HAMSTERS & HEROIN: Not all junkies are purse-snatching grandmother-killing psychos. I'm keeping this blog to bear witness to that fact.

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DIARY OF A SLOWLY RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICT

I used to take heroin at every opportunity, for over 10 years, now I just take methadone which supposedly "stabilizes" me though I feel more destabilized than ever before despite having been relatively well behaved since late November/early December 2010... and VERY ANGRY about this when I let it get to me so I try not to.

I was told by a mental health nurse that my heroin addiction was "self medication" for a mood disorder that has recently become severe enough to cause psychotic episodes. As well as methadone I take antipsychotics daily. Despite my problems I consider myself a very sane person. My priority is to attain stability. I go to Narcotics Anonymous because I "want what they have" ~ Serenity.

My old blog used to say "candid confessions of a heroin and crack cocaine addict" how come that one comes up when I google "heroin blog" and not this one. THIS IS MY BLOG. I don't flatter myself that every reader knows everything about me and follows closely every single word every day which is why I repeat myself. Most of that is for your benefit not mine.

This is my own private diary, my journal. It is aimed at impressing no-one. It is kept for my own benefit to show where I have been and hopefully to put off somebody somewhere from ever getting into the awful mess I did and still cannot crawl out of. Despite no drugs. I still drink, I'm currently working on reducing my alcohol intake to zero.

If you have something to say you are welcome to comment. Frankness I can handle. Timewasters should try their own suggestions on themselves before wasting time thinking of ME.

PS After years of waxing and waning "mental" symptoms that made me think I had depression and possibly mild bipolar I now have found out I'm schizoaffective. My mood has been constantly "cycling" since December 2010. Mostly towards mania (an excited non-druggy "high"). For me, schizoaffective means bipolar with (sometimes severe)
mania and flashes of depression (occasionally severe) with bits of schizophrenia chucked on top. You could see it as bipolar manic-depression with sparkly knobs on ... I'm on antipsychotic pills but currently no mood stabilizer. I quite enjoy being a bit manic it gives the feelings of confidence and excitement people say they use cocaine for. But this is natural and it's free, so I don't see my "illness" as a downer. It does, however, make life exceedingly hard to engage with...

PPS The "elevated mood" is long gone. Now I'm depressed. Forget any ideas of "happiness" I have given up heroin and want OFF methadone as quick as humanly possible. I'm fed up of being a drug addict. Sick to death of it. I wanna be CLEAN!!!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Positive and Negative Symptoms

IS IT BAD for my cactus to live by the window?

I wanted him to get early morning dew ~ the condensation from the window. But won't this give the poor swine frostbite? The poor thing is recovering slowly from his spikey false flower wounds.

He has scabbing around the dots at the top of his trunks where the "floral toothpicks" skewered cruelly in. I have the tiny trotterdonkey fake flowers on my Boogie Nights DVD. The staves are covered in dried dark green cactus-scabbing-juice where hte evil florists pricked them nastily in. I have named the Cactus Kenny.

As we speak, Kenny is still on Donkey Ward in the Cactus Hospital. When he gets better he will be transferred to Horse prior to discharge. If he gets worse and the withered top banana spreads to other bananas causing a Withering Disease, he will get emergency therapy on Ass Ward. When he does make a full recovery he's still due to come in for outpatients appointments at Clopper House, our state of the art Cactus and Succulent Aftercare Building.

Because I am a schizoaffective schizophrenic I have a follow-up appointment on Thursday to be queried and probed to see how mad I am. Dr McGuinness, the Psychiatrist who tells me not to drink (wah wah!) has passed me along to a home help team thing where I get tested to see how schizo I am. Plus how affective.

My affect has actually gone to normal. I know they probably all think I'm hypomanic when in fact I'm NORMAL but that's the thing about psychiatry ~ there is no "normal". I'm secretly hoping to go a bit hypomanic because an "attack" of hypomania feels "like free coke" ~ of the sparkly variety (sparkly and white not sparkling and black!!) Did you iknow btw, that individuals in the 3rd world think Coca Cola's ickky because it's fizzy and BLACK as you'd think no "natural" drink would be... This is actually counterintuitive as Coke's formulation has barely changed in over 100 years and its ingredients are indeed 100% natural!

Anyway I'm quite OK today and very glad of it.

The mood has gone UP to normal.

I perused some fascinating books earlier in the public library, including one by a woman who was a GP who got so depressed she actually had to go for psychosurgery, which is the modern-day counterpart (involving a tiny tiny degree of actual surgery, compared to the old technique, which basically involved shearing the brain in half) ~~ to lobotomy.

I once saw a TV documentary on modern-day psychosurgery which is only performed on sufferers of treatment-resistant depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Which fascainted me, because after I got depressed in childhood, the symptoms faded into OCD.

Two bipolar sufferers who had been stuck in depression for over a decade apiece ~ and a lady who couldn't stop counting backwards, she had OCD so badly... all three had precisely the same brain operation. And in all three cases precisely the same area of brain tissue was lasered.

They had this operation and every one of them got better. One of the bipolars had to come back for more, but he was fine afterwards and back doing his art. Brain operations for depression. How amazing is that!

*******


4pm and I've just finished a sinkfull of clothes washing. I am fully into keeping clothes clean myself.

Deshane, my care coordination type person says I have low self-care. That's why he wants me moving into a mental health house.

It makes me feel weird knowing people ~ Professionals ~ sit about talking about me as having mental health problems. What I had called Plain Old Laziness is what Naomi, the Dual Diagnosis Drugs and Mental Health Lady calls "negative symptoms".

Negative Symptoms are what you do get in schizoaffective and don't get in bipolar (despite the name).

Negative Symptoms means you keep yourself to yourself, avoiding others; it means you feel flat, even when not clinically depressed; and that you just cannot get yourself together. Naomi says it's this that keeps me "ill" even when I feel relatively fine. And no medication can treat it. The positive symptoms of Hearing Voices, rapid mood swings and paranoia have mostly gone. I did get some really weird abstract thoughts in my head in a bush this morning (where I was going for a wee). Most of the Positive Symptoms have been banished by risperidone, but the Negative ones remain...

... So that's what I'm fighting against. Even when not depressed I have these things that are symptoms but they don't "feel" like them. They are called Negative or Deficit Symptoms because they mean something isn't there that should be there, as opposed to a Positive Symptom like a delusion or a hallucination, which is something that is there that "shouldn't be". So I'm fighting against this feeling of apathy which is a part of this illness. I don't know whether I'll actually beat it, but I'm trying.

Well I have to go now. I jotted most of this in my notebook earlier, so I hope my half hour is long enough to clatter it into the "system".

Kenny the Cactus passes on his finest regards to you all ...

(Can anybody tell me what species of Banana Cactus he might be ..?)

SEE YERS ALL LATER! :-)

4 comments:

bugerlugs63 said...

hi
I have not commented for a while as i also have no broadband, we had a limited 3 gb a onth free off gov. but have contd 2 exceed it so they stopped it, my clever son has found a way back on but have to sit on stairs and my back is broken!
Hope Kenny recovering well.poor sod x
Anchovy only had 3 pups and i a bit concerned as their noses seem very red, carrot nose?
i need to visit few sites and check it out or wait and see? i also now being referred again to psych. as mood down and staying pretty much down. They first gotta check if its hormonal or mental (not so simple in us women) as I said before i so used to mood swings being part of other stuff (womens stuff;-))that I not
sure what is what. blood test will tell.Must go as back in agony. love to U & Kenny, hope u back soon.
x

Sarcastic Bastard said...

I have mild OCD, but if I couldn't stop myself from counting backwards, I'd kill myself.

Love you, Gleds!

SB

Gledwood said...

SB: no have the operation!

BUGGERLUGZ: if they ALL have red noses maybe they're normal. As long as they're not all sniffly...

... if you have a one-month mood cycle maybe it is hormonal, who knows? I have the appt tomorrow so wish me luck and good luck at yours!

Syd said...

Nice that you have the cactus. They don't need much water. Maybe once a week and they do like sun.

I WANT OFF METHADONE AS QUICK AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!

METHADONE ~ A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH







Heroin Shortage: News

If you are looking for the British Heroin Drought post, click here; the latest word is in the comments.







Christiane F

"Wir, Kinder vom Bahnhoff Zoo" by "Christiane F", memoir of a teenage heroin addict and prostitute, was a massive bestseller in Europe and is now a set text in German schools. Bahnhoff Zoo was, until recently, Berlin's central railway station. A kind of equivalent (in more ways than one) to London's King's Cross... Of course my local library doesn't have it. So I'm going to have to order it through a bookshop and plough through the text in German. I asked my druggieworker Maple Syrup, who is Italiana how she learned English and she said reading books is the best way. CHRISTIANE F: TRAILER You can watch the entire 120-min movie in 12 parts at my Random blog. Every section EXCEPT part one is subtitled in English (sorry: but if you skip past you still get the gist) ~ to watch it all click HERE.

To See Gledwood's Entire Blog...

DID you find my blog via a Google or other search? Are you stuck on a post dated some time ago? Do you want to read Gledwood Volume 2 right from "the top" ~ ie from today?
If so click here and you'll get to the most recent post immediately!

Drugs Videos

Most of these come from my Random blog, which is an electronic scrapbook of stuff I thought I might like to view at some time or other. For those who want to view stuff on drugs I've collected the very best links here. Unless otherwise stated these are full-length features, usually an hour or more.

If you have a slow connexion and are unused to viewing multiscreen films on Youtube here's what to do: click the first one and play on mute, stopping and starting as it does. Then, when it's done, click on Repeat Play and you get the full entertainment without interruption. While you watch screen one, do the same to screens 2, 3 and so on. So as each bit finishes, the next part's ready and waiting.

Mexican Black Tar Heroin: "Dark End"

Khun Sa, whose name meant Prince Prosperous, had been, before his death in the mid 2000s, the world's biggest dealer in China White Heroin: "Lord of the Golden Triangle"

In-depth portrait of the Afghan heroin trade at its very height. Includes heroin-lab bust. "Afghanistan's Fateful Harvest"

Classic miniseries whose title became a catchphrase for the misery of life in East Asian prison. Nicole Kidman plays a privileged middle-class girl set up to mule heroin through Thai customs with the inevitable consequences. This is so long it had to be posted in two parts. "Bangkok Hilton 1" (first 2 hours or so); "Bangkok Hilton 2" (last couple of hours).

Short film: from tapwater-clear H4 in the USA to murky black Afghan brown in Norway: "Heroin Addicts Speak"

Before his untimely death this guy kept a video diary. Here's the hour-long highlights as broadcast on BBC TV: "Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict". Thanks to Noah for the original link.

Some of the most entertaining scenes from Britain's top soap (as much for the poor research as anything else). Not even Phil Mitchell would go from nought to multi-hundred pound binges this fast: "Phil Mitchell on Crack" (just over 5 minutes).

Scientist lady shows us how to cook up gear: "How Much Citric?" Lucky cow: her brown is 70% purity! Oddly we never see her actually do her hit... maybe she got camera shy...

And lastly:

German documentary following a life from teenage addiction to untimely death before the age of 30. The decline in this girl's appearance is truly shocking. "Süchtig: Protokoll einer Hilflosigkeit". Sorry no subtitles; this is here for anyone learning German who's after practice material a little more gripping than Lindenstraße!































Nosey Quiz! Have you ever heard voices when you weren't high on drugs?

Manic Magic

Manic Magic

Gledwood Volume 2: A Heroin Addict's Blog

Copyright 2011 by Gledwood