Lock us up and throw away the key because we can start a fight with our own mothers, even if our mothers aren’t even in the same room as us, and we are asleep, writhing fitfully in nightmarish sleep, slipping and sliding in a pool of puke, shit, blood and kebab meat. RULE BRITANNIA!
BOLLOCKS TO THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH
HEARING VOICES | BY DR MONA MOORE | ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL DAVID FREEMAN
Published August 2009
I was having a moment of self-loathing on the tube yesterday as I recalled a particularly drunken misadventure and, without meaning to, I groaned and hit myself in the head a few times with my book, saying: “Idiot, idiot, idiot.” Everyone on the tube turned and stared. I realised that must be what it’s like to be mad. The voice in your head becomes so overwhelming that it requires action.
I was thinking about insanity after a 30-year-old lady came into A&E last week covered from head to toe in her own shit. She was clearly psychotic. We had to sedate her to clean her up because every time we tried to wipe any of it away she would flail and scream, agonised. She was very attached to it. Still a little stinky, she was inconsolable about no longer being covered in her own faeces in the examination. Eventually, we learnt what had happened. Her husband had died six weeks previously, launching her into a psychotic episode where the voices in her head convinced her that her husband was not dead but inside of her. She desperately tried not to shit, becoming toxically constipated, but eventually her bowels would explode in protest, so she would scoop it up and smear it over her body trying to preserve every last pellet of her husband. It was utterly tragic and part of me wished that we had scraped her shit into a little jar to take home with her.
One in a hundred people will have an episode of schizophrenia—you see people walking around with earmuffs in summer or headphones unplugged and often these are coping mechanisms. Auditory hallucinations are very persistent, like small children, so telling them to be quiet or threatening them just doesn’t work. It is like your inner monologue, the wanky one that insists you’re a twat, becomes self-sufficient—it no longer needs you to exist and, like a coke-fuelled motor-mouthed rant, it goes on interminably. Only you hear it as a constant outside noise.
I once sat in on a hearing-voices class where people are encouraged to articulate their voices, talk back and negotiate with them. A pretty 20-something girl had thought her Co-op was compelling her to buy things she had no use for, and she couldn’t walk within 100 metres of the entrance. A Nigerian man’s voices were personified by a 6ft blonde transsexual and an angry midget who would constantly argue in his head. And one old lady believed her husband worked for the secret service. They had kidnapped her and planted a chip in her brain, which made her act out their will.
They all agreed the best coping mechanism was using a mobile phone. They held it to their ear when they had the urge to talk to their voices so people didn’t think they were insane. Many of them had learnt to live successfully alongside their voices—the aim of the classes. The pretty 20-something girl even said she had a new voice, who sounded like a younger version of herself, except incredibly witty, and she enjoyed their conversations.
The funny thing is psych consultants are all a bit nuts too. They like to provoke patients and get their voices to act up in an attempt to prove to them they are not real. I sat in on a psych consultation with a 45-year-old who had been suffering for four years.
The doctor asked, “So, where is your voice now?”
Perfectly sane, the patient replied, “He’s in that chair,” pointing to a very empty chair in the corner.
So the psych doctor stood up, walked over to the chair and sat in it, saying smugly, “So, where is your voice now?”
The patient looked at him, and replied, “He’s in the corner and he’s telling me you’re a fucking cunt.” It made me think that sometimes I would quite like a voice which I could blame for calling people a cunt.
HIGH SPY
SMOKE POT WITH ME AND YOU’RE FIRED | AS TOLD TO EUGENE ROBINSON PHOTO BY KATIE MURRAY
Published April 2004
Hello! I’m a cold-hearted, misanthropic drug addict, and if you work in any small-to-medium-to-huge-size company it’s very likely you spend each day alongside somebody like me.
Last year, the US Department of Justice announced that nearly one million individuals become victims of violent crime—mostly committed by people under the influence of drugs and alcohol—while working. When bosses and shareholders and presidents heard this, they hired undercover agents to weed out the miscreants. In short, I am a fucking narc and I work for a corporation that rents me and my fellow narcs out to your bosses for the sole purpose of getting you fired.
I’m just like any other employee. I’ve worked warehouses, stockrooms, mail-rooms, wherever. A lot of these places just have guys doing the same old stupid shit: taking long lunch breaks and stealing office supplies. But I’m always under pressure to produce results.
That’s where I got the idea of essentially entrapping people. “Hey, buddy, you want to get high?”—that sort of thing. Mostly I’ll get my victims high on weed, but if I really take a dislike to somebody, I’ll get some rock, stand near where I know there’s a camera, and get them fucking annihilated like Pookie in New Jack City. The bosses tip me off whenever there’s a mandatory drug test coming, so usually I strike right before it’s piss-cup day.
Guilt? Ehhh, maybe a little. Not much, though. I only get minimum wage, but I’m on the so-called management track and am officially sanctioned to get high all day. Fucking unbelievable, no? They hire undercover drug addicts so they can fire their employees who get high a little bit, so their companies look better if the cops or government ever take a peek.
Because of the risky nature of the job and the constant threat of being exposed and having the shit kicked out of me, I move around a lot. That doesn’t bother me, though. The more I learn about people and their motivation to make money by toeing the line and sucking the man’s dick, the more I want to take them down. In fact, whenever I get somebody fired, I feel great about it. There’s always someone else ready to fill their job anyway. It’s sort of like natural selection. Shit, someone’s coming… I have to go.
CUT THE SHIT
HOW PURE ARE STREET DRUGS? | BY ANN HIGGINS
Published May 2005
I bought cocaine, heroin, crack, weed and ecstasy and had them forensically analysed by a chemist at MIT because I thought they would all turn out to be poison. Guess what? Drug dealers don’t cut drugs with cement and ground glass. They barely even cut drugs at all, because they don’t need to. Relax, I’ll explain later.
The samples were analysed by a PhD chemist at MIT (we can’t say his name or he’ll get fired) using acid/base extraction, proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and thin-layer chromatography. Acid-base extraction is the method used to isolate the chemicals. Once they’re isolated, the NMR machine is what you use to analyse and identify stuff. Basically, the kind of NMR done here tells you about the hydrogen atoms in the molecules in the drugs. So it’s like, the spectrum of heroin has 20 lines in it, all at different positions and heights, and you basically look for that particular set of lines. If you see another set of lines, you go, “Oops, there’s something else besides heroin in here.” Finally, thinlayer chromatography is a quick method that tells you how many components there are in a mixture. The