Aurora_I_Am

I don't know. I saw several of the best-respected shrinks in Texas over the course of several years. They all gave me different diagnoses (panic disorder; depression; rapid-cycling bipolar disorder; they pegged all sorts of shit on me) and drugged me up HEAVY (I'm talking highest legal dose of 6, 7 things at a time - drugs like lithium, Depakote, and Adderall - not child's play).

I eventually got fed up with this because I was up to my elbows in bullshit, and because I could no longer take them seriously/was quite bitter by this point, I started screwing with them. Just inventing answers to their questions that didn't necessarily reflect my actual thoughts or feelings. I never said anything crazy/scary/violent or whatever - just invented answers with no particular connective thread between them - but they ate it up. I would say these renowned shrinks were the easiest people to fool I've ever encountered. I would even tailor my answers to see if they would diagnose me with certain things sometimes. YEP. ("Panic disorder" was my brainchild.)

I'm not saying this was mature of me. I was a sullen little toot of a teenager. But they kept diagnosing me based on things like "extraordinarily high IQ" (which I guess is common in crazy people, but is this really causal?!); "inability to pay attention" (have you BEEN to public school?! They cover the same material for 2 months at a time); "problems with authority" (I was surrounded by verbally and emotionally abusive adults); and "mood swings" (this following my first real breakup as well as several deaths in my life)...the list goes on. It was like they were grasping at straws to label me insane.

I was pharmaceutical'd out for almost a decade. I refer to it as my comatose years. I was told I would have to take medication forever or go to a psych ward and that I was severely, dangerously ill. I was told if I ever stopped taking my medication, statistically speaking, I would commit suicide rapidly.

I quit taking that shit in 2009. Withdrawals were awful for some months. Eventually I wrote my thesis about how SSRI antidepressants rewire the serotonin reuptake system utilized by our brains' synapses in undesirable and largely irreversible ways. I graduated Cum Laude with 2 academic scholarships (was also a TA and a tutor), taught myself Spanish, and spent 6 months teaching ESL in Latin America. I returned home, got three jobs at once and was self-sufficient ever after. I exercise daily, eat extremely clean and vegetarian, have a good life, and am clearly NOT ill.

I'm not telling anyone to stop taking their meds. That is a personal and very case-specific decision and this is not a recommendation for that. And I admittedly had a horrible experience and have a chip on my shoulder. As long as my parents would give them money, they'd diagnose and drug me up however possible. However, in my quite vast experience with the psychiatry field specifically, I have seen nothing but idiocy and harm.

TL;DR I became depressed following a series of traumatic life events in early adolescence and spent ten years being sedated hardcore with pharmaceuticals and diagnosed with everything under the sun. Fast forward, they were wrong about everything the whole time and I lost ten years of my developmental life to their incompetence and greed.

Joel, JP is probably my favorite movie character ever. How did you film some of those choice scenes and keep a straight face? Did you have to cut repeatedly due to cracking up? Also, what percentage of his one-liners would you say were improvised??