The day that I died (A preface to A FOGGY LIFE)

People tied to beds, people being hit, people overmedicated with psychiatric drugs and getting worse and worse. That's what I had seen when I left the lunatic asylum in 2001, a lunatic asylum that the mental health professionals called a hospital. But how could I call that place a hospital when there was no examination whatever there? Until 2001 I had been in two other so-called mental hospitals.

I decided to write the history of my crises and some parts of my personal life, because I believed that it would help mental health professionals to improve the treatments and understand that the people that are tied to beds have feelings and are human, and even if they don't complain afterwords, it's always one of the worst experiences of their lives, even worse than the crises themselves. Besides it was clear to me that the psychiatric medication wasn't so effective as the mental health professionals believed it to be, since two of the relapses that I had I was taking the psychiatric drugs.

In A FOGGY LIFE I described embarrassing moments of my crises and embarrassing moments of my life, because I believed that if I displayed my most shameful thoughts and experiences of the past it would help the mental health professionals find a treatment that worked, because the treatment that I received surely DIDN'T WORK. (Which is ascertained by my relapses even when I was under psychiatric medication.)

I knew that if I told those horrible stories I would be exposing myself in a way that nobody would ever do. In fact there were some beautiful girls that I was interested in that just dismissed any possibility of having a relationship with me when they saw the site where I revealed that I was a psychiatric patient, even without reading it. One particular girl only saw my home page and without reading it just went saying to everybody "he's crazy".

Before I wrote my horrible experiences I knew it would make my life harder and that I would suffer a lot a misconception, actually I knew that the day I decided to publish the true story of my crises and its probable causes I was practically dying, I mean, I died the moment I published my true story, for it's so embarrassing and compromising that I couldn't tell the consequences of its being released and made public. But I had to go on existing, even without life, for the battle for better treatments for the mentally ill needed that I continued existing.

It's so much so that some women kill themselves when people expose intimate sexual relations that they had and wanted to keep secret, and some men, homosexual men, kill themselves when other people reveal that they are homosexual because they just can't bear the fact of everybody knowing their sexual status. Well, I'm not homosexual, I never had sex with men and never felt like having, but I shared in A FOGGY LIFE a moment when I acted like a homosexual in a severe crisis. I shared this embarrassing experience myself because I believed that it could help scientists understand mental illnesses. If some homosexuals killed themselves when people discovered that they were homosexuals you can be sure that I felt like dying when I shared my embarrassing experiences. After all the suffering that I had seen I believed that the sharing of my horrible experiences would really help improve treatment and prevent other people from going through the horrors that I saw and lived. I was determined to take all the risks.

Why would I act like a homosexual in a crisis? I shared this experience exactly to help everyone understand that there are some reasons behind the odd behavior of psychiatric patients in crisis. I described a moment when I LITERALLY fingered myself in public a crisis in a manner that surely seemed homosexual when I thought of my elder brothers who molested me when I was a child. In this bizarre crisis I tried to justify the sexual abuses that I suffered, I tried to believe that my elder brothers were very good and that I was the bad guy. I babbled out the name of my brothers in that horrifying moment.

The public disclosure of my crises in fact ruined some romantic relationships in my life, when I thought that I would finally have a life with a relationship in spite of everything. There were girls who flirted with me who read my true story and then started believing firmly that I was gay and some were so convinced that started homophobic jokes and insults against me and thus the relationships were through abruptly. (Thus even being heterosexual I suffered because of the homophobia of people, that's why I made it a point to fight homophobia too.)

Notes:
CAPS (Psychosocial Center of Attention) is an almost literal translation from Portuguese. "Psychosocial Center of Attention" is, in fact, a HALFWAY HOUSE, CAPS is a HALFWAY HOUSE. Thus when I left the lunatic asylum in 2001 I was sent to a HALFWAY HOUSE. Psychosocial Center of Attention Rubens Correa = Rubens Correa House, or Rubens Correa Halfway House.
I put the word "seizures" instead of "crises", this because in a book by a psychiatrist he used the word "seizure" to describe the crises of his mentally handicapped daughter.

I wrote A FOGGY LIFE between 2004 and 2005, some of the chapters were added later and some of the chapters are only handwritten, in MANUSCRIPT, and I'm not sure whether I am gonna type them some day.

The edited version is this one:
A FOGGY LIFE
The unedited version can be seen here:
A FOGGY LIFE

Since I wasn't a very experienced writer in English when I originally wrote it I made a few spelling mistakes in the first version of A FOGGY LIFE, which are now corrected.
Many of the errors that I made were errors to which the foreign student is naturally prone, as is noted by the excellent book A CONCISE ENGLISH GRAMMAR FOR FOREIGN STUDENTS, the book which was one of my main references for good spelling and good grammar when I wrote it, along with the outstanding WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY UNABRIDGED. (Even with very good references, I made many mistakes due to my own lack of attention.)

(I will continue this text later, since there are a few more points to clear up to consider this a preface to the true story of my crises, A FOGGY LIFE.)