The Schizo-Stroller

Is it a contradiction in terms to try hard to be lazy?

Sometimes my toilet talks to me when I piss in it.

It’s most disconcerting.

I get angry when people won’t take responsibility for their own actions.

But that causes a problem for me and my voices. If my voices blame me for something they have done, I get angry. But there lies the rub, autonomous models aside are they not still me? If that is the case is that not then me not taking responsibility for my own actions against myself?

And it comes down to what extent to which I am the cause of my voices? If I willingly put myself in an anxiety inducing situation that makes my voices worse, then I’d have to take responsibility for making the voices worse, but do I have to take responsibility for their content. To what extent am I consciously or unconsciously choosing this content? How much is this related to the environment I may or may not have chosen to be in?

It’s a problem that vexes lawyers and legal practioners and theorists especially to do with criminal responsibility. But that is for actions. I believe I have enough conscious control of myself for that not to apply to me. I’m simply not that psychotic at this moment in time. I’m willing and able to take responsibility for my actions, but then I’ve done nothing criminal anyway. So I’ll leave that part to the lawyers.

But how much am I responsible for what my voices say to me. How much is anyone, diagnosed with a mental illness or not, responsible for their unconscious thoughts? If no-one, then I most certainly am not responsible for what my voices say to me. The environments I put myself in, my health (physical and mental that I can consciously and willingly affect), my life barring any accidental and external incidences, that will affect my unconscious state, I am responsible for. But not my unconscious once I have done all I can to keep it in as good health as I can possibly can. I can do nothing else about what my voices say to me.

Again in another city, on the other side of the Watford Gap/ Divide, I had a bizarre delusion that I think helps explain how disparate fantasies/ hallucinations can conspire to create some truly bizarre delusions.

Again it was the early days of hearing voices and I was trying to comprehend where they were coming from. The voices are not always disembodied sometimes they are accompanied by what seem to be physical feelings, and this can lead to all kinds of fantastical explanations. The one I was having at the time was a kind of sideways feeling (which I’ve since put down to a side to side twitching of the eye balls potentially brought on by anxiety, all though I didn’t think this at the time).

I used to be a bit of a hippy-punk (if that’s not a contradiction in terms), dreads and all, and for years I’d worn boots but I’d recently bought some trainers. This was the early days of air-cushioned soles becoming mainstream and mine had an air bubble just under the heel that you could look through from edge to edge.

One night I noticed my friends pair had air-bubbles too, but his were in the sole, pointing down to the ground. Ah! I summised, that is why he doesn’t broadcast his thoughts, when he’s walking his bubbles broadcast his thoughts downwards thus earthing him. Whilst mine are sideways orientated, therefore my thoughts are broadcast sideways and so people can hear them.

QED. Who said the course of reason always runs smoothly?

When I was breaking down in another city far, far away, one of the voices/ delusions was that I was being told to ask a question, the voices often came to me thick and fast, ‘Ask, ask!’. “Fucking ask what!” I’d scream. I didn’t know what they were talking about. ‘Ask the question’ the voices would go. “What fucking question. What the fuck are you on about?”. I didn’t know what they meant, why did I have to ask a question? For what purpose, what reason? What was the question I was supposed to be asking?

These were the early days of my illness, I didn’t know what was going on. All day I could hear people talking, shouting, telling me things. It was a new and frightening thing and it scared me. But most of all it wouldn’t stop. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, voices, voices.

And all the time I had the line from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers song: ‘If you have to ask you’ll never know’ running through my head. But things got wierder, I kept thinking my friends I was living with were saying things like ‘Why hasn’t he asked yet?’, when I was walking down the street I would hear ‘He still hasn’t asked’. But I still didn’t know what the bloody question was. So I decided I’d ask ‘Who are you’.

But all I heard was laughing. And I’ve never been asked to ask again. I still don’t know if it was the right question. I still don’t know what the question was. I still don’t know why I was supposed to ask it. I guess I never will.

My voices, as I’ve mentioned before, say abusive things about me, lies about me. I can deal with that. Unfortunately my thought broadcast delusion means that I think that other people can hear these voices, in fact the delusion is that whoever is spreading these lies is talking directly to them. Then it becomes, or feels at any rate, uncomfortable,

My delusion doesn’t explain why these people, voices, entities, voice creators, whoever are doing this, what they want or even who they are. Occasionally they pretend to be someone I’ve known in the past but the stories are usually inconsistent and anyway if they spread lies then they’re going to lie about who they are so in a way I don’t really care who they are and I’m not going to waste my time finding out (or at least who they’re supposed to be!). The question that does intrigue me is what I’ve done to deserve it, and there doesn’t seem to be one. It seems these voices are doing it to fuck me up and they’re doing it because they can. For no other reason.

So, assume for a minute that this is real, people in the street really can hear them. Why does this matter, after a while people should suss that they’re nasty pieces of work and not believe them. So why should I care?

Because every day I see newspapers like the Daily Mail preaching hate and bigotry, when I pass a newsagents, the billboards outside have the worst piece of news because this sells the papers, news stories on TV are invariably negative because that gets airtime. People watch reality programmes to see people fail, to see people worse off than them, soaps are getting grittier and grittier. Everything falls to the lowest common denominator because it sells. And you ask me to have faith in human nature?

The thing is I do. Not everyone’s like that, but it only takes a few. As we were always told in school: ‘There’s always one who has to spoil it for everyone else.’ And I never know who that person is going to be.

However the question I have to ask the rest of you is: “Why the fuck do you buy this shit?”

As I was walking down the street earlier, I thought someone was shouting ‘paranoid’ at me.

 Ho Ho!

One of the hardest things to explain, yet perhaps an important underpinning to the way my illness manifests itself – I think it’s possible to delineate between the having of the illness, its biological or chemical properties and the way it manifests itself, its psychological properties - is how my voices treat me.

I argue with my voices a lot. When you’ve had them for over ten years it’s hard to ignore them and sometimes you just have to go with the flow. One of the expriences I have in arguing with them is that they accuse me of not doing things but having thoughts about things of which I believe I have no real inclination.

Sometimes, the thoughts I get seem to be caused by my voices which seem, at times, to bring up subjects seemingly at random and having no relation to what has been going on around me nor to what I was originally thinking. Now my voices are very opinionated and seem to think they have a right to interject into my thoughts and demand that I focus my attention on the subject they bring up. The fact that the accusation is usually false and what’s more unrelated to any belief or whim I may consciously have does not put my voices off. They are right and because I am thinking of it, the fact that they brought it up seems lost on them, proves their point. To which I bring up the effect of the observer on the observed.

This manifests itself in other ways too, if someone comments on something I’ve been thinking of, whilst I’m out e.g. walking down the street, which then gets altered (it gets a bit complicated) because someone is second guessing what they think I’m supposed to be thinking about, and the comment is charged at me but is based on the second guess, often by the very same person who is doing the commenting. Again I bring up the effect of the observer on the observed.

I feel I am being observed, watched, analysed, but by another person (often the commentator), but being human this person has their own agenda, they project this agenda on me and through their observations see it in me, often unaware that I too am aware of their agenda (not saying I don’t have one of my own), and so will be influenced by their beliefs and opinions. So they accuse me of what they see in themselves, as a sort of mirror, unaware that I am merely doing this because I am weaker due to my illness (the delusions created by my illness become part of their own delusion), and so cannot ward off their agenda but can merely reflect it, so what they accuse me of is what they hate in themselves.

Of course, I am aware that I observe myself and so this applies to myself consciously as well as unconsciously.

Sorry, I’m not always 100% rational. Why do you think I’m writing this shit.

Some of the most important elements of a nutter’s arsenal are his/ her coping strategies. One of mine is chewing gum. Like most coping strategies its simplicity is its most powerful weapon.

I read somewhere that a lot of voices are caused by sub-vocal utterances. Testing this I studied my lip movements when I heard voices and, yes, they did move, just slightly.

So I thought, can I stop the voices by stopping my lips from moving? I’ve found that I get less voices when I talk because the voices are created in the same part of the brain as the speech centre , hence, if that part of the brain is already being used by speech I get less voices.

Of course I can’t talk constantly, not only is it rude but nigh on impossible (although I do know people who could give it a fucking good try). But following this logic if my lips were otherwise engaged would I not get voices. So – Chewing Gum!

And it works, if I’m chewing I get less voices. I use it sparingly as, my voices can get round coping strategies if used too much. But the fact that I find if I do get voices whilst chewing, I find I’ve stopped chewing, I think, reinforces this fact. This seems to be that the impulse behind the voice is so strong it forces me to stop chewing so it can manifest itself, just as when high voices can interrupt speech because their impulse is stronger than that of the speech and they come from the same part of the brain.