Musiccosmos

Have you ever found yourself caught in a downward spiral of negative thoughts? It’s as if your mind is like a funnel with thoughts racing towards the bottom only to get stuck in the neck. The more you try to think your way out of the funnel the more distressed you become because there appears to be no way out. Negative thoughts can be overwhelming, and if we are not careful, they create pathways in our mind from which we draw . Unfortunately, thoughts rarely occur without emotions. When we add emotions to our negative thoughts, we try to think our way towards a solution yet as we spiral downward, a solution seems out of reach . So much so, that we start to panic . It may look something like this. (Figure 1) Picture a funnel, wide at the top, narrowing at the bottom. Consider the thought, “I feel grumpy today.” Now, put this thought into your funnel. This thought is worrisome but not distressing. However, what would happen if more worrisome thoughts followed? “I’m usually not ...

“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” –  Isaac Newton Schizophrenia is madness in motion. When I am psychotic — when I see and hear things others do not — it seems as though the buzz of atoms, the molecular bonds that hold things together, reveal themselves as tiny humming grains beneath the appearance of my surroundings. It took me a while to learn my illness isn’t like other ways of being sick: it knows everything I know. It uses my brain against me and the more active and operational one’s brain, the more powerful the disease: the more tools it has at its disposal. When I learn new coping methods so does the disease, which in turn seeks to undermine them. As I say, it knows everything I know. That is why a lot of the time I choose to blunt my brain: with drugs, with alcohol, with sleep . For a long time I existed in a dysfunctional zombie-like haze before I learned to manage a rough, teetering balance between sedation and awaren...