Unusual in that I had therapy today instead of tomorrow, Friday.

It was a decent session. I still feel like we are missing the point somehow. I have a deep feeling that we are not getting at the good stuff, the stuff that really needs to come out, the stuff that is horrible to release but feels godly to have gone.

I still have a heavily laden chest with far too many things to get off of it.

But what I am missing, I do not know. I just know it’s deep and dark and painful and horrifying and I want to evict it. And the only way to get rid of the trash in your emotional closet is to take those accumulated emotions and feel them. Express them. Send them back into the world.

The world gave them to you. It can bloody well have them back.

I got a call from David Granrirer of Stand Up For Mental Health. Looks like I will be joining a new class of potential comedians at Stand Up For Mental Health in May. Comedy and insanity…. two things I’ve had a lot of time to develop.

Ha ha ha.

The basic idea for Stand Up For Mental Health is that you take a bunch of members of the “mental health consumer” community (aka “crazy people”) and teach them to write and perform standup comedy, and in the process help them through some of their issues.

I get the feeling that it will be more group therapy with attendant comedy as opposed to vice versa. And my previous experiences with group therapy have left me with a poor impression of it.

The first group therapy I did was part of a sort of satellite program to the larger Vancouver General Hospital (VGH to friends), and that was around ten people, and that was not too bad. We had plenty of time to get to everyone, and we all got to know each other reasonably well.

That was the one where I discovered the third type of depressive. There’s the anxious, the dysthymic… and the aggressive. There was a guy in there who had gotten really thoroughly shit on by life and had developed an aggressive, abrasive persona in order to deal with it. As such, he got into a lot of fights and confrontations and such.

I really wonder what happened to him. Prospects are not good for people like him.

Anyhow, the VGH one was okay. The lady running it was good at keeping things together and running smoothly. I think she was sort of attracted to me.

Wrong tree, darling. I’m for the boys.

But that group just plain ended one day. Imagine if that was how it worked with regular illness. “We’re sorry, but this dialysis program has come to an end. Don’t let the door hit you on the tailbone on the way out. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here. Where else can you get dialysis? Heck if I know, or care. ”

So that was it for me and therapy for a while. Then I moved in with Angela in Richmond, and after a few false starts with Richmond Mental Health Team (who only deal with serious crazies, not us mere depressives) and a few other agencies, I managed to get into the Core Program at the Richmond Hospital’s Psychiatric Outpatients Department.

My, I am capitalizing a lot tonight. Hope I don’t run out.

That program ran every weekday morning, plus one lunchtime a week. The idea was to give people an intensive program in hopes of getting them over the hurdle and into mental health.

But all it really amounted to was a lot of group therapy, only this time with around twenty people and only forty-five minutes at a go in which to get to everybody.

This, for me, was hell. It was just another group where I am not really listened to and where everyone has worse problems than me (including one woman who had a Fetal Alcohol Syndrome child and Filipino man who had been tortured by the Japanese in World War II) and everyone is more important than I am and where I felt ignored and neglected and abandoned.

Plus, it was run by a Doctor Dahi (or “Prince Dahi”, as the nurses called him behind his back), a man so incredibly incompetent that when he spoke up at all, it was almost always something completely irrelevant to what was being discussed besides containing a few key words from the last sentence or two.

And that’s when he was awake. Can you imagine? The guy fell asleep during group therapy many, many times. I think we went two months without him staying awake through a whole group therapy session.

And let me tell you, it degrades the efficacy of the therapy when you have to talk over the supposed leader’s snoring.

Near the end of that program, they gave us the standard patient feedback sheet, and asked us for our opinions. We were to take the sheets home, fill them out, and hand them in at the next and final session.

I was giddy with pleasure at this opportunity. I was so eager, in fact, that I didn’t even wait to get home to fill it out. I stopped at White Spot (the one on Ackroyd) and borrowed a pen from a waiter so I could fill it out there.

I used up all the space on the main sheet and one side of the supplementary one.

To be honest, describing Dahi’s massive incompetence in great detail was probably the most therapeutic thing I experienced in that program. It made me feel ever so much better.

It wasn’t the first time he learned that depressed and stupid aren’t the same thing, and that some of us craziest are not at all timid when they see something wrong.

I hope I helped get him fired.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.