ALCOHOL VERSUS TREATMENT03-06-09
Alcohol is the mainstay of my life. Even though it will most likely be the agent that kills me, I know it won’t forget me. Alcohol has saved me from death but I’m sure it will call me back to balance the books, once and for all.
I feel that it’s a fair trade-off. I am willing to pay for it. I can’t even imagine not having the most honest and reliable ally in my life. I will not turn by back on it now. How could I? It has been the most honest, trustworthy and comforting companion since forever.
Very few understand the sanctuary provided by liquid spirits to the unsettled mind.
It comforts and protects against others spirits who just hang around to joke, nag me and outright irritate me at times.
Then there’s always the spirits that haunt. They don’t go away, they don’t give up, yet I owe them nothing. They were never there for me. Why do they think I owe them now?
Alcohol is not an evil or un-cruel enemy, but it must exact its price. I can’t think of one thing or instance in my life that hasn’t eventually demanded a slice.
Demise is a word that loses its meaning unless you really take it in and see it as a choice to dampen the perception of the life around you, the world that is so foreign.
To feel outside of life; the strangeness of getting the mail, the desperate desire to not wake up and attempt a “normal” day is so daunting that more appropriate solutions look reasonable. My thoughts about me are so conflicting it becomes more comfortable to agree with my own worst diagnosis.
I was dubious when agreeing to undergo the various assessments and tests that were to be used to gain yet another ‘appropriate’ assessment of my ‘condition’. I succumbed to x-Rays, Cat Scans, blood tests, psychological ink blot tests, biofeedback, and countless other tools of mental evaluation.
Eventually I was led into a little stale room about the size of a public restroom. There was a vinyl backed steel chair tucked under a stark table. On it were a stack of questionnaires.
They exit, leaving the room to me. I start glancing at the thick stack of papers on the desk. GOD, I’m TIRED. I can imagine thatthis room stinks like jail although I’ve never been there…..yet. Hmm, that’s a lie; I have been to jail, for only a one-night stay, thank God. Maybe that’s why I can so acutely recall the stench.
Some of the questionnaires ask if I wanted to shoot people from a campus high tower, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries. To Me., this is laughable. Why ask such a question? So I decide to have fun with it and answer the questions in the most bizarre way possible. Mmm-hmm, this could get very interesting. If they are going to ask stupid questions, why not give stupid answers??
“Yes, I want to go into the military and be provided with weapons of mass destruction! The more, the better!!! Then I semi-quoted Arlo Guthrie: “Yes, I want to see veins and blood and guts running through my teeth!”
I think they are kind of wary after scoring the exams, and poke their busy heads back and forth out of the next room to fisheye me. Then just as quickly they disappear into their protective little cubby hole across the hall.
But. I knew I couldn’t hurt anyone beside myself.
They then implemented more extensive testing and all sorts of “Multiphasic Personality” inventories that are best described as MMPIs. These evaluations are sanctioned by the prestigious Bible of Psychiatry, the DSMV 4-5-6/. This is the unprotested Bible of true definitions of all mental illness.
Hoping to produce some reasonable diagnosis explaining why I was so completely different was not easy. They were searching for something, anything to give a hint of placing my persona in an acceptable frame. My completely unfamiliar presence was not acceptable without a professional definition. After all, they were all professionals, extrapolating what I was suffering from was critical! So, they kept up with a panacea of endless evaluations and psychological exams which seemed to be their greatest forte.
Psychology and the field of mental health had come up with endless tests for diagnosis, but it severely lacked meaningful and effective procedures to deal with or cure their unending discoveries of mental incapacities.
Complex-PTSD was a diagnosis that would be recognized twenty years in the future. But right now, I was just plain unruly, defiant, and pretty much crazy.
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