We see the world through the lens of what we understand, and what we understand depends heavily on what we have learned. To understand my perspective, one needs to know a little of my background.

Mathematics

I love numbers. Numbers were my friend before I even went to school. I learned to count playing Snakes and Ladders, and a couple of decades of education failed to beat it out of me. Along with numbers, mathematics is a whole universe of abstract thought. Indeed today I would say that mathematics is not about numbers, or abstract algebra, or calculus. Rather mathematics is the study of systematic abstract thought, and a language for communicating such systematic abstract thought between fellow mathematicians. Numbers, and the objects of abstract algebra are merely things that mathematicians do mathematics with, and which are amenable to a mathematical approach. But concepts of mathematics are a major part of the lens through which I see and understand the world, and a major part of the lens through which I understand myself and my struggles with Mental Health.

It was in my third year of a Ph.D. that my first serious manic episode occurred. With hindsight I had an episode of mania with psychosis back in 1998, but all the weirdness and spiritual awakening happened inside my head, out of view of others, and basically nobody else noticed. I did complete the Ph.D., but that is basically where the conventional path of life ended, and my Recovery Journey began.

The thing with a background like mine is that I am acutely aware of the myriad assumptions on which our thinking rests. In the Foundations of Mathematics, mathematics becomes formal logic, and a study of things like what can and cannot be proven from a given set of assumptions. When faced with psychiatry for the first time, I was completely unable to shake the uneasy feeling that their art was resting on myriad invalid mathematical assumptions. I've become far more accepting of their efforts in recent years, and taking the meds and accepting the need for them has led to a longer period of stability than I'd enjoyed before. In that sense, they worked. But that is not the whole of the story: while they can help, they take a lot away. Moreover, the reasons behind my scepticism of mainstream psychiatry, what I consider the 'medical approach' to Mental Health, remain.

I'll discuss those elsewhere, but for example the (incorrect) assumption that a chaotic system like a double pendulum's behaviour isn't much more complicated than that of a simple pendulum is to my mind analogous to the belief that one can get reliable results by classifying 'mental illnesses' in the way that, say, the DSM V does, and then following the 'evidence based medicine' approach of grouping people by symptoms and doing randomised controlled trials to test possible treatments. I'm amazed it appears to work as well as it does, but just as simplifying assumptions hide complexity, so does the assumption that 'mania=mania' and 'psychosis=psychosis', and what those assumptions hide is an important question that the mainstream doesn't address. I hope to elaborate on that as I populate this wiki.

Computers

Computers have always been a fascination since the day I saw a BBC Micro on a gameshow on children's TV (I think Beat The Teacher though my memory is a little rusty). Then they turned up at school. Then my parents bought my sister and I an Amstrad CPC, and it kind of went from there. Then PC's, DOS, Windows, Linux, and an interest in various topics in computer science.

Relevant to the story of my Recovery Journey, is how modern computing, along with the mathematics behind it, contributes to the conceptual machinery with which I understand my Mind and Mental Health.