Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Erotomania

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Erotomania is a type of delusional disorder where the affected person believes that another person is in love with him or her. This belief is usually applied to someone with higher status or a famous person, but can also be applied to a complete stranger. Erotomanic delusions often occur in patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, but can also occur during a manic episode in the context of bipolar I disorder.[1] During an erotomanic delusion, the patient believes that a secret admirer is declaring his or her affection for the patient, often by special glances, signals, telepathy, or messages through the media. Usually the patient then returns the perceived affection by means of letters, phone calls, gifts, and visits to the unwitting recipient. Even though these advances are unexpected and often unwanted, any denial of affection by the object of this delusional love is dismissed by the patient as a ploy to conceal the forbidden love from the rest of the world.[2]
Erotomania is also called de Clérambault's syndrome, after French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934), who published a comprehensive review paper on the subject (Les Psychoses Passionnelles) in 1921. Erotomania should not be confused with obsessive love or obsession with unrequited love, neither of which involves delusion.

Presentation[edit]

The core symptom of the disorder is that the sufferer holds an unshakable belief that another person is secretly in love with them. In some cases, the sufferer may believe several people at once are "secret admirers". The sufferer may also experience other types of delusions concurrently with erotomania, such as delusions of reference, wherein the perceived admirer secretly communicates his or her love by subtle methods such as body posture, arrangement of household objects, and other seemingly innocuous acts (or, if the person is a public figure, through clues in the media). Erotomanic delusions are typically found as the primary symptom of a delusional disorder or in the context of schizophrenia and may be treated with atypical antipsychotics.[citation needed]

Well-known cases[edit]

In his paper that described the syndrome, de Clérambault referenced a patient he had counselled who was obsessed with British monarch George V.[3] She had stood outside Buckingham Palace for hours at a time, believing that the king was communicating his desire for her by moving the curtains.[3][4]
Parallels were drawn between this and a 2011 case where the body of a homeless American man was found on a secluded island within sight of Buckingham Palace. The man had sent hundreds of "strange and offensive" packages to Queen Elizabeth II over the previous 15 years.[4]
The assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr. has been reported to have been driven by an erotomanic fixation on Jodie Foster, whom Hinckley was attempting to impress.[3]
Late night TV entertainer David Letterman and former astronaut Story Musgrave were both stalked by Margaret Mary Ray, who suffered from erotomania.[5][6]

History[edit]


M.S.P. "Female patient suffering from erotomania," from Alexander Morison's The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases
Early references to the condition can be found in the work of HippocratesErasistratusPlutarch and Galen.[citation needed] In the psychiatric literature it was first referred to in 1623 in a treatise by Jacques Ferrand (Maladie d'amour ou Mélancolie érotique) and has been variously called, "erotic paranoia" and "erotic self-referent delusions" until the common usage of the terms erotomania and de Clérambault's syndrome.
G. E. Berrios and N. Kennedy outlined in 'Erotomania: a conceptual history' (2002)[7] several periods of history through which the concept of erotomania has changed considerably:
  • Classical times – early eighteenth century: General disease caused by unrequited love
  • Early eighteenth – beginning nineteenth century: Practice of excess physical love (akin to nymphomania or satyriasis)
  • Early nineteenth century – beginning twentieth century: Unrequited love as a form of mental disease
  • Early twentieth century – present: Delusional belief of "being loved by someone else" 
             Yikes! Not all people with erotomania look disheveled like the woman pictured above. LOL



***So I learned a new word today, Erotomania. I may or may not have this. I am not a stalker and certainly, not violent. I am just a confused individual. My medication helps me a lot though. Strangely, my psychiatrist never diagnosed me with this. Perhaps she did not want to embarrass me or maybe she was too embarrassed to discuss this herself. She did try to convince me that Keith was happily married because they were splashing their love all over Facebook. Realistically, the best thing to do and was forget about him and quit following them on Facebook. She was right about that. I do think I have a subtle form of erotomania. Now I have to talk to my doctor and she if she agrees. She may not be the best psychiatrist for me. I mean, one of her specialties is death of a pet. Death of a pet? I have schizophrenia, a major mental illness. I do not know if I could find a better, local doctor who specializes in schizophrenia because there are not enough schizophrenics here to carry a practice. Roughly 1% of the population has schizophrenia.

Click below to read more about Erotomania.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319145.php


Another look for women with Erotomania. Just kidding.

Sunday, March 25, 2018

Unsane
Unsane (film).png
Theatrical release poster
Directed bySteven Soderbergh
Produced byJoseph Malloch
Written by
Starring
Music byThomas Newman
CinematographySteven Soderbergh
(as Peter Andrews)
Edited bySteven Soderbergh
(as Mary Ann Bernard)
Production
companies
Distributed by
Release date
  • February 21, 2018(Berlinale)
  • March 23, 2018 (United States)
Running time
98 minutes[1]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$1.5 million[2]
Box office$4.7 million[3]
Unsane is a 2018 American psychological horror-thriller film shot, edited, and directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer. The film stars Claire FoyJoshua LeonardJay PharoahJuno TempleAimee Mullins, and Amy Irving, and follows a young businesswoman who ends up in a mental institution after she is stalked by her former hospice patient's son. The film was shot entirely on the iPhone 7 Plus.
Unsane had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 21, 2018, and was theatrically released in the United States on March 23, 2018, by Bleecker Street and Soderbergh's production companyFingerprint Releasing.

Premise[edit]

Sawyer Valentini, a bright but troubled business woman, begins to find out that her past is catching up to her when a former hospice patient's son starts to stalk her. To ensure her safety, Sawyer signs up for a support group that helps people tackle stalking problems. Unfortunately, Sawyer finds out that she has involuntarily placed herself in a mental institution with strict rules that there should be no contact with the outside world. Alone and trapped against her will, Sawyer must fight her own demons within the twisted asylum as the visions of her stalker begin to take over.














***I have yet to see this movie. Many schizophrenics do not want to watch Unsane because it highlights the abuses that have happened and continue to happen in mental hospitals. The movie could be a trigger to us or simply upset us. The screenwriter, James Greer, does not have a mental illness so what does he know? I wonder if screenwriters eavesdrop and frequent websites and blogs like mine to pick our brains. I am putting my story out there and I would like credit for MY STORY. In my story, the protagonist is flawed but likeable. At least the mentally ill character is not the villain in my story, unlike so many other stories. The villains are my old classmate/stalker, his wife, and their creepy friends who practice Santeria!  In Unsane, the protagonist has no contact with the outside world. When I was in a mental institution (5150) I still could have visitors and phone calls. Unsane has a few fantasy elements, or out of touch with reality elements, for sure.

There is a scene in Unsane where the protagonist is strip searched in the hospital. This is actually accurate. My clothes were taken from me, including my underwire bra, for "safety reasons." I was given a hospital gown to wear. Because I have a major mental illness and was off my medication, I was also physically held down to get Abilify Maintena shots in my rear end. They did not trust me to swallow my medication.  I was not even resisting and they physically restrained me. This was executed by a male doctor, of course. That is a God-awful memory that I will never forget.  One thing that Unsane misrepresents is that psychiatrists in real life have a confidentiality agreement with their patients. It is unethical to reveal what is said in therapy. A psychiatrist could lose their license for this. 

I also believed I had a stalker, at the time of my hospitalization. I believed the voices I was hearing in the hospital were from my stalker's wife/enemies hexing me though. I knew my stalker was not in the hospital with me, which was a relief of sorts. To this day, I believe that I am being stalked by two different men. I do not feel flattered by it though. They just drive through my neighborhood and look at me. The two stalkers are very different. One stalker I have feelings for. The other one is a classic, creepy, mean stalker. He is an old acquaintance. I can't say that I have strong enough feelings to hate him but I am not attracted to him or flattered by him. He is also married, with a child. So, basically, he is a classic creep.

**I know it sounds like I am giving Keith a pass for stalking. I understand the seriousness of stalking and I am not using my mental illness as a pass for taking this subject lightly. I do not know what to call what these men are doing to me. I have no real case against them either. Unfortunately they are free to drive past me and my children, if that is all they are doing. I am sorry if the way I am speaking about stalking offends you.

*** I will think of a better word for what I am experiencing if I have to make it up myself. I changed my mind. I hate Tony Meister (the mean stalker) and his clueless wife for spying on me and trying to compare his life to mine. Get over me and stay out of San Diego! I have a hard time understanding why anyone's wife would let their husband travel to the neighborhood of a woman who they used to crush on to spy on them. It makes no sense to me. In 1998, Tony Meister raped me, right before I left LA to move to San Diego. He was never my boyfriend so I never had sex with him prior to that. He was the worst male I ever hung out with. He was always so mean to me. He was not a gentleman. He never took me out on a date but he would always try to hook up with me. I thought we were friends and then he raped me. I am scared of him. Why is he driving around my neighborhood? I saw him just yesterday in Leucadia. He is such a complete idiot. 






paradox







NOUN

  • 1A seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which when investigated may prove to be well founded or true.
    ‘the uncertainty principle leads to all sorts of paradoxes, like the particles being in two places at once’
I heard this word used in a sentence today and realized that I did not know the definition of it, so I looked it up. After reading the definition of paradox, I concluded that my psychosis will always be a paradox to me. I added Keith as a friend on Facebook. I contacted him and started making posts about him. This had to have irked his wife. I know this irked his wife. I believe her and her friends started hexing me shortly afterwards. I believe in magic and magic has never been disproven to me.  No one can disprove magic. You may say this notion is absurd because I was already diagnosed schizoaffective, so I would hear voices anyway.  How could I ever prove that the voices in my head were from these individuals? All I can say is we will never know because no one bothered to investigate. I stay out of Santa Cruz and away from Keith. I have not contacted him since 2014 and the voices have since dissipated. I am grateful for that, even if it is only because my hexers finally grew up and got busy with their own lives. My account of events will always remain a paradox to me. 

A paradox that makes me question my delusion is wondering how Keith could be in Carlsbad when he is a busy doctor with a wife in Santa Cruz. Every time I go on Facebook, I see pictures of him grinning with his wife in Santa Cruz. Is he happily married and loving life in Santa Cruz or not? He is the crazy one in this scenario though! 

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

It must be a sign or something. I see the middle finger, do you? LOL Wait...which finger was Jerry Garcia missing???
I also see a penis and two faces looking at each other in the top right corner.




Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Telepathy, direct transference of thought from one person (sender or agent) to another (receiver or percipient) without using the usual sensory channels of communication, hence a form of extrasensory perception (ESP)

Many Schizophrenic/Schizoaffective people, including myself, believe in telepathy. When I am psychotic and hearing voices, I am convinced people are sending me messages telepathically. When I had a major psychotic break in 2014, I tried to escape the voices by putting distance between myself and the voices. Unfortunately, this does not work for SZ/SZA people. We cannot walk away from our voices, because they are in our head. I remember flying from California to New York, to escape my voices. Being psychotic and unmedicated, I had a hellish flight. The stress of flying only made my voices worse. I could not get away from my voices. I usually paced around, which I thought was helping me get away from the voices. On a plane, you are confined to your seat, so I was stuck for over 5 hours listening to cruel and antagonizing voices. I worried that my seat neighbor knew I was ill, because I talked to myself on and off throughout the flight. Despite having a great conversation with Axl Rose and possibly convincing him to reunite the band, flying across the country was a complete and agonizing waste of time. Someone recently asked me if traveling to another country would help him escape his voices. I tried the same thing and it doesn't work.

Thursday, March 8, 2018

When I was deep in psychosis, it felt like I was repeating the same day over and over again. I heard the same words day after day after day. I was in hell. I could relate to this movie, in a lot of ways. Now that I am feeling better, I can watch Groundhog Day and laugh. 


Phil Connors[edit]


This is one time where televisionreally fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.

What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?

There is something so familiarabout this. Do you ever have déjà vu?

wake up every day, right here, right in Punxsutawney, and it's always February 2nd, and there's nothing I can do about it.
  • This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.
  • I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank Piña Coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn't I get that day over and over and over?
  • Once again, the eyes of the nation have turned here to this... tiny village in western Pennsylvania. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There is no way this winter is ever going to end, as long as this groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don't see any other way out. He's got to be stopped. And I have to stop him.
  • You want a prediction about the weather, you're asking the wrong Phil. I'll give you a winter prediction: It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

Rita Hanson[edit]
  • Sometimes I wish I had a thousand lifetimes. I don't know, Phil. Maybe it's not a curse. Just depends on how you look at it.

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Kevin Love, Forward / Cleveland Cavaliers - The Players' Tribune
On November 5th, right after halftime against the Hawks, I had a panic attack.
It came out of nowhere. I’d never had one before. I didn’t even know if they were real. But it was real — as real as a broken hand or a sprained ankle. Since that day, almost everything about the way I think about my mental health has changed.

“I DID ONE SEEMINGLY LITTLE THING THAT TURNED OUT TO BE A BIG THING.”

Kevin Love discusses his decision to seek help after suffering from a panic attack. (0:54)

I’ve never been comfortable sharing much about myself. I turned 29 in September and for pretty much 29 years of my life I have been protective about anything and everything in my inner life. I was comfortable talking about basketball — but that came natural. It was much harder to share personal stuff, and looking back now I know I could have really benefited from having someone to talk to over the years. But I didn’t share — not to my family, not to my best friends, not in public. Today, I’ve realized I need to change that. I want to share some of my thoughts about my panic attack and what’s happened since. If you’re suffering silently like I was, then you know how it can feel like nobody really gets it. Partly, I want to do it for me, but mostly, I want to do it because people don’t talk about mental health enough. And men and boys are probably the farthest behind.
I know it from experience. Growing up, you figure out really quickly how a boy is supposed to act. You learn what it takes to “be a man.” It’s like a playbook: Be strong. Don’t talk about your feelings. Get through it on your own. So for 29 years of my life, I followed that playbook. And look, I’m probably not telling you anything new here. These values about men and toughness are so ordinary that they’re everywhere … and invisible at the same time, surrounding us like air or water. They’re a lot like depression or anxiety in that way.
So for 29 years, I thought about mental health as someone else’s problem. Sure, I knew on some level that some people benefited from asking for help or opening up. I just never thought it was for me. To me, it was form of weakness that could derail my success in sports or make me seem weird or different.
Then came the panic attack.
It happened during a game.
It was November 5th, two months and three days after I turned 29. We were at home against the Hawks — 10th game of the season. A perfect storm of things was about to collide. I was stressed about issues I’d been having with my family. I wasn’t sleeping well. On the court, I think the expectations for the season, combined with our 4–5 start, were weighing on me.
I knew something was wrong almost right after tip-off.
I was winded within the first few possessions. That was strange. And my game was just off. I played 15 minutes of the first half and made one basket and two free throws.
After halftime, it all hit the fan. Coach Lue called a timeout in the third quarter. When I got to the bench, I felt my heart racing faster than usual. Then I was having trouble catching my breath. It’s hard to describe, but everything was spinning, like my brain was trying to climb out of my head. The air felt thick and heavy. My mouth was like chalk. I remember our assistant coach yelling something about a defensive set. I nodded, but I didn’t hear much of what he said. By that point, I was freaking out. When I got up to walk out of the huddle, I knew I couldn’t reenter the game — like, literally couldn’t do it physically.
Coach Lue came up to me. I think he could sense something was wrong. I blurted something like, “I’ll be right back,” and I ran back to the locker room. I was running from room to room, like I was looking for something I couldn’t find. Really I was just hoping my heart would stop racing. It was like my body was trying to say to me, You’re about to die. I ended up on the floor in the training room, lying on my back, trying to get enough air to breathe.
The next part was a blur. Someone from the Cavs accompanied me to the Cleveland Clinic. They ran a bunch of tests. Everything seemed to check out, which was a relief. But I remember leaving the hospital thinking, Wait … then what the hell just happened?
I was back for our next game against the Bucks two days later. We won, and I had 32. I remember how relieved I was to be back on the court and feeling more like myself. But I distinctly remember being more relieved than anything that nobody had found out why I had left the game against Atlanta. A few people in the organization knew, sure, but most people didn’t and no one had written about it.
A few more days passed. Things were going great on the court, but something was weighing on me.
Why was I so concerned with people finding out?
It was a wake-up call, that moment. I’d thought the hardest part was over after I had the panic attack. It was the opposite. Now I was left wondering why it happened — and why I didn’t want to talk about it.
Call it a stigma or call it fear or insecurity — you can call it a number of things — but what I was worried about wasn’t just my own inner struggles but how difficult it was to talk about them. I didn’t want people to perceive me as somehow less reliable as a teammate, and it all went back to the playbook I’d learned growing up.
This was new territory for me, and it was pretty confusing. But I was certain about one thing: I couldn’t bury what had happened and try to move forward. As much as part of me wanted to, I couldn’t allow myself to dismiss the panic attack and everything underneath it. I didn’t want to have to deal with everything sometime in the future, when it might be worse. I knew that much.
So I did one seemingly little thing that turned out to be a big thing. The Cavs helped me find a therapist, and I set up an appointment. I gotta stop right here and just say: I’m the last person who’d have thought I’d be seeing a therapist. I remember when I was two or three years into the league, a friend asked me why NBA players didn’t see therapists. I scoffed at the idea. No way any of us is gonna talk to someone. I was 20 or 21 years old, and I’d grown up around basketball. And on basketball teams? Nobody talked about what they were struggling with on the inside. I remember thinking, What are my problems? I’m healthy. I play basketball for a living. What do I have to worry about? I’d never heard of any pro athlete talking about mental health, and I didn’t want to be the only one. I didn’t want to look weak. Honestly, I just didn’t think I needed it. It’s like the playbook said — figure it out on your own, like everyone else around me always had.
But it’s kind of strange when you think about it. In the NBA, you have trained professionals to fine-tune your life in so many areas. Coaches, trainers and nutritionists have had a presence in my life for years. But none of those people could help me in the way I needed when I was lying on the floor struggling to breathe.
Still, I went to my first appointment with the therapist with some skepticism. I had one foot out the door. But he surprised me. For one thing, basketball wasn’t the main focus. He had a sense that the NBA wasn’t the main reason I was there that day, which turned out to be refreshing. Instead, we talked about a range of non-basketball things, and I realized how many issues come from places that you may not realize until you really look into them. I think it’s easy to assume we know ourselves, but once you peel back the layers it’s amazing how much there is to still discover.
Since then, we’ve met up whenever I was back in town, probably a few times each month. One of the biggest breakthroughs happened one day in December when we got to talking about my Grandma Carol. She was the pillar of our family. Growing up, she lived with us, and in a lot of ways she was like another parent to me and my brother and sister. She was the woman who had a shrine to each of her grandkids in her room — pictures, awards, letters pinned up on the wall. And she was someone with simple values that I admired. It was funny, I once gave her a random pair of new Nikes, and she was so blown away that she called me to say thank you a handful of times over the year that followed.
When I made the NBA, she was getting older, and I didn’t see her as often as I used to. During my sixth year with the T-Wolves, Grandma Carol made plans to visit me in Minnesota for Thanksgiving. Then right before the trip, she was hospitalized for an issue with her arteries. She had to cancel her trip. Then her condition got worse quickly, and she fell into a coma. A few days later, she was gone.
I was devastated for a long time. But I hadn’t really ever talked about it. Telling a stranger about my grandma made me see how much pain it was still causing me. Digging into it, I realized that what hurt most was not being able to say a proper goodbye. I’d never had a chance to really grieve, and I felt terrible that I hadn’t been in better touch with her in her last years. But I had buried those emotions since her passing and said to myself, I have to focus on basketball. I’ll deal with it later. Be a man.
The reason I’m telling you about my grandma isn’t really even about her. I still miss her a ton and I’m probably still grieving in a way, but I wanted to share that story because of how eye-opening it was to talk about it. In the short time I’ve been meeting with the therapist, I’ve seen the power of saying things out loud in a setting like that. And it’s not some magical process. It’s terrifying and awkward and hard, at least in my experience so far. I know you don’t just get rid of problems by talking about them, but I’ve learned that over time maybe you can better understand them and make them more manageable. Look, I’m not saying, Everyone go see a therapist. The biggest lesson for me since November wasn’t about a therapist — it was about confronting the fact that I needed help.
One of the reasons I wanted to write this comes from reading DeMar’s comments last week about depression. I’ve played against DeMar for years, but I never could’ve guessed that he was struggling with anything. It really makes you think about how we are all walking around with experiences and struggles — all kinds of things — and we sometimes think we’re the only ones going through them. The reality is that we probably have a lot in common with what our friends and colleagues and neighbors are dealing with. So I’m not saying everyone should share all their deepest secrets — not everything should be public and it’s every person’s choice. But creating a better environment for talking about mental health … that’s where we need to get to.
Because just by sharing what he shared, DeMar probably helped some people — and maybe a lot more people than we know — feel like they aren’t crazy or weird to be struggling with depression. His comments helped take some power away from that stigma, and I think that’s where the hope is.
I want to make it clear that I don’t have things figured out about all of this. I’m just starting to do the hard work of getting to know myself. For 29 years, I avoided that. Now, I’m trying to be truthful with myself. I’m trying to be good to the people in my life. I’m trying to face the uncomfortable stuff in life while also enjoying, and being grateful for, the good stuff. I’m trying to embrace it all, the good, bad and ugly.
I want to end with something I’m trying to remind myself about these days: Everyone is going through something that we can’t see.
I want to write that again: Everyone is going through something that we can’t see.
The thing is, because we can’t see it, we don’t know who’s going through what and we don’t know when and we don’t always know why. Mental health is an invisible thing, but it touches all of us at some point or another. It’s part of life. Like DeMar said, “You never know what that person is going through.
Mental health isn’t just an athlete thing. What you do for a living doesn’t have to define who you are. This is an everyone thing. No matter what our circumstances, we’re all carrying around things that hurt — and they can hurt us if we keep them buried inside. Not talking about our inner lives robs us of really getting to know ourselves and robs us of the chance to reach out to others in need. So if you’re reading this and you’re having a hard time, no matter how big or small it seems to you, I want to remind you that you’re not weird or different for sharing what you’re going through.
Just the opposite. It could be the most important thing you do. It was for me.