Damaged Person Glass Analogy

     Just heard this somewhere and thought it was brilliant. Wish I could give credit but just can’t remember. I think it was the radio, maybe some interview on WBUR.

     Take a person and see them as a piece of pristine glass.

     Some of us are smudged, some of us are cracked, and some of us are shattered.

     Great analogy, to say the least. Let’s elaborate a bit for fun.

     Smudges are easily manageable. Cracks can also be undone with some effort. But if we are shattered, there is virtually no hope, barring divine intervention.

     I believe most addicts are simply cracked whereas, say, a narcissist or a sociopath (both the same really) are shattered.

God, help me to love those who are shattered, those who hurt others with no remorse…

Culture Of Mental Illness

     America’s perverse focus on mental illness has certainly crowned us the worldwide hub of pharmaceutical intervention. In fact, we celebrate that fact and glorify not only the discovery of a new disorder but also the magic pill to treat it. If you watch TV for a couple of hours on any given night, you will see reports and advertisements about a myriad of different disorders and some ‘amazing’ new drug to treat the symptoms. Of course, it’s only the symptoms we want to treat, though, because actually solving our problems would render an entire industry useless and impotent. Furthermore, people might start to think and act for themselves, and we certainly can’t have that.

     America’s explosion of mental illness and pharmaceutical interventions have achieved the precise opposite of what they advertise: Exacerbate mental illness. In fact, the more names and the more disorders and the more drugs we peddle to the masses, we achieve escape velocity, if you will. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We now cause mental illness just by focusing on it so much. Incessant scrutiny of the Self not only causes but fuels spiritual malady.

     This is the tragic irony about psychology and psychiatry. Ever more disorders and ever more drugs have done one thing and one thing only: led to an absolute explosion in the incidence of mental illness. It’s amazing to me that Harvard brass sends off countless PhDs every year without so much as a clue. These guys are academic geniuses yet couldn’t help someone if their lives depended on it. So either these guys really aren’t so bright, or, and this is my feeling, Harvard is shoving a bunch of nonsense down their throats.

     The pharmaceutical elite are no dummies. They know that the more disorders that the APA creates out of thin air will only necessitate more and more laboratory cocktails, i.e. enormous profits.

     It doesn’t matter if every man, woman and child are being diagnosed with some abstract disorder that they don’t really have, just so long as they swallow a couple of psychotropics everyday. It doesn’t matter if their brains are re-wired, leading to a psychotic break and suicide… or perhaps a demonic trip to the local elementary school.

     It doesn’t matter if the gullible, uneducated, uninformed masses of American parents are told by some clown that their 3-year old has Bipolar and ADHD and must take an anti-depressant, a mood stabilizer, an anti-psychotic, a benzodiazepine and a stimulant in order to have a good life.

     It doesn’t matter that our children are then over-medicated by said parents and, hey, what do you know, the kid doesn’t wake up for school Monday morning. We just killed another 3-year old.

     Now, I know his or her future may be somewhat bleak anyway considering they will inherit a bankrupt government with somewhere between 20 to100 trillion dollars in national debt, well over 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities, and about a quadrillion dollars in highly leveraged, about-to-explode OTC derivatives, but hey, what does everybody say we leave the kids out of it.

     Cool?

God, please show the Establishment puppets the error of their ways…

One of Seven Billion

     Guess what? I am just one of seven billion people who all feel the same things and go through the same things. My human experience in no more novel than anybody else’s.

     My pain is no more excruciating. My depression is no more brutal. My addiction and alcoholism is no tougher. My anxiety, insecurity and self-consciousness are no more agonizing. My life problems are no harder. My relationships, jobs, finances are no more complicated. My thoughts, emotions and feelings are no more unique. My challenges, both internal and external, are no more difficult.

     My life takes place in the same human body and the same human mind as everybody else’s. There’s nothing special about me. How do we addicts become so narcissistic as to assume we are somehow different from everybody else?

     Trust me, we’re not. We just think we are. We think nobody in the world really knows what it’s like to be us, to feel the way we do, to think the way we do, to suffer the way we do. In fact, the only thing that distinguishes us at all is our degree of narcissism.

     So whether we are alcoholics, addicts, or just plain mentally ill, it’s good to look in the mirror at least once a day to affirm:

     You aren’t different. You aren’t special. You aren’t a victim. You don’t have it particularly tough in life. You don’t have problems that no one else has. You don’t have a harder life than others. You aren’t smarter than others. You aren’t more talented than others. The world doesn’t owe you anything. Nobody owes you anything. The only difference between you and other people your age is that you still haven’t grown up. You don’t realize that nobody else is responsible for your circumstances. You don’t realize that nobody else is responsible for the way you feel. You don’t realize that life isn’t about you feeling good all of the time.

     Guess what? There are seven billion of us. So stop whining and get to work…

God, help me to get outside of myself and remember that I am just one of seven billion…