Thomas Wictor

A couple of days ago, a Ron Paul toady named Martin went after me on Twitter for having the temerity to disagree with him. He was incapable of answering any questions I asked, and at the end of his hours-long spewage, he blocked me so that I couldn’t respond to him. Well, today he unblocked me just so that he could block me again. This is a sign that I’m now living inside his head. Since he’ll forever read everything I write, here’s a primer on mental illness, written just for stupid old Jew-haters.

First, ordinary Martin confirmed everything I figured out about him. He’s in his mid-fifties, which means he’s actually older than I am. He told me that I was in my sixties, and then today he let this slip.

If he thinks I’m in my sixties, he just admitted to being in his fifties. I already knew he was past fifty because all his pop-culture references are thirty to forty years old. OU812 is a Van Halen album from 1988. Pronounced, “Oh, you ate one too?” it’s code for lesbian oral sex. American men in their fifties tend to be obsessed with lesbianism.

Martin mentioned The Amazing Kreskin, who was at his peak in the 1970s. And Martin’s first live concert was given by the Who. I’m sure it was 1979 or 1982.

Ordinary Martin’s knowledge of mental illness is half a century out of date.

As I said before, ordinary Martin got this information from my Website. For some reason he thinks that attacking me with my own descriptions of myself will hurt me.

What’s clear is that Martin has a horror of mental illness. Guess who taunted him constantly about being mentally ill?

This is ordinary Martin the Ron Paul toady.

His tweets tell me that he’s terrified of aging, and he’s worried that he’s mentally ill. Ordinary Martin does things that he can’t help, and it frightens him. His hatred of Jews repulses him, but he won’t stop. His compulsiveness embarrasses him. Today he behaved like a spurned teenaged girl. Unblocking me so he could simply repeat everything he said the other day? It’s almost beyond belief that a middle-aged man would do this to a stranger simply because I support Israel.

He’s treating me like an ex-wife after a nasty divorce.

This is a deeply ordinary view of mental illness. “Certifiably insane” is a phrase from TV. Like somatic (body) illness, mental illness is a continuum. There’s no such thing as a catch-all mental illness any more than there’s a single somatic illness.

But people with deeply ordinary minds repeat the words “certifiably insane” without understanding what they just said. If I were to submit myself to a psychological evaluation, they’d give me the bum’s rush right out of the hospital for wasting their time. One hand on the back of my shirt and one on the seat of my pants, and WHAMMO! I’d be lying on the pavement.

The “Thomas Wictor is insane” meme began when I wrote a post about a Palestinian man pretending to cry in a Gazan hospital over his dead father. It’s obvious that the scene was staged.

We never saw the corpse of the father, the “crying man” shed no tears, and he had no concrete dust on him, even though we were told that he had pulled his dead father from the rubble of their bombed house.

A man named Ali Gharib interviewed me about it. He misrepresented himself to get the interview.

Since he told me that he writes for the The Nation Institute, I naturally thought the piece would appear there. Instead it was posted on Lobelog, “the US foreign policy blog of the international news wire service, IPS News.”

I knew how Gharib would present me, since he finally asked if it were true that I saw a ghost cat. Yes, I did, and I photographed him too.

That’s my dead cat Syd the Second. He’d disappeared by the time the camera shutter had opened. Tell me why the cat’s eyes are glowing in the daytime when I didn’t use a flash, and why his hindquarters appear to be dissolving into smoke.

Lots of people don’t believe that ghosts exist. Gharib does not believe that Pallywood exists. It’s clear that his goal was to discredit me. I told him off the record the source of my PTSD-SP, but he wrote the piece as though my mental illness creates hallucinations. Here’s where a basic understanding of mental illness would’ve come in handy for Gharib and all the ordinary people who think I’m “certifiably insane.”

I have a mental disorder. And guess what? Even psychiatrists are confused about how to classify mental disorders.

There is significant scientific debate about the relative merits of categorical versus such non-categorical (or hybrid) schemes, also known as continuum or dimensional models. A spectrum approach may incorporate elements of both.

In the scientific and academic literature on the definition or classification of mental disorder, one extreme argues that it is entirely a matter of value judgements (including of what is normal) while another proposes that it is or could be entirely objective and scientific (including by reference to statistical norms). Common hybrid views argue that the concept of mental disorder is objective even if only a “fuzzy prototype” that can never be precisely defined, or conversely that the concept always involves a mixture of scientific facts and subjective value judgments. Although the diagnostic categories are referred to as ‘disorders’, they are presented as medical diseases, but are not validated in the same way as most medical diagnoses.

Ali Gharib and ordinary Martin think that mental illness is always a psychotic disorder. When you suffer from a psychosis, you lose touch with reality because you’re hallucinating or suffering from delusions. Psychoses include schizophrenia, paranoid schizophrenia, brief psychotic disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, delusional disorder, schizophreniform disorder, schizoaffective disorder, substance/medication-induced psychotic disorder, psychosis due to a medical condition, other specified schizophrenia spectrum, unspecified schizophrenia spectrum, catatonia, catatonic disorder due to another medical condition, unspecified catatonia, postpartum psychosis, major depressive disorder with psychotic features, and bipolar disorder with psychotic features.

Though my mental illness is called post-traumatic stress disorder with secondary psychotic features (PTSD-SP), it’s another continuum. The only thing that happens to me is that I dissociate. I enter a dreamlike state and lose track of time.

In 2007 I suddenly developed a resting pulse rate of 220 beats per minute.

All day and all night for a week. I could feel my pulse in my fingertips, my neck, my ankles, and my eyeballs. I could hear it in my ears. My cardiologist put me through every test possible for heart disease and pulmonary embolism, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with my heart or lungs. I have a cardiologist because I suffered from irregular heartbeat since I was a child. It killed me once.

So he recommended psychotropic medication. I take paroxetine and diazepam, the latter serving a dual purpose of staving off the rotational vertigo attacks of Meniere’s disease.

Stupid old Jew-haters who are stuck in the late 1970s have no understanding of mental illness or its treatment. The medication I take makes me sharper, not “drugged up.” I would bet every cent I own that ordinary Martin self-medicates with alcohol. He’s got the alcoholic’s rigidity and monomania.

The “Thomas Wictor is insane” meme was funny because the people who created it drew my attention to a photo that allowed me to prove unequivocally that the “bloody” crying Palestinian man at the hospital was faking.

Here’s the ambulance arriving with the crying man and his dead father.

This is the interior of the ambulance, a Toyota Landcruiser Hardtop.

Enhancing the photo shows two women sitting on the bench, and the crying man getting off the gurney (purple arrow).

There was no father. Not unless the son was lying on top of him. The “drug-addled mental deficient” who wrote this post wasn’t fooled, but look how many “sane” people were.

I don’t belong to the “mental-illness acceptance” movement. If you’re not comfortable dealing with someone who has PTSD-SP, that’s fine with me. I once dated a woman who said after a month that she had a secret to tell.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I’m a little bipolar,” she said. “How do you feel about that?”

“You’ve got it under control, so I don’t think there’s anything to talk about, really, in terms of what I feel.”

“No, but what do you really feel? You can tell me. I won’t get angry.”

“It doesn’t change anything.”

“But deep inside, do you feel anything about learning this?”

“Well, okay. It’s slightly unnerving, since you didn’t tell me for a month.”

“I KNEW IT!” she screamed. “YOU BASTARD! IT’S PEOPLE LIKE YOU WHO STIGMATIZE MENTAL ILLNESS AND MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME TO HAVE A GOOD LIFE!”

No. She made it impossible for herself to have a good life. Whatever peace of mind I’ve achieved is the result of therapy, medication, and decades of introspection. I didn’t get it from others. The ordinary Martins and Ali Gharibs of the world don’t bother me. Stigmatize me all you want. I don’t care.

My PTSD-SP is the result of experiencing things that most of you can’t imagine. As I wrote before, when I was three I saw a man murdered with an icepick. I was about two feet away. The murderer grabbed the man by the head, shoved the icepick into his left eye, and stirred it around. The man screamed and beat at the windows of the car, his palm pounding the glass right in front of my face. Then he went silent and limp.

If I told Wilfred Owen, he’d get it.

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

Owen was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, a week before World War I ended. He didn’t have the opportunity to accommodate his demons and banish what he could.

Maybe someday we’ll meet on Fiddler’s Green. I’ll give him my memoir.

You know who won’t be there? Ordinary Martin. He’s in a downward spiral: over fifty, full of hate, terrified of aging, denying his oncoming death, and titanically mediocre in mind and spirit. One thing my life taught me is that when people do or say certain things, you no longer have to worry about their welfare. We all end up where we belong. The horrible fate of horrible people doesn’t upset me in the slightest. It’s called “justice.”

Have a nice trip, Martin.