I grew up with my father being diagnosed as bipolar and under treatment for that disease. However, the real diagnoses turned out to be that the disease was schizophrenia. This was not learned until spending 18yrs under that roof watching the emotional bombs go off around me. I watched him change personalities with each new and incorrect medication provided. Some of which are no, longer on the market because of the suicides that occurred in patients who took them. A counselor once asked me to put my father in the chair and tell him all you want to tell him. My reply was quite simple: “There are not enough chairs in the room!”

I have been fortunate that I did not get schizophrenia, as there, was a good chance it could have been passed to me. I watched the pain it caused him inwardly to not be able to get better. I have healed mostly, from all the blazing, images burned into my mind over growing up with walking around mind fields. This is again because he was on the wrong medications & he could not help it. My diagnosis is that I have the following from my childhood:

Posttraumatic stress disorder¹² (abbreviated PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to one or more traumatic events that threatened or caused great physical harm.
It is a severe and ongoing emotional reaction to an extreme psychological trauma.³ This stressor may involve someone’s actual death, a threat to the patient’s or someone else’s life, serious physical injury, an unwanted sexual act, or a threat to physical or psychological integrity,¹ overwhelming psychological defenses.

The other side is that without him I would not be stepping behind or in front of the camera.

Break down of picture elements:

The hammer represents the constant tension that I felt. The cowboy hat is due to my father loved westerns and many of which were watched on b&w TV. The look being portrayed is being paranoid and perhaps hearing something not there. The TV is not in on a channel because focusing is hard for a schizophrenic mind and it could be there is an image there to thier mind.

Set/Design- Draven Studios

Self-Portrait

Canon

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