My Extended Stay at a Mental Hospital and a bit about Rationality

I wrote this Monday September 26th, the day of the first Presidential Debate. It is an excerpt from my upcoming book, From the Looney Bin, and has been lightly edited to provide more clarity. To provide some context, I am a 20-year-old college student and I wrote my book while rotting away in a mental hospital in Eastern Pennsylvania where I was imprisoned for a month. In short, I ended up there because I had been taking a certain psychedelic drug prior and started noticing some permanent positive effects which I will not elaborate on at this time but they have not ceased. I spoke to my parents about these effects and they thought I had lost my mind and was having delusions, so they ended up having me committed to a psych ward where I was immediately put on a powerful anti-psychotic called Seroquel after a five minute evaluation with one of the psychiatrists who deemed my story too hard to believe. I was eventually misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and had my Seroquel dosage pushed close to the maximum when the psych unit decided that I must have been experiencing a multiple week-long psychosis because I was not changing my story. After trying to sign myself out after a few days in the looney bin and finding out that I would not be released I became very angry and insulted a few nurses who had not been too kind to me.

A few days later I started breaking down in tears because my mental health social worker told me she did not know when I would be getting out, and that scared me quite a bit because one of my fellow patients had been incarcerated there for over 100 days even though he was quite a docile character. These changes in my demeanor were perceived as "mood shifts" by the psych unit because they are all lost in their own confirmation bias, so they put me on lithium. Of course I never would have taken a single dose of Seroquel or lithium if I had had a choice but I was told that if I did not cooperate with the psych unit and their demands my stay could be much longer, so I begrudgingly complied even though I knew there was nothing wrong with me mentally. This turned out to be a big mistake because the side effects of those drugs were absolutely horrifying. Every night the seroquel knocked me out and it was not possible for me to sleep for less than 11 hours, after which I would remain drowsy for the rest of the day and not feel up to most tasks until around 2pm. It also gave me tremendous headaches which the lithium added to and I honestly felt like a human guinea pig. But if I was a guinea pig then I was quite a lucky one because many of my fellow patients were on even more drugs than I was on, and at least one had ended up in the hospital because of an adverse reaction to previously prescribed psychotropic drugs.

After a month-long stay I was finally released after I stopped telling members of the psych unit that I did not have any kind of mental disorder. I never agreed with their diagnosis or "admitted" to having one but eventually I came to the realization that they were upset that I was in "denial" of my perceived mental condition and they were not going to let me out until that stopped. And so I was set free and left that hell hole but the experiences I gained there have stuck with me. I met a lot of interesting patients there and ended up forming meaningful friendships with some of them. Almost all of them have major problems with the psychiatric prison/exploitation system and have suffered through great trials because of it, and I will not let that suffering go unnoticed by society; that is why I'm writing this book. I am currently living with some friends and have severed all ties with my parents who tried to force me to take the drugs I was prescribed after leaving the hospital and abused me after I stopped taking them and started suffering from withdrawal. I have a full-time job at the company I was working for last summer and have already received a raise and secured a modest sum of venture capital for an alt-coin mining operation I'm starting. I'm also working on a documentary about the vegan lifestyle with an older friend who's had a successful career in entrepreneurism and nursing, and helping him start a business. Soon I will begin mixing and recording music with some friends who have already seen some glimmers of success in the EDM scene and I will also be writing an app. Let's just say taking on a lot of bold, intellectual tasks has become fairly easy for me in the past few months. The following passage from my book was written while I was still in the hospital and ultimately led me to the work's thesis: I am not trapped in the looney bin, we all are.

I have been reading Ayn Rand pretty much all day. I finished Anthem, and now I’m on to Philosophy: Who Needs it? Rand’s ideas in Philosophy simply tear apart the fabric of our absurd society, and I deeply regret not giving it a read sooner. Logic is not king anymore, and Rand laments this fact. This made me think back to one of my fellow libertarian patient’s assertions that today’s kids are raised to be emotive, neurotic, reactionary adults instead of rational thinkers who are in control of their emotions. I’m quite certain that Hillary and The Donald will prove that on the debate stage tonight, as will their audience. Believe it or not it, it wasn’t long ago that debators on the presidential debate stage referred to each other as “my opponent” and debated idealogies instead of stooping to personal attacks. But civil discourse appears to be dying in America, and this brings me to a very interesting discovery.

Have you ever wondered how it came to be that in our culture, religion and politics are the two things you’re just not supposed to bring up in everyday conversation? Many would argue that the reason for this is that they’re just too divisive. But that in fact is not the real reason. Plenty of other subjects are even more divisive, like “What kind of music are you into?” and, “what’s your favorite color?” People take very different sides in regard to both issues, but rarely will that result in gnashing of teeth and bitternes. Politics and religion, just like favorite colors, are matters of preference. But voicing your opinions on political or religious matters often brings forth anger and bitterness. This is not due to their divisive nature, but to the learned nature of Americans to get angry when their opinions are challenged. The more deeply held the belief or opinion, the more angry they will get. Democracy amplifies this, because with it, our opinions can actually affect each other’s lives. Of course, unless an election is decided by one vote, no one’s individual opinions actually matter. This very rarely happens, and will likely never happen in a national election, however, we our taught to believe essentially the opposite.

The other day here at the hospital, politics did come up at the dinner table, and of course I said that Hillary Clinton is completely corrupt, an assertion easily proven with a look at her and her husband’s dealings with foreign governments and interesting pardons (if you don’t know what I’m talking about google Marc Rich). But I was quickly hushed up by one of the staff members who warned that politics is not an issue we should be discussing here. I find it quite odd that the process by which we choose our rulers who make decisions that affect our lives, is not someting to be talked about in a hospital where many patients’ status here is fully dependent on government spending.

Indeed, the process of discovering the irrational and emotion-driven fabric of our society has been a slow one for me. I really only started my long stumble over it last summer when I was watching TV while baked. For whatever reason, everything on TV seemed absolutely absurd. Every commercial was more ridiculous and superficial than ever. I no longer questioned the authenticity of reality TV, I knew it to be completely the opposite.

It makes a lot of sense that absurdity on TV would be a symptom of an absurd culture. Many people will repeat whatever they hear on CNN or Fox News without questioning its validity, and millions tune in to watch the trainwreck of Kim Kardashian’s life every single week. People worship and gossip about celebrities they will never even meet. But if you ask the question, “which is a reflection of which, TV or our society?” I think you are asking the wrong question. Both influence each other, and this creates a very disturbing positive feedback loop.

I believe I have seen real evidence of this in my own life. When I was younger, Keeping up with the Kardashians did not exist. The Presidential debates were nowhere near as heated as they are now, and I think this descent into madness has been going on for a very long time. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR cannot hold a candle to Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington as far as rational thought goes, and this brings me to an interesting hypothesis. According to my Western Civilization professor from Sophomore year, one evident, enduring trait of Western Culture is a longing for “the good old days.” Is it possible that, without even realizing it, we’re really just longing for a more rational society?
An even more important question I believe, is, “is this descent into irrationality intentional?” Undoubtedly, the masters of humanity have every reason to want an ever more irrational society, where humans are easier to divide into sides to fight each other. Of course, another explanation could be that, regardless of what sparked this descent, it is very difficult to reverse it, especially in the age of mass media. Humans tend to model the behavior of their superiors, and now, in a very complex society, they have more superiors than ever before, and thanks to masss media, they see them more than ever before. How many housewives and housedads tune in to watch Whoopi Goldberg and Elizabeth Hasselback yell at each other over whether or not black people should be allowed to say the N-word on The View? (yes this actually happened) Too many, that’s the answer. How many kids are tuning into Basketball Wives LA and learning to argue over pretty much anything that comes to mind and hold ridiculous grudges? Probably more than we’d think, and unfortunately some of those kids may grow up to fill the shoes of some meaner, madder basketball wives. This gigantic feedback loop continues every day of the year all over the world, slowly turning us back into animals.

The prevalence of alcohol and bingedrinking culture add some very hot flames to the fire, as we’re all taught by our society to actually go out and betray our capacity to reason every single weekend. The side effects, nay, direct effects, are more rape, more fights, more accidents, more arguments, more everything that’s more animalistic. And it’s no secret that the big alcohol companies are in bed with the feds.

America’s favorite drugs really do combine to create a cacophony of insanity. Alcohol makes us irrational on the weekend, while caffeine and cigarettes give us the buzz to keep us worker bees going (but not the mental drive of course). Sugar, though not a drug, keeps us happy, lazy, and clouded in the mind while simultaneously killing us. Anti-depression pharmaceuticals either keep us from killing ourselves when an increasingly meaningless and shallow society gives us ever more reason to do so, or they ruin our minds or actually just kill us. I could go on but I think I’ve made my point.

Today marks the day that it struck me that the Age of Reason is over and has been for quite some time. The world is badly in need of rational philosophy, and it saddens me to think of just how much more could have been accomplished if the teachings of the Greek philosophers had never been forgotten. While many might respond that they haven’t been forgotten, as Aristotle and Plato’s works are still read in school, they are missing my point. Society has forgotten reason, and we can trace many social ills back to this fact, a point Ayn Rand tried her best to hammer home in her lifetime. We live in an era of poisoned bodies and poisoned minds. The remedy for the bodies is obvious, but for the minds it is unfortunately not. Reason is the medicine for the mind, and though it may be my mission to create as much value for mankind as possible, my legacy must be bringing back the medicine, and helping bring forth a new Age of Reason.