Frienz,
The reason I had such severe akathisia, on both occasions, is because I live a pretty sedentary lifestyle. I did mention that dopamine is metabolized by inhaling great gusts of oxygen & exchanging those for full exhales of carbon dioxide, aka BREATHING!!!??? When you live an active lifestyle and do a lot of exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide, you aren’t at too much risk of getting dopamine clots. As a writer/artist whose days are spent typing at a computer or drawing at a table…I did not have much oxygen breaking up those clots.
So not all akathisia looks like mine. If you have a very active job like landscaping or porn star, you may just feel anxious & sleepless in the middle of the night. You may feel overly caffeinated at times, but will be able to dispel all that restlessness as you work. You may or may not feel the depressive symptoms of akathisia. If you work a desk job, you may feel more anxious and jittery at work, and more depressed and restless at night. It can manifest in many different ways. It may not knock you over the head like it did me, so just pay attention to your own reaction to any medication you take.
 |
| 'Juliet' was my alter ego before I was Vin. Very complicated — don't even try to understand |
************
SO, I’ve made some bold claims as to why I KNOW certain celebrities & school shooters died from akathisia. I stand by those claims whole-heartedly. And I will defend them for you now:
HOW I KNOW ROBIN WILLIAMS DIED FROM AKATHISIA: more intuitively than anything else. Because RW’s suicide happened during my own worst phase of akathisia, it came with flashing warning lights. Of course, I thought at the time that it was because I was getting the same disease that RW had been diagnosed with — Lewy Body Dementia. I had no idea until recently that the reason both RW & I were feeling so horrible was not because we had Lewy Body Dementia*. I have since read commentary from his family that states they believe it was medication side-effects that were the direct cause of suicide.
*RW did have LBD, but that was not the direct cause of his suicide.
HOW I KNOW DAVID FOSTER WALLACE DIED FROM AKATHISIA: When I read ‘Infinite Jest’ in 2017, I was absolutely bowled over by the passage in the middle of the book in which Wallace writes w/ such painful clarity about “DEPRESSION”.
“This is exactly my 2014 experience!!!” I thought. I couldn’t have described it with any more alarming accuracy. In fact I was jealous that Wallace had captured the essence of “DEPRESSION” with his brilliantly simple metaphor. I had tried to write about it when I was going through it but I could not capture the profound horror of it.
Of course, I thought then that I had been suffering the same level of Major Depressive Disorder as David Foster Wallace. Wow, maybe depression really IS that bad, I thought.
And of course, I later found out that it was akathisia and not depression that was being described. If you google ‘David Foster Wallace akathisia’ you will find the passage from ‘Infinite Jest’ I’m referring to.
Reports from Wallace’s girlfriend at the time of his suicide reveal that he was experiencing some pretty severe akathisia symptoms for quite awhile. Amazing that he hung on for as long as he did.
 |
| post-akathisia art 2015 (I was still calling it a *nervous breakdown*) |
HOW I KNOW THAT ADAM LANZA (& ALL HIS VICTIMS) DIED FROM AKATHISIA:
NOW PAY ATTENTION! The other two were easy. They just killed themselves. I told you akathisia looks different for everyone. Mostly it manifests as a strange combination of severe restlessness and horrific sadness. But it can also manifest in violent ways. [Is it any surprise that extreme sadness & restlessness could lead to violence?]
Now here’s the part of this story that’s going to get weird if I’m not careful how I tell it. You may or may not know that from 2017 — 2019 I went on a ‘psychic safari’ that was planned, open-ended and not focused on writing things that sounded like gibberish today but might mean something in the future.
It started with simple automatic writing in Dec 2017, and soon it found its purpose after the Feb 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas school. I knew that i wanted this psychic safari to ‘show me’ what we need to do about school shootings. That’s all I knew. I wanted answers to all this deadly violence that no one seemed concerned about. [No one being Congress & the gun lobby.]
I was very focused on the guns. And I was very focused on Nikolas Cruz for much of 2018, as we all were at the time. Sometime in the summer of 2018 I started experiencing some out of character emotions (like really violent bouts of anger). And a persistent, urgent voice seemed to be emerging from the din — ‘Lambert.’ Lambert seemed to be taking direction of my psychic safari.
As the whole experience deepened and sharpened into something I can only call ’shamanistic fight club’, I hope you all were astute enough to guess that it was Adam Lanza & his mother Nancy whom I met with from Mar 27 — Apr 29, 2019 on the psychic plane. Lambert was Lanza.
Before I embarked upon my psychic safari, I was not particularly interested in school shootings; I did not have a special interest in any particular shooting or shooter (though I had read Elliot Rodgers manifesto, mostly for knowledge of the enemy]. I just knew I was tired of feeling helpless & hopeless every time I heard another report of multiple dead bodies on school property.
So…to end up in communion with these two spirits was UNEXPECTED to say the least. Frustratingly enough, I still had trouble understanding what they were trying to tell me. I remained focused on the guns.
And don’t get me wrong — the guns are bad. GUNS ARE BAD, mmmkay, and STUPID. They just are. They suck. They do kill people. They were to blame for all the school shootings just as much as the shooters & the medications involved. It is a three-pronged problem.
But I was missing one of the prongs. In an effort to keep the gun lobby from deflecting blame onto MENTAL ILLNESS, there was a big push to deflect blame right back onto the AUTOMATIC WEAPONS. And rightfully so. No civilian human being should own an automatic weapon.But I digress.
If anyone had told me that it wasn’t so much MENTAL ILLNESS that needed looking at, but the MEDICATIONS used to treat mental illness, I would’ve decried it as another distraction from the GUNS.
It took me going through it myself — experiencing the potency of these side effects — to understand that yes, this could definitely contribute to a person’s urge to commit utter destruction.
Anyway…my time in the spirit realm with the Lanzas was not easy to understand, but the dialogue we did maintain led me to believe that Adam was feeling very “strange” for months before the killings. That’s all I kept hearing “I feel strange” “I feel weird” I feel bad all over”. And in 2019, I just thought that was because he was a psychopathic school shooter. Of course he feels weird & bad.
I felt weird & bad the whole time I was communing with them. I was angry the whole time & my arms hurt really bad. Switching between spirit world & real time was a harsh transition every afternoon when Tony came home. I yelled at him a lot. I yelled at my mom. I yelled at my cat. I felt weird & bad…but it wasn’t quite the weird & bad I needed to feel to understand…
One thing I forgot to mention about my 2014-15 akathisia was…I used to RUN. I carved a path through my house & whenever I felt unbearably restless, I would RUN back & forth through my house—too embarrassed & scared to go outside—FOR HOURS.
If I tried to run for 10 minutes right now, I would huff & puff & fall to the floor in a heap of out-of-shape exhaustion.
And I was NOT in great shape in 2014-15. As I said I was living a pretty sedate lifestyle. But I was able to run for hours at a time. Three hours was not unusual. Non stop until I could feel my dopamine clots loosen.Until I felt like I could finally sit down & think.
After communing with the Lanzas, I had more questions than answers. I went online to find some more personal stuff about Lanza. I had never had any interest whatsoever in the freaky kid with the asylum haircut who had killed all those children! I expected to find out he was a silent loner, a computer geek with no life beyond the screen.
And there was some of that — but not until later in his life. He presented pretty normally until puberty, when it seems he developed some pedophilic feelings. He also started seeing a psychologist and taking Lexapro (or Fanapt) around this time. Reports vary on which medication it was, and the fact that Lanza’s records from this psychologist were destroyed shortly after the crime is…SUPER SUSSSPICIOUS.
But the details of his life in the months before he committed the murders? Riddled with textbook akathisia. Nancy had reported many mornings Adam would spend crying for hours on the bathroom floor. He covered the windows in his bedroom with black bags & hardly ever came out of there. (I can attest to light-sensitivity during akathisia —especially light shining through windows. Unbearable.)
The only reason Adam would leave his room was to go to the local movie theatre, where he would spend HOURS playing Dance Dance Revolution in the lobby. Three — six hours was not unusual, according to employees at the theatre.
I don’t know any normally functioning human who could play DDR for 3 - 6 hours. Just like I don’t know anyone who could or would run through their house for 3 hours. When the tv says “restless legs” do you picture someone playing DDR all day or running frantically from room to room?
I don’t.
Anyway..there’s the nutshell version of why I KNOW all these famous names died from akathisia. I hope I haven’t scared you or sizzled your synapses with all this info. I hope that if you are experiencing any symptoms that resemble akathisia, you may recognize them & call your doctor, or tell someone you trust.
 |
| Hope you enjoyed this comic strip about Vin doing all of Juliet's emotional labor, while she walks away, ungrateful…isn't that the way alter egos always are? |
************
And so…if these famous people can kill themselves, and if these kids can feel so badly that they pick up weapons and shoot their peers, and it still goes unnoticed that they were all taking the same kinds of medication…
…then I have questions about the other suicides-- an alarming number of famous suicides in the last decade --
Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, Scott Hutchinson, Naomi Judd, et al…
and what of the other mass shooters? I remember the kid who shot up the movie theatre in Colorado was schizophrenic and had stopped taking his meds; same with the kid who shot Gabby Giffords in Arizona. Elliot Rodger took medication for awhile but stopped. So what meds was Nikolas Cruz taking; what about Ramos? What about the guy who shot up the concert in Vegas? How about the guy who shot up PULSE nightclub? I have questions!!!!!!!!! [exclamation point]
And I have questions about the people in my life —
my uncle Brett who committed suicide during the time I was separated from my family? He had Parkinson’s for several years and was on different medications — did they play a role in his “decision”?
My friend James who committed suicide in 2010? My step-cousin Diana who killed herself in 2013? My friend Jenna who killed herself in 2016?
I worry about our veterans, so many of whom are on these medications for their post war ailments. Are these meds only compounding problems that are unbearable to begin with?
In the next installment of the Akathisia Series I will share some of the more esoteric, conspiratorial things I’ve found about akathisia. And I will also share some links to interesting akathisia stories. You read them yourselves, and decide what you think about what I’ve written here today.
No comments:
Post a Comment