“Self Medication…Poems of Alienation” is a collection of specially selected spoken word material that I had written over some very dark years of my life battling Paranoid Schizophrenia:
Schizophrenia - A long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relationship between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.
So during those years, I suffered from many negative symptoms of my illness such as intense paranoia, delusions of grandeur, hearing voices, seeing and interacting with non-existent people and objects, and many other types of paranoid hallucinations and delusions. Because of all these symptoms, combined with my unawareness of the fact that I had an illness, I had driven myself to great lengths of self- medication by extreme self- mutilation to cope and deal. I did lots of negative things such as an over consumption of drugs, cutting, burning, and hitting myself all the way to driving myself over 100mph with no seatbelt from the highway straight into another car, then straight into the woods. And due to the fact that I had no clue what was really going on inside my mind, I had placed all the blame on the things outside my mind. All of my anger and frustration was driven towards the world that I had trouble understanding and the people in my life at that time that I had a strong, inaccurate perception of. I honestly and sincerely believed (from my intense paranoia and delusions) that these people were conspiring against me with the cruel intention of ending my life. I had thought these things pretty much about everybody I encountered at that time so I became a very pissed off and hateful person. I had virtually lost my conscience because I was living my life in a constant, overwhelming fear. However, besides alienating and mutilating myself, another one of my many attempts to fight back at all of these negative experiences was writing poems about them. After listening to this album, it will give you a more accurate view of exactly the type of negative, hateful, and delusional state of mind that I was in at that time.
On a more positive note, I’m happy to say that I’m a long way from that now. I’m headed down a very positive, peaceful, and healthy path. In these most recent years of my life, I’m putting out albums like this in an attempt to take all of those negative experiences and turn them into something positive and productive. I want to learn through self- reflection by revisiting these experiences now from a sane perspective so I can help myself complete that transition of turning my life around. So thank you so much for supporting this positive cause by listening and being interested. It sincerely means a lot to me. I hope you enjoy “Self Medication…Poems of Alienation”.
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