Statement of Disagreement For GO# WI 2014-45185
I must once again state that this file ought to be destroyed, as this should not have happened. I am more confident that I will be able to destroy this file, but I realize that it might take some time, so I would like to amend this rebuttal to the file until I can succeed in having it removed from my record.
As with the other files on my record, everything about this is ridiculous. In order to get to a proper understanding of how this file was created, one first needs to have a discussion about my mother, and it is difficult to know where to start on that one...
I do not have a meaningful relationship with my mother, and I never have. When I was a young child, my mother was generally either in and out of treatment centres for alcohol and heroin abuse or actively abusing alcohol and heroin and would frequently disappear without notice for months at a time, often leaving my grandmother to scramble to take care of me. My grandmother is in fact the primary maternal figure in my life, not my mother. Through grade school, I was lucky enough to have an active father that would take custody of me for up to five days a week in order to get me out of a frequently abusive situation at home, as my mother would become very violent when under the influence of alcohol. When I was home, her schedule often seemed designed to avoid me - she would sleep in until I had left for school, leave in the afternoon when I was gone and come home late at night when i was asleep, often under the influence of something or other. I was 13 years old when I moved in with my father, and have barely spoken to her since; I could count the number of times I spoke with my mother between 1994 and 2014 on one hand. She has continued to struggle with addiction throughout this period.
My mother also has a myriad of mental health issues, including depression or schizophrenia, and I do not know whether they are the cause or a consequence of her drug use.
Facebook is a strange thing, as it connects distant family members together, as well as strangers that barely knew each other at some point in the distant past. I would hardly suggest that I reconnected with my mother over facebook, but I was not so cold as to deny her friend request, either. I can’t know how she reacted with the pictures and writings on the screen in front of her, almost all of which were not directed at her, but, at the time of this report, my relationship with my mother could at best be described by referring to her as a “facebook friend” - and little else. This woman is essentially a stranger to me.
While I acknowledge that I have rationally approached the question of suicide at many points in my life, I deny that I was suffering from depression as a result of my father’s death, which occurred almost a year previously. I was definitely over it; it wasn’t even on my mind. The period in question was in fact one of the happiest and most productive periods of my life, as moving away to windsor allowed me the space to be able to work through a great deal of the art that I had been sitting on for many years previously. As I do not have a relationship with my mother, she is completely incapable of expressing an informed opinion on whether or not I have had suicidal thoughts in the past, and could not have known whether my posts were characteristic of a pattern of behaviour or not. The fact is that I actually have a deep interest in existentialist philosophy, and am generally going to approach issues of life and death within the context of a rational understanding of the futility of existence. Death is not something to fear or prolong, but an inevitability that must be embraced. As we will all die, accepting agency in the right to decide when is the highest form of freedom imaginable. Had my mother known anything about me at all, she would not have been agitated by seeing me discuss death in open, rational terms, as I have done so frequently for all of my life.
The exact reason that my mother called the windsor police from her home in ottawa and sent officers to my house to speak to me is that i posted the following link to facebook:
www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/julian-baggini-suicide-can-be-a-rational-choice-1912358.html
Any sane person can see that this is a fairly tame op-ed in a leading uk newspaper, and that it is discussing an important then contemporary political concern. And I will answer the question - yes, suicide can be a rational choice. Since that time, assisted suicide has even been legalized in this country.
So, what happened here, then? Well, I can tell you what happened - my mother was drunk and, in a shitfaced haze, went into a paranoid episode and freaked out over a perfectly rational post that somebody that she does not know well made on their facebook profile. The person having a mental health episode at the time was not myself but my mother. Unfortunately, the cops ended up at my place rather than hers and I’m the one that ended up affected by it.
How can this happen? If somebody calls in on a crime, the officers do not go directly to that person’s house, but conduct an investigation to determine if it is warranted, and then present that information to a justice of the peace. Who gives this unit the authority to just act on information without any sort of investigation? The most cursory investigation into my mother’s mental health would have exposed an individual that can barely tie her own shoes, should be place under a legal guardianship and should not be able to file a police report without it being signed off upon by that guardian. Now, as a consequence of her own mental health problems, I have a difficult file in my records that I need to react to, and waste a lot of time getting destroyed. This should not have happened - the COAST team should have been required to obtain a warrant before coming to speak to me.
So, the premise underlying the call was false. While I had been posting about suicide, I was not actively suicidal in any way, nor was I depressed, nor was I at all thinking about my father. I was actually very happy at the time, if somewhat worried about the possibility that the very happy situation I was in might be in jeopardy due to an upcoming odsp renewal process.
Now, regarding the officers...
I’m just going to be blunt: it was clear to me at the time that the officers i spoke to did not have the intellectual capacity or raw intelligence to follow any discussion i was initiating about existential philosophy, or the freedom of defining existence within any kind of self-defined purpose. The officers appeared to be lost in the doldrums of a christian worldview, fully attached to the sacramental concept of existence and the sanctity of the protestant work ethic. They were simply incapable of comprehending any concept of meaning that transcended the boring old school-work-marriage-kids-retirement cycle. So, we were not talking with each other but past each other. Reading it from a distance in 2018, this part of the report does not surprise me; the officer displayed a very religious and childlike concept of existence when I spoke with her, and this is fully reflected in the report.
What I do find surprising is the presence of several aspects of the report that are simply invented out of nothing.
It is stated in the report that I was seeking some kind of medication and would commit suicide if I did not receive it. That is not something that I stated to the officer, nor is it something that has any basis in reality. I am not able to even contemplate what kind of medication it is that she might have been referring to. It is true that I take a combination of anti-androgens, progesterones and estrogens for the purposes of gender transition, but I do not take any other medication, never have taken any other medication and frankly would not want to take any other medication, either. Given the history I had with my mother growing up, I am actually a very strong advocate of sober living and live a largely straight-edge lifestyle; not only was I not seeking medication at that time, but I would have forcefully rejected any prescriptions forced upon me by mental health professionals. So, again - where does such an absurd statement come from?
I’m left with little option but to deduce that the officer simply didn’t understand the arguments that I was making to her, which were about making a rational choice to cease to exist in the case that my odsp was denied. It is absolutely true that I was undergoing some anxiety around the question of the renewal, and had resolved to exercise my right to kill myself should i not have my odsp renewed, but i insist that my reaction was entirely rational, relative to my own set of personal axiomatic beliefs. This is a statement from my notes at the time, where I generate the logic of suicide as a rational reaction if my odsp gets denied:
1) it does not appear as though i am going to have my disability renewed.
2) therefore, i will be unable to pay rent.
3) therefore, i will lose my studio. again.
4) i have nowhere else to store my studio.
5) therefore, i will have no way to save my studio if i am unable to pay rent to house it.
6) humans need a purpose to continue to exist and whither away without one. i have categorically rejected most accepted purposes for existence as not interesting (children, "career", partner, family, etc.). the one purpose i have is recording.
7) therefore, losing my studio would also be losing my purpose to exist.
8) therefore, i would no longer have a will to exist.
9) therefore, suicide will become desirable.
So, what i was saying was that if my odsp gets denied then i would decide to kill myself; you will note that this is equivalent to stating that i have no plans to kill myself, so long as my odsp gets renewed. What right would anyone - my mother, the windsor coast team or anybody else - have to interfere in such a rational decision making process?
So, i don’t know where the claim that my suicidal thoughts were based around getting a prescription were coming from, other than the officer’s inability to follow the argument - which is really no surprise, as it was obvious at the time that she really wasn’t following the argument.
Likewise, I was not awaiting the results of a meeting with Dr. Bordoff; while I had spoken to him recently, I did not schedule a follow-up and have not spoken to him since. Rather, I needed to renew my odsp documents by september, and had resolved to move to the rational end of ceasing to exist should i fail in accomplishing the task. The officer simply didn’t understand what was said to her.
The officer states in the report that I am fully capable of working. That is an original diagnosis based on her intuition; several doctors have told me otherwise. Thankfully, her diagnosis is not particularly relevant,; her credentials to diagnose are somewhat lacking.
I made the following posts to facebook after the officers left:
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lol.
some cops showed up today to talk about my suicidal facebook messages. but, the context in the messages is very clear - i'm not currently suicidal. such an autonomous decision is dependent upon the outcome of the odsp evaluation in september. i was posting to prepare others for the eventuality. further, while i'm fairly certain of the outcome, i'm actually holding out hope that it will be extended. how can i be suicidal if i'm mutedly optimistic about the future, and merely planning for the worst case should it actualize?
i've already posted my logic.
it's always interesting explaining my coldly rational, detached perspective to people that seem to think they have the ability to magically project their desires onto reality.
but, you're giving up too soon! you're young!
it's not a question of giving up. that's a subjective perspective. i'm about analyzing data and coming to objective conclusions. my attitude doesn't affect the data, which clearly demonstrates that my chances of finding employment are exceedingly low. it has nothing to do with how i feel, it's just what the data states.
but, you haven't tried.
sure i have. that's how i built up my data set. why try further when the data projects a high probability of failure? it would be *this* behaviour that would be insane.
but that was in ottawa.
the conditions here are worse than in ottawa. that's why i moved here. it follows that i should spend even less time trying here.
you're just focusing on numbers and statistics, you just need to think positively and...
no. i need to focus on data. your arguments are not convincing, because you're not challenging the data, you're merely asking me to ignore it in favour of magical thinking.
*frown*
i tried to explain it, but they didn't get it. they did, however, convince me to allow a nurse to come later today to talk to me.
btw: the correct mathematical argument against my data-driven deductions is to question whether employment data is dependent. if each process is independent of the next, my conclusions collapse.
i think there is some argument for this. in fact, it even follows that if each process is independent then the probability of eventually finding a job approaches one (because any non-zero probability implies at least one success in infinitely many trials).
however, i'm convinced that the challenges are related to personal character traits, which makes each trial dependent on the last.
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A second report exists, GO# WI 2015-19702. I would just like to point out in this space that I am and always have been an entirely independent artist, and that I am not and never have been interested in getting a record contract from anybody in Toronto. I operate with a very strongly DIY ethic. Everything I do is done from the ground up, entirely by myself - and I feel the art would suffer if it were any other way. I do not know who made the suggestion that I wanted a record contract from somebody in Toronto, but it is both wholly inaccurate and entirely contradictory to my goals and purposes as an artist; it is completely ridiculous, and has no basis in fact, whatsoever.