blood nerve and bone

My system is traumagenic; formed due to childhood trauma. I've long wanted to write about antipsychiatry and mad liberation specifically relating to plurality and systemhood. There's only one way to do that - defend endogenic systems. I hope after this you'll defend them with me, reader. Let me set the scene first. Plurality, or systemhood, refers to an experience where one person has more than one separate identity, sense of self, memory, et cetera; as if more than one person occupies one body. This, generally, is said to come about due to dissociation during childhood trauma. Endogenic systems (shorthand 'endos') are plural systems which did not form due to trauma. There are many ways they could form, but childhood trauma isn't one of them. There's long been infighting in system communities where traumagenic systems ('people with DID/OSDD') see endogenic systems as faking a serious illness, as taking away resources from 'real systems,' and ...

I always found it a bit strange how, when talking love and relationships, most of my friends decided that love (platonic) and love (romantic) were entirely separate ideas. To me, love is just friendship with an extra step or two. Love is something that makes me want to snuggle up to my best friend after a long day. Love is something that makes a friendship that little bit extra special. But, that's about it. When I love someone, they're my best friend who I have cuteness aggression for and who I want to spoil. My friends always described love differently - something entirely new, something overwhelming, something with physical flutters in your stomach. I never really understood that. I put it down to being autistic for a long time, and honestly, maybe it just is. I don't know! All I know is that I don't really know what they're talking about. On the outside, it looks a lot like I know what they're talking about. I have a wonderful girlfriend, who I love in my wa...

  i dont know that i even need to say this, i think its a known fact, but im in an international long distance relationship! my girlfriend lives in northern poland, and i split my time between west wales and northern england. i thought you could come travel with me from northern england over to northern poland, dear reader, for a little ditl of being in a long distance relationship. 8am: wake-up call after 3 airport related stress dreams is a great start! 9:20am: i arrive at the train station in my home village after stopping for a bottle of lucozade on the way. the village chickens are screaming good morning, and its an oddly sunny day. i think its a good omen! 9:30am: first train of the day! i met a man, james, who has worked with greenpeace since 1974 to stop whaling! he was telling me all about his base jumping in australia, all about sharks, showed me his helmet, the whole lot. usually im not one for talking to a stranger, but honestly, this guy was sick as fuck. good luck to ...

 Madness is a funny thing. It's a horror movie trope, a psychiatric label, a societal label. To me, though, it's an identity in and of itself. The first Mad moment in my life that I can recall is my first memory of plurality. I was eight years old, barely, and had just been informed I was going to move over 4000 miles later that same week, and I vividly remember telling my mum in the kitchen that I "didn't feel like myself." I knew who I felt like, but somehow, I knew it was Mad to admit to, and so I didn't admit.  I was a Mad teenager, too. I would (allegedly) go into piles of old prescription drugs laying around my house and take whatever I could find that'd get me a buzz. It became routine. I'd self-harm with anything I could get my hands on, so long as it wasn't obvious, because again, I knew it was Mad. No one had taught me explicitly anything of the concept of Madness, yet I knew Mad was bad. In my late teens and early twenties, I really went...

 Throughout my years in education, I was surprisingly good at the whole thing. I wasn't the typical "good at school" nerd, for lack of a better way to explain the type of person I'm thinking of. I got myself in trouble, I did stupid teenager shit more than a lot of my peers did, and school didn't come naturally to me, except English and geography. But, I left school with all 7s to 9s in my GCSEs. I went on to do two A-Levels and an equivalent course, and left again with 3 A-stars. I say it to brag only a tiny bit, but I fear I might have lost a lot of my bragging rights. My first adventure with university was actually very different to my current one - and out of character for myself now. I studied BSc Psych at a university in north-east England for a year. I did really well, considering my circumstances of undiagnosed bipolar disorder and alcoholism I didn't particularly feel like addressing. I have the certificate - a Certificate of Higher Education in Psych...

Let’s just cut to it. I’m bipolar and also anti-psychiatry, and it’s not as contradictory as it sounds. I actually fell into anti-psychiatry before I fell into my diagnosis. My dive into anti-psychiatry started after my dad’s needless death at the hands of the psych system. I started to question its efficacy, its usefulness, its ethics. How come it’s okay to lock someone up when they haven’t committed a crime? Is that supposed to make a sad, angry person less sad and angry? It hasn’t sat right with me for many years. It was only a year or so ago that I got the language for this, and fleshed my view out. For an overview, my view is this: You can’t ever prove anything scientific in the psych world. My A-Level Psychology teacher used to phrase this as “you can’t test everyone who has ever lived, is living, or will ever live, so you can never prove anything.” It literally isn’t possible, yet we act like it is. Why do we act like we have a concrete, scientific answer (like low serotonin ca...

  I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know what I hope to achieve by talking about this again. I think I just hope it brings me some sort of peace of mind, or maybe, this time, I’ll have some sort of revelation and my grief will be fixed. Maybe all the pieces will finally slot together. I doubt it. There’s no nice way to say this. You can try – passed away, left this life, whatever. No. None of it conveys what I want it to. My dad killed himself when I was sixteen. Died by suicide, whatever, that works, too. It was February 20th 2020, which was a Thursday during the half-term holidays. I’ve talked about the day it happened before. What’s the point in doing it again? All it does for me is remind me how it felt to feel my life shatter when the police came knocking. It’s strange, because it wasn’t like I wanted my dad in my life. I just didn’t expect this to be the way he left it. That’s a lie. It was expected. My dad was ill for a good part of my life. I don’t like the psychiat...