Gianna on Madness Radio

Hi Gianna,

I’m a former psychiatric patient. I experienced extreme traumas in my childhood due to violence, criminal behaviour in my environment, alchol and substance abuse in our sociale neighbourhood, within the nineties where we all seemed to be a lost generation still involved in the punk movement.

As a young child I was always hypersensitive, shy, scared but with the best results at school, but that changed when I became 13 of age. I started to follow the behaviour of the outcast dropouts in our little village and became a heavy rebelling teenager, playing guitar all night long, and I did a lot of drugs. This resulted in a total collapse of the ego and I got hospitalised in an extremely psychotic state. Nobody understood what happened to me. In my family we have more schizophrenics. My uncle commited suicide in 1994. After years of hospitalisation with manic and psychotic episodes I felt an intense need towards natural health care, meditation and yoga. This resulted in a spiritual emergency when the kundalini energy arose in me. At the same time I was a victim of verbal crime and physical crime (a drunken man attacked me at night and stuck a knife in my hand). And as if that wasn’t enough, my grandmother was dying from cancer and I suffered from glands fever, which later lead to the extreme fatigue syndrome.
I went to see a psychiatrist and told him about the kundalini but he gave me only Risperdal which made it worse, so I got stuck in the experience and due to the lack of transpersonal guidance I tried to commit suicide.

I survived an attempt to kill myself by putting a large knife in my heart. I woke up at intensive care on morphine after a heart operation. When I saw the psychiatrist there I showed some books on kundalini awakening and shamanism which I got from a theosophist. They didn’t listened to me and gave me pills untill a was in a normal state of consciousness again. After three weeks, I left the hospital against the advice of the psychiatrist and went home. After all during the years since my first psychotic episode at the age of 18, I graduated from high school in economics and modern languages, got some certificates in computer languages, did work as a volonteer with other patients and kept on reading on psychology and spirituality. I realised I was an extremely highly sensitive person, and I had extreme problems with our rat race society where sensitivity isn’t a good thing. To release my trauma and existensial problems a started to perform as a poet and musician and wrote a couple of songs, they are still on myspace (www.myspace.com/kristopop1983). After the ego-collapse during the kundalini-process I felt an extreme influx of spiritual energy. It was like a thousand volts of electricity flowing through my body. Al the trauma came from the unconsiouss into my consiouss mind. I realised I had been using a lot of drugs to be able to study at high school and to cover my sensitivity. I got a lot of help when I met a transpersonal psychologist who was working for the spiritual emergency network, founded by Stanislav and Christina Grof. I became a student in theosophy, read Ken Wilber, Aurobindo, Jung, Assagioli, lots of works on highly sensitive persons, and I become a good friend of famous and unfamous artists in my country and in the Netherlands. Right now I’m still seeing a psychiatrist, it’s a good man but he doens’t now I comming of my meds now, and I feel fine. I take of myself, work volounteerly as a webdevelopper, journalist writer, I research daily on the internet, I am active as an activist for psychiatry, I make interviews with artist, because I believe creativity is a way of healing if you suffer from mentall distress. After years of freaking out on psychedelics, cocaine, amfetamines, XTC, alcohol and so on, I live no the most sober live ever. I see substance as tools to use if you do it properly, but no abuse. I hardly drink alcohol. Right now I am on ice tea or orange juice daily. My main addiction is nicotine, that’s what’s still left, but I live a rather self-fullfilling live. I’m still sensitive to our rat race society and stress, but I’m again at university, course by course, on my own speed, slowly towards my goal. I did workshops in shamanism and chakra consciousness and I live from the heart. I’m sure that my suicide attempt wouldn’t be necessary if there had been a psychiatrist who studied altered states of consiousness. Also the chronic fatique syndrome together with the kundalini I see as a purifying process. I had a ‘shamanic illness’ accompanied by visions, experiences of synchronicity, telekineses, and I could read aura’s for a period of time while in that extreme state of higher awareness. My father also saw that I could read his throat chakra and so on.

I believe now what Dr Daniel Fisher said, a former patient who works now as a psychiatrist. Antipsychotic drugs can help in dangerous situations, but they are a temporary solution. I don’t believe in patients who have to be an psychiatric drugs for the rest of their lives, only when the brain is damaged or so, but not due to psychoses induced by yoga, meditation or drugs.

So my goal now is to study the psychology, keep on writing and researching. I have a transpersonal psychologist who helps me financially with my education. A test a unversity told me that I have to be active on four fields: poetry, music, writing and psychology, so that’s what I do. I also work on the stigma on mental illness because I still suffer from people who call me lazy, worthless or a loser, while I’m all I can for humanity.

I’m in contact now with Sean Blackwell from Bipolar Or Waking Up (You Tube Channel). From the Spiritual Emergency Network I got the DVD on spiritual emergencies; the trailer is on my website: http://marsraker.blogspot.com/2009/01/spiritual-emergencies-trailer.html

I hope, in the future, to build a bridge between psychology and spirituality for a better mental health system. After all the pain and distress, I feel I’m on my path and I am at the right place on the right time.

My diagnoses have been: psychotic depressive, bipolar 1 and schizoaffective. I think I’m just highly sensitive, that’s all, they might think I’m totally nuts and lost my mind, but not my heart!

Thanks for reading,

Kristo
Singer-songwriter and poet
Volonteer as webdesigner, journalistic writer
Bachelorstudent psychology
Student of shamanism and theosophy