So, you like books?

Recent responses to the blog have been gratifying, so I’m taking a big step and putting another item on the conversational table. If you know me, or know of me through some medium other than this blog, you might know that I am a paid-up paranoid schizophrenic (I hope that the number of junior Kraepelins who have arrived at this conclusion based on the material previously available here is small). I became seriously troubled in the fall of 1999, and was diagnosed with a schizophreniform illness the following spring: in 2001, this was upgraded to full-on schizophrenia, after a court-mandated hospitalization following some foolish behavior on my part. I suppose you might be surprised to hear that someone with this diagnosis has “heard voices” exactly twice and never found them compelling: the primary symptom of my seriously ill years (right up into 2004) was a little more unusual than that.

Under the impression that a philosophy professor of mine had taken an ill-considered “romantic” interest in me, I became convinced that she and people in league with her were trying to communicate with me through the juxtaposition of books left out in libraries and bookstores. The very first time this thought occurred, I was in the Barnes and Noble in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Having been having a stressful time dealing with this woman, and believing that she (or a woman looking exactly like her) had stared me down in the same bookstore some months previously, I was at the bookstore (under the pretense to myself of buying a Karl Marx reader) hoping to meet up with her in a less fraught environment. Entering the philosophy aisle, I saw two books removed from the display and lying in front of the other books on the shelves: Atheism: The Case Against God and a book on the German political theorist Carl Schmitt.

At that moment, I was off. I had expressed an interest in Schmitt to a friend of hers, and the atheism book might be a sign that her Nietzscheanism wasn’t all that anodyne; suddenly I knew, or strongly surmised, that those items had been left there to get my attention. I knew that this wasn’t something that “normal” people did; but she seemed far from normal to me, and if there was even a chance that I would be being harassed in such a fashion, I concluded I was really in for it. Once these kinds of thoughts get started in a susceptible person, they’re hard to uproot, and as the pieces of my life began to fall apart I spent more and more time in bookstores and libraries (first only in Pittsburgh, then later on in Portland as well) looking for ominous signs of this nature. I felt incredibly afraid, and concluded that this was in fact the point of such an exercise: and why, even if such things weren’t going on at a particular time, they could always start up if I attempted to confront my “oppressors”, couldn’t they?

Today, I know it’s an anthropological invariant that people don’t do things like that: nobody in their right mind, no matter how twisted, would waste time and energy on such a practice. So, although I’m generally open to all corrections and criticisms here, I would suggest that stating the obvious (which facts have probably occurred to a severely mentally ill person, without their finding them appropriately compelling) is not necessary. But, having considered it for a long time, I think there may be some value for people in having a venue to find out what the “weirdest of the weird” think, and so I intend to maintain as a sideline explaining and answering questions about the unobvious facets of severe mental illness. There are other things to talk about; in a way, there are only other things to talk about. But I think it’s almost as important to hear about the real mental existence of the afflicted, as to read their slightly tendentious interpretations of philosophical topics; of course, you’re welcome to do neither if you so choose.