After President John F. Kennedy said we have “control of the mind” (in referring to me) and shaking all over, walked away from a press conference in January, 1961, he had a nervous breakdown and was put into a mental hospital for eight months and relieved of the Presidency and another man with plastic surgery was President John F. Kennedy from then on.
John F. Kennedy was used to follow me around at different times from then on. When I was living at Gulf Shores, Alabama, John F. Kennedy, looking like another man, ran a small grocery store and motel from 1961 to 1964. After I got a job at a filling station in New Orleans, John F. Kennedy went to work there, too, looking like another man through plastic surgery. The last time I was around John F. Kennedy was when he was a man looking like a former State Department worker in Washington, D.C. and we were both in the old Building of Bryce Mental Hospital at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on the same ward. My coffee and cigarettes were the only things keeping me alive then and John F. Kennedy constantly bummed them from me and he got electro-shock treatment each morning. In 1967, I killed John F. Kennedy through mental telepathy who was on a computer after me.
Two and a half million women in my harem of women are former men. Two of these men are Charles Chaplin, former actor, and Pablo Picasso, former painter.
I have scientific proof of my “cosmic mind” going from my head into the Cosmos. I bought myself a ratemeter and dosimeter which measure neutron radioactivity. My ratemeter read 30 Roentgens per hour and my dosimeter read 200 Roentgens. I got a very small reading of alpha, beta and gamma rays on a Geiger counter.
Until 1981, the Cosmos had been known as the Ether Cosmos or Universe. In 1981, on coming through on several time limits I created the Ether Cosmos into 100% Hydrogen Cosmos. But I was still under pain and time limits were being thrown at me from every angle, so on some more time limits I created the Cosmos into Earth, air, water, and fire and it will stay that way.
Excerpt from The Selected Letters of D. S. Ashwander
Note from the Publisher:
In an otherwise encouraging letter, a reader wrote that by publishing the work of Dan Ashwander we “could be said to be exploiting the anguish of schizophrenia.” We agree that this could be said, and that some clarification of our intent is needed. Our desire to publish this work stems from a genuine admiration and respect for Dan Ashwander. He beautifully describes the world as he experiences it. This experience may be very different from ours, but it does show a very full response to an often sad and confusing world. His ideas are valuable and should be published in the tradition of great books such as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber and A Mind That Found Itself by Clifford Beers.
Taking the poststructuralist demolition of Western metaphysics as its point of departure, this book is a positive exercise in the affirmative “nomad” thought called for in its predecessor Anti-Oedipus.
Publisher: University of Minnesota
Paperback: 640 pages
Weaving together the work of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, Anti-Oedipus is an anti-psychiatry critique and attempt at an essential theory connecting politics, desire and anthropology. How to be a nomad in late industrial society beyond time and space.
Publisher: University of Minnesota
Paperback: 400 pages
“A victim of mental illness recalls the development of her disease and the nightmare world she lived in throughout her youth. A classic illumination of schizophrenia and an extensive commentary on the treatment of the author by Dr. M. A. Sechehaye.”
Publisher: Meridian
Paperback: 192 pages
How to Become a Schizophrenic is a thoroughly researched and timely refutation of the increasingly ascendent medical model of schizophrenia by a recovered schizophrenic who combines thoughtful arguments with a vividly written account of his own personal case history. “The universal acceptance of the medical model (or disease hypothesis) stems from the fact that it serves the needs of so many people including psychiatrists, the parents of schizophrenics, and society in general… Obviously, the medical model benefits everyone except the persons whom it is ostensibly designed to help: the schizophrenics.” SS
Publisher: Apollyon
Paperback: 291 pages
Idiosyncratic autobiography of a 19th-century German judge who became schizophrenic. Freud’s views on schizophrenia were largely based on Schreber’s own observations about his states of mind. His writings discuss God, his “solar anus” and visual and auditory hallucinations and dispute such psychiatric authority figures as Kraepelin.
Publisher: Harvard University
Paperback: 416 pages
“Return from Madness is a profound and moving book. In the tradition of Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings it tells the dramatic story of patients suddenly liberated from lives destroyed by mental illness. Most of Degen and Nasper’s patients are forced to organize life around the illness, their psychological and social development cut short by its onset. The authors not only describe the startling relief Clozaril provides for symptoms of chronic schizophrenia, but understand that relief from schizophrenic symptoms demands deep reorganizations of living as the patients resume development and mourn decades lost to illness.”
Publisher: Aronson
Hardback: 242 pages
“Are schizophrenia and manic-depressive disorder biological afflictions or the results of a traumatic upbringing? Are some people genetically destined to become schizophrenic? This book, the result of a landmark study, provides compelling evidence that both schizophrenia and manic-depressive disorder are biologically based diseases of the brain, unrelated to psychological influences.”
Publisher: Basic
Paperback: 304 pages
Illustrated
Publisher’s Note: “In an otherwise encouraging letter, a reader wrote that by publishing the work of Dan Ashwander we ‘could be said to be exploiting the anguish of schizophrenia,”We agree that this could be said, and that some clarification of our intent is needed. Our desire to publish this work stems from a genuine admiration and respect for Dan Ashwander. He beautifully describes the world as he experiences it. This experience may be very different from ours, but it does show a very full response to an often sad and confusing world. His ideas are valuable and should be published in the tradition of great books such as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber and A Mind That Found Itself by Clifford Beers.”
Excerpt: “When I was living at Gulf Shores, Alabama, John F. Kennedy looking like another man, ran a small grocery store and motel from 1961 to 1964. After I got a job at a filling station in New Orleans, John F. Kennedy went to work there, too, looking like another man through plastic surgery. The last time I was around John F. Kennedy was when he was a man looking like a former State Department worker in Washington, D.C. and we were both in the old building of Bryce Mental Hospital at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on the same ward. My coffee and cigarettes were the only things keeping me alive then and John F. Kennedy constantly bummed them from me and he got electro-shock treatment each morning. In 1967, I killed John F. Kennedy, through mental telepathy who was on a computer after me.
Two and a half million women in my harem are former men. Two of these men are Charles Chaplin, former actor, and Pablo Picasso, former painter.
I have scientific proof of my ‘cosmic mind’ going from my head into the Cosmos. I bought myself a ratemeter and dosimeter which measure neutron radioactivity. My ratemeter read 30 Roentgens per hour and my dosimeter read 200 Roentgens. I got a very small reading of alpha, beta, and gamma rays on a Geiger counter.”
SS
Publisher: Tray Full of Lab Mice
Pamphlet: 58 pages
Illustrated
Burke wrote this autobiographical novel because, he said (in a note he left for his doctors before committing suicide), “I would like a separate reality besides my fantasy, a factual description.” At various stages a hippie searcher/druggie, convict (for a crime committed while in a delusional state), institutionalized tranquilizee, and student, the book's narrator Sphere searches for love, sex, companionship and meaning like any other earnest and adventurous person, but is increasingly hobbled by terrifying hallucinations and delusions. His descriptions of “the dream” blend seamlessly with his philosophy, personal allegory and humor into a tale of struggle and pain.
The many accounts of sparkling moments and prosaic epiphanies produced by mushrooms, acid, pot, and alcohol provide a time capsule of ’60s Aussie hippiedom. However, Sphere's mental illness increasingly reveals itself asa separate animal: he is the only one among his friends (whom Burke has named Baron Wasteland, Magic Star Flower, etc.) whose drug experiences begin to dovetail into a kind of crushing, psychedelic blackness that seems like it will never end. As his story goes on, and the illness becomes increasingly florid, Sphere's isolation grows. His friends deteriorate into hepatitis-ridden geriatric cases, and their mutual love sometimes resembles depressing toleration: “The five bacteria came into the room and Magic spoke: 'We've brought an astrologer to heal you, Sphere.'”
Burke's drive to live life to its fullest permeates this story and the unexpected rhythms and clever surprises of its prose. Passages which at first might appear inaccessible often prove precise and beautiful: “Hours go by before the electric current is barbed and meshed into circuits that leave the victim in a crusty shell of irrational forces.”
Publisher: Plume
Paperback: 256 pages