10/07/08 04:33 [Thursday]

The structures of thought I am speaking of were maintained over a long period in the above cases and in similar cases, that is they were capable of being set aside for the purpose of leading a day-to-day life but were always ‘in the back’ of the mind and resumable in the more detailed form as occasion allowed. This was a prerequisite to sorting out such involved structures into the coherence (that is, having entire internal consistency within themselves) which made them acceptable on public presentation and indeed gives confidence they are ‘correct’ that is that, insofar as they are supposed to, they correspond with reality.

These structures of thought were embodied in neural structures in the brains of their creators of the type I have recently been mooting as depending on neural-loop style arrangements. This type of semi-permanent memory is used to set up internal models for such purposes as (in adolescence) answering examination questions and (in more practical life) maintaining an internal plan of one’s location as one moves about even in unknown territory. The arrangements which permit their maintenance depend on transmission across synapses of dopamine as I know because they are defeated in myself when I am given dopamine-blocking drugs. For example I completely lose my ability to maintain the internal plan of my geographical location at any time I am in less familiar territory.

Needless to say these neural structures are located in the frontal brain in man and come into use only from the time of adolescence. They are present in only a rudimentary form if at all in other animals (for example it is possible apes have them in rudimentary form). It seems to me that the functions called seriatim functions must correspond with those implemented using these structures of resumable semi-permanently remembered internally envisaged models of parts of the world (or as-if of parts of the world, in that the models can be used for abstract purposes such as in mathematics and chess when they are divorced from immediate connection with any structures in the physical universe, of tangible matter or time or space).

Experiments with rats trained in conventional mazes which were then converted to mazes of canals having to be swum convinced theoreticians who had previously hypothesised that learning a maze involved merely learning a sequence of muscular operations which got the animal from start to finish, that it was not so and that the rats in fact must have an internal model of spatial arrangements. Needless to say rats achieve this without a seriatim process.

An adult human being could learn a maze - walked or swum - much faster, the reason being he could set up an internal model ‘by an effort of will’, a model which (consisting of the type of neural structure spoken of above) could be discarded afterwards if no longer needed. Giving dopamine-blocking drugs would interfere with this ability, reducing the human to needing like the rat to practise sufficiently often over a sufficient period, to embody the knowledge of the maze in synapses which had permanently adapted to form a model of that specific maze.

Needless to say I strive my best to evade being given dopamine-blocking drugs because I dislike in the extreme having the ability taken from me to form such semi-permanent models of the world and its parts. I find it a matter for bitter regret that developers of these drugs, as well as those prescribing them in practice, have not taken sufficient care to determine adequately this effect they have. I find it very difficult to believe that anyone treated with these drugs will not suffer the debilitation I am speaking of. In practical terms the debilitation I have suffered of this nature over the years, given the unusual circumstances of the foisting on me of the drugs, has led to my not being employed in any capacity I would otherwise have been fit for and might have benefited from (as well as benefiting the economy). I regret the legal framework which permits such drugs to be compelled on people in disregard of their attempts to complain when they cannot understand (I myself have not until now) what the nature is of the debilitation they have to complain about. I regret any legal framework allowing people’s freedom to be taken from them without absolute need.

Includes cost to the economy

In the 1990s I had a number of pen-pals who I had got in contact with through the NSF (the National Schizophrenia Fellowship, by the old name it was then called). Possibly one of these, or possibly it was someone who came on TV with his story, explained what had happened to him: he had developed schizophrenia (according to doctors) and had been treated with antischizophrenic drugs. His mental organisation had become totally disrupted: whereas before he had been (I think) a Civil Servant, or anyway in some position needing ability to think clearly, afterwards he was totally incompetent. He himself believed the mental disorganisation was due to the illness, and presumably those treating him did.
I must be about the only person treated with such drugs for schizophrenia (or as if for schizophrenia) who already knew a good deal about the illness. I knew from the start that my mental disorganisation was nothing to do with symptomatology of schizophrenia, and in fact I knew the truth, that it was due to the drugs. How it comes that no one else has understood this I find difficult to unravel. Those testing the drugs seemingly don’t measure the right things, in measuring the effects. They don’t measure the effect on ‘mental organisation’: for example (to harp on again) Armond said that antischizophrenic drugs do not affect intelligence, so I think testers of these drugs must test the effect on IQ and conclude that the drugs don’t affect mental capacity because they don’t have a measurable effect on IQ.
The effect they have (on mental organisation) is as I have said comparable to the effect of lobotomoy. I saw a TV programme about a man in the United States who had had a brain injury destroying part of his prefrontal cortex. Whereas before he had been a high-powered legal executive, afterwards he could only hold down a job as a petrol-pump attendant. This is what happened to me given these drugs: beforehand I was highly regarded as a trainee accountant (for example at Round Oak Steelworks, and for a while at Dudley Council) but afterwards I was what I would call totally incompetent.
It may be - and I hope it is - that someone sensible recently, because of events, has cottoned on to these allegations I make about the effects of antischizophrenic drugs. If they have cottoned on and find a way of testing the truth of what I say (which, if I have been adequately observed, will already be well on the way to being done for my own case) they will discover it is true, and that giving these drugs incautiously results not only in horror for the treated individuals (which they naturally blame on their illness) but deprives the economy of useful workers.

Trespass

When I was a kid I had all sorts of ideas for gadgets, for example making use of transmission of information over a distance. I saw a TV programme about the invention of telegraph and - whether specifically suggested by the programme I can’t remember - afterwards made a telegraph of my own by winding a solenoid myself using ordinary low-voltage wire (probably supplied with a Philips Electronic Engineer kit I had) and arranging it to swing a needle to indicate dot or dash (or whatever) as in Morse code. Today I have been using my versatile intelligence (as I might call it) for practical purposes - security of our home - rather than (yesterday) writing intellectual (the word I use) or philosophical stuff. I mention the telegraph I made as a kid because nowadays wireless devices are easily affordable, and I am pleased with what I have achieved this morning along the lines of transmitting information from home to a handset I shall carry about with me when I am out and about.
Having achieved pretty competent security, my self-questioning asks the question, does anyone genuinely ever enter our home illicitly, or rather: have they in the past? On one occasion, in January 2007, we returned to the bungalow here in Kingswinford having been away in Nottinghamshire and there was slight damage in the bathroom. It seems very likely someone had entered, and at the time the only alternative I could envisage was that there had been a minor earth tremor. We called in the police but they simply took note, and took note (as we ourselves did not till later, and phoning the police found they had been aware of it) that the breakage of the bathroom window was the internal pane of the double-glazing (arguing the damage was indeed done from inside).
It seems not unlikely (for example because of the legal position that an Englishman’s home is his castle, which would require some special permission presumably in each case, for ‘illicit’ entry) that the advantage taken of us is more by way of (something like) drugging us into a heavy sleep and then walking in through open doors (to drug water stored in bottles in the kitchen, in January this year for example). The law might well regard that as little more serious than trespass.
I have to say the law is wrong and should be changed. The hurt in such a case lies in the drugging. Even being drugged with something like a ‘Mickey Finn’ (something almost certainly perpetratred on us) gives rise to headache in the hangover. And if it is used to further drug us, with drugs which are seriously offensive - say putting antischizophrenic drugs into bottles of water - the offence is severe. The hurt does not so much consist in physical ‘side-effects’ (like headache) as in the effect on one’s mind (certainly speaking for myself). Medical people are hopeless at measuring such hurt - consider for example Armond’s assertion that antischizophrenic drugs ‘do not affect the intelligence’ as though all mental capacity is measurable as ‘intelligence’ or its absence - and it is wrong to allow psychiatrists who are especially foolish medical people to prescribe mind-altering drugs with so little limitation or control on them.

Here's one I did yesterday

The drugs affecting me earlier - probably a mixture of stimulant and ASM [antischizophrenic medication] - have worn off (which for one thing implies the pleasing fact that they did not derive from the bread which I can continue to eat with impunity: probably they derived from the remains of the Sara Lee gateau, as I suspected at one stage this afternoon as well as a day or two back of the gateau then) and my mind is almost as it was when I was in my late teens, certainly as regards activity level (or ‘activation level’) although I suppose I must admit I have more experiential memories so that the subject-matter thrown around in the activity is more varied, and likely more realistically founded.

Just as at that time as a teenager then, I ask myself - before doing anything much at all, including any writing - what point there is in it? The answer today is differently based from then, as regards writing, because I have a readership. Anyone with a blog can hope for readership, but in my particular case almost certainly a lot of what I put up is read by or on behalf of ‘the Authorities’. I put this forward as the explanation for my relative garrulousness in explaining matters such as I am here in these prefatory paragraphs, which would be different - perhaps non-existent - if I did not have in mind these readers for ‘the Authorities’.

A lot of what occurs to my mind to write, in fact, takes shape as though directed at the readers for ‘the Authorities’, and usually it is complaining about what I suffer, or explaining what it is the Authorities are doing that they shouldn’t be. I conclude that most likely such explanations and complaints aren’t understood although at times I have wondered if they are read at all.

Taking on the theory that from the time I was at Cambridge the Experimenters were intent on tracking through life a person thought liable to develop schizophrenia, and that in 1986 Armond (as one of the Experimenters, or employed by them) genuinely concluded I had developed schizophrenia - not entirely unexpected, as I say - and what has been happening since then is treatment of that supposed schizophrenia, using extraordinary methods including admixed heroin (not unheard of in cases of terminal disease in combination with something like chorpromazine, to give a kind of early death in life before actual death, but made happy - supposedly - by the heroin) and later admixed antidepressants and admixed stimulants (this last virtually unbelievable as countering - almost any scientist would have said so - the dopamine-blocking action of the antipsychotic leaving only side-effects of both drug types with zero benefit), with observation - that is, tracking - continuing.

Because, as I say, much of what I write to ‘the Authorities’ - formerly in letters to what was said to be Caroline’s address in Bristol but where a Water Rate bill I found was addressed to a Mr S Phillips if I remember right (because I was reminded of the actress Sian Phillips) and lately via my website - is not understood at all, I wonder what it’s all about. The conclusion must be - this supported by general evidence of the low intellectual quality of psychiatrists, not least of this being Armond’s failure to correct the mis-spelling of his own address in the Medical Directory I consulted (whether corrected since I do not know) - that the Experiment was a lackadaisical affair from the start and did not ever envisage gathering detailed information of the sort which might interest myself were I engaged in managing such a scheme. The failure of the Experimenters (Armond and others at the outset, I imagine) to take in much detail, let alone understand it, led to the error - quite common in psychiatric diagnosis in Britain, I should think - of giving me disatrously hurtful drugs and ignoring my complaints. I am hopeful that in the present phase more sensible people take cognisance and have ultimate control over the psychiatrists’ leashes (for one thing police officers must be quite aware of the sort of things perpetrated, and if my attempts to ‘publish’ are not stymied politicians too will become aware).

Hence my conclusion now (and, my mind clear of drugs, almost certainly this is the correct conclusion) is that my diagnosis of schizophrenia in 1986 on the evidence of my suicide attempt was a genuine diagnosis, so mistaken because Armond - and British psychiatrists generally - are fools. The treatment I have received in the twenty-odd years since has been based on standard British treatment for schizophrenia (but with the embellishments mentioned: admixed heroin, etc) and has resulted in my having a non-life thought to show typical symptomatology of schizophrenia (that is, British psychiatrists know so little they take the disastrous effects of the drug treatment as symptoms of the illness).

Goodness knows what will happen now but I presume I shall be freed.

¬¬¬

That’s how the ‘prefatory paragraphs’ have turned out, and backtracking, what they were supposed to preface was something to the effect that before I was writing to communicate to anyone - in my notes and diaries around 1972 - some of what I wrote (thinking particularly of notes on the computers I designed) was so complicated that after trying to explain them to my best friend I gave up ever hoping to explain such matters.

As regards what point there is in doing anything, I tend to agree with Sartre (at the end of the book Nausea) that to produce art objects is the way to go, because they are slightly less existent and being less existent in real-time have the hope of enduring forever (or a longish time, anyway: certainly longer than the statue of Ozymandias). With art objects I include scientific theories and mathematical (including computer) models.

Do people honestly not understand what's wrong?

I can’t tell how genuine are the enquiries what it is that’s bad about being given antischizophrenic drugs, in my own experience which is all I can speak of (plus Dawn’s I suppose to a degree). Sometimes the enquiries strike me as near to being cynical ways of getting round my objections, or perhaps objections put forward either on my behalf or on the behalf generally of patients subjected to such drugging, with the intention (this fear is in my mind this morning since the failure of any help from the Drinking Water Inspectorate, meaning I cannot know the circumstances of drugging our water supply and cannot be at all sanguine it will not resume) of continuing by hook or by crook to foist these drugs on me.

The thing is, what I have lately been complaining about I should have complained about before, but was stilled by the drugs given at the time. What I have suffered as a result of perpetrations I am now complaining about range over various types of negative experience including physical hurt, loss or waste of my money and waste of my time and effort. In Bristol police cells in September 2004 I was physically hurt, and while I did complain towards the beginning of 2005 I did not sufficiently pursue the complaint, and (naturally enough) nobody else looked out adequately for me (especially since it was an ‘official body’ sanctioning what it was I was complaining about - over-use of force by a security firm employed by some ‘health authority’ - and that official body or a related official body was the body which would have provided any support to look out for me: just like patients’ advocates for hospitalised mental patients, and even the solicitors patients are provided with, being part of the Mental Health system running the entire show).

I lose money (as one example) from the interference with the postal service, which means I cannot presume as the average citizen can that almost all his letters posted in the ordinary way will be delivered reasonably promptly. I need to pay to record the delivery, at least, so as to be sure the letter has in fact been delivered, and when.

Waste of my time and effort includes inefficient procedures I adopt when my mind is fuddled by drugs, sometimes (especially in the past) leading me to experience severe frustration because nothing I try delivers the required result in anything like the ordinarily acceptable way. And (baffling in the extreme to us non-psychiatrists) these frustrations have been deliberately engineered, presumably (this is all I can guess) to observe the ways I try to get round obstacles. A simple (but frequent) example of this is to be found in my attempts (and Dawn’s since she has joined with me) to use public payphones. It cannot be an ordinary average statistic that everyone who phones BT has to wait half an hour or more for an answer. Such frustrations get exaggerated through (1) fear that the consequences may include further suffering along the lines of detention and drugging; and (2) not having anything else in mind at the same time as an interesting and happy-making diversion (ie if the antischizophrenic drugs cause me at the time to have an almost completely empty mind).

All I can hope is that publicising the ridiculous way I have been treated will make it known and understood by a wide audience, and hope this will deter much in future of the same.