Prolific Dreams Of Creative Writings Are Coming To Me With My Creative Process, During My Course At University, Pre- Halloween And On Halloween Morning

Now that I am following at discipline of thought for a creative process in writing at University level, I am now dreaming of my hand writing of stories and articles when I never used to dream much. The course at University has been really good for me in other writings besides my blog. For this reason I have not been making blog entries as much but I figured that I would get this post up for Halloween . My costume for class like suggested for the Halloween class room lecture, is the image in the photo. So I am in this other humourous writing process that takes time away from writing my blog. I have lots of things I want to create out of the process of creativity I have gone through. I am part of another art show at the Musee des Beax Arts de Montreal, the show is in the community hall between MacKay and Crescent Street below Sherbrooke here in Montreal. The Museum is hosting the show of works produced with help of the Museum for Mental Health Services here in Montreal with two Hospitals. I have four pieces of work on display and they are all signed with my pen signature for my art Doc GM. Things are moving along and I must get off to school so Happy Halloween!

Here I am getting back to my blog posting between school work, the creative process course that I am taking at Concordia University here in Montreal, has been so inspirational and has been getting me to read other works of literature that are proving to be most inspirational. I have to put together a portfolio of creative works produced during the semester along with a creative process journal. It all has been a wonderful experience so far, thanks to a resourceful Professor with a poetic flare for giving lectures. I am maintaining a good grade average and proud of the direction I have been lead into with my creative process. It is like I wrote at the beginning of my blog when I started it, there is more to schizophrenia than meets the eye and my Professor seems to be able to draw the very best out of me. Reading creative works of my fellow students has proved to be enlightening on various different aspects of society on the whole. One does not realize how much creative energy is out there that is looking for direction and honing of skills. Morally, it has been fantastic being part of the scholastic system again and my Psychiatrist is proud of me as well, with my mid term evaluation. We are still fence mending our patient/Doctor relationship and she has taken a keen interest in my school work. Over all, the Hospital is proud of their Doctor Goober returning to school and I am proud of the Hospital with bearing with me through my anger and frustration while being a Mental Health Consumer. All Government levels have a responsibility to inject monies into the Mental Health system, may it be through local municipal sponsored programs to the Federal and Provincial Governments making more money available for treatment programs out side of drug therapies. My parents have injected money into my life over the years and they still do with care packages, not all Mental Health Consumers are as fortunate as myself and they depend on Government programs more and more as family resources are not always as resourceful as my own. So may God spare the Mental Health Consumer and may they succeed through the poverty stricken system, as well as I have fared with my own resourceful ways.

The End Of September Has Got Me Sitting Prettier With My Life As I Get In A Healthier Daily Routine

Well here I am finally getting back to writing my blog again, did I ever slack of doing my blog as I was kept busy with other things. With the start of September I began school again at Concordia University here in Montreal. The course I am taking at the moment, is a creative writing course that is keeping motivated and stimulated. It has also proved its self beneficial by giving me my life challenge back. The course has also given me a certain direction in my creative writing and has got me reading other writers to expand my horizons. With getting used to being a student again and getting my home work done, at times I wonder where the time goes, I really feel for students with a full course load. I do have a full slate all the same, with the other activities I have committed myself to.

I attend the Stress Management Group with the Adult Educator at the Hospital on Monday mornings. I really enjoy our Adult Educator, for she puts a lot of effort into her courses and she has a very positive way of dealing with people with her French Canadian background. The group lasts an hour and we review various aspects of how stress is part of our life, for the positive or negative, along with how we deal with these stressors in our daily routine. It gets me interacting with other out patients and I learn different perspectives on my own character that I had not really noticed. After group we have a lunch break, I take my own lunch and indulge in filling my belly and having a cigarette break before the gym class right after lunch. At the beginning of the semester when I met with the Adult Educator, she offered me three groups to be part of, the gym class was one of them. So after lunch between one and two o'clock the Adult Educator make full use of the gymnasium by giving those interested a bit of a physical work out. We start out with simple stretching exercises, along with some crunches and push ups etc. Once we are limbered up some what, we take to jogging around the gym, frontwards, backwards and side ways. At this point with my smoker's lungs, I always take to hacking something up and clearing out my lungs a bit. Once we have done with the jogging exercises we play some babmiton or volleyball, depending on the number of people present for the group. For the last legs of the hour in the gym, I usually set up two exercise mats with a distance between them, and jog back and forth between them while doing more endurance exercises on the mats. By the time I am starting to work up a sweat, the hour is just about over. After the first gym class, I almost completely died the next couple of days. I knew that I was out of shape with week lungs but I never realized how badly out of shape I had become. I do feel energized after the gym class and head off to work afterwards to clean the building where I hold down my part time job. Feeling good after the work out has given me a more positive attitude to doing my job. I have not got a whole to do on the job, just basic cleaning of the building but I just feel a whole better doing it after exercising in the gym for a bit.

I have Tuesdays off and I find myself doing some of my University home work on this day while I have the break. Wednesday morning gets me up and going to my guitar lesson and music group at the Hospital with the Music Therapist. My guitar playing has come a long way as I learn new styles of playing. Recently I have been directing my energy at finger picking on the guitar for I find it relaxing to play with all my stressors I am getting over. With being used to doing things with my fingers as a trades person, finger picking comes easily to me. Last session with the Music Therapist, he had me jamming with him on guitar. There we were, playing away and I was keeping the beat with him while finger picking. I really have to catch up on some guitar playing, during my mini mid life crisis during the summer I really slacked off practicing guitar. Then with the start of University I had no time but I am finally getting into a good healthy routine of balancing my interests that I cover all the necessary ground to get ahead. The Music Group its self proves to be rewarding with some of our musical improvisations we come up with. I usually hold down the beat on the conga, which I am getting pretty handy at. Sometimes I will be creative playing a melody on my mouth recorder as part of an improvisation. The Music Therapist is trying to get me to play more guitar during group and I promised him I would spend more time practicing songs that he leads the group with, Beetle songs are quite popular with us. After the Music Group, I head home to later return to the city core to go to my class at the University come evening time. It makes for a complete day!

It is late by the time I get to bed after getting home from my class and I get to sleep in a bit before getting up to attend the Art Group at the Hospital Thursday afternoon. There are not many people in the group but we are well animated by the Hospital's Adult Educator. I recently have been taking my own art supplies to group and started producing in art, one of my apparitions/hallucinations I had during the summer. The medium I am using to create this piece of art is oil pastel, it is a great medium to learn how to use. While producing the art, we get therapeutic conversation with the Adult Educator and other group members. It is kind of a place where we get to voice our complaints about the mental health system to one another and share the positive and not so pleasant experiences we have gone through. The Adult Educator gets to learn more about a system she has become part of and her sympathetic ear is comforting, sharing experiences with other patients proves rewarding as well for we all help each other with our own personal insight about the mental health system.

Friday is another day off for me but I have no time to slack as I keep my healthy routine going, between University home work and preparing for my Saturday Writer's Group which meets in a Cafe on Saturday afternoon, it keeps me busy. The Writers Group has been good for me with learning how to effectively recite poetry or read a short story so all can here. The feed back and constructive criticism on our work is helpful in guiding our writer's hand. Patrons of the Cafe seem to enjoy hearing our words of creativeness and we are often given positive feed back from strangers who have enjoyed our recital. We are putting together a chap book of some of our creative works and I am eager to have the publication completed. It will be neat to see my pen name in print along side other poets. Going through the motions of putting the chap book together has given me a foundation on how to go about putting out my own chap book with some of my creative writing, it will come in time.

As to my relationship that was falling apart with my Psychiatrist, we are in a bit of fence mending right now. I did have to go see her to continue my follow up, did I ever let her have it from what transpired with me being in her research. I think the whole hospital heard my complaints from her office with how I felt I was being mistreated. I did feel like I was a human Ginni Pig and my own personal needs were over ridden by her drive for her research results. Where the inter muscular medication she had given me, which hampered my sex drive severely and threw me into my mini mid life crisis this past summer, some things have been rectified. I am on the pills again instead of the injections and my manly blessing seems to be as operational it can be for a man my age. (age 47) The Doctor even sent me for a blood test so she could have lab results from a blood test indicating my testosterone level, I think. (What ever gives me my sex drive) Then while waiting around the Hospital hallway for the blood clinic to open up after lunch, I ran into a Psychiatric Nurse I know from way back. He ended up having his lunch standing talking to me in the hallway and he has taken an interest in my case. Apparently he is hooked up with my Doctor now and offered to arrange for me to be able to talk to him in regular sessions about my anger with being a mental health consumer. It should prove to be interesting for apparently he has his Masters in Nursing now, at least I will not be alone with my male aging process! So my Psychiatrist and I are in a stage of her earning my trust again, I do not naturally trust Psychiatrists and having a female Doctor play with my balls through medication levels did not help our patient/Doctor relationship any. The counter balance of possibly having a male Nurse to relate issues to, has given me hope that somehow the system does work for the patient and not just for a pay cheque for Hospital Staff. It is a case of plugging away with sheer determination as a person with schizophrenia, in a system that is not always so pleasant.

Music Therapist Gets Me To Open Up In Group, About Resentment Towards Psychiatrists, Through Studying The Song "Walls" By Tom Petty

Two weeks ago my Music Therapist at the Hospital got his group to listen as he played and sang Tom Petty's song "Walls", then we had to draw a quick sketch of a wall we felt we had in front of us to discuss in group. We then got to pick the type of music and instruments the group would play, for our musical improvisation on our individual wall that was in front of us. My therapy session on the subject continues through my blog! If I had got $1000.00 each time I have said "the fucking Psychiatrist" or heard another patient say this phrase, I would be a very rich man. So they are going to get one of my literary beatings in this posting, they are tuff enough to take it because they know they are the "bad person" with being the one that prescribes the medication and the detested side effects. First and for most, when I opened up in group, other members voiced similar feeling that I had about the "Block Heads" that are the corner stone of our treatment. A very common hurt we out patients have, is feeling like just another medicare number, sometimes we feel like we are not being treated like a real person. One present issue I have with feeling like this is when my half hour is up, I am then pushed out the door. On many occasions I have left the Psychiatrist's office feeling depressed, angry or dam right frustrated with them. Many a time over the years I left the session in one of these states of mind from the Psychiatrist putting me there, then headed to my Psychologists office at the local bar to talk to a barmaid because of having no one else. At times I feel the Psychiatrist is not listening, an example of this is from dealings with my present research Psychiatrist. She wanted to put me on inter muscular injects in her comparative study instead of pills. I was not keen on this idea from the very beginning, one reason was having lots of experience with loosing my orgasm on inter muscular medication and I expressed this concern to her. In time she got her way with me and I started on the injections. As she played around with the injection levels, (slowly increasing them and decreasing the pills), I first lost my orgasm, then lost my juice before the drugs made me impetent. I was taken off the injections, it took me talking to the bottom of my beer bottle and leaving telephone messages to her Research Assistant insulting the Doctor like a drunken sailor for her to get the message. She was deaf to my complaints of the sexual dysfunction as they slowly came upon me, it drove me into my mini mid life crisis this past summer. Another complaint I have is the fact that the Psychiatrist calls me delusional for having hallucinations, like I say to her, "strap the Pope to a bed and pump him full of drugs for believing in the Holy Ghost". Psychiatrists should really consider getting cross trained in philosophy and theology, maybe they would learn to deal with us "schizos" in a less insulting manner. A lot of persons with schizophrenia are philosophers and baby theologians when dealing with their apparitions/hallucinations, when we bring up these subjects in the clinical setting, it is like the Doctor of medical science can not relate to these subjects. They deem us delusional when we try and discuss these subjects and how it relates to our personal life. It totally royally pisses me off!!!! I never have a problem talking about these subjects to "normal people". Even trying to get a Psychiatrist to talk about my apparitions/hallucinations is impossible, never mind me insisting that my Psychiatrist try to find the time to read my blog to get insight into the "grey matter of my brain". The TV or mini cartoon version of the Psychiatrist taking notes while one is laying on the Psychiatrist couch and talking does not happen, last time I saw a Psychiatrist's couch it was being used as a filing cabinet. One time in Hospital when the Psychiatrist was trying to figure me out with out ever really talking to me, he wanted to change my diagnosis to bi-polar, I quickly responded, "I built my life as a "schizo", you are not ruining that too by making me bi-polar". He still kept pumping full of drugs but kept the diagnosis as a person with schizophrenia. I once had a Psychiatrist say to me when I was reaching out to him about my apparitions/hallucinations, "Oh yea, you like playing with your hallucinations" while he was punching in medication levels into his calculator. It is like I need therapy now from having dealings with Psychiatrists and I do get get it from various sources besides the Music Therapist. A Psychiatric Nurse that has known me for years, can be more therapeutic than my Psychiatrist, when the Nurse gives me a enriching conversation dealing with psychiatry on part of her lunch hour and she is no longer a Nurse of mine. When the Psychiatrist made me impetent this summer, my conversational therapy over it, came from the Animatrise that leads the Hospital art group. I was alone with it all until the start of September when she came back to work and she admits she is not an Therapist but an Educator. The Psychiatric Nurse from the art group has proven to be therapeutic in conversation compared to my Psychiatrist as well, laughter therapy about old times is one example along with referring to me as an example to other patients, she also has know me since the beginning of treatment here in Montreal. The Social Worker's telephone answering machine has been very therapeutic over the years, these are Professionals that get a lot of the brunt of patient's frustrations. I remember when I was on the Court Ordered injections, my Social Worker at the time, always got a earful of anger from me on her answering machine. I remember saying to her once on the phone in anger, "your medication does not exactly make us fuck like rabbits", she was a silent listener at the other end of the phone. Powerless Student Nurses have been very therapeutic when I was a inpatient, they were always eager listeners with questions and I could always get a air hug out of them! Professors at Concordia University past and present, proved to be therapeutic in theology and philosophy with course formats and reading material, I have probably spent more time in a Psychiatrist's office getting damaged than I have spent in a class room at the University. Many a time since I started going to Java U coffee shop at Guy metro station, which is close to the Hospital and University, the waitress' have been therapeutic through treating me like a real person, some of them know I am a person with schizophrenia through me giving them my promotional bookmarks containing my web addresses, the waitress' make for good laughter therapists as well! So the Psychiatrist got a much deserved beating today. I do have my morning manly blessing back and have a full sack of juice again, along with orgasms due to forgetting to take my medication a fair bit during my mini mid life crisis this summer. The Psychiatric System has change over the years but still has much to be desired and it needs fresh blood to make psychiatry at better place for the Mental Health Consumer.

Update Sept 21 2007: Was at the the Montreal General Hospital's Emergence yesterday after my Hospital Art Group, getting my prescription re-newed and taking steps to get a new Psychiatrist. I was interviewed by two young Psychiatrists in training who re-instilled my faith in the system. I actually felt really good heading home and I am left feeling empowered today, it is a wonderful feeling. I even got to discuss one of my apparitions/hallucinations and how I dealt with it, thus giving the Doctors insight into my thinking process. When I corrected one of the Doctors regarding the use of the word " schizophrenic", he started using the phrase "....as a person with schizophrenia", which honestly made me feel good. Keep up the good work guys, you two are going to make a difference in the system for the better, nothing like fresh blood! I am now looking forward to the challenge of dealing with a new Psychiatrist and I hope it will be as positive as yesterday's experience with Psychiatrists.