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LOOKING ON THE POSITIVE SIDE

by ZYRA

The following item was given as a speech by Zyra a few years ago at the Perceptions Forum self-management conference at the Atheist Church in London. Dorothy Rowe had just given an excellent speech about the mechanisms involved in the workings of schizophrenia and introduced Zyra "...who's going to cheer us all up". Zyra went on the stage wearing a moderately-weird outfit and with sandals made from carpet which had come from the mental asylum, and was holding the speech on a roller-towel loop type arrangement so the audience could not tell when the speech was going to come to an end. The speech contains material recycled from some of the items Zyra had written for the magazine, so don't be surprised if some of it looks a bit deja-vu!

LOOKING ON THE POSITIVE SIDE

Hi! Welcome ALL! I'd like to introduce you all to ZYRA, who's me. But not exactly me right now, but more my future, a matter of something a bit clever I've done to how I've applied self-management. What to do about DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR? The solution I suggest is to actually attempt to BECOME GRAND. Whilst it's not easy to do this instantly, the idea is to work out how grand you'd like to become and what sort of style you'd go for, and then WORK TOWARDS IT. The thing is, you might actually achieve grandness. But even if you don't, you'll always be trying to get there, you'll never actually fail, because you'll always be on the way.

I am a MAD SCIENTIST. But rather than worrying about the fact that I am in fact MAD, I've decided to use the creativity inherent in my madness to try to get into the business of creating records, books, poems, whatever I can, in order to become rich and famous (ie GRAND), and because I think I can do a lot of good.

I think a lot of people could become better off if they realised their true creativity and potential and became MORE THEMSELVES.

Just about all the people now respected as having been GREAT in history, the great artists, scientists, explorers, all of them have at some time been said in their own time to have been MAD. Some of them were indeed mad, but that's not necessarily the nightmare some people dread it to be. It's how you use it that counts as they say on the advert.

If you're individualistic as well, this star-quality gives you a good start.

(MIXED-UP ?)
I should mention that this speech is going to be a bit mixed-up, because I've not really finished writing it yet! So don't worry if I jump from one subject to the next and then off to somewhere else and that sort of thing.

(PARANOIA ?)
Do you notice something unusual about my appearance? You can see I'm not normal-looking. I'm often weirder than this.

Now about PARANOIA. I used to suspect that people were looking at me, watching me as I walked along the street or browsed round the supermarket. But now I've started dyeing my hair interesting colours (green / purple / bright orange etc) this isn't a problem anymore as I KNOW people are looking at me.

I used to be very shy. But now I've solved that. The truth is it's the other people who are more shy than I am! You can tell that, because when I walk through the centre of the crowded marketplace with a curious appearance, the people stare but I don't need to stare back. If I did they'd look embarrassed!

NOT NORMAL?
So, you've got schizophrenia? Surprisingly that's not all entirely bad. This has some advantages which the "normals" don't generally experience. The first and most important thing is that now you know you're not normal, you need not pretend to be normal. You can BE YOURSELF! Too many people try too hard to be what they think is normal.

The "normal" condition is a bit sad, because the normals wish they dare be interesting, weird, unusual. They might not admit to it, but it's true.

One of the advantages of being "quote mad quote" is that you don't have to play along with all this conformity nonsense so epidemic in the "normal" world. The normals have to spend a lot of effort trying to hide away and blend in with the crowd. But you don't have to be "normal", because you KNOW you're different. You can BE YOURSELF. My health has improved greatly since I started dyeing my hair, and wearing clothes I think ought to be fashionable rather than the drab unoriginality conformity demands.

CREATIVITY
The thing about schizophrenia is the vast untapped potential and CREATIVITY involved. Being able to think up so many odd and diverse things one after another or simultaneously is a great leap of art which isn't there with the plodding along type of thinking. It's that spark of inspirational genius that makes the difference between spectacular creativity and the more ordinary.

Don't just take my word for it. Put it to the test. It's your schizophrenia. You can use it to your advantage. The trick is to find ways of recording the thoughts going on. I've found I can think up astonishingly diverse ideas by playing music very loud through headphones, in bed, in the dark. It works a bit like a do-it-yourself total sensory deprivation unit. The extended creativity produced defies normality.

MEET PEOPLE
Another advantage of having schizophrenia is that you get to meet a lot of interesting people. You get to go to different places and have meetings at which curious things happen. And you get to go to TALKS and get to talk to a lot of interesting people. And if you talk about odd mental things that are happening to you the good folk there listen to you rather than looking totally gone-out.

EVOLUTION
Nature continues to produce diversification of new species. Every now and then something odd happens and a new variation of existing species produces an advancement. What if schizophrenia shows the way to a new advancement? Being able to think so many things at the same time sounds like an advancement.

VOICES
Now, what to do about VOICES IN THE HEAD? I used to do what they told me to do, but after a bit it turned out that this wasn't a good idea. Anyway, if they really had been premonitions of the future I'd have won the lottery long before now! So what I do these days is to try to consider carefully whether something is actually sensible or not. I can usually work it out logically after consideration, although sometimes I have to argue the point with myself and come up with a reasonable decision. Some people think this looks a bit odd in the discussion.

HOTEL
I've stayed in an interesting hotel a few weeks. I don't think it was a five-star hotel, but it was quite comfy. The food was good, and there were a lot of members of staff around who were very helpful They'd even take time out from the upkeep of the hotel to actually TALK to me, as a guest, about things, about how I was thinking and that sort of thing. I stayed there a few weeks, but I noticed one of the odd things about the hotel is the fact that the doors are sometimes locked. I've been reliably told by the staff that this is for the safety of the guests.

If I could SET UP a hotel, I'd try and make it as comfy as that. There are some things I have learnt about hotel management from seeing how they ran that place. So, what I intend to do is to buy a huge building, a huge derelict mansion somewhere and set up in the hotel business. So if you know of anywhere likely please let me know.

SENSE OF HUMOUR
Having schizophrenia I have the advantage over normality that I can see life from a different aspect. I can see sometimes that something is funny even though some people can't see it. I laugh. They look.

DIABETIC MADNESS
With having the diabetes and coeliac disease as well there are some problems which link to the schizophrenia. If I can keep them apart it's not too bad, but if I get it wrong I can end up with hypoglycaemia and then I run the risk of having a MAD FIT. It sometimes happens if I forget to eat. What happens then is that I get into a delusional state where the logic works entirely differently and I get isolated into an alternate universe where eating isn't a valid concept. I don't realise I've gone mad and I start throwing things about and demolishing things, and I become incapacitated. Demolishing the huge stacks of books which are all over this house. But now I've solved the problem by buying a large number of bars of chocolate and placing them all round the house as if they were an emergency precaution like fire extinguishers. So now if I go mad I eat the chocolate and soon recover. My friends are quite pleased about this because now I don't phone them up in the middle of the night, tell them I'd mad, and get them to call for an ambulance!

COLD FEET
When I first started solving the problem of my feet getting cold on cold floors I happened to be in the mental hospital. There was carpet all throughout the halls but none on the cold wipe-clean floor of the eating area. At that time they were laying a new carpet in the halls and I managed to get some offcuts. I would carry a piece of carpet-tile about and when I sat down for a meal I'd put the piece of carpet down on the floor so my feet didn't get cold. I'm sure some of the staff there thought this carrying about of bits of carpet was part of my insanity. Later I fashioned some pieces into sole shapes and made elasticated sandals with a carpet base. This was quite good, because when I got out of the hospital I could walk round town walking on mental hospital quality carpet. (This is before McDonald's made a big joke of the idea, but I was quite serious about it). The curious thing was, when I was admitted to hospital at a later time and I was trying to get my nervous-breakdown sorted out, I was still wearing the unorthodox footwear, and of the nurses noticed the sandal soles were precisely the same colour as the carpet! Of course from a staff security point of view the immediate thought is to wonder whereabouts in the expanse of the carpet of the mental hospital there is a pair of holes of the right size the right shape cunningly sliced out of the carpet. And of course where has this NUTTER got a Stanley knife from to cut the floor? Anyway, I got the witty comment "I like your carpet-slippers!". And I replied "I call them ASYLUM SNEAKERS"

DAYCARE
I was going to talk about solutions concerning mental hospital daycare. But I no longer have a voice in that matter. I discovered there was a widespread wasting of food there, which is of course a terrible SIN. So I stood up there in front of all the nurses and patients and made a big announcement and then I left there for the last time and walked away!

HATTERS
Classic image of madness, the MAD HATTER. Now if you think about it, suppose you were in the hat-making business, what would be a good idea, from a commercial advertising point of view? Well, how about wearing a huge top-of-the-range hat and putting the price ticket on it, and going around with it on, and then people would say "Gosh! Look at that character wearing a big hat! Must be a hatter because they're got the price ticket on the hat. I could do with buying a hat like that!". So the hatter gets people approaching him and booking appointments to be measured-up for hats. Excellent for business! Method in the MADNESS, eh?

"THEY"
If you're a paranoid, you probably have the suspicion that THEY are out to get you. The government, the secret service, EXTRATERRESTRIAL ALIENS, etc. The problem is that THEY are very powerful and clever etc, and seem impossible to counter. But it's not so. The thing about such forces is that whilst powerful, they almost certainly have a limited budget and limited resources. The thing to do is to exhibit interesting behaviour which will make them go to an immense amount of trouble and fuss and all for nothing. BIG BROTHER or whatever it is, is not all-powerful. The trick is to do various misleading things so as to cause an immense amount of fuss as THEY try to work out what you're trying to do. You can soon run up the bill as they continue covert spying all over the place etc. I have been known to do some very odd things which any paranoid-catchers would find very hard to deal with.

If you've got a problem of people being out to get you, there are some things you can do about it. People whose job it is to persecute paranoids must be very busy, and it's up to you to make them have as difficult a job as possible. Always wave at security cameras, and if you know of any secret radar installations, always drop chaff, (which can easily be made by putting turkey foil through an office shredder). But most importantly, always write everything down that happens. Paranoid persecutors live on secrecy, so don't let them get away with it!

MICE
When I first discovered I'd got hallucinatory mice in the house I thought about seeing a psychiatrist. But last time I did that I got prescribed some very powerful drugs which HID any REAL problems I'd got by creating even more important things to worry about. This time, though the hallucinatory mice were a nuisance because some of them were as big as cats, and they would rummage about in the dark in the house at night. In the end I solved the problem by a cunning technique. I set small (ordinary) mousetraps round the house baited them with stale cheese. What this did was to kill all the ACTUAL, normal, cheese-eating mice. When they'd all gone, about two weeks later, the hallucinatory mice magically disappeared.

DIARY
One really good coping strategy I recommend is KEEPING A DIARY. I don't just mean "what I had for breakfast", but you keep a SECRET diary of your innermost thoughts. I write volumes of stuff in diaries about things that are going on, whether true or delusionary. Whilst this doesn't stop the delusions, it means that they have to be more consistent!

The best way is to have a freeform style where you don't have a fixed page-per-day but you write the dates and times when you wrote the thought on a blank canvas. This is good because for one thing it's therapeutic, being able to talk to someone, ie yourself, and also you can look back at what you thought. I've found it's particularly good at dealing with DELUSIONS. Well, you might say, how do I know they're delusions if I'm fooled into believing them? The thing is I write in the diary not just once a day but more like ten times a day, and I can look at what I thought earlier on in the day and say "did I believe THAT?!".

I've taken the idea of diary writing to an extreme as on the computer since Oct 1994 my diary is now about TEN MEGABYTES, ie about the size of the complete works of Shakespeare and The Bible put together!. So writing a diary can help sort out mania, although it can become a manic activity in itself.

UNIVERSAL TIME
There's this odd thing about time that the authorities seem to think they can change it. So when it's springtime the clocks go forward. Well, mine don't. I know what time it ACTUALLY IS. When the sun is at its zenith it's noon, ie MID-DAY. And when it's at its nadir, ie when it's the MIDDLE of the night, then it's MID-NIGHT. No amount of legislation can change that. So I keep Universal Time, or GMT. All my wall clocks, watches, and computers are all still on GMT. Why conform to an artificial time like British Silly Time ("BST") when you can have "the time it actually IS", ie GMT? The added satisfaction of having your clocks on GMT is that you're right and almost everyone else is wrong.

LADY DI MONEY
And when I go round the supermarket to buy stuff I get looked at. Great! Then I go to the till and pay up not with paper-money, but with ceremonial collectible special edition Lady Di solid metal five pound pieces (You can get them from the Post Office). People soon start to question their beliefs in the normal world.

VIRTUAL TEENAGER
When I was younger I missed out on being a teenager. But now I'm making up for it. Have you missed out in your life? Remember it's never too late to live it! The thing is, that a lot of people, after they're older than not a lot, say "I'm too old", and they generally go on assuming they're "too old" to live their dream until they're about EIGHTY. At about that age it suddenly occurs to the person "why didn't I do it before!?" The point is, you're never TOO OLD. And you don't have to "act your age", or even "your SHOE-SIZE".

ECT
Why is ECT so popular with psychiatrists when so many people believe that it doesn't show good results? I have a paranoid theory about this. The idea is that ECT makes you subconsciously frightened of electricity. This is an insidious plot to stop you getting involved with the electric mania in which you wire up hundreds of lightbulbs. If you did, you'd probably find it very therapeutic. I have now wired up several hundred small bulbs in one room. There is a technical way of doing this which is moderately safe and requires the insides of gambling machines, dead computers, video recorders, car headlamps etc. I have some plans if you're interested ask me. But there is a trial version available where you hang many sets of christmas lights up all over the place and have them switched on instead of the normal room-light.

DRUGS
I've tried various drugs, which is quite a thing to say considering I don't smoke - not even tobacco. However, these experiments have largely been not conducted by me but by my doctors. Let's take for example Zuclopenthixol. I'm not knocking it, because for some people it helps quite a lot, but with me it obscured all silly thoughts by obscuring ALL thoughts. So, not everyone's cup of tea.

Stelazine. Again, might be ok, but there were unfortunate side-effects for me. Slowness, drooling, that sort of thing. In the end I started thinking I might be starting to look like an IDIOT, so I stopped taking the stuff, as I'd rather BE CRAZY than look like an idiot. Sure enough I was crazy. It was a wild trip for a day or two as the cold-turkey of the stuff happened. Crazy visions, hallucinations, and delusions. But because it was ME that had deliberately decided to get into the risky game of NOT TAKING STELAZINE it was acceptable, and I coped with it, and after a while everything settled down.

Now the success story. THIORIDAZINE. At the time I was admitted to the mental hospital for the first time I had a problem that because of various medical problems I could not sleep for more than one hour thirteen minutes. But upon taking the wonder cure-all drug thioridazine I SLEPT. Great! In fact each night from then on, for years, I slept very well. Brilliant. But then by chance I heard about the side-effects. Impotence. I hadn't thought about that. I thought the fact that I had become impotent was because I was diabetic. It didn't occur to me. If anyone had asked me "Are you GOOD IN BED?" and have been honest and said "Oh yes! Definitely! I'm EXCELLENT IN BED! I get a really good night's sleep every night!". But then as soon as I heard about the impotence related side-effect I decided that I'd stop taking the stuff. This had some startling results. I won't go into too many details but the transformation was astonishing! And I'm not too bad at the sleeping either!

MENTAL HEALTH ACT
Now on the new dreaded Mental Health Act. The idea by the government is to have an ethnic cleansing, removing so-called mad people from society. However, if the government had tried to ban Trade Unions, there'd be a general strike. So here's what we do: We form non-disappearance clubs. The idea is to get to know as many people as possible, so that if you get locked up without having done anything wrong, there will be a lot of people (ie the members of the non-disappearance club) making a lot of fuss, so the authorities will have to think twice before unreasonably sectioning any of us.

POEM
And now to finish off the performance I'd like to read to you a POEM I've written. It's a poem about the new Mental Health Act. It's not a bad poem really, though I say it myself. But I think it'll probably disqualify me from winning any knighthood, commendations, or prizes from a certain character in government I might mention.

About the new Mental Health Act,
The government and the Devil have a packt,
They'll lock you up and throw away the key,
Because they can't stand mad people to be free!

They think you just have to take the pills,
As if it's a cure for all ills.
You should see what they did to me,
Because they can't stand mad people to be free!

They do a detailed diagnosis,
To pigeon-hole your psychosis.
But why? They then prescribe ECT,
Because they can't stand mad people to be free!

They assume that anyone who's mad,
Might also be guilty of being bad,
But I can see what they can't see,
That they can't stand mad people to be free!

As regards politicians like Mr Smarmy,
Who'll lock you up for being barmy,
They should be consigned to history,
Because one day mad people will have the right to be free!

ZYRA can be explored some more at Zyra.org.uk and has a character-review on the Perceptions Forum site.