stMarkus

Louis immerses himself in the world of Ohio's state psychiatric hospitals, meeting patients who have committed crimes - at times horrifically violent - while in the grip of severe mental illness. They have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered by the courts to secure psychiatric facilities to receive the treatment that it is hoped will, one day, lead to their reintegration back into society. In the second episode of this two-part series, Louis spends time with patients whose personalities are so intertwined with their illness that it makes them more difficult to treat. In doing so, he examines the grey area between criminal actions and medical symptoms, and investigates how we define insanity. Part 1 [BBC] Part 2 [BBC] [FDR topic on part 1] Use Hola plugin to access links from UK servers.

Link? Nvm, found it [link]. It makes me cringe that Dayna would expose her children to this kind of toxicity. Uhghghg it's even worse than I expected, I can hardly watch. Ditto.

Thanks for the suggestion, I am very interested in this. I like the views of R.D. Laing on schizophrenia and other explicitly unintelligible behavior patterns. He takes the route of semantic/behavioral/cognitive analysis of the patients past life and childhood from the perspective of the self. Take for example a person claiming to be Jesus or Napoleon or what have you. How would that come to be? Say that as a child that person is denied the realization of the self by subtle and incessant suggestions to embody their parents' phantasy. In plain language that would mean to the child: "You can be no one but whom I tell you to be! You are what I say you are!". The parents' phantasy is eventually seamlessly accepted and everything appears well until the child (or adolescent usually) starts feeling the unreality of their phantasy-self. Now to escape the pain of that unreality they instinctively rebel with the original situation that was created for them by the parents. But since their whole self is built on the idea that "I am whomever my parents want me to be," they change that into "I am whomever I want to be" in an act of instinctual rebellion. In this the original self is never acknowledged; instead the parents' phantasy is exchanged for the child's phantasy: "I can be whomever anyone tells me to be but I was always a slave and now I'm free so I can be whomever I want to be i.e. Napoleon, Jesus, etc." In that way the parents' destructive phantasy is turned into the child's unintelligible behavior that is labelled as mentally ill and "treated" appropriately. The process is also compounded by the child's effort to break away from the phantasy which is a collective process within the whole family. Hence, if the child attempts to break the phantasy, all the other participants perceive that as threat to their own reality and vehemently disregard and attack the emerging real self of the child. Thus adding to the confusion and unreality of the child's sense of his self. In Laing's books there are many real life examples of patients with serious schizophrenic symptoms who's evolution into insanity is paralleled with cogent analysis of their childhood, parents etc. The conclusions seem to lead very logically to behavioral and metaphysical reasons instead of any neurological impairment. This also seems to apply in the situations of this documentary and probably most similar situations.

http://www.alluc.com/l/Louis-Theroux-By-Reason-Of-Insanity-S01E01-x264-C4TV/zbbeu7d3 Highly recommend this as it is interesting and insightful as Theroux's documentaries usually are plus it deals with mental illness. Of course there is the general idea of heavy medication that is put forward as a cure for their "illness" and pain of childhood trauma is sadly and expectedly left entirely undiscussed. As a specific example, there was a man who had killed his father, whom he believed had sexually abused him and Theroux or the psychiatrist don't seem even slightly interested whether the father had actually done it. Instead Theroux keeps asking the patient questions like "Do you/did you love your father". I'm sure he could never prove that his father raped him as he was thirtysomething when he killed him but I kept imagining some analogous situation where in a documentary the interviewer keeps implying to a rape victim who had killed their assailant that they should have instead loved their rapist. How sick would that be?

The scientific paper Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe conclusively shows the presence of unignited aluminothermic explosives in dust samples from the Twin Towers, whose chemical signature matches previously documented aluminothermic residues found in the same dust samples. More great articles, research regarding thermite and WTC: Link.

An ex adult film star, a 12 year old girl and a 22 year old who yearns for "normal" private parts are chronicled in this thought provoking doc about how porn, social media and pop culture affect women and girls. [imdb link] Highly recommend this doc if only to see how the highly intelligent 12 old girl gets sucked in to the peer-oriented culture of slutiness, social media, sex etc as she starts going through puberty.

Apart from the virginity aspect a call in show very related to your situation Link. First 52 minutes of it.

Do you feel like you are not able to form any new relationships to break the isolation? Have you had any bad experiences with people (parents, siblings, peers etc) that would make it hard for you to relate to people? I’m getting the feeling someone has indicated to you somehow that you are unworthy to enjoy life so now that is all you’re feeling as you are alone and unable as of now to relate to new people. There’s not much to go on as you were brief and it might be a million different things but I’ll assume for now that this has more to do with what you may have experienced in the past. The pain you are feeling, could it be a response to your effort to change your life, to find new friends, to seek freedom, happiness? Have you ever experienced someone indicating that you are not worthy of those things, that instead you need them to tell you what you are and what you are worth? Understanding how present suffering has its roots in unprocessed pain from the past can be a start for eventually achieving freedom. Myself and the whole community would very much like to help you and I think you could help us help you by elaborating on your situation more.

I would humbly suggest you explore the more sinister sides of yourself that got you into this relationship. Reading through your post I got the impression that this happened to you despite your best efforts and I see you take the moral high ground by being someone who "has done nothing but hurt him". This seems to strip you of much responsibility which I think you`re very capable of having since you`re obviously not lacking on intelligence. Hence acknowledging all the responsibility you might have had in this would definitely mean you taking a dive into your dark side. So the part where you say "Everything that I began to value in him seems to have drained from him in my eyes, the moment he had any hesitations about being with me." Implies to me you have some kind of a mechanism in you that uses other people as a tool to prop up your feeling of self-worth. You associate your affiliation with him as a way to make him lovable for you. I know it might sound over-complicating this but by deeply analyzing these topics complicated things become really easy to understand. Anyway you view yourself as a successful, lovable person and rightly so I believe but there seems to some lack in self-worth as you seek a relationship with someone who has these deep problems that you described. Why not woo someone as virtuous and worthy of love as yourself? But you didn’t, you found yourself with this flawed person whom you wanted to improve. There must have been a part of you that felt you deserved better, someone that was actually worthy of your love. This feeling could have been very strong but even stronger are the defense mechanisms that were set up somewhere within your previous relationships (of course this is a reference to your parents or siblings). Thus you find yourself in this relationship and certain parts of you feel incapable of openly expressing their desire to find someone more worthy of you. The psychological defense mechanisms are so strong that they even make you feel that you actually love him and that there isn’t a slightest reason for you to fight. Thus the deeper parts of you that feel incapable of explicitly expressing their needs ("We need someone who can love us back, who is truly virtuous etc.") start to express their needs in more implicit ways. For example you ascribe as one of the lovable qualities of him that he is associated with you? So he`s a tool for expressing your sense of grandiosity? I`m not judging or anything this might have been one of the mechanisms you have developed of making someone not worthy of your love seem like they actually are worthy. A way of making yourself love someone you actually don’t. Has this happened before in your life? You say you had a great dad but he was always busy and he hit you regularly? Did you really love him or have you possibly developed a defense mechanism of some kind that deludes you into loving someone whom the deepest, most wonderful parts of your soul don`t really love? You say your dad was deeply religious. Could have this brought about some form of forced piety, admiration or love? These are some of the questions I would ask. By doing this kind of analysis you uncover the ways that might not be conscious for you in which you orchestrate much of the mechanisms of your relationships. Yet these are not opportunities for self-hate or regret or developing further defense mechanisms. They are opportunities for wonderful self-discoveries, for getting to know parts of yourself that might have gone through serious traumas and unimaginable suffering but rediscovering them and finding they are still alive and just want to be free and happy can be a glorious humbling experience. You might discover that these darker parts of you that have orchestrated many of your past miserable experiences don`t really want to have a part in creating all this misery but they are forced to do so. They have been forced to do so in a situation where they are abandoned, unheard, forced into silence and almost suffocated with infinitely complicated defense mechanisms. Have you ever felt unable to express some parts of you? How do you think you would try to express yourself in a hopeless situation? Wouldn’t you perhaps try to sabotage the whole situation you are in just so you could be heard? This kind of compartmentalization can very easily happen during a person`s childhood and backfire later on in unintelligible nefarious ways. Does this feel familiar in any way? Does asking yourself these questions bring up any emotions? What do you feel introspecting about your relationship with this gentleman? Therefore I would suggest trying to find the hidden ways you might have been responsible in the buildup of the relationship. I see your unintentional unwillingness to take on some of the responsibility as a defense mechanism that perhaps conceals the darker parts of you. The parts that I’m sure will have all the answers you need to move on with your life towards true happiness. Thanks for your post and if you find any of this helpful, let me know.

@Baakpoon I left 3 years ago but I'm still financially dependent on my parents and they use this power to humiliate and control me. I feel helplessly dependent on them because making money and being independent is too frightening for me at the moment. The world seems like a frightening place, where I wouldn’t last a moment, where no one would find any use for me. My mother definitely trained me to be entirely dependent on her so she would feel that someone needed her. I feel that it’s impossible for me to be independent, like I’m hopelessly tied to my mother, who treats like crap. It’s like the situation in the movie 127 hours, where the guy gets stuck under a rock and has to cut off his arm in order to free himself and escape his death. I certainly feel like I’m dying in this complete mental dependency on my parents and especially my mother and cutting off this tie feels like I have to cut off a part of my body. This is probably a classic example of a depressed and lonely single mother, who is not able to accept her son’s independence and so destroys his enthusiasm to explore the world by himself. In the beginning of my puberty I tried to distance from my mother and that made her crazy, she’s like the overly attached girlfriend. So I learned that trying to be independent would make my mother lose her affection for me; by becoming independent I would also be alone and no one would love me. This is like a big knife entering my heart every time I try to be a separate person, to be free, to be happy. I wonder if they would also want to make a movie about me. It wouldn’t be as tense as 127 hours but…. ah forget it.

All this theory is turning my mind into shit. I’d rather stay with self-knowledge for now.

I have recently started reeling that I’ve lived most of my life up to this point as someone who is not really me and who has over time taken almost complete control over my being. I have grown to hate life, people and the world because there is this wall between me and the world that prevents me from ever experiencing anything outside of my head. Recently I have started exerting effort to return back to what I really am and what I really feel and I try to remove this wall from between me and the world. However it’s terribly frightening to expose myself to the world, because I have built this wall to protect myself from an unbearable and dangerous world. In my efforts to expose myself amongst people I am filled with rage that was supposed to be a reaction to how my parents treated me when I was a child. I feel that I am stuck in this rage just as I was when I was a child, because I was not allowed to experience my anger in a healthy way. So I am either stuck in this rage or I feel myself sinking back into myself, where I am surrounded by a wall of fake personality in complete isolation from the world. Does this kind of situation seem anything similar to yours? God damn, I feel myself controlled by a fake personality right now, it’s like I don’t even exist, like I don’t have needs, preferences, emotions. I just feel too scared to come out of that shell, it’s like a prison of the mind. Fuck it seems so hopeless. The world outside of me doesn’t exist for me, only the world inside my head that is filled with alters that I have created to protect myself from my family. They constantly attack and berate me; they force me to be on a constant lookout for dangers, and behave in silly and humiliating ways. In other words they create my childhood world inside my head and this is the hell I’m constantly living in.

I may be having some similar problems but I don’t think there’s any kind of advice except pursuing self-knowledge that would be helpful to me. Are you happy now? If you really got over your problems without a therapist then that's remarkable in my opinion.

Every time I return home from a day of school or a day of being amongst people I feel a great relief like I can finally relax. The burden that I’ve been carrying all day can now be set aside but I still don’t feel free of it because I know that I really have no control over when and where I need to carry this unbearable weight. Just a single look from someone reminds me that I need to pretend and hide myself and live a life that is not my own. I need to denounce everything I value and become and empty, boring, meaningless and shallow person. I feel yet again all the humiliations from my brother, father, mother and grandmother saying what a worthless and meaningless person I am and in this moment that is exactly what I am. This feeling of not being in control over who I am and seeing myself turn into some kind of a hideous parody of what I want to be makes me want to scratch my eyes out and scream. The fear of expressing myself, of letting my real self be seen by everyone around me feels to me like definite suicide and so I am paralyzed by fear when I feel the urge to express myself. Instead of letting my thoughts and feelings be manifested in the world around me, I feel myself sinking deeper and deeper into isolation. I feel weak, hurt, scared and overpowered by the fake personality that always automatically assumes control over my being when I’m too scared of the world. I feel the fake personality mocking me and saying to me that I don’t deserve to live and the isolation, pain and suffering is exactly what I deserve. It fills me with intense, acute pain to see myself be controlled my something so corrupt and evil, to know that I’m hopelessly imprisoned in the same cage with that evil, corrupt, broken, dead being. These beings symbolize my family members who have managed to crawl into the deepest parts of myself and now I feel that they will forever be a part of me, that I can never be free of them. At the same time I see happy and free people around me, who know nothing about the suffering and imprisonment that is part of my life and I feel even more intensely the unfairness and tragedy of my situation when comparing it to everyone else’s. My choices right now seem to be to either keep pretending and hiding the reality of my life and history or entering into the world that I decided to escape from a long time ago. This is a world of anger, pain, loneliness, isolation, sense of worthlessness and total lack of control and of never-ending hopelessness. By now I’m so sick of pretending that I would do anything to find something real in myself and even if the real part of me is comprised of the aforementioned feelings, I will take it gladly. Therefore I choose suffering. I choose it because I believe it will lead me to something good, to love, to happiness, to satisfaction and enjoyment, whereas pretending will only lead to a life that is not mine and that is not a life at all. Sadly I still don’t feel any control over my life, like I’m living my own life, I still feel hopelessly chained to what my family needed me to be, I feel stuck. There seems to be nothing but hate, suffering and ridicule in the world for me and it feels utterly hopeless to chase any kind of happiness, empathy and understanding but I do want those things and there’s nothing else I want to do, but chase after them. I don’t really care whether they exist or not, I just know that I will never accept the fact that I will not find love in my life and I’ll always be working hard to achieve it. I think it lessens the feeling of isolation when I write something and upload it on the internet, where people might read it and possibly relate to it.

Hello everyone! I am 21 years old, I live and study in Estonia and I haven’t really posted anything yet. I’ve been listening to FDR for about a year. Anyway lately I have been trying to get in touch with my real feelings and needs and it’s starting to feel hopeless again. All I feel is tremendous rage and fear that is preventing me from really experiencing or expressing that rage. Along with the rage and the fear comes very deep sadness and hopelessness. The sadness seems to be about my feeling that I can never be who I want to be and because of that I can never feel love or happiness or any real enjoyment. That makes me feel like I’m dead, completely empty, like everything is meaningless. On top of all that I’ve created a fake personality inside myself that tries to appear happy and satisfied despite all the rage and sadness and who pretends to like people who treat me like crap and don’t care about me at all. It seems that whenever I feel too scared and ashamed to express my real emotions, the fake personality assumes control over myself automatically. That makes me feel like I have no control over who I am and in those moments I become that shallow and fake person that I created long ago to protect myself. At the moment I am trying prevent the fake personality from taking over but I find it very hard to be the real me because in doing that all I feel is rage, fear and shame. I have tried being in that state for two days in my school and I found it impossible to talk to anyone or feel anything besides the aforementioned emotions. In this state I am too scared to talk to anyone because I don’t want to talk to them as my fake personality and yet I feel too scared to express my real self. That leaves me only one option which is to not talk to anyone and isolate myself from all people. My fear of expressing my real self seems to come from the feeling that I mustn’t let anyone notice my real self, my real emotions. In my desire to express my real self I feel very vulnerable and tremendously afraid about the fact that someone might notice me expressing myself. This fear seems to apply more to women but it is definitely very strong on most other people as well. This feeling of fear and shame in expressing my real self prevents me from establishing any kind of relationships that would give me satisfaction. In fact it pretty much cuts me off from all the rest of the people in the world. It seems that the only way I can socialize with others is by maintaining the fake personality that has been my façade for most of my life so far. Nevertheless I’d rather be cut off from all people and face the pain than try to hide the pain with that hideous personality. So essentially my experience in trying to take part in social life is me constantly scanning all the people around me in fear that they might catch me in expressing my real self and during this time I will have assumed this personality that has nothing to do with who I really am. In this case I would feel empty, unsatisfied and bored so I would just avoid people, because they seem unable to offer anything of value to me. In another case where I would actually try to express myself, I would feel overwhelmed by fear and stress; there would be physical symptoms of GAS syndrome like fast and shallow breathing and I would generally feel that I’m going to die if I actually express myself. In this case it would feel impossible and hopeless to try to get any enjoyment out of socializing with people and I would be, yet again, inclined to isolate myself. All this, of course, is a good indication of what my childhood was like. I have an older brother (4 years older than me), who tortured and dominated me until I was in my teens. When I wasn’t entirely a child anymore the physical abuse and domination from my brother ended but he seemed to compensate all that by humiliating me in other ways. I was always the weak and vulnerable one in my relationship with my brother, his domination over me was relentless and without mercy and over time I’m sure that I created a personality in myself that would invite less attack from him. That personality would be helpless, stupid, ignorant, incapable of anger, accepting of all unfair criticism and insults without proper emotional reaction and always scanning my brother’s emotional state. By scanning him constantly for emotional feedback I would know what kind of behavior to manifest in the coming moments to suit my brother’s needs and so to protect myself. This is exactly what I do in the midst of people right now. Of course I never got to be the real me with my brother, because that way I would be in his mercy without all those intricate protection mechanisms that were made to protect me from my brother in the first place. And whad’ya know, I can’t be myself with all the other people as well! There seeeeeeems to be a connection here. Maybe. Besides I notice myself all too often assuming this helpless, stupid and ignorant character that I’ve grown to hate and feel ashamed about. But the most disconcerting is definitely the feeling of being unworthy feelings like love, happiness, enjoyment, self-worth or the ability to take pride in my achievements and myself. As you can imagine my brother wasn’t a fucked up person just because he decided it would be great fun to be that way. Our father was violent, uncontrollable, full of rage and an extremely scary person in general. My brother happened to be the target of my father’s rage, humiliation and violence and it seems that my brother tried to pass all that pain onto me. I know that my brother was very scared of my father and he felt completely helpless in his power. It makes me cry when I think about situations, when we were children and I saw my brother’s face light up with fear and helplessness when my father started harassing him. This reminds me that my brother was once entirely good and could have loved me like I needed him to. Instead he became a bad and corrupted person and eventually resorted to drugs and alcohol and became a failure in life, at least in my eyes. It just breaks my heart to think about the potential for love and happiness he had as a child and how I saw him slowly destroyed by my father’s rage and how my mother completely neglected him by not making him or me feel safe from his father. The lack of love, the feeling of helplessness, fear, loneliness and isolation throughout my childhood just tears me to pieces. I can recall situations when my father was yelling at my mother and me and my brother ganged up on our father and told him to shut up and it actually worked, because it made him too ashamed to continue harassing our mother. So it seems that we tried to battle the corruption and hate coming from our parents but gradually it still managed to eat its way into our hearts and now my brother seems to be permanently corrupted and I have lost all capability to open myself to people. There was also my mother who seems to have become deeply ingrained in the deepest parts of my being, like the parasite that she was. I seem to have formed a deep attachment to her that started in my younger years, when I was too young to really remember anything. I feel that she completely ignored my need for her to reflect back my affection towards her, in fact she ignored my feelings entirely, because she was incapable of empathy towards me. But she did use my affection for her as a tool to get me hopelessly dependent on her. That way I would be entirely at her power, I would do anything she said, because she made me believe that my love for her was reciprocal. I was her little doll that she used to make her feel less miserable and lonely since her husband was a retard and treated her like shit. I still managed to be rather happy and sociable until my teen years where everything turned to shit and started feeling depressed and worthless. Then my parents broke up when I was about 13-14yo and I lived with my father for a little while, because I had grown too sick of my mother, but soon I grew sick of my father too and I started living with my mother. Now I was alone with her and she treated me like I was nothing so I always felt terribly alone and worthless with her. By that age I had no friends and I had isolated myself from people so the only person I had some kind of relationship with was my mother. I always felt I was dependent on her and I expected her to love me, understand me and cure me of my problems and unhappiness. She appears to be a huge factor in why I feel the need to conceal my real self from people. I never managed to let go of the attachment to her so I kept opening myself to her after my puberty despite the fact that he treated me like I was worthless and disposable. Somewhere along the way I assumed a fake personality to suit her needs and this personality has been with me ever since. The problem is that by conning me into believing that she loved me, I always tried to open myself to her completely, which means that it was practically impossible to create a fake personality that she wouldn’t notice was fake. This led to a kind of mind control over me- she needed me to be a person that suited her and every little thing or thought that wasn’t suitable for her was instantly noticed ridiculed. I feel that she had immense power over me, she could manipulate me with just a single look, her control over me was just so horrifyingly deep and it still is. I could hide nothing from her that she wouldn’t notice and either discard or use if it suited her needs. It feels like she raped my mind and I definitely still feel the effects of it very intensely. Part of it is a never-ending deep pain, like a part of me is missing, like I’m broken, incomplete and that makes me feel terribly alone and always needing something that is never there. I don’t completely understand it all yet but I know that she used me as completely as is humanly possible and threw me away when she felt she didn’t need me anymore. I know I feel totally worthless, I’m unable to love or open myself to anyone and I’m totally stuck in feelings of anger, shame, worthlessness and fear. I’ve also seen a dream about her where she rapes me. Other dreams where usually about my family members trying to kill me. Another woman in my family was my grandmother from my mother’s side of the family, who probably had some effect on me. She also used my trust, affection and vulnerability towards my mother and her to hurt and manipulate me and also to render all my attempts to stand up to her inert. She humiliated and belittled me and she was extremely skilled in doing that. I thought she loved me like my mother and so I opened myself to her as much as I could, which means that she also assumed unlimited control over me and eventually almost nothing that happened in my mind was left unnoticed by her. That way when living in my fake personality to suit her needs, I always felt like an all-seeing eye was on me constantly scanning me whether I indeed was that good little dog that I needed to be for her. Like I said this situation manifests in my life with women, where I am afraid to express my true emotions and I feel like nothing that happens in my mind is hidden from women. I feel like women would hate and humiliate my true self and since they seem to see everything that happens in my mind I can’t even look into their eyes without feeling like I’m going to die or something. I feel that they know everything I think and since I think mainly about how to express my true self, it feels like they automatically hate and despise me. This kind of situation creates enormous stress, fear and shame in me and it feels hopeless and impossible to try to establish a relationship with a worthwhile woman. As I am beginning to try to establish my real personality I seem to be stuck in anger that I was never allowed to feel towards my family members. I just don’t really know how to go forward from here, what to do with my anger and progress is starting to feel hopeless. The anger feels never-ending, because it seems as though I can never feel enough anger that would adequately express my emotions for what my family did to me. The hurt seems so big that I will be stuck in anger forever. Also I definitely haven’t really understood the meaning of everything they did to me and that could prevent me from properly experiencing the anger. It would be helpful if you told me about your examples of similar situations and your experience in dealing with being stuck in negative emotions.