Schizophrenics Never Lie

I used to compulsively read the Wikipedia page for schizophrenia back when I used meth. I was trying to figure out if I was in the midst of a psychotic episode or if I was truly being punished by god to atone for the sins I had accumulated as an eighteen year old guy, like literally just some guy.

I’m now certain God was punishing me, but not much too much to explore there. Can’t do much about that. However, something on the wiki for schizophrenia always stood out to me. Immigrants are three times more likely to develop some form of psychotic disorder than their native born counterparts. What is funny is that, the article that Wikipedia cites for the “three times as likely” stat, mentions how pretty much all the scholarship on the significantly higher prevalence of psychotic episodes in immigrant populations have attributed this discrepancy to social and economic forces,and offer instead hypotheses rooted in biological determinism. Which is a favorite for western scientists, among other studies like phrenology and eugenics. It is almost comical western intellectuals' aversion towards dialectics. They consciously choose not to address class, material reality because part of their hypotheses as to why immigrants are prone to develop psychosis would have to include, “…and at fifteen he watched his brother and best friend gunned down by during a strike at a Coca Cola plant by pro-western, fascist paramilitary forces.”

They don’t speak the language well, they don’t understand certain social customs, they are treated like invaders, they hardly have any friends and family (if at all) their bosses know they are easier to exploit. These are the realities they endure every waking second. However, I did not bring up the prevalence of psychotic disorders in immigrants to explore that particular topic in depth. I brought it up to establish that those who suffer psychotic breaks do so in an environmental context, in the context of the society they inhabit. Our brains are built to recognize patterns. Fresh paw prints must mean a predator is nearby. The leaves rustle in a specific way when something is stalking us. The jungle suddenly falling silent is instantly detected by us and forces us into a state of vigilance.

We left the jungle, but we never expected we’d be getting eaten up all the same, still on the brink of survival. Our foes now are even more deplorable. The jaguar follows your cent for days, crouches through the foliage and vines. He bides his time and when you take a moment to yourself to sit on a rock and rest for a bit, he’s got his jaws crushing down on either side of your neck, pinning you down for the ten or so seconds it takes for you to pass out.

Now we walk around with leeches latched onto anywhere where there’s warm blood, pulsating and growing fat with each drink of blood they take. Everyone’s tired. They can’t rest ,because they’d end up pale and cold. The leeches would suck what’s left of them.

You go to work by and are alienated from the process which you are exalted as being “a crucial member”. And you are. Your shift leads make it abundantly clear how much they struggle whenever you miss you a shift. But if you were to suggest, in that case that you won’t show up the rest of the week unless you get a pay raise; you are so easily replaceable. It’s the worker that is crucial, not you. What’s crucial is your surplus value, that you ask for the least from your workplace while giving the most:creating the most surplus value.

And then .after a long day of getting scrutinized by a bunch of shifts who would genuinely die before they would let anyone take their special shift lead specific uniform (reminds them there are people below them in the cast). You come home and find a letter from your landlord that rent is going up because, well, property prices are going up.

These two sequences alone can make any man snap, and then remember that this is the premise this country was built on. The free market, land speculation, and rugged individualism. Used car salesman, makeup meant to reject the fallibility Americans, pay day loan services, private industrial prison complex staffed with slaves ,a military industrial complex staffed by old crones who love playing god and the soldiers who jump a the to kill and rape the defenseless because thag is what Americans do. That aforementioned rugged individuality, love of the free market , and love for land speculation has forged the love for exploitation, for theft that permeates every aspect of society.

I remember being in rehab when I was nineteen with this other meth head named Jesse. He was obsessed with numerology. We would be watching a movie and he would go “wait pause it. How many cars are on screen right now” and then he’d go and scrawl down the number of cars that were on the screen. He had spent time living out in, what was known by drug addicts colloquially, as “the woods”.

Everytime in group, we would be presented with some topic to discuss. Shame. Strength. Acceptance. But none of this mattered at all to Jesse. Each share he would repeat over and over the story of how he was beaten by three men, one armed with a bat, and had all of his things taken. Even his tent. Something pretty important in the woods. The counselors would validate his anger, his trauma, before asking him in roundabout ways how he could move forward from it. I need a gun. Jesse mentioned how they beat him so badly that he just lay there bleeding and gasping for air while they took the time to sort through his stuff. When they found all they needed, they just walked off, having only given one glance back just to make sure he hadn’t gotten back up in pursuit of them. Jesse wanted nothing more than to have a gun, then to have had a gun. I found that quite funny. The best he could ask for was the right to live in a tent in the woods without being beaten and robbed.

Was this story meant to be an indictment of the men who robbed Jesse? No. They were all-American. Before Jesse came across those men in the woods, he was kicked out of his home for being gay at the age of seventeen. He couldn’t lease an apartment. He had no credit and no guarantor. He could hardly focus on finding a job, since he had to eat and sleep from the moment he first left home. But he found it hard sleeping on the street, so he chose not to sleep. He bought meth ,so he could keep moving. So he didn’t have to lay his head on concrete.

Me and him got along well except every once in a while his demeanor would change sharply ,and he’d ask me “are you a good person” or “why do you want to know that”. He told me that some people were demons. They would study humans, so that they could better deceive them. One night, at the house all the patients stayed at, there was a blood moon. Everytime someone would try to go out to smoke a cigarette he would shout at them to stay inside. There were witches out there in the woods behind the house. They would cast spells that would induce night terrors. They would cast spells so that your nightmares persisted even when you were awake. You would be cursed and a foul stench would emanate from you. You would be like the living dead, set in some purgatory between living and dead.

I found that so interesting. At the height of my meth binges, I thought I had leprosy or that I was a walking corpse. Genuinely, I believe I was a decaying corpse that somehow was still lurching around the streets of Austin in the dead of night. I believed him when we said some of us are cursed, that we inhabit some underworld. I remember sitting on the sidewalk and watching people look right through me- if they even looked at me at all. I was cast from civil society, and I could not comprehend why. Was it witchcraft and demonic possession as Jesse claimed? Was it the CIA or FBI as so many other meth addicts I talked to claim. Who was it that had conspired against us? Who was it that had left us so destitute and alone? The conspiracy was built into the world we came into. We came into it wrong. We didn’t even have enough to offer to exploit. It is us, who the system has no place for, that are made the most aware of the things the recognition of our humanity are contingent on.