An Alternative Perspective

In recent years I've been wondering if my experience of schizophrenia is the result of a number of atypical factors. I guess my doubts started as I learned more about cannabis use and schizophrenia. A substance induced psychosis arising from intense cannabis use usually clears up relatively quickly with abstinence, but that isn't quite as clear cut as it sounds. Cannabis can probably cause schizophrenia in young users especially, and if users don't stop their use during treatment they continue to experience symptoms of psychosis/schizophrenia. The fact that someone experiences psychosis with substance use suggests they are more vulnerable to developing schizophrenia in the first place and you find quite a few people diagnosed with schizophrenia that seems have been induced by prolonged cannabis use. I smoked a lot of cannabis after I grew 20 lbs. with a friend one summer. I grew the 20 lbs. because cannabis was so important to me, giving me a self confidence I lacked, reducing my quite disabling social anxiety and shyness.
The two other factors that probably have played an even greater role in my eventual schizophrenia were Dioxin poisoning and the ten years of trauma and poor health I experienced in Western Canada as a result. Before failing graduate school I had learned about the poison Dioxin and realized that it had a profound effect on me during adolescence. My first contact was in childhood though. My father had received a case of Phisohex as a free sample from the drug company when he had his family practice as a doctor in Kitchener. He would have used it to wash his hands before and after examining patients, in order to reduce the risk of infections. Dioxin is an unwanted contaminant produced in the production of Hexachlorophene, the active ingredient of Phisohex. I have a memory when I was quite young , before the age of six when I developed a severe rash on my left or right temple in my hair. I was given the Phisohex to wash the region but instead I would pour some onto a hand cloth, rub it into the wound, and leave it there. Sometime later, within a week or two, I essentially stopped moving and became very quiet, very unusual for me. In animal research this is the "wasting syndrome" that is fatal for the lab animals being poisoned by dioxin. My mother becoming very concerned took me to see my father, who enquired how I was using the Phisohex. When I showed him he got very mad at me, so mad he frightened my mother, and from that point I rinsed the soap from the wound when I washed it. The wound cleared up and I stopped using the Phisohex, until I developed acne in my early teens, when I used buckets of the stuff and finished off the case my father had ordered years ago. Neither my father or mother thought for a second about the toxicity of that Phisohex, even though my father eventually became suicidal in his family practice and moved the family to Toronto, just as I was developing my first romance I might add. He eventually after two other jobs settled into employment with Workmens Compensation Board, which involved a substantial reduction in pay. Back before 1960 the toxicity of substances like dioxin was never even considered. Phisohex is still available and still used by doctors, but it is only available by prescription. I stopped using the Phisohex for my acne during university at some point when I could no longer afford it. I remember a friend warning me about it, but I was so convinced of its safety, that I laughed at her suggestion to stop using it. My skin is still very oily, but daily washing with Pears soap is all that is required to prevent infection.

I was a very strange kid at high school and university. My experience of adolescence was tragic, full of crippling anxiety, self doubt, and alienation. I had no male friends during mid adolescence, and lost my first and only true romance with Elizabeth to the emasculating effects of dioxin. When I started to read about Dioxin in graduate school in toxicology pursuing a Masters in Environmental Studies, I realized that Agent Orange during the Vietnam War was used as chemical warfare and the Dioxin was used as an exocrine, (an endocrine disruptor). The Vietnamese were poisoned during and following the war. I had been poisoned from the case of Phisohex my father had received as a free sample. I sought medical attention but within a few months I was experiencing psychosis and hospitalized. I suspect that dioxin was mostly responsible for that psychosis. The other piece was the heavy cannabis use the year prior to graduate school which ended the summer before graduate school. I suspect that suddenly ending the use of cannabis after a year of heavy use may have complications of its own that our medical research can't examine yet. Both cannabis and especially dioxin cause considerable brain damage, although probably nothing comparable to the damage caused by untreated psychosis, especially one that lasted 10 years.

After being forced out of that graduate Environmental Studies program because of incomplete course work, and after another year of mostly unsuccessful employment I made a horrible mistake, one that cost me my life several times over. I headed out west to Crofton on Vancouver Island where a university friend was working. Crofton is a pulp mill with a bar and a corner store. I lived there for five months and my health rapidly deteriorated. My physiology just fell apart. I couldn't stay warm, and I couldn't digest carbohydrates of any sort which really frightened me. I was experiencing profound disorganization and anxiety. I was also experiencing some symptoms of psychosis that had faded during the previous year. I was perpetually unemployed, something I have never been able to escape, feeling drunk if I ate sugars, and frightening headaches if I ate more complex carbohydrates like bread or cookies. I had no muscle strength and manual labour was basically impossible and the only work I could have got. All digestion of any sort became impossible and I was living in abject poverty. I had no liver function if I ate and was forced to keep moving, walking or running to rebuild my liver function. I remember I had to always run long and hard just before bedtime in order to literally be able to lie down and be inactive while asleep for 8 hours during the night. It was the most horrific period of my life and it continued for the five years I lived out west as well as the five years I subsequently lived in downtown Toronto, every year in abject poverty. I had no money, and couldn't work. I have never been able to understand the loss of digestion, liver function, muscle strength, and cellular metabolism, until I read years later how dioxin creation occurs in the bleaching of pulp and paper. Dioxin is a fairly simple Chlorine compound, that occurs in the presence of carbon, oxygen, chlorine, and a certain temperature. Simply burning PVC pipe creates dioxin. Chlorine was used in pulp and paper mills so paper was a marketable white color. Very few pulp and paper mills use chlorine these days, but they were a major source for dioxin production for many years. It actually isn't possible that I could have received the exceedingly high dose I did in Crofton. I lived in Crofton just for 5 months. People have lived there their whole lives with absolutely no symptoms of dioxin poisoning, such as Chloracne on their face, a common but not requisite symptom of dioxin poisoning. I don't experience that symptom which became famous with the Russian poisoning of Mr. Yushchenko in the Ukraines. One of the only labs in Canada that can test for dioxin, which is incredibly potent at quite infinitesimal doses, just happens to be in the Victoria area, where I lived for four years, struggling with dioxin poisoning.
Dioxin is a quasi military secret. Dioxin causes soft tissue damage, very difficult to prove, very difficult to measure. It doesn't show up in most lab tests of your blood unless you are specifically looking for it. It is an endocrine disruptor amongst its many other effects, and that makes the damage it causes very difficult measure or appreciate. According to what I have read on the internet the KGB at one time used dioxin to force people to commit suicide and Tibetans use it for that purpose too, or at least they did with me. The US government dumped large quantities on Vietnam in what will some day be known as one of the stupidest wars in human history, and has repeatedly prevented any funding to investigate what the medical consequences were for those people. The Veterans Administration in the US has prevented Agent Orange claims by Vietnam war veterans. The actual research into the long term effects of dioxin are very unclear. There are a myriad of effects, that seem to vary considerably according to the different studies that have been conducted. It is considered a carcinogen by the US Environmental Protection Agency, but I think that is probably the least serious effect, even though I developed cancer of the small intestine which is quite rare among cancers. Unusual things happen with dioxin poisoning that have really never been seen before. In Sveso Italy where a population was accidentally exposed to a single cloud of dioxin, the most striking result was the sex ratio of births following exposure. Many more females were born than males. Sveso is unusual because they took blood samples even before it was possible to identify how much dioxin was in them. This effect on the next generation though is unusual and I think it might continue into the following generations. In a documentary I saw on Vietnam dioxin, "Battle's Poison Cloud", a Vietnamese soldier's son was born missing a toe on his foot and what looked like considerable brain damage, but he was able to marry and his son was born without any legs at all. Dioxin could not only to disrupt hormone function but literally rewrite the genetic code of the individual. Since the option of raising a family has been taken from me I don't spend much time worrying about that. I have in some ways been subjected to the forced abortion of children I might have fathered. Dioxin has impacts on the liver function, on the immune system, and on various components of the endocrine system. You have no idea how important your endocrine function is. It is how you interact with the world. It is an even greater power per se than your brain. Disruputing endocrine function is a very powerful military weapon that will rewrite future human history. When I was at university reading endocrinology, there was one exceptional book that I destroyed, because I know what humans will do when they can manipulate people's endocrinology. I regert that now but the book is out of print and only a few copies exist in the world, so I can't replace the one I destroyed, much as I would like to. Dioxin has impacts on all cellular metabolism, that is, every cell of the human organism. Recently after I lost some weight I developed a thrush infection that kept reocurring. My family doctor had no idea why it kept coming back after a few months, and I started seeing as many doctors as I could within my medical system to get other opinions. One good country doctor in an afterhours medical clinic said it was an immune system problem, and after some research on the internet I discovered that thrush is common amongst AID sufferers who have lost much of their immune system function. I tested negative for AIDs so I suspect Dioxin was the most probable cause. Eventually the recurrences of thrush stopped, but it was a major disruption for over a year. I had to take time off work when they happened and I always had to really struggle to get the medecines I needed to treat it, which are only available by prescription.
Because Dioxin is lipotrophic and accumulates in fat tissues it is a particularly dangerous chemical. Most of the food we eat contains some dioxin, especially those composed of animal fats like ice cream, any meat, and even freshwater fish. Once ingested dioxin will likewise accumulate in your fat tissues. According to the medical studies on the internet there is a balance between what is in your adipose (fat) tissue and what is in your blood and various organ tissues, especially the liver. A single dose of dioxin has a half life of 8-9 years in human blood. It took slightly longer than that for my digestion to return. By that time I was living in Toronto. My ability to be warm took longer, a few years after arriving in Guelph in 1990. I arrived in B.C. in January 1980, left for Toronto in the spring of 1985 and spent New Years in a hospital in Guelph 1990. Recently, I lost 20 lbs and again have had been having difficulty staying warm outside, especially in winter. That occurs 29 years after my exposure to dioxin. I have never had very good health during those 29 years, and have for the most part had to focus a lot of my energies on daily exercise, especially running and other aerobic exercise. When you are permanently unemployed and don't have much money that is not as hard as you might think. Every time I visit a Caribbean island I'm impressed by how fit everyone seems to be, active, and lean. I don't expect my health will ever recover and that is hard to live with. Dioxin has wasted my life and there is very little to salvage. I never married. Never married is very good indicator of some very disabling disease, whether it be celibate religious shit or people like me who have been tortured by celibate religious shit, and it is also a very common experience of people with schizophrenia. I never developed any career skills, I don't have any peers, friends who I have much in common with... the list goes on and on. It hasn't been a life worth living, and sometimes I wonder what keeps me alive... my freedom mostly, such as it was, free of the Tibetan torture that simply can't be forgiven until it stops. I've been taking Olestra for the last two and a half years. Olestra seems to necessitate a re-experience of dioxin symptoms (severe trauma), as dioxin is drawn from the adipose tissue to replace what is taken out of the blood by the Olestra. Olestra is a synthetic fat that isn't digestible that has a high affinity for dioxin. It really messes up your bowel movements but it increases excretion rates of dioxin by up to a factor of 30. Even at 30 times the excretion rate it takes many years to clear dioxin from your adipose tissue. A lot of the damage dioxin does during adolescence is permanent. The changes that your brain and your physiology go through during adolescence don't happen if dioxin is inhibiting and interfering with your endocrine function. There is a lot of prefrontal cortex pruning that happens during adolescence. The prefrontal cortex is critical in the development of schizophrenia, and my schizophrenia was probably caused by dioxin poisoning during adolescence. So I will never become who I was biologically likely to become because dioxin interfered with my adolescent prefrontal cortex maturation. Olestra is used in the manufacture of low fat potatoes chips, called Pringles Lite that I can only buy in the US. I drive down, load the trunk up with these potatoe chips and sort of smuggle them across the border. I used to take about 20 chips a day after reading an article on the internet about dosing. You really can't take anymore without major digestive functioning difficulties and I take them less often now because of that and the fact that there doesn't seem to be much point now that I am 55 years old. It didn't seem to be helping at all either.
Nineteen years ago when I moved from Toronto to Guelph I started fresh, believing that absolutely everything of my experience could be explained by completely typical schizophrenia. I had trouble sleeping and many nightmares, both of which I still experience. I couldn't explain why I lost my digestion and strength for all those years but because I was really struggling completely alone in celibate poverty I didn't think about it. My father said my letters were that of a 8 year old, but at least I was being treated for schizophrenia. When I got depressed and frightened I even wrote to the lama in Victoria to see if I could come back. Severe trauma for the most part is permanent, and while it may not be very visible on the surface, it more or less leaves permanent scars in functioning. It is soft tissue damage. It is damage to your behavioral repertoire. It can't be measured per se. Being in isolated trauma is a very critical quality. The Jewish people who survived concentration camps were still able to marry and raise families after the event because they had each other in the camps. The same is true for the Vietnam veterans who had each other during combat. When a group of Vietnam or World War two veterans get together, they always talk about their war experiences, every time, for the rest of their lives. Even then there were some Vietnam veterans who came back from the war and just disappeared into the forests. They would go into the forest with a Bowie knife, and be found years later wearing animal skins, looking very wild. It took years of coaxing to get them to come out and rejoin humanity. I expect I will always love the forest. I wish I had the ability to survive alone in a forest, but I'm incompetent in virtually everything I would have liked to have done. I still have no male friends per se, no lovers, no real close relationships of any sort. I expect that I don't have much life to experience anymore, maybe ten years. Dioxin kills people. I am also not worried about the extinction of humanity which seems inevitable, because I'm not really involved. A part of me wants to start the final nuclear war by dropping nukes on the Vatican, Jerusalem, Mecca, and Dharamsala. A part of me wants to develop a virus that kills 6 billion people. The nuclear war will be the end of humanity, the virus would save it for awhile. There are no other options, at this point in time. The future for humanity is going to be very brutal for everybody. Nobody seems to value the planet over the 6.8 billion people who all have demands to make of it. Half are living on $2 a day or less. If they had more they would make the same demands that the richer people do. We have some very hard choices to make in the near future. There are simply too many people for a sustainable world. One billion at a Western standard of living is probably too many. Virtually nobody would be willing to give up a Western standard of living without a fight. In a democracy that government would simply be voted out of office.
When, after a few years in Guelph, I took stock of my life, I realized it was basically a write off. Nothing could be salvaged from my experiences except one thing. I could help make sure that nobody had to ever experience what I had experienced. For many years that was schizophrenia, and I worked hard to educate, telling my story mostly, to people about mental illness. I made about 75 presentations a year for ten years, half to high school classes and half to community organizations. I ran out of people to tell my story to. Now I believe my disability has other causes as well, like dioxin, and again I mostly want to prevent other people from experiencing what I have experienced.
My delusions used to involve being the only male survivor of the human species, favoured in many ways by the aliens and given a second 1000 year life in what is essentially paradise. The reality is one of poverty, celibacy, poison, disability, alcoholism, and a tremendous amount of permanent loss in functioning from schizophrenia and dioxin. It's hard to face that and for many years it was the trend to a better life that motivated me. When I was working for a mental health agency in town a couple of years ago I read a supplement to the Windsor Star on schizophrenia and murder. A well known cardiologist in Windsor, who had a son with schizophrenia, had been killed by his son after the father had unsuccessfully taken his son to emergency to be committed. Windsor was really hurting. Every article in the supplement was about murder caused by someone with schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia do not commit murder unless they in psychosis for a prolonged time and not receiving treatment. People with schizophrenia who do receive good medical attention are some of the gentlest people I have ever met. I criticized a provincial agency and the provincial government who could have prevented this violence, with a more realistic awareness of schizophrenia. The agency I criticized did not treat schizophrneia as a very serious health condition that had to be treated. They were very consumer driven. The local CEO of that agency wrote a letter to the CEO of my agency telling him I should be relieved of my duties for ethical reasons. I almost relapsed because at that point my life was my work. My whole purpose in life was the community service I was doing in my employment. I didn't have any life to speak of outside of my work. I didn't lose my job but before long I transferred to a different line of work where I would be less vulnerable to such attack. I wasn't very good at it. It was difficult for me and it wasn't my purpose in life. I think it's very strange that a mental health CEO would attack a consumer like me. It's his job to support consumers in their recovery, and that man was literally walked off his job by the Ministry of Health a few years later at their AGM. But the damage was done. I remember my CEO at the time telling me that "you need to talk with that man", and that is sometimes true for people you disagree with, and I did meet with him, but all in all it was a extremely traumatic experience for me. I almost had to be hospitalized for psychosis after more than 15 years of stable recovery. Coincidentally a Tibetan lama moved to Guelph during that time, and he may have caused the whole episode for all I know. Religious people don't face their delusions so I don't usually challenge them. It just causes them to get angry. Angry people become violent and take revenge. I try to avoid challenging devout believers as much as possible because their grasp of reality is basically pretty fragile and easily overwhelmed, but religion is probably the worst disease humanity has ever faced. It's a disease that develops through the brain damage sustained in childhood from malnutrition in periods like medeival Europe. Religion grows out of superstitions, and allows a small sadistic elite to control and torture the majority.
I would actually like to patent a new quality of life indicator developed from my observations about religion I call the "Cleavage Indicator". Here in Guelph women have been showing more and more cleavage more and more often each year I have lived here. A few years ago the law on exposing female breasts in public in Ontario changed thanks to a Guelph woman named Gwen Jacobs who took her shirt off on a very hot summer day and walked around until she was arrested. She took her case to the Supreme Court and won. Since then women only go topless at special events like the Hillside Music Festival, which is disappointing, but in recent years there has been an awful lot more women showing more and more cleavage. It's nice to see, and to me an indication that life in Guelph is getting better, hence the creation of the Cleavage Quality of Life Indicator. You read it here first and it's probably the most important economic indicator you will ever be able to actually understand.

Live and learn I guess. I am at any rate still taking my medication. The funny thing about psychosis is that it doesn't really matter what the cause is. All psychosis is treated the same way, with anti psychotics. It's the only medicine we have at the moment, even if your psychosis is caused by dioxin or torture. Of course any psychosis is to some degree mutilation and brain damage. You never fully recover. It's a brutal truth about psychosis that makes schizophrenia such a tragic human condition. I attempted suicide in Toronto believing the aliens would be forced to transfer my mind into the body of a healthy and very wealthy man who lived on the French Riveriera. The only reason I'm still alive is because the aliens intervened, and I believe that because of Luis Bunel movies mostly, like "Un Chien Andulou". There is no point in attempting suicide again. Last time it hurt, a real lot. The aliens would never let me be successful in committing suicide, even if they don't actually exist.

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