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| English: Zyprexa (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Clonazepam tablets Klonopin 0.5mg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The biggest mistake I have made in my life was walking into the office of a psychiatrist's office as a means of continuing education. Given the nature of communication, and how words often annihilate ideas and lead to confusion, it was almost inevitable that Dr. Pascal, although the fall guy for the profession, would reach for the prescription pad and the result led me into a quagmire of muddled diagnoses and the consumption of approximately eighty different medications. I have listed seventy-five here put I'm certain I have missed a few. I apologize for the formatting problems of the listing of the drugs I have taken in accordance with the prescriptions.
I began 200,000 PILLS looking for the right drug for me and it was during the many drafts and delays that I came to realize that an empathetic listener was the best medications. I did however suffer from a debilitating disorder but it was missed by all of these psychiatrists and the harm to my personal life is incalculable.
200,000 PILLS
DRUG INDUCED COMA
US COPYRIGHT PROTECTED
Insomnia such as mine has driven many people
insane, many have attempted suicide, and many have joined support groups,
making their eventual suicide a certainty.
Remorse over consuming hundreds of thousands pills has enhanced my
omnipresent sense of guilt, hopelessness, and decay. To prevent me from ending
the life I love with uncommon greed, I ate even more pills to excise these
psychological demons.
For decades, I have tumbled down a chute into a synthetic
coma. It begins like this: despite my toxic bloodstream, I sip from a glass of
filtered water and mash three mgs of Klonopin, a potent sedative, with the
pestle of my tongue, and then press the paste into the membrane lining the mortar
of my mouth. I eat 100 mgs of Sinequan, a sedating antidepressant that has
failed to raise the black curtain of my dysphoria. This old drug induces
coronaries, strokes, and causes black tongue, always a party favorite. Next, I
down 50 mgs of Benadryl, ubiquitous in OTC sleep aids, and 10/20 mgs of
Vytorin, to ensure many more years impaled on the stake of my fiendish malady,
and finish with 20 mgs of Zestril, to restrain my roller coaster blood
pressure, while I hum, for some reason, the William Tell
Overture. Dessert is Zyprexa an antipsychotic marketed off label as a mood
stabilizer; it is the newest green algae pond scum cure Du jour. My stable dysphoria
attests to its efficacy.
To speak with eloquence given my lethal drug
cocktail amazes my doctor, but I cannot recall if his comment came before or
after his stroke. My lethal medicinal meal inhibits smooth muscle contractions,
so emptying my bladder is a contentious battle. I run a warm stream of water
over my hand, and stare into the commode’s blue Cyclopean eye while some
urethral tears fall. Either a few beads remain to taunt me, or I enjoy holding
my penis. I refill my glass and place it on my night table. My pill-parched
mouth with its cracked tongue remains Velcroed to my upper palate until sunrise
and my drug-inspired snort and sexy ululation terrifies foraging raccoons.
Tormented still by my version of The Prince and the Pea, I slide to the
carpet, and stumble forward to repeat my liturgy. The bedroom spins into a
Tilt-a‑Whirl; hot flashes spew searing sweat needles through my pores, while
the languid flutter of my eyelids, black wings tattooed with golden streaks,
foreshadows my impending loss of consciousness. Lowering my head to prevent
fainting, I allow blood to be reabsorbed into the blotter of my brain before
toddling forward, locating the far bedpost with my forehead, smacking into the
dresser, bouncing off two walls, the TV stand, stubbing my toe, and hop about
doing the universal, ‘I-broke-my-fucking-toe dance,’ accompanied by the usual
expletives. Undaunted, I stumble forward to stare into the bowl’s antiseptic
eye to wring a single bauble from the dishrag of my bladder and I watch that
forlorn drop plop into the ocular tarn while inducing a tingle rivaling an
orgasm.
My drug-induced tarantella back to the rack of
my bed is fraught with danger. Blasting off one object into another, and
another, my forehead discovers the amoire, while I avoid a concussion, and
crash onto the bed and grab the remote. What I need is a roller derby outfit
with their phallus worshiping knee guards and elbow protectors.
I pause at an infomercial for a hairspray to conceal bald spots – it’s the identical substance used to simulate snow making the gloomiest Scroogean Christmas white. Click. An attractive woman in an exercise outfit is bound to a body-sculpting device. Her fixed smile suggests severe motion sickness. Designed for the country’s pandemic of bulimia, anorexia, or for any masochistic this electric chair spins her clockwise, counter-clockwise until the poor model is on the verge of hurling.
I click to Girls! Girls! Girls! Whose
scrumptious faces and bodies make men lose control of their cars, miss mortgage
payments, murder their wives, and stuff their sleeping children into wood-choppers, but these beauties are pinning for you Mr. Nowhere Man. Their gravity-defying
breasts make me wonder who will lift off first while the Greek chorus sings, Pick up the phone! Let go of your tumid
cocks, drop your semen-congealed tissues, and pick up the phone! The girls’
tone escalates into a demand, ‘You
snot-picking nerds pick up the phone! Pick up the fucking phone! Another
click finds John Wayne
and James Stewart
with welcome mat toupees sitting askew on their keloid dappled heads; during
this scene, to me, they are wondering if they have benign prostatic hypertrophy
or a cancerous walnut. I laugh before plunging into a hollow coma.
Dream or REM—rapid eye movement—slumber is
essential for emotional health. The medications I gobble distort REM whose
deprivation can induce a psychosis, launch the good ship despair, and years
have passed since I have had a genuine dream. Inadequate delta five sleep
forces the brain to compensate, freeing the chimeras of a mind deprived of
nocturnal delusions to run amok in the sunlight, an eerie double-exposed
wasteland engraved with hideous images.
Toward dawn, my polypharmaceutical nightcap wears
thin; a mule kicks a can against my ribs, and I awaken from a black culvert, a
child with night terrors. Drenched in a sweatscicle, and frozen by shame, you
would think I was monster, a Hitler, oh, name any sociopath
unburdened by a conscience, and I am tethered to the most intense remorse, but
what have I done?
“Do you know how many suicides have been ruled as accidental overdoses?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Neither do I, but I thought you might.”
While each pill my drug-cocktail drags me closer
to Death’s perimeter, I eat another two mgs of Klonopin, stuff silicon plugs
into my ears. Daylight’s carnivorous glare enhances my dysphoria and one eye
remains unzipped awaiting my enemy’s ascent; desperate, I scratch my way back
into coma’s womb.
Serenity eludes me again, and I awaken in abject
terror as the wasteland’s repulsive light dismisses the night and my heart is a
metal noisemaker cranked in a drunkard’s sweat-creased paw. Thrust into the
light from the darkness of my perpetual night, I taste the bile of my
unfettered sorrow. The moon is my sun and the nocturnal shadows and ink that
disheartens most infuses me with the pale recollection of my misplaced joy and
obscures the charred soul of this murderer’s malady.
None of the drugs doctors have
prescribed for my amorphous dis-ease has tempered my pain. What damage drugs
have done to my brain remains unknown? Do these medications protect me from the
stress of my illness or are they destroying my brain? Many psychiatrists
consider psychotropic drug damage a more virulent transgression than physical
rape. Since it cannot heal, they believe the destruction of one’s brain, is a
more piercing violation than the desecration of a body with its ability to
mend.
Early in my life’s journey, I had strayed from
the true path into a black grove. Trying to find the way, I wandered through
the thicket lost, until I pushed the wheelbarrow filled with the compost of my
angst into Dr. Alan Pascal’s office. Hoping to mine the archetypes in my psyche, I dumped that pile of
my intrapyschic distress on his beige carpet. A brilliant psychiatrist with a
reputation for a conservative medicinal approach, he wrote my first prescriptions
for psychotropic drugs, inaugurating the hundreds of thousands of pills to
follow.
Pascal saw my
judicious use of pot, speed, and barbiturates as a nascent flare, a sign of the
incipient madness in the pith of my soul. Before I had entered his office, I
had given up recreational drugs but
Pascal never
remembered this fact, enabling him to blame subsequent conflicts on those
forbidden chemicals. During thirteen years of prattle, his erroneous zones
became blatant, and I learned we had never spoken the same language.
Ignorant, in effect illiterate, I saw Pascal
as a genius, a paternal model who would teach me to endow my life with meaning.
I envisioned psychotherapy as an integral part of my education, but beneath
this overt inspiration, as I scan back over the mildewed pages of my life, I
see the naked specter of my chronic misery with great clarity. Given Pascal’s
purported gift, I recommended his therapeutic insights to my friends. All of
them had experimented with amphetamines, grass, Quaaludes, and barbiturates,
and he treated us all with the same medications I received. We were all, by his
standard, teetering on the brink of insanity.
Two chairs stood opposite each other in his
anteroom. A huge plastic plant sat in a bucket filled with fake soil. A network
of cobwebs decorated the plant; behind a vinyl curtain blocked the windows
that, owing to the building’s construction, were at ground level while his
subterranean womb was a curious symbolic arena to study the runes of patients’
psychological histories. Dr. Pascal’s collection of magazines, due to his
parsimony, were limited to two hepatic-yellow mildewed issues of The Vacationing Physician, a
professional journal, and an ancient copy of National Geographic, which was so old the women of Nigeria wore
pasties. His office was ample; it contained additional plastic foliage.
He greeted me in silence with his Jack-o-lantern
smile, revealing a mouth with tiny seeds for teeth. His smile said I was a nerd
but “I became a sagacious doctor in order to get laid or you are a nut.” He
invited me in, and I sat in his Naugahyde dunking stool while he placed his
albino-white ass on a leather chair in front of bookshelves whose tomes were
the size of the Manhattan
phonebooks, I dubbed it The Great Wall of Knowledge. Stacks of medical journals
lined his desk, a Maginot line. During sessions, he slid my
chair to the corner of his desk providing him with an unimpeded view of his
patient who sat beneath a floodlight as if being interrogated by the CIA.
I waited for him to talk. He waited for me. He
massaged his chin and readied his pencil. Then he tugged his earlobe and
swiveled in his chair, and so it went . . .
until I broke the sacrosanct therapeutic silence. Left-handed he hooked his
arm around a tiny spiral pad, writing in a furor as I spoke, and I recalled
that southpaws die nine year earlier and a higher incidence of mental illness
than right-handed people have. I should have kept my mouth shut and run.
Could the Sheetrock support the Great Wall of
Knowledge and the wall next to the patient’s chair covered with thirteen
diplomas survive the weight of Dr. Pascal’s
framed authority? His large head evoked images of observatories; seven strands
of oily, black hair like a car’s detailing on the bright pink dome of a skull
appeared too large for his body like a baby’s head, and as an infant, I
suspect, he resembled a fifty-year-old man.
When my hairline began to recede, he led me to
believe that losing my long, curly hair was pathological. It took commercials
for Rogaine, The Hair Club for Men, and hair transplant mills to make me
realize that most men were very concerned about losing their hair. Since he was
bald, reducing my complaint to a sign of psychopathology was perhaps
compensation for his own premature loss and a form, perchance, of projected
mourning. In contemporary culture, personal beauty is the gold measure of human
value, while money is the silver. During my youth, many thought I had a great
deal of gold.
When a girlfriend had sprayed her hairdo into a
lethal weapon, we broke up for a few days. Kicking his conservative-bent aside,
as I sat tethered to my Naugahyde dunking stool, Pascal dipped
me into the polluted lagoon of his fallacious reasoning, decided I was a tad
blue, and he prescribed the first little blue pill, Stelazine, an antipsychotic
used off-label for ‘neurotic’ anxiety. To annul my lifelong insomnia, he
prescribed another antipsychotic, Mellaril, a medicinal choice commensurate to
killing an ant with a sledgehammer. The drug hangover made speaking almost
impossible while I either bit my tongue, or plied it from the roof of my mouth.
Mellaril’s half-life made this condition last from one dose to the next. It was early one morning when I sideswiped
six parked cars, making friend and passenger I had promised a ride consider an
alternative means of transportation.
Eager to excise the tumor of my discord,
perpetuated by what Pascal had begun, my ceaseless attempt to find a medicinal
cure, found me in the offices of fifty to seventy psychiatrists, who can keep
an accurate tally, who have prescribed each pill I have taken excluding a few
recreational morsels, I had gobbled during my brief illusion of immortality.
However, these noisome and dangerous medications have irrevocably altered my
mind, my body, and my soul and though I’ve organized my neurochemical chaos as
well as I could, my disheveled perceptions form a multicolored jigsaw puzzle in
which the pieces no longer fit, and my own mind seems alien and damaged.
Who
am I? I do not quite know, but I am without question a grunt in our army of
doctor-induced drug addicts. Predicated on our morbidly obese, and gaining,
lexicon of psychological syndromes, housed in the DSM, we now lead the world in
mental illnesses. No one knows what incurred this epidemic of neurochemical
deficiencies and excesses that has spawned the mind-bending desecration of
brains and the masses of people suffering from them but immigrants who land on
our shores soon become as insane as the rest of the population
Under the influence of 300,000 pills, that have
failed despite their purported promise, I fell in love, again, again, and
again… rented my body, selling it was absurd, and married, which brought me the
wondrous gift of my daughter. My tale explores the stigma of mental illness,
suicide, obsessions, compulsion, betrayal, squandered potential, our communal
ignorance, and doctor-induced madness.
Here’s the mind-bending list of drugs doctors have
prescribed to control my incurable schizophrenia, poverty, and as one of the
fifty million grunts in the army waging a savage battle against erroneous
misperceptions, and the universal dread of those with a mental illness or its
concomitant anomalies.
1. Abilify 17. Dexedrine 32. Milltown 48. Ritalin 64. Trileptal
2. Adderall Capsules 33. Nardil 49.
Ritalin-SR 65. Tuinal
3
Amytal Sodium 18.
Dilantin 34. Navane 50. Seconal 66. Valium
4. Asendin 19.
Effexor 35. Nembutal 51. Serax 67. Valmid
5. Atarax 20. Elavil 36. Neurontin 52. Seroquel 68. Vistaril
6. Ativan 21.
Etrafon 37. Noludar 53. Sinequan 69.
Vivactil
7. Benadryl 22.
Etrafon-Forte 38. Norpramin 54. Stelazine 70. Wellbutrin
8. Celexa 23.
Geodon 39. Pamelor 55. Surmontil 71.Wellbutrin SL
9. Chloral Hydrate 24. Halcion 40. Parnate 56. Synthroid 72. Wellbutrin XL
10. Clonidine 25. Haldol 41. Paxil 57. Taractan 73. Xanax
11. Concerta 26. Lamictal 42. Phenobarbital 58.
Tegretol 74. Zoloft
12. Cylert 27.
Lexapro 43. Placidyl 59. Thorazine 75. Zyprexa
13. Dalmane 28. Librium 44.
Provigil 60.
Tofranil
14. Depakote 29. Lithium 45.
Prozac 61.
Tranxene
15. Deseryl 30.
Luvox 46. Remeron 62. Triavil
16. Dexedrine 31.
Mellaril 47. Restoril 63. Trilafon
Welcome to my life…
Please see below an excerpt from Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond, by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain (Grove Press)
Copyright 1985 by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain
This Section is titled MAD SCIENTIST
The Mad Scientist is the late Dr. Paul Hoch
Dr. Pascal, a pseudonym, diagnosed me with a disorder that emanated in the mind of Paul Hoch in 1948 and appeared in medical journals in 1949. Although I consider Dr. Pascal as one of the best psychiatrists I have known it was Dr Pascal who began my consumption of a wheelbarrow full of pills. It was an egregious error and it has had a profound negative effect on my life. The diagnosis of pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia was a 'wastebasket' diagnosis that was compelling but never accepted by the psychiatric community or entered into the DSM in 1952. The problem with assigning a diagnosis predicated on my attempt to describe an abstract concept to Dr. Pascal is predicated on two main issues. In the first place, Dr. Pascal saw very few people with schizophrenia and he was making a guess predicated on my metaphorical description of panic attacks. True panic attacks are so profound that I felt as if I was dissolving and on the verge of death.
In an earlier post, I described being mugged. Though I had a gun placed to the back of my head, it was not as frightening as the panic attacks I tried to describe to Dr. Pascal and others. When I called Dr. Pascal, he knows that he has harmed me i ways that few can imagine, and he acts as one might expect from a doctor who had made a gaffe of monumental proportions.
What follows is the gist of what some journalists wrote about Dr. Paul Hoch.
Dr.
Hoch, early advocate of the the theory that
LSD and other hallucinogens drugs, performed numerous number of bizarre
experiments for the army while also serving as a CIA
consultant during the 1950s. He administered intraspinal injections of
mescaline and LSD to psychiatric patients, causing an "immediate,
massive, and almost shock like picture with higher doses." Aftereffects
("generalized discomfort," "withdrawal,"
"oddness," and "unreality feelings") lingered for two to
three days following the injections.
Hoch, who later became New York State Commissioner for
Mental Hygiene, also gave LSD to psychiatric patients and then lobotomized
them in order to compare the effects of acid before and after psycho surgery.
("It is possible that a certain amount of brain damage is of therapeutic
value," Hoch once stated.) In one experiment a hallucinogen was administered along with a local
anesthetic and the subject was told to describe his visual experiences as
surgeons removed chunks of his cerebral cortex.
In another study, Hoch gave
mescaline to a thirty-six-year-old male diagnosed as a "pseudo neurotic
schizophrenic." Afterwards Hoch reported: "He had
some visual hallucinations. He saw dragons and tigers coming to catch him and
reacted to these hallucinations with marked anxiety. He also had some illusions distortions of the objects in the room. The emotional changes
were apprehension and fear at times mounting to panic, persecutory
misinterpretation of the environment, fear of death, intense irritability,
suspiciousness, perplexity, and feelings of depersonalization. He verbalized
the feelings of depersonalization as 'floating out of space,' seemed 'between
this life and the next,' and had the feeling of being born. The paranoid
content concerned essentially, why the doctors were taking notes and fear that
he would be attacked by them. He also expressed an ecstatic grandiose trend
of having the feeling that he was God in heaven and then, however, had the
feeling of being in hell...The mental picture was that of a typical
schizophrenic psychosis while the drug influence lasted."
As an afterword, Hoch noted, "This patient
received transorbital lobotomy and showed temporarily a marked improvement in
all his symptoms, losing most of his tension and anxiety. Postoperatively he
was again placed under mescaline. Basically the same manifestations were
elicited as prior to the operation with the exception that quantitatively the
symptoms were not as marked as before."
Dr. Hoch
also used electroshock treatment on patients who had been given mescaline.
"It did not influence the clinical symptoms at all," he reported. "The patients continued to behave in the same way as
prior to electroshock treatment." On the basis of these tests Hoch
concluded that electroshock "has no influence on mescaline-produced mental
states." He might have revised his "objective" assessment if
he had taken the drug himself and had one of his assistants apply the volts
while he tripped the lights fantastic. But those who secretly funded his
research required only that he dish it out to mental patients and prisoners.
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Postscript: It is my understanding that Dr. Hoch had worked under the auspices of Dr. Eleanor Benders and many of the subjects in her CIA project were young children who were given ECT, were placed in matrazol comas, like insulin, LSD and prefrontal leucotomies, lobotomies. This experiment began in the early 1950s. Dr. Hoch said, "Sometimes destroying a little brain tissue is a good idea."
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