Read this essay online or reprint it at:
http://www.geometricvisions.com/ocpd/damnation.html

A Special Kind of Crazy

You, sir are a special kind of crazy. They may even name a type of crazy after you.
People will no longer be called "odd" when they are batshit, self destructive crazy. They will be called "ogg".
-- undermyne

Michael David Crawford
November 3, 2009

I wrote this at first as a private letter to Blarney and Holly, then decided to submit to the queue as I felt I owed the lot of you the same explanation. I know that I have upset many of you for a long time, and I understand completely why you are so weary of my navel-gazing essays on my mental illness.

I ask you to vote for this piece, not out of any consideration for me, but out of consideration for others that might be helped by reading it. K5's headlines are syndicated to hundreds of other web sites. Reading this essay could save some human lives.

I stumbled across the following essay almost a year ago. I posted the link at k5, but no one paid it much attention. I begged Bonita to read it, I told her it would mean more to me than anything in the world, but she flatly refused. She didn't even want to know what it was about.

I wasn't trying to get anything from her, or to win her back or anything. I just wanted her to understand.

I try so very hard to explain, really I do, but hardly anyone ever even pays attention:

The RIGHT Stuff - Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder: A Defect of Philosophy, not Anxiety

In March of 1994, my therapist in Santa Cruz, California, who I had been seeing once a week for eight years, quite abruptly and without explanation said "I think it's time", then fetched a photocopy of a chapter of a book from her desk, then asked me to take it home to read.

The book it was from, David Shapiro's Neurotic Styles, was written in 1965. I was born in 1964. I have written many times, about how I felt to read not only my entire life's history, but every thought and feeling I had ever experienced, written down in a couple dozen pages of a book that was written when I was just one year old:

Obsessive-Compulsive Style

What David Shapiro called Obsessive-Compulsive Style in 1965 is now known as Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. It is quite a different thing than the more well-known Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

It's important to understand that my OCPD is a completely different thing than my schizoaffective disorder. They are two completely independent and completely unrelated conditions. Psychiatrist speak of Five Axes Of Diagnosis. Schizoaffective Disorder is my Axis One Diagnosis, OCPD is my Axis Two.

From The RIGHT Stuff:

It would not be unusual for an OCPD sufferer to literally take delight in being wronged, since it affords them, what they perceive, as the justified opportunity to deliver a steep punishment. The term "righteous indignation" was probably conceived with this perspective in mind. Crossing a person with OCPD provides her the license to hold a grudge and forever hold your mistake over your head.

My health insurance company's case manager, who I've been speaking to on the phone regularly since August of 2008, is herself a licensed psychotherapist. She is quite good and I love her absolutely to death. But we have discussed not only my own Personality Disorder, but also Enigma's Borderline Personality Disorder. We've spent quite a lot of time at both of these.

And my case manager has told me many, many times that there is simply no known treatment for any of the Personality Disorders. I once thought my Obsessive-Compulsive Style was a neurosis, something caused by an event from my undoubtably traumatic childhood, that will someday be cured through psychotherapy. I've been working towards this cure for twenty-five years this month.

Something about what struck me today has made me realize that this isn't the result of anything that ever happened to me. As far as I am able to tell, I was born this way. Had I known what an attorney, judge, courtroom and lawsuit were when I was four years old, well I would have been suing my little playmates back then in 1968 just as I've been doing here today.

Now I am told that I am simply doomed, and might as well give up.

That's what made me so suicidal this morning. I can't really go into why I'm not suicidal anymore - it's complicated, and I am very tired.

Holly, a very common problem is that the mentally ill refuse to believe they are sick or that they need help. Quite commonly everyone around them urges them to get help, but always they refuse. They insist that everything is just fine, or that the problem is in someone else's head and not their own.

That's not because we are just being obstinate or trying to be difficult. Recent research has shown that this happens because of the damage that mental illness does to a structure in our brains that gives us insight. It's not that we don't want to believe we are sick, but that we are actually mentally incapable of even having that understanding.

When I first met my psychiatrist in Truro, he said "You have insight. You know you need help. That's half the battle."

But I'm very sorry to say that I was not always so insightful, that many, many friends and loved ones urged me to get help. Always I refused, always with the same reason: "Psychologists are for crazy people, and I'm not crazy." Those Exact Words. Well by the time I did see a psychologist, I wasn't just crazy, but so far gone as to be completely beyond any hope of recovery.

It's known as "Anosognosia" - "Without Knowledge" or "Denial of Knowledge" or some such. Look it up in Google.

The reason I bring up Anosognosia is not that I am unaware that I am sick, but to make a comparison to my own condition. No doubt you both feel that your pleas are falling on deaf ears, that I am so paranoid or so self-righteous or am on such a Self-Appointed Mission From God that I am simply unwilling to listen to what you say.

It's not that way at all. Not by any means. I beg you to understand, to believe what I am about to say:

It is because I am simply mentally and emotionally incapable of being any other way. Don't think for a minute that I haven't tried, or that I haven't spent years - no: decades, grieving all that I have lost because of my condition.

You have to understand that there is something very fundamentally different about the way my brain is wired than the way any of your brains are wired. It is as if I were an alien species, visiting the Earth after having traveled from another star system in a space craft.

You can no more change this about me by reasoning with me, begging me, pointing out how wrong I am, than you can make a rattlesnake stop biting by pointing out that its venom is hurtful. My righteous indignation is as far as I can tell encoded into my genes, much as a snake's fangs and venom are encoded into its own.

I am very sorry to have to say all this. There simply are not words to express my sorrow. I have lost so much, so very much... there is no way any of you could comprehend the profound depths of my loss that has come from this.

But!

David Shapiro writes at the end of his Chapter on Obsessive-Compulsive Style that many mental illnesses have adaptive symptoms. For example paranoids have unusually acute powers of observation.

I have spent many, many years pondering how I could be, as I claim, one of the very best coders in the entire industry. Just in certain important and very limited respects, and not at all in every way. This despite having only one computer science class the whole time I was in school. Otherwise my coding is entirely self-taught, by reading books and writing software of my own on my own computers.

My most significant skill is low-level debugging. For twenty years now I've been telling everyone I know that I can fix bugs that no one else can - and I consistently prove that I'm right. I am absolutely not kidding, that it took me only a week to fix a bunch of bugs at Data Robotics that had the lot of them flummoxed for months.

I know now why I am such a good debugger. I've been discussing it with my doctors and they both agree. I discussed it in more detail today with Dr. I. She doesn't know much about computers, but she does seem to be an expert on Obsessive-Compulsive Style, and she agreed completely:

It Is My Very Madness That Makes Me Such A Good Coder.

I am so good at debugging because I have such a phenomenal attention to detail. Shaprio discusses that in his chapter. The kind of attention to detail I possess could not reasonably be expected of any rational human being. The kind of attention to detail I possess - and my uncanny ability to spot the most miniscule, obscure bits being the least bit out of place - is without a doubt the product of Madness.

I spoke to someone today who said my Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder is both a blessing and a curse. But that doesn't quite express the extent of it:

No, it is as if I am simultaneously Damned, in the Seventh Level of Hell right next to Judas chewed by the teeth of Lucifer for All Eternity...

... while at the same time my very soul is saved. I sit at The Right Hand of God basking in His Radiance.

Both at the same time.

I hope that helps you to understand. I do understand myself that it won't make a whole lot of sense to anyone.

And Holly...

From what you've been saying, I have the sense that your father may have suffered Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder as well.

I have observed that many of my colleagues share these same traits. Computer programmers have a very well-deserved reputation for getting into raging long, drawn out arguments over completely pointless differences such as what text editor is the best for writing one's code.

I've been in many such flame wars myself. Tell me now - is it Free Software, or Open Source?

Please forgive me - I know I've upset so many of you, but I swear on All That Is Holy I would not hurt a fly if I had the choice. I have always meant well, but I am not always capable of acting rationally.

Many of you claim that I refuse to accept responsibility for all the grief I cause myself and others. That is absolutely not the case. I accept - fully and without reservation - responsibility for all I have done and said as a result of my condition, and all the damage and pain I have done to so may people I care so deeply for.

I have promised you for over a year that I would tell you why Bonita left me. I'll tell you now:

I wanted her to read Writing as a Symptom of Mental Illnesss. It was a very hard time for both of us - I had just gotten hospitalized a week after arriving in Vancouver, Bonita was all on her own back in Truro.

"I can't right now," she pleaded with me, "I'll read it, but not now. I'll read it later."

But I wanted her to understand that it was only my writing that enabled me to hold on to any shred of sanity. I wanted her to understand that my writing was my only hope for survival. I wanted her to read that essay Right Now.

So I threatened to divorce her, if she didn't read it.

"When you said that," she said much later, "Something changed."

I miss My Bonita so very much. I miss our beagles Jacob and Twiggy so very much. I love them as if they were my own children. How could I ever hope to explain to them why their Daddy is never coming home again?

None of you need point out to me the depth of my insanity, nor what it could cost me. I know them both far better than you could ever possibly hope to comprehend.

I am grateful for you kind help during these troubled times.

Your Friend -- Mike

Bonita Flatly Refused To Read Any Of My Writing

I said many, many times here at Kuro5hin, that nothing made Bonita so anxious as for me to tell her I had an idea for a new article.

Bonita was quite devoted to her study of art. She worked very hard, she was very diligent not only with her studio work, but with all of her theoretical work as well - art history and criticism.

She and I spent many a happy hour discussing her studies. I would pose for her paintings or drawings, she would come home from her art history lecture then pass on the entire lecture to me. As a result I myself was able to gain a pretty good understanding of 19th and 20th century art history.

Given that she was so serious about her work, how do you suppose she would have felt had I refused even to discuss it with her? To be in the same room with her when she painted? To act fearful every time she broke out a blank canvas?

Her refusal to ever discuss - let alone read - any of my essays, actually wounded me far deeper than you would expect from this comparison. As I explained in Why I Write, my writing is a profoundly important part of the process by which I transformed myself from profoundly disturbed, completely delusional and a menace to society, to a man that, while without a doubt, eccentric and unconventional, and occasionally - but temporarily - off the deep end, but a largely happy man as well.

You asked why I dont' spend less time at Kuro5hin and more time on Ogg Frog. My answer is that Ogg Frog would not serve as the critical component of my healing process that Kuro5hin does. I was not able to understand until I reflected on it just now, but I am not able to choose the time and the way that my writing will heal my mind. To have any hope for that healing at all, I must write more or less continously. Kuro5hin serves that vital need for me.

Now consider how I would feel after having written a ten or twenty page exposition of my own inner mental process, and by doing so, having exorcised - forever - one of the many demons that unquestionably possess me.

How would I feel, to excitedly offer my essay to Bonita to read, to ask her to read it, to plead with her to read it, to break out in tears in my desperation that she read it, to scream in pain and terror because she won't read it?

My friend, Bonita refused not just to read that one essay - but any of my essays. She did take a stab at Living with Schizoaffective Disorder once, but she failed to read the whole thing through.

For her to treat her own husband's deepest, most vulnerable thoughts and feelings with such callous disregard, well, my friend,

She might as well have driven a railroad spike through my heart, not just once, but every time I wrote a new essay then asked her to read it.

I'm not saying I was right to threaten to divorce her. But I had my reasons for doing so. I wanted to understand that the very writing that she feared and resented so deeply, was my only hope for ever staying sane.

I wanted her, simply to understand, that my writing was not something to be feared and resented, but valued - no, cherished.

And when I made this request, when I emphasized the importance of this in the only way left available to me after she refused all my entreaties...

She divorced me.

I'm not saying I was right to have threatened The Nuclear Option. But Bonita bears a great deal of responsibility for our Nuclear Exchange herself.

Quite likely the most painful part of all this, is not just to have lost what I always said was the very best thing that ever happened to me, but than I'm pretty sure she never did read that essay.

All I wanted, was for her to understand why writing was so important to me. Now I've lost her, she blames me for everything, I paid her way through art school and she left me with collossal debt...

And she still doesn't understand, and refuses even to discuss the topic.

Read this essay online or reprint it at:
http://www.geometricvisions.com/ocpd/damnation.html