Reflections on being misdiagnosed...

It took approximately 15 years to convince doctors to drop the diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder from my file.  It finally happened in 2023, but it was 15 years too late.  What followed was another diagnosis that was equally upsetting for me (schizotypal personality disorder) until it was (apparently?) dropped as well.  I have discussed this at length before, the subject is nothing new on this blog.

As I reflect on being classified with schizoaffective disorder, I am reminded of incidents where diagnosis is weaponized, or used as a means to control a difficult client so as to prescribe antipsychotics to keep them in line.  I hear it happens in Russia, for example, but it also happened here in Toronto, at St. Michael's Hospital, when a patient who had lupus was diagnosed with schizophrenia so as to control her with forced medication, because apparently she was considered "difficult" - the doctor later admitted he was making symptoms up.

Perhaps not as damning as that scandal, I can't help but feel frustrated by the number of doctors I talked to who agreed that the complete lack of bipolar symptoms in my case made schizoaffective disorder a questionable interpretation, and yet none would fight for me.  They also failed to consider the symptoms that were unusual that suggested that I was living with something else entirely.  I was issued an EEG to rule out epilepsy (turns out those were spontaneous kriyas, not seizures, but try getting a doctor in Toronto to even know what a kriya is) - when they decided it couldn't be related to seizures, they shrugged off all mystery symptoms and chose to ignore them.  The Jungian analyst I had got it, along with the rogue psychiatrist I once had who agreed that what I went through was all bullshit, but I guess I had to convince inpatient care doctors for anything to change.

But the damage in my relationship to medicine, as I have discussed before, was done.  I was so put off by how things played out, I went on an extended hiatus to contemplate how to proceed with my image in the art world, after my name became synonymous with a disorder I simply did not have and was trying to protest.  Now that I am Latuda free and not involved with psychiatry anymore, I am hoping that my new work, which is mostly related to the soul, will catch on somehow and promote the true story of what I was enduring = an ancient condition that can arise when someone is called to transform.  This would all be so much easier if only the American Psychiatric Association would recognize such ancient conditions in a future edition of the DSM, because apparently labels matter more than true insight.  I don't even expect anyone to take the possession component seriously in this city's wretched medical care system, but it would be a fine day in Toronto if they would at least recognize the existence of transformative psychology.

While some Mad Pride people are fine identifying with their diagnoses, many others feel as I do about how reductive these labels can be, so my frustrations are not out of the ordinary.  Thankfully, with time, common sense in my case prevailed, and I finally got away from the white coats.

One day I will look at my psychiatric profile, perhaps out of morbid curiosity, but not today - it still feels too raw.

-Saraƒin

"God Save The Queen"...

Well, I'm very pleased with how this one turned out!

I decided to call this piece "God Save The Queen" as a nod to The Sex Pistols, this being a painting inspired by punk culture going into a show that's rock music themed.

I got the idea to add the Latin with ransom note style lettering, cut from old magazines.  I had a blast getting on the floor, cutting letters out while playing The Clash.  I also decided it would be fun to add a few safety pins, so I punctured the canvas with them, and added a few drips of blood.  I chose three to represent the Holy Trinity.

The message of this piece became a statement about the growing renewed interest in the Sacred Feminine, be it related to environmental concerns, or dissatisfaction with mainstream religion.  Here, Mother Mary is presented as a punk goddess with Kali Maa undertones.  I have felt since I began mystically working with Mary that She is more than "just another saint", She is an embodiment of the Sacred Feminine, which has been argued by the East, as an example.  The Latin, which translates (hopefully not crudely) to "Punk's not dead, neither is God" suggests new ways of perceiving or understanding God, rather than rejecting God entirely.

14 x 18", acrylics, imitation gold leaf, paint pens and Sharpies on a big sturdy canvas, plus three safety pins added for detail.  I think I will ask $400.00 for this one, it has a lot of detail, and I am very happy with the results.  (As usual, there might be some touch-ups, but She's done.)

Here is the flyer for the art show this piece is going into:

-Saraƒin

Notes on going goth (and being into counterculture in general)...

Perhaps it's time for a slightly more lighthearted post, after some of the heavy content I have recently produced, reflections on my struggle with occult/religious problems.

I have joked before that I felt it to be a crime to not go goth as a fashion style with the kind of strangeness my life has been about.  I have always loved the music, so technically that was goth enough for levels of it, but I wanted to embrace the look more in recent years, to have more fun.  I spent too many years looking frumpy while in a sicker state as a soul, so when I got the upper hand of my spiritual situation, I decided it was time to reinvent my look.

Not having a lot of money, I started doing what many goths do, poor or otherwise - I regularly hit the thrift stores and sales racks.  I got back into the local goth scene by going clubbing again and doing alternative karaoke, often at least once a week, and made new friends.  I decorated parts of my apartment to make it into a gothic den, using Hallowe'en decorations, art, and religious artifacts.  Because I am not good with hair stuff, I began donning a black veil look and added accessories to cover my shaggy mane... I got better with makeup.  When I lost weight due to lifestyle changes, I had more successes with authentic goth thrift finds that actually fit.

Some funny things I've noticed about regularly gothing it up - firstly, more people approach me for cigarettes or a lighter when I'm in this look, assuming I'm a smoker.  (Apart from the occasional cigar, I don't smoke at all anymore, no marijuana either.) Secondly, security guards in certain stores began hovering over me, I guess they assume all goths are shoplifters.  One time I was accused of shoplifting a perfume from Sephora, until I willingly offered to show them the contents of my backpack, which was when they backed off.  After that incident, I decided to boycott Sephora and blast them on social media for being ignorant about counterculture people.  Lastly, more people started approaching me to proselytize with Jesus.  My answer to that kind of thing is to always gently say that I am Anglican Goth, go to church, and know Jesus well, not telling them about other levels of my spirituality.  It is usually met with surprise and some embarrassment on their part, I suppose some denominations are warning Christians of the "dangers" of the gothic subculture and its "ties to Satan"... sigh.

My main circle of friends in the goth scene are pretty fascinated by Heaven.  Two of us are Muslim, another few come from variants of Christianity, and there's a Baha'i Faith goth, too... and then, there's whatever I am, the eclectic.  We are deeply spiritual, so obsessed with holy themed discussion that I started calling us "The Sunshine Table".  Most goths in our scene I've encountered are agnostic, atheistic, Luciferian, Thelemic, are into non-theistic satanism or are neopagan, but then you'll find our crew, who pray litanies and Psalms in the graveyard, consecrate our wine with Catholic folk rituals while listening to St. Hildegard von Bingen choirs, and take occasional retreats to monasteries.  I am tired of boring Christians getting the subculture wrong, but in my experience it has mostly been from lay Christians, not the clergy.  Goth embraces virtually any faith, unless it becomes a problem where it makes a person hateful of other groups.

Goth is just one of my styles, but it's my staple style.  I have also been known to flirt with punk, lolita fashion, fairy kei, "dollcore", "angelcore"/"churchcore", "kidcore"/candy raver, and something that might as well be called "witch doctor chic", among them.  I refuse to have a day, if I can avoid it, where I don't have fun with clothes, and I often take photos with my tripod of my outfit for the day to put on social media.  

Like karaoke, clothes are just another major hobby of mine, and the hunt for them at thrift shops is always a joy when you discover something neat.

-Saraƒin

Unraveling after the ouija board...

I thought I'd talk a little bit more about how things began to go south for me and my household after age 14, when I first explored the ouija board:

It was early on in my grade 9th year in high school when a fellow student approached me with his homemade ouija board.  When we sat to play with it, it worked oddly well, and the makeshift planchette at one point flew out from our fingertips, shocking him.  After playing with his board and later one I made for myself with some other students, I became obsessed with what it produced, then later terrified when it began to tell me it was going to kill me.  After burning the board I made that led to that incident, I was too afraid to do it again for a while, but looking back, it was after that point that life really started to get pretty shitty.

My father developed his first bout of cancer two years later, and there were a lot of fights in my household, tension was high between my mother and I (we are very close now, all is well at this point), marriage between my mother and father started to fall apart.  My mental health began to slip dramatically, I became obsessed with self-destruction, would write notes on every page of my school agenda about suicide, and had weird dreams with themes of shocking horror - the smell of blood as it dripped from a rusty abandoned waterpark slide, a red sky, the hum of buzzing flies and cicada bugs, dead bodies piled up, rotting in the heat.  I began smacking my arm with a hairbrush until it bruised on a regular basis, and would later turn to cutting and overdosing on various kinds of pills.  One time, I was so depressed I prodded an electrical socket with a fork and was thrown back several feet.  I started to feel uncomfortable about my wrists, that I might slash them open, so I began wearing wristbands on them to take the edge off... unfortunately, I would one day slit them after all, during a suicide attempt in the woods in 2012.  I had a really bad psychiatrist in high school who was a bit of a pill pusher, and at one point I was prescribed Risperdal, even before any psychotic-like state had set in.  Looking up mental disorders online, I believed I had Borderline Personality Disorder, but it was likely PTSD and this horrible occult shit going on, coupled with what I suspect is a degree of autism, or some other neurodivergent thing.  I'm not sure what they officially marked on my file, but I did take DBT for a while, and found it to be utterly useless.

I had problems at school, my grades became really shitty, I suppose my high school decided I was a bit of a delinquent.  I dreamed of running away to a mental hospital forever, or killing myself before I reached the age of 25, it was bizarre how I became inverted as a person, I was a neurotic growing up, but never this self-destructive.  Whatever portal I opened up with that incident with the board, it had affected me in many ways.  I became very strange, as did my life.

Back when I was in grade school, I often drew bloodied animals killing each other, wolves eating deer carcasses, carnivorous dinosaurs eating herbivores... in high school, I was drawing strange horse headed demons and horrific things from the mind - the horse head demon would later inspire "Armananstantanu".  I also fooled around with a loose set of ideas which would later become "Asylum Squad".  I had no idea how heavily evil was influencing me, and would not find out until my mid 20s, I just thought I was strange, pathetic, and better off dead.

I wonder how many teens and young adults open up weird portals with ouija boards from sleepover parties and the like, and end up slipping mentally... is this rare, or is it more common than the modern age wants to believe?  Several others have told me of their strange experiences with this and similar devices, it is certainly at least not for beginners.  As mentioned, I have made another one in recent years for an art show, but do not use it with a planchette - rather, I use it to study, so that if I am trying to get a letter or a number while doing downloads, my eye is directed by the Spirit to get a clue... that is not the same thing as using it for spirit communication.

My Jungian analyst was really good at taking this stuff seriously, but most conventional psychiatrists think it's just a coincidence.  I think this is unwise, and I think psychiatry could stand to learn from other groups about what they know, such as Catholics, indigenous, several world religions and groups who feel uneasy about the use of these tools, especially in the hands of youth.  

A bit more awareness in mental health care might really help someone who swears the damn thing led them into madness.

-Saraƒin

My dear old Dad...

I'm about to open up about something that's truly disturbing - so troubling, in fact, that I beg that it not be true, that it's just a horrible coincidence, and that perhaps I am just overanalyzing things as I reflect on my terrible journey with dark forces.  If this is real, this is the worst thing evil might have done to my life. 

I am worried now that it's possible the evil one influenced my family unit as much as he harmed me, specifically one other member - my Dad.  There was strangeness I witnessed in my mind, too sickening to describe entirely - at one point, I heard the entity say that "one person you really care about has to die".  I saw imagery in my head of my Dad weary, feeble minded, nailed to a cross as a sacrifice, there was a suggestion of someone developing conditions of the brain, one eye, and the heart, and a weird deviant depravity to everything that I just don't want to get into, it's that vile.  On and off, there was this mockery of my father that made me very angry - he was a good man, I didn't agree with all of his ideas, but I loved him, and we were friends.

My Dad passed away at the age of 74, it's so strange and horrible how many complications there were to his health.  What's eerie as I reflect on my experiences with evil was that among his conditions was an enlarged heart that required a pacemaker, a brain tumour that would kill him, and his eye turning inward as the brain tumour progressed.  As I recall the body parts that were mentioned by evil as to be infected, it gives me chills.  There were other medical complications, but I will leave my father's privacy alone.

I really hope I am just overanalyzing this from having lived a life of horror, but now I am getting insights that it could be real.  Still, I can't bring myself to feel much from it - either I feel nothing because I realize it's untrue, or because I've just been exposed to so much strangeness that I simply don't know what to do with this information but shrug it off as yet more pain, something I really shouldn't take on, not knowing the truth anyway.  I sense my Dad's spirit often, he visits me a lot with a couple other ancestors, perhaps that is why I can process this, he is not gone, just not a body anymore.  I choose to see this as just really eerie information, and I think it's a good thing that most of my family probably don't even know about this blog, or else they'd get upset.  

So I guess it's troubling experiences like this, and everything else I have gone through, that truly makes me see satanic movements, specifically theistic ones, as ridiculous.  Atheistic ones I kind of understand, because they don't even believe in the devil, and yet I hope they realize that although they might get a rise out of ignorant Catholics, the smart ones probably see atheistic satanism as having the sophistication of one of those guys who is just a bit too much into Warhammer, or perhaps some hokey LARPer (which I guess I can say because I used to LARP a bit myself) - the smart Catholics are likely truly unmoved by all the silly diabolical pageantry.

To the ones who see the devil as a god, or something to admire, and who genuinely believe in him - I wish you knew my world.  I don't hate you, I can't say I even judge you, depending on how you live your life, but if you could understand the impact this malefic crap had on my life and those I care about, I think you'd get how tacky satanism looks to me.

And to the skeptics out there who have personally put me down for telling my story, who think I'm just a kook with a strange mind - kindly go eat shit on a plate with cilantro on top.  I have met a few of these types, they just can't keep it to themselves, trying to make me feel unsophisticated.  I've had it with them.

If I could, and there was the guarantee that they'd get out of it scot-free, I'd wish possession on the skeptic for one year - then, buddy boy, you tell me this wasn't real, that it was "just the shadow".  Go away.

-Saraƒin

More oddness from my childhood (that makes me wonder)...

I had mentioned several years ago on this blog about an "imaginary enemy" of mine when I was a child, a girl with red hair and missing teeth who called herself "Lucy", who told me to do bad things.  Though it was too long ago for me to actually remember Lucy very well, it was my mother who would tell me about how I would blame Lucy if I misbehaved.  After my fight with dark forces as an adult, I wondered if "Lucy" meant "Lucifer", and was something odd from the infernal world haunting me.

As I reflect more on that time in my life, back when my family and I still lived in Stratford, I recall that between the house I was born in and the house I lived in during my time in Halifax, there was a house that had some very strange phenomena in it.  Spirit told me recently that dark forces didn't like me ever since they took notice of me, which began when I was around the age of 2.  That would have been about the time that we lived in the second house.

I don't have strong memories of that time, but here is some of what my mother and my sister reported.  There were lights that flickered on and off in the kitchen, a painting that was firmly hung on the wall that would often fall off unexpectedly, and my sister described a darkness haunting my bedroom.  The strangest thing (and I actually have vague memories of this) was a renegade bat that made it into the home, flew into my bedroom, and crawled up beside me on my pillow.  Mom noticed the bat as she came in to check on me in the night, shrieked, grabbed me by my ankles, yanking me away from it.  We were able to trap the bat in a waste basket with a vinyl record sleeve and release it back outside, but it was extremely traumatizing for me.  My mother later made a cute toy bat out of old pieces of felt as a reminder of that crazy night.

We swore that home was haunted, but I wonder if it wasn't in fact my old friend the dark entity coming to visit me for the first time during that period in my life.  My existence has always been haunted by strangeness and gloom, it's only now that it seems the tone is much gentler.  Life still has its share of problems, but they are relatively normal by comparison.

BTW, I think I figured out "Meagan" - it is simply the name an angel is using to represent herself when calling to me with downloaded information, she's not an ancestor spirit.  I guess this could be compared to "Abraham", the name given when Esther Hicks does trance channeling.

The air quality has been terrible in the city because of the horrors of out of control wildfires coming from the north.  I pray that the rain will come to take care of these fires, because our provincial government cut funding for firefighting by 64%, from what I understand.  Awful what is happening to our indigenous communities up north.  

Seasonal wildfires are so terrible now, I don't recall them being this bad when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s.  One of my greatest worries is what is becoming of our ecosystem.  Canada doesn't often suffer as badly as other parts of the world do with things like hurricanes, but these seasonal fires are getting absolutely horrible.

-Saraƒin

UPDATE: One other eerie thing from my childhood that I just thought of, this time from the Halifax house - for Hallowe'en one year, my sister and I were recording a cassette tape of organ music and scary sounds to blast for the neighbourhood kids who came to us for trick or treat candy.  When we played back the recording, there was this strange demonic voice that came through during one part of the tape.  We couldn't make out what it said, laughed at how creepy it was, and didn't think much of it beyond that, but now I wonder.

Mad Pride 2026...

This will be my first Mad Pride without Latuda, or any other daily psychiatric medication for that matter, since I became involved - a major milestone in my transformation and recovery.  Though I still use a quarter of a tablet of Loxapine for sleep sometimes, I have gone a week without it, and am trying to keep it to a bare minimum.

I would say that although I don't truly identify as "Mad" in some ways (in that, I was Mad because of my break from reality, I solved it, I identify more as a mystic, among other things, which was the advice my analyst gave me), I still call myself Mad politically, in that I am very much on board with many ideas from the Mad Pride movement.  As mentioned before, the movement in Toronto is either dead or has merged with the Disability Pride movement, but I am not focusing as much on activism these days as I am working on my health, spirituality, and trying to get more involved in the art scene with my new body of work.

I wish Mad Pride was embraced more in Canada, but a lot of people still don't know what it is about when I mention it.  When I try to explain it, sometimes people, even leftists who often shout "ACAB" and "Queers For Palestine", don't seem to get the need for Mad Pride, thinking it's "too much", that mental health awareness should be enough.

But a lot of the "stigma" (discrimination?) I have faced as a client of mental health has been from professionals themselves, not just from former friends who dumped me because they found my distress grotesque, not just from communities who didn't want anything to do with me anymore.  There was the nurse who chimed in after I offered an apology for being rude, saying "I don't take anything the insane have to say to me seriously anyway".  There was the nurse who suggested that if he gave me hot water for tea, I might throw it in his face, even though I never showed signs of doing anything of the sort.  There were aggressive orderlies who tackled me, there was the one orderly in 2023 who screamed at me like someone on a prison ward deserving of punishment for crying and smacking my head in frustration.  There have been several insensitive psychiatrists who have not only repeatedly misinterpreted and therefore misdiagnosed me, they have been patronizing, infantilizing, and have overmedicated me, causing horrible side effects with drugs that I'm worried have had a lasting impact on my body.  One nurse in the ER asked why I was on Latuda, asking if I had Borderline Personality Disorder, which I guess is because I was dressed in goth clothing because I certainly wasn't there for anything mental health related (I was there because I felt something weird in my chest, but they sent me to psych anyway - ugh).  There are more situations I could describe, but this is an example of the behaviours in hospital that Mad Pride is frustrated by.  My concern, as is the concern of many activists, is that the current model of psychiatric healthcare is often more about commanding obedience than it is about any true healing of the brain.

Mad Pride is important because, for example, spiritual emergency is real, healthy voice hearing can happen, and, as the message of Asylum Squad says, even a saint would be abused by the mental health industrial complex.  We had a sexual revolution in mental health, now we need a spiritual revolution, where cultural, religious, and spiritual sensitivity can be taken into consideration more with diagnosis and treatment.  (I have been told, as it stands, they're supposed to do better than this, but in my experience, they don't.)

No current plans from me for any further activism, I still feel I have work to do on my body for optimum health.  But I will still contribute artworks and articles on the subject of Mad Pride from time to time, at the very least.

-Saraƒin