The Georgie Gust Exhibit

With work, partnerships can be saved after a schizophrenia diagnosis. Every relationship has its ups and downs, but what does "in sickness and in health" mean if one partner has schizophrenia? While severity of the condition is a factor, relationships can survive if each partner gets the right support. Loved ones can help someone is diagnosed with schizophrenia by showing compassion: The best thing to say is “I love you. I care about you. This doesn't change how I feel about you.”

Schizophrenia is a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation 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.

Etch A Sketch On Acid: Mind-Blowing Artwork Short Film w/ Sketches and Music by Jonathan Harnisch

Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography Reviewed by Alex FranksOctober 14, 2015

This, it is easy to imagine, is what life with mental illness is like for some: full of continuous questioning, rationalization, guilt, anxiety.

Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography presents a simultaneously dazzling and frightening portrayal of mental illness through the eyes of several characters—though all embodied in the same being.

The complex narrative is seemingly told from the viewpoint of Benjamin J. Schreiber, son of a wealthy blue-blood family who converses with his doctor (known as C). The privilege afforded to him by birth enables him to live relatively well off; his multitude of diagnoses, including Tourette’s and schizoaffective disorder, would effectively render him incapable of functioning in society under other circumstances. However, Ben doesn’t wish to talk about himself with Dr. C, but rather a fictional counterpart, Georgie Gust.

Georgie, like Ben, comes from an aristocratic family and views reality from a different vantage. An obsessive coffee drinker and chain smoker, he maintains a quiet (though sordid) existence on the outside, a rich sexual life in private. Early in the text, an erotic scene focusing on his foot fetishism appears in exacting detail. This proves to be the most tame of Georgie’s passions, as soon he begins his sadomasochistic conquest of Claudia, an older woman whom he hires to torture him. This, too, is richly rendered, as Georgie is teased with dripping wax, hot pans, and psychological distress. The two become dependent upon each other, hating yet needing their company, and their relationship evolves into a bizarre reimagining of the American Dream, one in which we are privy to the seedy reality underneath the polished exterior.

Forced to confront the darker nature of desire, An Alibiography shocks and confuses as the narrative unspools itself with a randomness that evokes a questioning of reality. This, it is easy to imagine, is what life with mental illness is like for some: full of continuous questioning, rationalization, guilt, and anxiety. In many respects, this work can be compared to Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine, in which a businessman obsesses over his sadomasochistic desires and dreams, seeking meaning in his own marginalized existence. Harnisch’s work, however, employs many main characters embodied in the same man, building realities within realities that often cannot be constructed into a cohesive narrative.

At over eight hundred pages, the subject loses shock value and becomes mundane. As Georgie and Claudia’s passion evolves and intensifies, and the novel ventures into the completely surreal, disgusting, and criminal, the oversaturation of violence and S&M confuses the message. Mental illness is romanticized at points in the text, as well, which may leave some familiar with the realities with an unsavory taste. That’s not to say the work isn’t well written—it’s carefully plotted with well-rendered characters, presented in a narrative that would appropriately be deemed “schizophrenic.”

However, upon reaching the end, there is an exhaustion. Perhaps, though, this is in itself a meaning: that life with mental illness is difficult and confusing, yet produces a desperation for understanding.

?ALEX FRANKS (October 14, 2015)— Foreword Clarion Reviews

Thoughts on Kindness: When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kindness. People may not tell you how they feel about you, but they will always show you. Pay attention. Spread kindness. Be nice to those around you. If you can't think of anything nice to say, you're not thinking hard enough. Smile at others, start a piggy bank for a cause, keeping your spare change in a piggy bank and when it is full, donate it to a good cause or charity of your choice. A sincere smile is a very kind and meaningful way to make a positive difference in someone's day. Without using words, a smile says to a person "Hi, I hope you have a nice day." Help a child learn. When you look back at your childhood, you can probably name several key people who taught you some of the most important things you know today. You too can be an influential force in a child's life by spending time helping him or her to learn. Though it is a common courtesy to say, "Bless you!" when someone sneezes, people rarely do unless it is someone they know. The next time you hear or see someone sneeze, offer those kind words regardless of whether or not you know them. And if you have a tissue on hand, offer that, too! Beyond anything, the hardest part is self-compassion. You need that to do anything for others. That seems to be the hard part, but is the first step. Again, by default, when given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kindness. It will make a huge difference if you can pull it off, one of those easier said than done ideas, speaking from experience. Thank you for reading these thoughts, some of which I have read about from various sources online and in books about kindness, and behaving on them when I can, often going to homeless parks and giving away food from the restaurant when I can leave the house. I have been doing so for over years and years and even writing a chapter about it in Alibiography, my debut novel, in the chapter entitled, "Benevolent Georgie," Enjoy your morning, day or evening, depending where you are, in your neck of the woods. …There is more to come, as usual. Thank you in particular to new you who are new readers. What a terrific group of you!

I Am Not A Motivational Speaker:

Writing Therapy from September 2015: [previously unpublished... until I felt better]. It is interesting for me to look back at these written accounts of the bouts I have with myself and with schizophrenia. Also, how I seem to always get through them. To me, that shows resilience. I am proud of that. A positive written word on kindness follows, called, Thoughts on Kindness. 

“I am not a motivational speaker. That is not my job. Please understand. I am a deeply troubled and disturbed person. I only write when sleeping, deprived or symptomatic. I never get writer's block. I never get sleep. I-I-I… Me. Me. Me…I write and publish what I want and what I feel, no matter what mood or state of mind I am in, but I always do my best to keep things positive. I miss the mark frequently. I love those who speak from their core, truth, whatever it is they feel, expressing every last feeling. I want to thank everyone who continues to stick around with me online. I have no friends in real life and no family. I engage in deep philosophical conversations with store clerks, where turnaround is quick. I see them once or twice at the Quick Fix on Maple Street and then, never again. I am a wandering, wondering prophet of sorts. I am an oddball, a weirdo, eccentric, and intricate, a lyrically minded creation. A nutcase.  I feel my best, writing out my shame, my narcissism, and my delinquency… my insanity. My delusion. My life. I built something, and they came. No, I get to the core.  I lose. I am mad. I am real. I am real-deal. Shameless and raw, brazen and careless. Genius. My moods change frequently, and I am currently and don't know how I feel. I settle for nothing less than the bitter and savagely violent, brutal truth. Beyond that, there I am… nothing. There is nothing. I look in the mirror and see a complete stranger. I apologize for my exuberance, no wait, I don't apologize for going blotto yesterday, for my exuberance., I revel in it. I encourage you to take what you want and leave the rest. Considering my being diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and so forth, blah, a rare blood disease, dyslexia, and cancer, I am doing okay. I keep the hope and move forward, always.”

— Jonathan Harnisch  

Check up from the neck up, living another day with schizophrenia and severe mental illness.

At the opening of Living Colorful Beauty, the reader is presented with two protagonists. There’s Ben, the narrator of the preface, who relates the story of the awful sex education classes he sat through in middle school and of his subsequent discovery of his father’s collection of pornography; and then there’s Georgie, a sexual submissive with a foot fetish, who is obsessed with his beautiful and manipulative next-door neighbor Claudia. As the story progresses, however, it becomes clear that Georgie and Ben share a single three-dimensional body. Georgie is a character in a novel Ben is writing, and Ben maintains that Georgie is in fact no more than a literary device.  However, it is clear almost immediately that this is not the case. Throughout his life, Ben has received a number of psychiatric diagnoses, ranging from Tourette’s Syndrome to borderline personality disorder to schizoaffective disorder, and he displays some traits of all of these.  Yet amid all these diagnoses, the one thing that seems to have slipped under the radar thus far is his tendency towards emotional dissociation, which is closely related to post-traumatic stress syndrome. It is this dissociative tendency that has led Ben to create Georgie, a safe repository for the emotions and desires – primarily sexual – that Ben himself is unable to process. 

Initially, therefore, the life of Ben and Georgie is fairly well ordered.  It is clear from the start that Ben has issues relating to women: his romantic life has been a string of broken relationships and missed opportunities, and though he needs love desperately he finds himself overcome by fear around women.  Whenever this issue arises, Ben retreats into Georgie’s relationship with Claudia.  Claudia is compelling, manipulative, emotionally abusive, and tremendously sensual.  She controls Georgie completely, only allowing him sex at certain times, alternately telling him she loves him and that she couldn’t care less about him, telling him she won’t sleep with him and then inviting him to watch her sleep with other men and other women.  Yet Georgie is inextricably drawn to her, accepting all of the emotional pain that comes with his relationship with her as long as he can continue to hope that she may sleep with him again.  The sex they share is gritty and fetish-laden, with strong overtones of sadomasochism and violence, and their relationship itself is sustained entirely by Georgie’s obsession.  Yet he is unable to let Claudia go.  Similarly, Ben claims that Georgie’s relationship with Claudia is based on his own relationship with Heidi – yet as the story progresses, we learn that Heidi is a lesbian whom Ben met once some months ago when she was in town for a conference, and that after one night, she left town and Ben had never heard from her again.  In Ben’s relationship with Heidi, mirrored in his imagining of Georgie’s relationship with Claudia, it is clear that his interest is not in Heidi but rather in the image of Heidi, which, in the absence of the real Heidi, Ben can mold into whatever he needs her to be.  Heidi is the locus of Ben’s obsession, as Claudia is the locus of Georgie’s; however, the root of these obsessive tendencies lies somewhere else entirely.

A chapter from “Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia by Jonathan Harnisch”.

Harnisch (Second Alibi, 2014, etc.) offers a novel that investigates the fractured mind of a schizophrenic.

“Let’s get the facts straight up front, to avoid any confusion later,” the author states at the start of this wild, candid book. “I am a person first, a human being, just like anyone else. Maybe a little different, that’s all.” That difference is a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and this extensive work explores the realities of mental illness through a whirlwind of fictional, narrative pieces and personal reflections. Along the way, it takes readers to places of depravity and confusion. Its characters include Ben Schreiber, a precocious but mentally ill youngster in Armani jeans, who explains his troubled life to the ever-calm Dr. C, after trying to rob a bank with a cellphone. Schreiber discusses his alter ego, Georgie Gust, a masochist and foot-fetishist, who’s wealthy enough to pay his neighbor Claudia to torture him; indeed, he seems capable of enduring any type of humiliation, so long as it doesn’t involve actually working. The first-person narrator regularly interrupts the proceedings to offer generally off-topic details: “(Parenthetical Pet Peeve) Commercials for unappetizing products shown at meal times…feminine hygiene products, jock itch, yeast infections, etc.” The scattered narrative uses diverse literary mechanisms, to say the least, mixing elements such as journal entries, a screenplay, a straightforward melodrama involving a Tourette’s sufferer at a private school, occasional celebrity name-dropping (“I met Joanna Cassidy, Dick Van Dyke, Robert Downey Jr, Mel Gibson, and others”), and a dapper figure named John Marshal, who, when asked his opinion of a party, responds, “I’d scarcely be a good judge of that…. My life is taken up with writing.” Making sense of it all in any traditional way, it would seem, isn’t really the point. From horrific scenes of child abuse (“She did. She raped me. My grandmother”) to glimpses of triumph (“I can start taking control of my life”), this long book’s many scenes of anguish and hope are difficult to take in, by any estimation. Whether readers will find the difficulty worthwhile depends largely on their tolerance for twisted tales.                  

A repetitive, explicit, fractured, lengthy and honest book, with an overall effect that mimics the confusion of its title.

In this chapter, Harnisch’s Ben encounters Heidi in a convenience store parking lot. She is in town for a psychiatry convention and decided to get her nails done. He gives her a pedicure in her hotel room. They meet and walk in the neighborhoods and along the beach. Heidi encourages him to write. She skips her conference class and has a bath instead. Ben joins her and gives a foot massage. Ben finds his writing block has gone.

The collected writings of Jonathan Harnisch mark a magnificent contribution to the public understanding of mental illness through a masterpiece of transgressive fiction with a heart. The general reader is finally able to see mainstream literary author Jonathan Harnisch at his best. Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia contain the works of 2014, Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography and Second Alibi: The Banality of Life, in one complete streaming narrative. The monumental scale of Harnisch’s achievement through adversity flourishes and can now be appreciated in this diverse, invaluable, and thought-provoking collection of fragmented fiction, which will make your brain spin as Harnisch's sense of the inner machinations within the human experience spring into life through the written word. It forces one to question reality and step into another world wanting the protagonist and his alter ego to get it together and be okay. The author reveals himself through a series of alibis in the day-to-day meetings of multiple personalities, a corner of psychiatry that is hardly understood, and shedding light on the experiences of schizophrenia in a language that the non-sufferer can understand, albeit from the author who suffers himself. Not for the faint of heart, this fictionalized account of a disparate mind triumphs.

I was diagnosed with Tourette’s at the age of 12, although, according to my mother, I had shown symptoms since I was two. I sometimes wonder whether I was even then showing signs of the psychosis that has plagued me for my entire adult life. 

I was 18 when I had my first psychotic episode. It was Christmas Day, 1994. I was living in New York City and was admitted to Beth Israel, where I was given a number of tests—medical and psychological. 

My toxicology report came up 100% clean, a clear indication that my psychosis was not drug-induced. My intake report by the ER doctor shows that I had a “loosening of association” and “pressured speech,” both of which can indicate schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or bipolar disorder with psychotic features. No wonder it took so long for me to get the right diagnosis; so many of the symptoms overlap. 

However, I want to bring this back to delusion and truth, and how people so frequently label your truths as delusional as soon as you’ve been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. I will also discuss my condition’s genesis and prognosis—and then move onto those accomplishments for which I’ve never been truly recognized. 

I often wonder if other people, like me, have trouble being believed. 

As I may have mentioned already, serious mental illness, such as schizoaffective disorder, is believed to be caused first by a genetic predisposition to develop mental illness and second by environmental factors. In my family, I have a grandfather who seems to have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to old medical records that I recently found. In addition, I have two second cousins, both of whom have been publicly diagnosed with mental illness. So, I would definitely seem to be genetically predisposed to becoming mentally ill. 

However, having this predisposition isn’t enough. You also need certain environmental factors. What I’ve read in some of the literature is that mental illness can be compared to diabetes. A person may be genetically predisposed to develop diabetes, but if that person gets enough exercise and watches their sugar intake, then the diabetes may never take hold—it’s the same with mental illness. 

In my case, I had the predisposition, but I also underwent enough traumas (sexual, physical, and emotional abuse) and upheavals (such as my parents’ divorce when I was young) for the illness to take hold. Boy, did it take hold. 

Sometimes, though, people like my sister, who has a genetic predisposition plus environmental factors (my sister comes from the same family and has had the same kind of upheavals), do not become mentally ill. Nobody knows why. 

Maybe, as my wife says, it’s just the luck of the draw. She’s kidding. At least about the luck part, because having mental illness isn’t lucky, although we do have to keep laughing about it. Keep positive. You’re never alone if you can laugh with someone about it. 

As I’ve mentioned, I have schizoaffective disorder. Originally, though, I was diagnosed with depression. That was back in 1994, when I was 18. 

Over the next 10 years or so, I saw doctor after doctor, moving here and there, trying to find my place in the world. I made seven suicide attempts and had years of alcohol and drug abuse issues. My last suicide attempt was in 2001, and I was freed from my drug and alcohol addictions in early 2003. More than 11 years ago. 

As I was getting off the drugs, I saw a doctor who diagnosed me with schizoaffective disorder, which basically means schizophrenia with a mood disorder thrown in, and, in my case, that mood disorder is bipolar with manic features. However, in 2005 and 2006 I saw a doctor who said that I did not have schizoaffective disorder. Instead, I had a personality disorder. The point is that getting the right diagnosis can be time-consuming and frustrating, but it is also necessary, as once I was “re- diagnosed” with schizoaffective disorder,