make my life worth the fight and the day to day aggravation of just dealing with my own issues, or my own brain, as I often say to myself and others.

But on the night of December 30th, 2017, all of this changed.

I was 34, and my wife, my one year old son and I were staying at my sister place upstate, along with her husband and two daughters, who were 3 and 4 at the time.

I had been having a tough year… rewarding, but tough. My son had been born a year ago that last October, and I was probably the most proud father you could possibly imagine. Less than a month after my son was born I had been contacted by my previous employer and was made an offer to return back to work for them. I had hit a plateau at my current job after recently obtaining my architecture license, and so I gladly accepted. The new job involved more responsibility and relative independence in a project management roll. Since then I had been working hard at this new job and was on the verge of burnout at the end of that year. Additionally, my wife and I had moved into a new apartment the month after my son was born, immediately realized it was too small for the three of us, but were still determined to make it work despite everything.

So to say that I was worn out and beaten up at the end of 2017 would be a bit of an understatement.

To top it all off, upon arriving at my sister’s place for this vacation I had gotten a horrible cold and was now feeling awful all day long and every night, while still trying to enjoy my family and relax a bit before returning to my demanding job back in the city. In addition, I was at the end of my prescription for Prozac, so for the first two or three days of the visit, starting on the 26th, I did not have Prozac to take. We quickly got more once I started to have withdrawal symptoms, which I have had before and basically can only be described as phantom pools of color that formed in my periphery vision, along with a slight confused sense of detachment from reality.

About the day after I got back on my Prozac, my cold had gotten very bad and I asked my wife to go back to the drugstore to get some DayQuil and NiQuil. My cold had basically wiped out my energy completely, and I was getting massive chills throughout the day and night. The day of December 30th I had been taking DayQuil all day, and I had possibly even taken one too many doses that day than the directions recommended.

That night, all of us decided to sit and watch a recent movie, “I, Tanya.” I had been pretty out of it all day, but right away when the movie started, I started to notice some weird things about my perception of the movie… it started to feel as though I was almost watching myself watch the movie… as though I was floating above my body and watching myself on the couch looking at the TV screen. Along with this I also started to feel as though my perception was beginning to slow down and separate, as though I was watching my experience on film and the reel was beginning to slow down, so much so that it began to feel like I could see individual frames of my own experience of reality. At times curious and interesting, at others disorienting, I started to feel this experience increasing in intensity.

It eventually became so intense that I could feel my heart rate increasing and I began to get a little scared by the whole thing. I decided I would go to the bathroom, even though I didn’t particularly have to go. As I walked over and stepped into the bathroom a new sensation began to wash over me in waves. Now not only was I aware of the individual frames of my reality, the basic units of my experience, but I started to become aware of multiple, branching realities that started to spin off of my current version of reality. Not only did these alternate versions branch out into the future with all of the possibilities of this current moment, but they also branched back in time with all of the various possibilities of how my life could have ended up or gone in different directions with all of the different decisions I could have made, so that my entire existence started to feel as though it was but one branch of the most complex and vast living, plantlike organism that I could possibly ever imagine.

Not only that, but I started to feel that those alternate paths that I could have taken and that I might take in the future had just as much validity and reality as my current version of existence. So intense was this feeling washing over me that I became positive, without a single doubt in my mind, that I was only one of an infinite, but very clear and defined, number of alternate versions of myself. Not only that, but I was on somewhat of a continuum of all of the possible versions of myself, and I was very close to, if not exactly within the center of that continuum as far as the extremes of my possible choices were concerned.

In addition to that, my perception of time itself became linked to these other ideas, to the extent that I also felt very close to, if not exactly within the center of all temporal human experience. All of this was occurring to me while I was in the bathroom, blindly staring into the mirror, and upon my mind pulling so far out from this actual moment to the outer reaches of existence and then back to this moment, I realized I had no idea how long I had been in the bathroom. It felt like years had passed. My wife and family could have been calling to me from the bathroom, but I had no way of knowing in that moment.

Finally after my first of several mental odysseys of the evening, I walked out of the bathroom and back to my family in the living room…