How I Fell Into the Vultures’ Clutches

Warning Label: This true personal account, released 20 years after the fact due to the dreadful incapacitated state in which the events described left the author in, will, taking a highly confrontational approach, no doubt be thought highly offensive to many (especially the perpetrators!). If you cannot tolerate a little salutary poison and malice in your panacea, please look away now. Side effects may include: much horror, legitimate remorse, bitter yet cathartic and healthy lamentation, extreme dizziness, ecstatic trance-like states, life-changing epiphanies, rebellious outrage, vomiting up society’s propaganda, increased working vocabulary, uncontrollable weeping or laughter, shortness of breath and frothing angrily, indignantly at the mouth!

#PoetryNotPills #MeditationNotSedation #DietNotDrugs

Growing up is tough. Perhaps it has been an awful lot worse in the past. But today, it is still very hard, even in the more developed countries. How lost so many of us are, or have been at times. Our education system draws no attention to our spiritual life, to the cultivation of the virtues and dispositions that make life genuinely meaningful. Many people become brainwashed by the system, in a sense keeping their heads firmly in the sand and never questioning their social indoctrination. They merely become more and more fanatical.

I wasn’t like that. I suffered from, if anything, the opposite pathology. When I read Nietzsche’s Beyond Good And Evil at 17, I suddenly found myself engulfed by so many doubts and reservations about the education I had received hitherto, and about the ‘values’ that most people take for granted, that it paralysed my ability to continue with life—with my formal schooling—in a productive manner. However, I was so enthralled to the system, so ‘institutionalized’ by 14 years of public curriculum schooling and classroom routine, that I was unable to act independently and decisively to extricate myself from this same system.

Thus I continued, going to university, pursuing a degree (Philosophy and Mathematics) that I didn’t even want. I think I would have fared better with Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, but that wasn’t available at a top university other than Oxford until a year later. I should have taken an extra year and switched course, or simply abandoned the Mathematics, as I was only interested in the human condition at the time… but I was too indecisive, didn’t think Philosophy alone sounded as impressive or offered the same ‘career prospects’, and, not knowing what I really wanted anyway, was afraid of making any kind of a scene.

In the last year I was at university, because I was expressing my unhappiness, and had always been curious about psychoanalysis after seeing it romanticized so splendidly in the incomparable films of Woody Allen, I foolishly consented to see a psychiatrist—thinking I would get the full, in-depth couch & dreams approach; the intrepid, disabused psychological delving and diving with a seasoned guide.

But in reality…

The white-coated philistine asked me a bunch of puerile questions from his standard, poxy little ticklist, and unfortunately, when he asked, “Do you think you receive messages from the TV?” in my sweet naïvete I simply answered, “Yes.” (Doh! The TV is a form of media; its whole job is to send you messages!) As a result of that moronic misphrased question and misunderstanding, the jumped-up dimwit labelled me ‘schizophrenic’ there and then… and that’s how it happened, folks! Because I claimed a TV sends messages!

Anyway… they didn’t kidnap me at that point. I merely returned to university after being kept in for a night on the ward, and then I just about passed my horrible course, after four years of intellectual sclerosis in the bloom of youth (though far, far worse was to come!). But by the end of it, I was masturbating compulsively (to internet pornography), which continued for another two or so years at home again in my old bedroom of my parents’ residence. Then, to cut a long story short, I suffered a (minor) injury to my private parts, which I was convinced was more serious than it actually was, yet still I continued with the self-abuse, with ever-mounting guilt and worry.

I began having physical symptoms—coughing up phlegm, pains in my head—as well as extreme states of dysphoria upon attempts to withdraw from my porn addiction. I was concerned that I was verging upon doing permanent damage to my nervous system.

To combat this, as well as the unpleasant effects I just mentioned, I began fasting and meditating for days, even weeks at a time. After prolonged fasting, I would then feast prodigiously, especially on lots of meat (yes, I invented the ‘meat-only, ketogenic diet’ a good decade before Jordan Peterson—which now is officially being used to treat ‘schizophrenia’, btw!—and, unlike him, I was roundly committed for it!). And blueberries.

Meanwhile, my worried mother took me to see a doctor (who I just went along with, not considering it of any great significance and vaguely hoping he might send me for a brain scan to see what was happening with my nerves). However, due to the fact that I had spent all of the last two years largely alone in my bedroom (one of the ‘negative symptoms of schizophrenia’); and because I said I was concerned that my excessive habits might be causing a problem with my brain (together with my unorthodox but actually quite effective attempts to rectify the issue); and as a result of my frenzied feasting, they thought I was delusional. Psychotic.

So one night, when I was least expecting it… they came to my house and ‘sectioned’ me (though ’vivisectioned’ might be more accurate).

The above is of course only a brief summary, and it doesn’t nearly convey the inner turmoil I was in at the time. But that inner turmoil was nothing compared to what I suffered after that, as a direct product of my sectioning. For those who don’t already know, this means I was involuntarily detained At Her Majesty’s Pleasure (meaning, for an indefinite period of time) in a so-called mental ‘hospital’.

I’m sure it’s rather common, maybe even ‘normal’, to be distressed when state workers accost you at your home and basically kidnap you indefinitely (the technical term for it is ‘Kafkarian Nightmare’). But the reaction I underwent at this time was extreme, even by normal (or even abnormal) human psychological standards. Years of constant masturbation, combined with successive attempts to heal myself via fasting, meditation, and feasting, had ignited enormous reserves of energy. At home, I had been able to keep my environment under very tight control, restricting my movements, my entire attention and dietary practices exactly as I required so as to free myself from the aforementioned addiction and its attendant malaise, along with progressing my spirit even further. When all this control was completely taken away from me, all the energies that I had been on the brink of directing toward productive purposes imploded.

I was told and basically forced to accept that all of my attempts to control my own actions were wrong and I was prohibited from acting upon them. I was suddenly absolutely terrified of all my own impulses, as every expression of them was punished mercilessly by the most vicious slander, contempt and humiliation, potentially rendering me a medical captive for life if I didn’t lie to hide my excruciating agony.

When you become scared of your own impulses, ladies and gentlemen—especially when they are running at literally 100 MPH under heavy assault with no way to defend yourself—the intense conflict causes them to self-destruct. They destroy you. That is exactly what happened, causing precisely the nervous breakdown I had been expressing fears about previously and for which the doctors had ridiculed and sectioned me in the first place! No growth is possible under such conditions.

During this time, my distress and agony exceeded my tongue, and to this day that pain finds no correlative in verbal expression. For six months, I felt the most acute, extreme, and constant restlessness, which I was absolutely unable to do anything about no matter how much I paced around the cramped wards, and I watched internally as my nerves were crushed against my skull and gradually gave up the ghost.

They said all my suffering was in my imagination. All a ‘hallucination’. They said, “You can’t feel brain damage!” They couldn’t have cared less about my agony—they laughed at me as I begged for mercy.

I suffered in Hell for 12 years as a direct result of their actions. They list in their idiotic ‘scholarly’ manuals that sleeping problems and unquenchable thirst are signs of such damage, and for the last 12 years I’ve been waking up over 20 times a night (as well as sleeping extremely shallowly compared to how I used to); whereas before, even in all my distress, I slept soundly every night. I’ve also had a more or less constant sense of some kind of nervous thirst, which nothing would satisfy, and which is unbearably frustrating and difficult to describe. Added to that, I have experienced a complete derangement and profound loss of my identity, memory and functionality since that time… I have only slowly re-gathered myself after 12 years!

Before I was (vivi)sectioned, I was extremely hopeful of writing my first novel within a couple of years. As it was, it took me 12 more years of most bitter Hell & purgatory to recover even a semblance of my former self from the iatrogenic effects of my ‘treatment’, producing a meagre one book of extremely angsty poetry (named Madness: a form of love). It was only after this time, having come off the drug-poisons in late 2018 after 12 years of oppression and being subjected to ‘friendly little’ compulsory monthly get-togethers with my drug-rapists, that I once again regained some footing and my life has become tolerable and seemingly a bit worthwhile.

But as it turned out, this second spring was short-lived. After releasing a flurry of further books in 2019 and 2020, my parents called the police on me, after a debate with my Jewish supremacist father about Palestine. I was forced to move out, and after lodging for a short while at a halfway house in Crosskeys, South Wales, I once again became homeless. This was fun for a while, but, to cut a long story short, I ended up in prison for three months on remand after missing a court date before the ludicrous charges against me were dropped.

After leaving prison and becoming homeless (again!), it wasn’t long before I was sectioned after hurling threats and abuse at passersby in London. Admittedly this wasn’t my finest hour, but by any measure I didn’t deserve to be sectioned again as I had already served my sentence beforehand, as this entire sorry tale proves. And indeed, my outburst was only due to the anger in me created by my previous, excessively punitive and unjust lock-ups and forced drugging.

After spending an additional and further detrimental eight months or so on locked wards, I eventually came home to once again live with my parents with the stuffing finally knocked out of me, which is where I now reside. It is now 2026, another three years have passed, and with my literary ambitions in the shit and my hopes and dreams now all but exhausted, I am now (to quote the late, great Townes Van Zandt) merely “waiting around to die.”

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Sylvia Plath, excerpt from “Lady Lazarus”