At the end of December 2016, my gatekeeping sessions were finished, and I finally [started HRT](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/): Climara® 0.05 mg/day estrogen patches, to be applied to the abdomen once a week. Allegedly, the patch was supposed to stay on the entire week despite showering, _&c_.
(Interestingly, the indications listed in the large fold-out sheet of drug information that came in the box of patches are all for symptoms due to menopause,
-post-menopause, or "hypogonadism, castration, or primary ovarian failure"; if it had become common to prescribe to intact males with an internal sense of their own gender, neither the drug company nor the FDA seemed to know about it.)
+post-menopause, or "hypogonadism, castration, or primary ovarian failure"; if it had become common to prescribe to intact males with an "internal sense of their own gender", neither the drug company nor the FDA seemed to know about it.)
In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I [promised myself](/ancillary/a-broken-promise/) (and [published the SHA256 hash of the promise](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199) to signal that I was Serious) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017—_that_ was what my new secret blog was for.
I don't think that's right. I _was_ crazy, but _that doesn't mean ordinary social reality is sane_—and it doesn't mean that some of the things I thought I saw from my altered perspective weren't _directionally_ correct, as I can evaluate them from a more standard frame of mind now.
-Sometimes, the words written down in official documents really are just lies. I have in my possession an "Involuntary Patient Advisement" form, which claims that I "self presented due to [my] suicidal thoughts". This isn't true. Getting accosted by cops while trying to go into the train station to get back to my apartment is not the same thing as "self presenting"!
-
-
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+Sometimes, the words written down in official documents really are just lies. I have in my possession an "Involuntary Patient Advisement" form, which claims that I "self presented due to [my] suicidal thoughts". This isn't true. Getting accosted by cops while trying to go into the train station to get back to my apartment is not the same thing as "self presenting"![^telephone-game]
+[^telephone-game]: Reading the doctor's notes six years later, it seems likely that this false description was copied from the beginning of a note ("WHO WAS SELF PRESENTED TO CCRMC PES VOLUNTARILY DUE TO SUICIDAL THOUGHTS") that _also_ contains a more accurate description of events later in the same note, except for the substitution of Oakland for Walnut Creek ("PT SEEN EARLIER TODAY IN THE KAISER OAKLAND ED BUT WAS RELEASED WITH THE CONTRACT MOTHER WOULD TAKE HIM HOME AND MONITOR HIM. AFTER THEY GOT HOME PT LEFT WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE. MOTHER REPORTED HIM A DTS"—danger to self—"AND POLICE EVENTUALLY FOUND HIM AT THE BART STATION").
I ended up with a "Rights for Individuals in Mental Health Facilities" handbook, which claims that:
I worry, again, that some readers will take this as vindication that the authorities were right: they forced me to take drugs, and now that I'm sane and have a little more information, I agree that the drugs were a good idea. Why, the contemptuous normie reader asks, does this not demonstrate that they were right to force me, when I was crazy and therefore couldn't make decisions for myself?
-Because submission to authority isn't the same thing as sanity. In the psych ward in February 2017, I _knew_ that I needed sleep. If someone I trusted to have my best interests at heart had _told me_, "This is 50mg Trazadone; I strongly recommend you take it, because it will help you sleep; I also have this Trazadone fact sheet you can read if you want more information," I probably would have taken it.
+Because submission to authority isn't the same thing as sanity. In the psych ward in February 2017, I _knew_ that I needed sleep. If someone I trusted to have my best interests at heart had _told me_, "This is 50mg Trazadone; I strongly recommend you take it, because it will help you sleep; I also have this Trazadone fact sheet you can read if you want more information," I would have taken it.
-But a system that actually had my best interests at heart would not have _kidnapped me and locked me in a building with strangers_, which is _not a good environment for getting rest_. Serious antipsychotic medication is scary stuff. When I was institutionalized in 2013, I had tardive dyskensia—an involuntary lip-smacking compulsion—from the Haldol that they gave me. Tardive dyskensia can be permanent in some cases. Given the information I had at the time in 2017, I do not think I had good reason to trust the system.
+But a system that actually had my best interests at heart would not have _kidnapped me and locked me in a building with strangers_, which is _not a good environment for getting rest_. Serious antipsychotic medication is scary stuff. When I was institutionalized in 2013, I got tardive dyskensia—an involuntary lip-smacking compulsion—from the Haldol that they gave me. Tardive dyskensia can be permanent in some cases. Given that experience, and given the information I had at the time in 2017, I do not think I had good reason not to just trust the system!
...
-I remember pacing the tiled halls of a the first facility where they took me. I was exhausted, but also feeling a sort of manic euphoria, pacing around, tapping demonstratively at the signs on the walls, thinking it was my duty to teach the other inmates how to read. Ziz's report of Vassar's comment about "Zack Davis _vs._ the world" stuck with me; I had of vision of myself as one of the seven most important people in the world in the lead-up to the intelligence explosion, as reckoned by future historians. Being a world–historically important genius wouldn't have _felt like_ being a genius at the time, most of the time. It must have felt like being pretty smart, and the rest of the world seeming dumb and crazy. (A young Albert Einstein working in the Swiss patent office wouldn't have had the mononymic aura of "Einstein" _to his contemporaries_.) Notwithstanding that I was having psychotic delusions of grandeur at the time, I do think I had reason to feel pretty smart, and that the rest of the world was dumb and crazy.
+I remember pacing the tiled halls of a the first facility where they took me—probably [Contra Costa Regional Medical Center](https://cchealth.org/medicalcenter/psychiatric.php) in Martínez.[^ccrmc] I was exhausted, but also feeling a sort of manic euphoria, pacing around, tapping demonstratively at the signs on the walls, thinking it was my duty to teach the other inmates how to read. Ziz's report of Vassar's comment about "Zack Davis _vs._ the world" stuck with me; I had of vision of myself as one of the seven most important people in the world in the lead-up to the intelligence explosion, as reckoned by future historians. Being a world–historically important genius wouldn't have _felt like_ being a genius at the time, most of the time. It must have felt like being pretty smart, and the rest of the world seeming dumb and crazy. (A young Albert Einstein working in the Swiss patent office wouldn't have had the mononymic aura of "Einstein" _to his contemporaries_.) Notwithstanding that I was having psychotic delusions of grandeur at the time, I do think it was legitimate for me to feel that I was pretty smart, and that the rest of the world was dumb and crazy.
-There were two rooms with beds, in that first facility: one for women, and one for men. I didn't end up sleeping there that I recall. Before long, I was taken to a separate facility, with individual rooms. (Or was I incredibly lucky to not have been assigned a roommate?)
+[^ccrmc]: I only know this because, when consulting the doctor's notes available to me while writing this up more than six years after the fact, one of the notes mentions "CCRMC PES". "PES" is probably "Psychiatric Emergency Services".
+
+There were two rooms with beds, in that first facility: one for women, and one for men. I didn't end up sleeping there that I recall. Before long, I was taken to a separate facility, [Fremont Hospital](https://fremonthospital.com/), which had individual rooms. (Or was I incredibly lucky to not have been assigned a roommate? Having to sleep by someone else at night would have been very bad for me, given my fear of the other inmates and my desperate need for sleep.)
...
-----
-After being released,
+After being released from psych prison, arrangements were made for made for me to attend outpatient group therapy at Kaiser Walnut Creek. That also wasn't helpful, but it was much less of a problem.
+
+The outpatient psych authorities are just as stupid and paternalistic as the
+
[TODO: interacting with the outpatient program]
---------------
✓ "People ..." introduction
✓ finish existing 5150 scene scraps
+✓ CCRMC facility note
+✓ footnote about telephone game of "self present"
_ interacting with the outpatient program
_ Vassar discourse
_ emailing Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence/Cantor
_ integrate 5150 scene scraps into a coherent section
_ misc. March activities: asking Anna for promise, meeting Jessica, ordering DIY hormones, proposed credit-assignment ritual
_ "Roberta" situation
-_ overheating in April, staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase, BABSCon
+_ overheating in April, staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase
+_ BABSCon
_ "my call with Western Psychiatric's Manager of Patient Relations"
_ chat transcript relevant to War on Optimization for Generalized Secrecy
_ final credit assignment ritual
_ backlink "again grateful" for doctor's notes
terms to explain on first mention—
+_ inpatient/outpatient
_ NRx
_ TERF?
_ Civilization (context of dath ilan)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff