Recovering with schizophrenia, bestselling author Jonathan Harnisch is a noted mental health advocate, fine artist, blogger, podcast host, patent holder, hedge fund manager, musician, and film and TV writer and producer. Google him for more information.
Some magically mundane times. And excellent soundtrack hanging with Jonathan and Melissa on some dreamy and ennui-tended footage from an earlier live video from earlier in the day creatively intertwined. An exploration perhaps in the essence of the banality of life within oneself, sorry the intro was a little long but pretty much 4 minutes into it, and you're there and feeling its grainy yet whimsical texture. Things get real. We had some excellent feedback on our Facebook, so deciding to share it on our syndicated podcast. Peace.
Spend 20 minutes with us or not; life is short, good vibes only. To quote Rhonda Byrne, "Don't compare yourself with anyone else because you have potential inside you that no one else on the planet has."
as usual join us for 17 minutes, or if you have more important things to do, that's oy too, audio from our facebook live.
Get comfortable, find yourself pleasant and calm and join Jonathan and Melissa tonight for cannabis cuddles and conversation (kinda) for a half-hour, just raw footage twisted together but still pretty sick. Please excuse the semi-messy intro. It's been a challenging day buckling down to see if tomorrow and upcoming months are a little less heavy on us, and Jonathan's already overcoming his schizophrenia and anxiety.
"What...is it like to suffer from...schizophrenia combined with...Tourette's syndrome? ...[Harnisch's] answers to such questions and the ways in which they are portrayed prove complex. Mixing diary entries...with a screenplay...messages are often jumbled though not without merit, [as] when the narrator announces that "I had a paranoid spell last night. [My wife] was texting me, and I was convinced that it was my stepmother impersonating my wife." Wildly varied in style and content, making for an informative and strange trip through the experience of mental disorders." - Kirkus Reviews
Host Jonathan Harnisch (dubbed "mental health guru" by the UK Guardian), with fiancee/co-pilot Melissa Graham have a heart-to-heart sit down with their Facebook friends. Their life is becoming increasingly remarkable, yet more challenging, with Jonathan's schizophrenia. Realizing this conversation would make for a good share on the cannabis cuddles & conversation podcast, voilà, here it is. Themes like self-forgiveness and hating oneself while loving one's life are explored. Join Jonathan and Missy for today's half-hour episode; if you have more important things to do, that's ok too—life is short. ♡
I just wanted to share this with you guys.
Immediate gratification, for Melissa, the rest is really good too. Join us! If you have other things to do that's cool too. Apologies for the shitty sound quality, had to crank it out and share.
Join us for half an hour, or not, or if you have other things to do, that's cool too. Jonathan finally got high today, and Melissa is kicking ass. Come along and feel the love!
Follow hosts Jonathan and Melissa as their love deepens, so does their continued good healthy solid (and sometimes tricky conversations) and open communication. But being in it for the long term means you've got to keep communication open and keep everything in check. In any event, The UK Guardian recently recognized Jonathan as a "mental health guru" lol, so go figure, but as the famous quote goes (a Jonathan original from his 804-page Alibiography), "You know what is beautiful? A real conversation with a real person." So join Jonathan and Missy for today's half-hour or thereabouts; if you have more important things to do, that's ok too—life is short ♡
as ususal join us for ten minutes or if you have more important things to do, that's okay too. today we're smellin the roses (literally! lol) fun times and beyond love. sending love hugs and hope your way ♡
Late at night, Jonathan's in Seattle, Melissa's in Albuquerque, and things get complicated when apart, things, ugly things like jealousy and stuff; catch us mid-conversation and be inspired, like; it's ok damnit Jonathan, she loves you. You love her! Join us if you feel like taking a peek into our beautiful lives and hear us banter and junk. We are sending love from Jonathan and Melissa.
Join us, or if you have more important things to do, that's okay too — life is short! ♡
Jonathan and Mellissa drive the streets in rainy Seattle traffic to discuss the mid-life and the real-life tedium; mental and physical health, making good choices, and their importance, and what could be more beautiful than a real conversation between two real people.
Join Jonathan and Melissa for banter and joviality in tonight's slightly manic episode and some chill time, some love story stuff—good energy and good times. This was a fun recording; we hope to engage you, elicit positive emotions and inspiration.
Another snuggly night for cannabis cuddles and conversation with Jonathan and Melissa discussing lots of cool stuff, from silly to serious, so kick back and chill with us for a half-hour; we love you! Thanks for hangin.
Discover meaning, purpose, and peace of mind with or without a mental health condition and hang out with Jonathan and Melissa inspired by some Facebook Live recordings from earlier in the day. Time spent with the right person is like a vacation from the world; may your day be filled with love, peace, joy, and laughter.
Climb into bed with Jonathan and Melissa as we get all abstract and stuff, good times, and good convo. May your day be filled with love, peace, joy, and laughter.
Join Jonathan and Melissa for diversion and distraction in the car at a gas station sippin Joe in Seattle.
Just hanging out with Jonathan and Melissa and talking about stuff.
Hangin and bangin with Jonathan and Melissa with some sick readings from The Oxygen Tank. A real gem.
Half-hour hash night session getting back on the horse and dreaming big.
hi everyone! hope u enjoy this. it's inspired by the book avail on amazon etc. stay happy healthy & safe this year. your pal, Jonathan
Waking up with us in Vancouver for a nice quick cast.....
The Oxygen Tank by author, Jonathan Harnisch is a non-linear story of schizophrenia and obsession. Rather than having a chronological plot, it exists in a series of maddening hallucinogenic episodes that combine Benjamin J. Schreiber's deepest insecurities and darkest fantasies. In every one of these manic flashes, the same characters appear: Georgie, the alter-ego living in Ben's body, and Claudia, the object of his twisted desires and destructive obsession. These "schizophrenic blue-movie skits and sleazy hardcore porn-flicks," as Ben describes them to his psychiatrist, open a disturbing window into the psychopathy that controls his every day.
A fictional novel that explores the inner workings of the schizoaffective mind. This book is not just to provide a picture of how mental illness disrupts the reality of the sufferer, but more importantly to share how creative pursuits like writing can have tremendous therapeutic benefits. Its target audience is adult readers who enjoy the transgressive style that best depicts the intricacies of a mentally ill mind.
Mentally-ill sexual abuse victim, Ben Schreiber undergoes psychiatric sessions while rambling through memories of sexual exploits. Nominated for the Crimson Quill, finalist INDIEFAB, finalist National Indie Excellence Awards 2016, shortlisted 24th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards, BookLife Prize for Fiction.
Independently wealthy schizophrenic offers to pay his neighbor to be his sexual torturer. Nominated for the Crimson Quill, finalist INDIEFAB, finalist National Indie Excellence Awards 2016, shortlisted 24th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards, BookLife Prize for Fiction.
A beautiful film about new tears for old grief, and loving what was and what was not. I competed Melt Away while undergoing a dark, deep experience with depression, existential despair and with new tears for old grief. I am glad to see so many people have appreciated Melt Away's inherent beauty. I thank you, all, to God, and to all my fans, friends, and family for playing such a unique role in my experimental pieces, although perhaps without you knowing it. I am brought to a deep sense of nostalgia for good times long gone, from lost film footage in the archives here at the production office to experimenting into the depth of new ground, and new artistic expression. I suffer from a rare and comorbid mental health diagnoses, namely those within the schizophrenia and autistic spectra. My mental illnesses have blessed me over the years with many creative gifts. So, with immense gratitude, I thank you, my muse, wife, and my family, friends, and fans.
Envision a blend of a mentally ill mind with unsurpassed resiliency and fiery intellect and your result would be the brilliant Jonathan Harnisch. An all-around artist, Jonathan writes fiction and screenplays, sketches, imagines, and creates. Produced filmmaker, fine artist, musician, and published erotica author, Jonathan holds myriad accolades, and his works captivate the attention of those who experience it. Manic-toned scripts with parallel lives, masochistic tendencies in sexual escapades, and disturbing clarities embellished with addiction, fetish, lust, and love, are just a taste of themes found in Jonathan's transgressive literature. Conversely, his award-winning films capture the ironies of life, love, self-acceptance, tragedy and fantasy. Jonathan's art evokes laughter and shock, elation and sadness, but overall forces you to step back and question your own version of reality. Scripts, screenplays, and schizophrenia are defining factors of Jonathan's life and reality - but surface labels are often incomplete. Jonathan is diagnosed with several mental illnesses from schizoaffective disorder to Tourette's syndrome; playfully, he dubs himself the "King of Mental Illness." Despite daily symptomatic struggles and thoughts, Jonathan radiates an authentic, effervescent, and loving spirit. His resiliency emanates from the greatest lesson he's learned: laughter. His diagnoses and life experiences encourage him to laugh at reality as others see it. Wildly eccentric, open-minded, passionate and driven, Jonathan has a feral imagination. His inherent traits transpose to his art, making his works some of the most original and thought-provoking of modern day. Jonathan Harnisch's struggles with his mental health conditions are interlinked with the incomprehension of non-sufferers, which provokes him to explain his reality. He has explored a range of media, including film, music, and now the written word, to help the general public understand exactly what it feels like to suffer from schizophrenia. By fictionalizing the day-to-day meetings of multiple personalities, he is illuminating a corner of psychiatry that few understand. As an author with schizophrenia, Jonathan Harnisch is ideally placed to share the unusual perception commonly defined as 'mental illness'. Harnisch is not dealing with an altered reality, but a double reality. His main characters, Ben Schreiber and Georgie Gust, perfectly illustrate how two lives can share the same body.
Envision a blend of a mentally ill mind with unsurpassed resiliency and fiery intellect and your result would be the brilliant Jonathan Harnisch. An all-around artist, Jonathan writes fiction and screenplays, sketches, imagines, and creates. Produced filmmaker, fine artist, musician, and published erotica author, Jonathan holds myriad accolades, and his works captivate the attention of those who experience it. Manic-toned scripts with parallel lives, masochistic tendencies in sexual escapades, and disturbing clarities embellished with addiction, fetish, lust, and love, are just a taste of themes found in Jonathan's transgressive literature. Conversely, his award-winning films capture the ironies of life, love, self-acceptance, tragedy and fantasy. Jonathan's art evokes laughter and shock, elation and sadness, but overall forces you to step back and question your own version of reality. Scripts, screenplays, and schizophrenia are defining factors of Jonathan's life and reality - but surface labels are often incomplete. Jonathan is diagnosed with several mental illnesses from schizoaffective disorder to Tourette's syndrome; playfully, he dubs himself the "King of Mental Illness." Despite daily symptomatic struggles and thoughts, Jonathan radiates an authentic, effervescent, and loving spirit. His resiliency emanates from the greatest lesson he's learned: laughter. His diagnoses and life experiences encourage him to laugh at reality as others see it. Wildly eccentric, open-minded, passionate and driven, Jonathan has a feral imagination. His inherent traits transpose to his art, making his works some of the most original and thought-provoking of modern day. Jonathan Harnisch's struggles with his mental health conditions are interlinked with the incomprehension of non-sufferers, which provokes him to explain his reality. He has explored a range of media, including film, music, and now the written word, to help the general public understand exactly what it feels like to suffer from schizophrenia. By fictionalizing the day-to-day meetings of multiple personalities, he is illuminating a corner of psychiatry that few understand. As an author with schizophrenia, Jonathan Harnisch is ideally placed to share the unusual perception commonly defined as 'mental illness'. Harnisch is not dealing with an altered reality, but a double reality. His main characters, Ben Schreiber and Georgie Gust, perfectly illustrate how two lives can share the same body.
A collection of personal essays exploring the author's experiences battling schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. Prolific writer and filmmaker Harnisch (Porcelain Utopia, 2016, etc.) explores his personal struggle with mental disorders in this short collection of autobiographical pieces that he originally wrote for his "online community dedicated to mental health." Throughout his adult life, he writes, he's received myriad diagnoses from doctors, including PTSD, depression, and schizoaffective disorder. His book elucidates the day-to-day activities of a person who suffers from such conditions, and the author mentions frequent communication with therapists, a demanding cigarette addiction, and many sleepless nights. At times, the prose is hard to parse and the content can feel repetitive. However, the author shares some incredible insights into what it's like to suffer from the rarely understood symptoms of schizophrenia. In one essay, for example, he describes his experience of paranoia: "We have become the target of a vast conspiracy stretching on invisible webs....It lives in the telephone wires, the cell towers, the papers, and even online....It nests in the hearts and minds of my family, friends, and loved ones." He also sheds light on what it's like to suffer from delusions: "Symbols, mythology, and connections, even coincidences, take on a very deep and personal meaning, a very deep and personal context." Ultimately, although this work is challenging and heavy, it's also uplifting, as the author never loses hope for recovery; instead, he remains tirelessly optimistic: "I keep moving ahead, as always, knowing deep down inside that I am a good person and that I am worthy of a good life." A courageous, if difficult, self-portrait of one man's suffering, as well as his hope for recovery. — Kirkus Reviews
“It's like I'm too far away, in time, from when I would actively participate in things, enjoying them while they were happening…” Ben Schreiber mostly inhabits a world within himself, sharing it with his alter ego Georgie, living often non-linearly in a process of psychosis with visions and images of characters that fade in and out. In reality, Ben is in sessions with his therapist, Dr C, who is inviting him to recall family memories. Inside his own world, Ben is in front of the cameras he has set up in his home office, telling his story. In it, he recalls his sex education as a child, the sex ed. in class counterpointing his father's pornography and the relationship his father may or may not have had with Gladice, a sexually provocative woman who has similarities to and elements of Claudia, a woman Ben meets aged thirty. Claudia captivates Ben when they share an early ‘moment' together while smoking and a physical one that involves Ben's foot fetish in which he paints her toes and makes love to her feet. Claudia urges Ben to go ahead and write about his life and experiences. Ben again begins to recall his early sexual experiences. A particularly vivid one is the day he is with his grandmother at the gym and he sees her friend fully naked in the changing room. Darlene, at least in Ben's version of the scene, temptingly and languorously dresses herself in front of him. Ben also sees his own funeral, attended by numerous ex-girlfriends (even an ex-boyfriend) who talk about how, in spite of Ben trying to be considerate at first, the relationship always failed when Ben's behavior degenerated. Ben discusses his failure to engage with life with Georgie. Georgie encourages him to make changes, to find work (even though Ben is rich), to find friends, to seek whatever it is he really wants, to face up to why he acts and lives life as he does. Back in therapy, Ben is with Dr C, where he begins to relate a story of his grandmother, of her toughness during his childhood. Flashing forward to another session, Ben as Georgie is very agitated. Inside his mind, the ghost of his grandmother visits Ben at home. Georgie is there too, helping Ben to recall and face the subdued memories of this woman. Georgie is eleven years old… he thinks he wants to do anything to help his sobbing, lonely grandmother until… Although he wants her to leave his bedroom, he is frozen as she sexually assaults him, the experience mixing with the pornography and sex ed. he has recently been exposed to. Again with Dr C, Ben is highly anxious, pacing. Georgie encourages Ben to open up to Dr C. He does and breaks down, crying hard. In Ben's internal world, a number of characters attempt to console Ben, including his wife, Kelly, who may or may not have been real, as he comes to terms with his childhood memories in the following days. Ben looks up to the cameras, says his goodbyes, and leaves. Author, Jonathan Harnisch has written the bestselling and award-winning novels, Lover in the Nobody, Living Colorful Beauty and When We Were Invincible. He is also a noted controversial mental health advocate, and fine artist, blogger, podcast host, patent holder, hedge fund manager, musician, and film and TV writer and producer.
Living Colorful Beauty is a twisted, intensely character-driven ride. In Living Colorful Beauty, author Jonathan Harnisch tells the story of Ben, a man diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome, schizoaffective disorder, and several other issues. Ever since his youth, Ben has been both plagued by mental illness and obsessed with venality. As he navigates through an unstable, directionless life and leaves a string of shattered romances in his wake, he generates a fictional character, Georgie Gust, to deal with his many paraphilias and neuroses. But with the introduction of a new psychotherapist, Ben may have a chance to let go of his doppelgänger as well as his overwhelming insecurity. Though the book is saturated with Ben's sexuality, its prevailing theme is actually his struggle to come to terms with his mental health. The entire book reads like a Freudian therapy session, so the ultimate resolution of Ben's problems is appropriate. Ben's internal creative process is integral to the book's effectiveness, since much of the psychoanalysis Ben receives seems to come from himself through the lens of his fictional creation, Georgie. The book features an almost claustrophobic amount of navel-gazing, which may be intentional. At times, the reading experience leaves no doubt as to how the book's main character could drive himself crazy with his recursive, obsessive self-examination. Ben and Georgie have an interesting and nuanced relationship. At times Ben seems completely unable to control his double while simultaneously being one with him. He often reassures himself that his creation is the inferior man, citing Georgie's pumpkin-like body as the reason that nobody will ever want him. On the other hand, of the two of them, Georgie seems to have the more active love life. Ben reaches for emotional intimacy through relationship after relationship, but his illness, issues with women, and physical demands--the Georgie in him--constantly hamper his progress. As the narrator, Ben's point of view colors all of the other characters. Several of these, in addition to Georgie, are or may be fictional, mere expressions of Ben's illness. This is especially true of the women in Ben's life. There are comparatively very few men in this story, but the women are usually of a seductive and even predatory type. Ben aggressively sizes up the ladies he knows, from his girlfriends to his therapist, in terms of their attractiveness, perhaps in an attempt to balance the scales, since in his own perception, women are domineering copies of his own terrifying mother. Part of Ben's evolution is to move toward a valuing of women beyond his mother issues, a satisfying direction for this character to travel. Living Colorful Beauty is a twisted, intensely character-driven ride that ends on a hopeful note. It may interest fans of Charles Bukowski and Tom Robbins.
Written in the vein of Catcher in the Rye or The World According to Garp, Jonathan Harnisch's When We Were Invincible is a coming-of-age novella, which details the experiences of outsider Georgie Gust navigating the fictional St. Michael's Academy, a prestigious East Coast boarding school. Georgie suffers from Tourette's Syndrome and early onset schizophrenia, which makes his journey all the more poignant.
A young man battling extreme mental illness brings his sadomasochistic fantasies to life in Harnisch's (Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia, 2014, etc.) latest novel. As this riveting story opens, Georgie Gust, a suicidal Tourette's syndrome patient, tells his doctor he wants to leave the mental institution where he's been committed. When the doctor puts him off, Gust finds himself buffeted by violent fantasies of escape, and he even prepares to hang himself. The novel plunges readers into the mind of a man at war with his own urges, memories, and sexual obsessions. After a scene shift, Gust's chauffeur, Ben, delivers him to his empty home, where Margaret, his only friend, visits to check on him. However, she annoys him because "she seems to care." Later, Gust, a foot fetishist, gives a pedicure to his sexy neighbor, Claudia, in a scene lit with unexpected poetry and poignancy. As the narrative viewpoint flickers among Gust, Ben, and a quasi-omniscient third-person perspective, Gust's voracious appetite for pain prompts him to hire Claudia to torment him. (He has wealthy parents, so he spends cash liberally.) When Claudia's house goes up in flames, she moves in with him, and their sadomasochistic bond descends into extraordinary, hallucinatory violence. In Claudia's hands, Gust discovers new depths of masochism, and she finds joy in tormenting him. Despite the garishness, brutality, and squalor of many passages (which are not for the squeamish), more sophisticated readers will appreciate the extraordinary feat Harnisch has accomplished. He lucidly, poignantly conveys a mind riven with what are, after all, human vulnerabilities: mental pathologies, shameful fantasies, anguished doubts about the natures of reality, love, and memory. In the hands of a lesser writer, these themes would splinter the narrative. Fortunately, the author masters his material; readers will believe the voices that vivify it and compassionately wish them to find the healing that eludes them. An extraordinary, harrowing odyssey into an embattled self, full of humor, compassion, and a rare understanding of mental illness.
Jonathan Harnisch's postmodern literature relies on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator. In Fragmentation, Harnisch has outdone himself, for good or ill, with the strangest, saddest, most confusing, and unedited, schizophrenic, psychosexual stream-of-thought narrative imaginable, a work suffused with almost evangelical zeal in the service of disillusion. Author, Jonathan Harnisch has written the bestselling and award-winning novels, Lover in the Nobody, Living Colorful Beauty and When We Were Invincible. He is also a noted controversial mental health advocate, and fine artist, blogger, podcast host, patent holder, hedge fund manager, musician, and film and TV writer and producer.
Jonathan Harnisch's postmodern literature relies on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator. In Fragmentation, Harnisch has outdone himself, for good or ill, with the strangest, saddest, most confusing, and unedited, schizophrenic, psychosexual stream-of-thought narrative imaginable, a work suffused with almost evangelical zeal in the service of disillusion. Author, Jonathan Harnisch has written the bestselling and award-winning novels, Lover in the Nobody, Living Colorful Beauty and When We Were Invincible. He is also a noted controversial mental health advocate, and fine artist, blogger, podcast host, patent holder, hedge fund manager, musician, and film and TV writer and producer.
BENJAMIN (BEN, BENJY) SCHREIBER has Tourette's syndrome, which causes him to display uncontrollable tics and hops, and to stutter and swear inappropriately. He is bullied through his school years and can never form firm friendships, especially with women. He is simply incapable of happiness. In his late twenties, he plunges into a downward spiral of drug and alcohol abuse, which culminates in an attempted bank robbery using a cell phone as a fake bomb. He is arrested and placed under psychiatric evaluation, where his psychiatrist, Dr C, quickly sees Ben's affliction as more than just Tourette's. Ben is not alone: Inside his head lives GEORGIE GUST, Ben's alter ego. Georgie is obsessed with his manipulative but extremely sexual next door neighbor CLAUDIA NESBITT and shares a sadomasochistic relationship with her that is supported only by his obsession—Claudia has no love for Georgie. Ben is desperately searching for someone —Claudia Nesbitt as the Perfect Woman—who will provide him the unconditional love that he never received as a boy. He finds it easier to retreat into his mind to share Georgie's sick obsession with Georgie's cruel and abusive Claudia than to deal with his real issues. Dr C senses that Ben is suffering from some type of post-traumatic stress that occurred early in Ben's childhood and that he uses Georgie as an escape when bad memories start to surface. It is up to Dr C to help Ben face the buried terrors of his childhood so that he can finally let go of Georgie and reduce him to the literary character that the writer Ben wants him to be. Envision a blend of a mentally ill mind with unsurpassed resiliency and fiery intellect and your result would be the brilliant Jonathan Harnisch. An all-around artist, Jonathan writes fiction and screenplays, sketches, imagines, and creates. Produced filmmaker, fine artist, musician, and published erotica author, Jonathan holds myriad accolades, and his works captivate the attention of those who experience it. Manic-toned scripts with parallel lives, masochistic tendencies in sexual escapades, and disturbing clarities embellished with addiction, fetish, lust, and love, are just a taste of themes found in Jonathan's transgressive literature. Conversely, his award-winning films capture the ironies of life, love, self-acceptance, tragedy and fantasy. Jonathan's art evokes laughter and shock, elation and sadness, but overall forces you to step back and question your own version of reality. Scripts, screenplays, and schizophrenia are defining factors of Jonathan's life and reality - but surface labels are often incomplete. Jonathan is diagnosed with several mental illnesses from schizoaffective disorder to Tourette's syndrome; playfully, he dubs himself the "King of Mental Illness." Despite daily symptomatic struggles and thoughts, Jonathan radiates an authentic, effervescent, and loving spirit. His resiliency emanates from the greatest lesson he's learned: laughter. His diagnoses and life experiences encourage him to laugh at reality as others see it. Wildly eccentric, open-minded, passionate and driven, Jonathan has a feral imagination. His inherent traits transpose to his art, making his works some of the most original and thought-provoking of modern day. Jonathan Harnisch's struggles with his mental health conditions are interlinked with the incomprehension of non-sufferers, which provokes him to explain his reality. He has explored a range of media, including film, music, and now the written word, to help the general public understand exactly what it feels like to suffer from schizophrenia. By fictionalizing the day-to-day meetings of multiple personalities, he is illuminating a corner of psychiatry that few understand. As an author with schizophrenia, Jonathan Harnisch is ideally placed to share the unusual perception commonly defined as 'mental illness'. Harnisch is not dealing with an altered reality, but a double reality. His main characters, Ben Schreiber and Georgie Gust, perfectly illustrate how two lives can share the same body.
Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality. Although schizophrenia is not as common as other mental disorders, the symptoms can be very disabling.
Ben Schreiber suffers from a range of physical and psychiatric disorders, ranging from Tourette's syndrome to narcissism, borderline personality, and schizoaffective disorder. He is hospitalized after a drug-crazed attempt at a bank robbery and is now under the care of Dr C, a female psychiatrist. Ben has little faith that psychiatric medicine will help him rid his mind of the delusions and hallucinations that his disorder presents, as it has done little for him thus far. He also knows that Dr C will not be treating him alone: He must introduce her to the cast of characters that share his brain, including Ben's alter ego, Georgie Gust. Ben/Georgie are not classic "split" personalities: Georgie is a hallucination that springs from Ben's disease and physically shares Ben's life, making his symptoms even worse. Dr. C begins to suspect that Ben draws upon Georgie to help him avoid the bad memories that he has suppressed for his entire life and that underlie his post-traumatic stress and anxiety. She must try to get Ben to explore his relationship with Georgie, and the sexual fetishes that are triggered by Claudia Nesbitt, Georgie's highly sexual and manipulative girlfriend, so that Ben can become once again the loving person he once was. She encourages Ben to talk about Georgie and Claudia in their sessions, and more importantly, to write about them as therapy. Ben discovers that writing gives him increasing freedom from the obsessive invasion of his thoughts by Georgie and Claudia and from his dreadful past memories that Dr C slowly uncovers. He begins to hope that converting Georgie to a literary character in the pages of an autobiographical novel will slowly remove him, along with Claudia, from Ben's mind forever.
"Let's get the facts straight up front, to avoid any confusion later," the author states at the start of this wild, candid book. "I am a person first, a human being, just like anyone else. Maybe a little different, that's all." That difference is a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and this extensive work explores the realities of mental illness through a whirlwind of fictional, narrative pieces and personal reflections. Along the way, it takes readers to places of depravity and confusion. Its characters include Ben Schreiber, a precocious but mentally ill youngster in Armani jeans, who explains his troubled life to the ever-calm Dr. C, after trying to rob a bank with a cellphone. Schreiber discusses his alter ego, Georgie Gust, a masochist and foot-fetishist, who's wealthy enough to pay his neighbor Claudia to torture him; indeed, he seems capable of enduring any type of humiliation, so long as it doesn't involve actually working. The first-person narrator regularly interrupts the proceedings to offer generally off-topic details: "(Parenthetical Pet Peeve) Commercials for unappetizing products shown at meal times...feminine hygiene products, jock itch, yeast infections, etc." The scattered narrative uses diverse literary mechanisms, to say the least, mixing elements such as journal entries, a screenplay, a straightforward melodrama involving a Tourette's sufferer at a private school, occasional celebrity name-dropping ("I met Joanna Cassidy, Dick Van Dyke, Robert Downey Jr, Mel Gibson, and others"), and a dapper figure named John Marshal, who, when asked his opinion of a party, responds, "I'd scarcely be a good judge of that.... My life is taken up with writing." Making sense of it all in any traditional way, it would seem, isn't really the point. From horrific scenes of child abuse ("She did. She raped me. My grandmother") to glimpses of triumph ("I can start taking control of my life"), this long book's many scenes of anguish and hope are difficult to take in, by any estimation. Whether readers will find the difficulty worthwhile depends largely on their tolerance for twisted tales.
A young man battling extreme mental illness brings his sadomasochistic fantasies to life in Harnisch's (Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia, 2014, etc.) latest novel. As this riveting story opens, Georgie Gust, a suicidal Tourette's syndrome patient, tells his doctor he wants to leave the mental institution where he's been committed. When the doctor puts him off, Gust finds himself buffeted by violent fantasies of escape, and he even prepares to hang himself. The novel plunges readers into the mind of a man at war with his own urges, memories, and sexual obsessions. After a scene shift, Gust's chauffeur, Ben, delivers him to his empty home, where Margaret, his only friend, visits to check on him. However, she annoys him because "she seems to care." Later, Gust, a foot fetishist, gives a pedicure to his sexy neighbor, Claudia, in a scene lit with unexpected poetry and poignancy. As the narrative viewpoint flickers among Gust, Ben, and a quasi-omniscient third-person perspective, Gust's voracious appetite for pain prompts him to hire Claudia to torment him. (He has wealthy parents, so he spends cash liberally.) When Claudia's house goes up in flames, she moves in with him, and their sadomasochistic bond descends into extraordinary, hallucinatory violence. In Claudia's hands, Gust discovers new depths of masochism, and she finds joy in tormenting him. Despite the garishness, brutality, and squalor of many passages (which are not for the squeamish), more sophisticated readers will appreciate the extraordinary feat Harnisch has accomplished. He lucidly, poignantly conveys a mind riven with what are, after all, human vulnerabilities: mental pathologies, shameful fantasies, anguished doubts about the natures of reality, love, and memory. In the hands of a lesser writer, these themes would splinter the narrative. Fortunately, the author masters his material; readers will believe the voices that vivify it and compassionately wish them to find the healing that eludes them. An extraordinary, harrowing odyssey into an embattled self, full of humor, compassion, and a rare understanding of mental illness.
I completed Chance Encounter while undergoing a dark, deep experience with depression, existential despair and with new tears for old grief. So many people appreciate this film's inherent beauty. I thank you, all, to God, and to all my fans, friends, and family for playing such a unique role in these short experimental pieces, although perhaps without knowing it. The holiday seasons often bring along a deep sense of nostalgia for good times long gone, from lost film footage in the archives here at the production office to experimenting into the depth of new ground, and new artistic expression with my goal of finding and redefining myself, through my art. A new original soundtrack for these films originally shot on both Super 8 film stock and Hi-8 video, will be developed and inspired by the final cut of The Morning After, Chance Encounter, and Emptying His Pockets. All three films on loss, love, and life will enhance with a revised original score, or soundtrack, over the coming months. Please leave comments, if you would. The responses to all the live cuts of these pieces have inspired me to bring The Morning After, which I recommend if you enjoy Chance Encounter, to the film festival circuit. It has been years since I retired from Hollywood film and TV work. It might, however, be time to see what I can do to reconnect with an audience in the world beyond online, once again, in some way, and if not we've always had the Internet, after all. Professional financing and marketing, etc., will often cause me a great deal of unwanted stress, which I prefer with not to do. I suffer from rare and comorbid mental health diagnoses, namely those within the schizophrenic and autistic spectrum. My mental illnesses have blessed me over the years with many creative gifts. So, with immense gratitude, I thank you, my muse, my wife, my students, and my family and friends without hesitation. Onward bound, as always. —Jonathan Harnisch, Harnisch Productions, LLC
I completed The Morning After in December 2014 while undergoing a dark, deep experience with depression, existential despair and with new tears for old grief. I am glad to see so many people have appreciated my movies' inherent beauty, especially this one, which has such a profoundly personal meaning. I thank you, all, for God, and to all my fans, friends, and family for playing such a unique role in the short experimental pieces within this short film series of sorts; this being said, perhaps without others knowing how many have inspired my art. The holiday seasons often bring me to a deep sense of nostalgia for good times long gone, from lost film footage in the archives, including a great deal of footage I shot during my days as a student of film and TV production at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in the mid 1990s and also movies kept here at the production office. I believe I have experimented into the depth of new ground, and renewed visual voice of artistic expression keeping my goal intact, to find and redefine myself, through the arts. A new original soundtrack for these films originally shot on both Super 8 film stock and Hi-8 video, will be developed and inspired by the final cut of The Morning After, Chance Encounter, and Emptying His Pockets. All three films in this series focus on my often recurring themes of loss, love, and life and may be recreated with a revised original score, or soundtrack, in time. Please leave comments, if you would. The responses for all the working cuts of these short pieces have inspired me to bring The Morning After to the independent film festival circuit. It has been years since retiring from Hollywood cinema and professional TV work. It might, however, be time to see what I can do to reconnect with an audience in the world beyond the Internet, once again, in some way, and if not, I don't think the Internet is going anywhere anytime soon. Professional financing and marketing, etc., will often cause me a great deal of unwanted stress, which I prefer to do without. I suffer from rare and comorbid mental health diagnoses, namely those within the schizophrenia and autistic spectra. My mental illnesses have blessed me over the years with many creative gifts. So, with immense gratitude, I thank you, my muse, wife, and my family and friends without hesitation. Onward bound, as always.
In a public restroom, the camera pans the closed doors of 4 stalls; the first has an "out of order" sign on it. We hear a gaseous noise, and one by one, three musicians (a guitar player, a bass player, and a trumpet player all wearing tuxedos) flush the toilets and come out of the stalls revealing their musical instruments. Finally, the last to be disclosed is an old lady, Pat (from the "out of order" stall). She goes to wash her hands and is shocked to find in the mirror that behind her, the three musicians, wondering where all the noise came from-- herself or the musicians.
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