Issue number 18 of my comic book starts into the "recovered memories" phase of my psychosis in 1992. Recovered memories are a thoroughly debunked concept that fall into the same kind of category as facilitated communication as discarded avenues of inquiry. Facilitated communication was supposed to supply a means for the nonverbal autistic or otherwise severely verbally and intellectually impaired to communicate with the world. A fully functioning person would "guide" an impaired person's finger or hand on a chart of the alphabet and, oh, the fun that ensued. People started getting skeptical when things such as allegations of sexual abuse conducted by people who had airtight alibis, such as abuse by a deceased grandparent at the time the abuse supposedly occurred, started cropping up in these communications. Recovered memories are now widely recognized a hallucinations in the more skeptically minded commentators of such phenomena. Rosanne Barr, with the aid of a therapist, had a recovered memory of her parents sexually abusing her at the age of six months.
In this part of the story, I'm going for the idea that I want to bring across my total conviction that these memories had a basis in reality when I first experienced them. My literary role model for this part of the story is Mark Vonnegut and his book, The Eden Express. Someone described the experience of reading The Eden Express as similar to reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In Fear and Loathing..., Thompson describes massive drugs binges of all kinds. The person describing Eden Express to me said that Vonnegut gives a similar visceral feeling of what it must be like to be psychotic to the reader of his ordeal, even if the reader has never been psychotic. I just changed a passage at the end of issue number 18 to indicate that I initially greeted the first wave of hallucinations with no ability to think critically about what I was going through. In effect, these "recovered memories" struck me as totally real, and I believed I was going through an evolution of consciousness rather than a psychosis.
People may find it hard to believe the hold these kinds of experiences can still have on me. I had another vision of the Legend of Richy Vegas in the Summer of 2016; this time while on medication and decidedly not psychotic, and its power still holds me to the point where I won't talk about it in detail or specifics on a forum such as this blog.
I've looked at Youtube videos that go into Dissociative Identity Disorder and whether that is real or not. The famous case of Sybil and her sixteen different personalities turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by an unscrupulous therapist and her willing patient. So yeah, maybe Dissociative Identity Disorder now. Y-y-yep.
In this part of the story, I'm going for the idea that I want to bring across my total conviction that these memories had a basis in reality when I first experienced them. My literary role model for this part of the story is Mark Vonnegut and his book, The Eden Express. Someone described the experience of reading The Eden Express as similar to reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In Fear and Loathing..., Thompson describes massive drugs binges of all kinds. The person describing Eden Express to me said that Vonnegut gives a similar visceral feeling of what it must be like to be psychotic to the reader of his ordeal, even if the reader has never been psychotic. I just changed a passage at the end of issue number 18 to indicate that I initially greeted the first wave of hallucinations with no ability to think critically about what I was going through. In effect, these "recovered memories" struck me as totally real, and I believed I was going through an evolution of consciousness rather than a psychosis.
People may find it hard to believe the hold these kinds of experiences can still have on me. I had another vision of the Legend of Richy Vegas in the Summer of 2016; this time while on medication and decidedly not psychotic, and its power still holds me to the point where I won't talk about it in detail or specifics on a forum such as this blog.
I've looked at Youtube videos that go into Dissociative Identity Disorder and whether that is real or not. The famous case of Sybil and her sixteen different personalities turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by an unscrupulous therapist and her willing patient. So yeah, maybe Dissociative Identity Disorder now. Y-y-yep.
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