Getting Sprayed with Mental Shrapnel: a Review of Phillip O'Neil's Mental Shrapnel (2020)
An intense paranoid saga featuring a therapist with PTSD caught between two women (one of them dead) writing a book on psychoses and civil wars, popping pills and drifting in and out of psychiatric institutions?
Yes, I will take some more of that thank you. Thank. You.
As a Foucault scholar I simply cannot pass up a book that, among other wholesome things, describes the weaponization of psychiatry as a technology of war. A perverse masterpiece.
Explicitly mentioning Foucault somewhere around the start, the reader gets warmed, prepped and groomed through beautiful prosaic accounts of self-mutilation, drug-abuse, the political history of post-soviet Chekhoslovakia and lots and lots and lots of alcohol.
"Drugs, Wars and Psychiatric Disorders" is the "Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll" of this textual contraption.
Entangled in street drugs and pharmaceutical soups, the politics of organized transgression is brought to light within the positive unconscious of the asylum. The inner and the outer slice through each other as Mahler's (main character's) unconscious and often his actual body, are dispersed through the multiple traumatic events and psychic ejaculations that pave the way toward 'the event'.
A mind in a state of psychosis is the direct reflection (either as cause or effect) of civil war. The analogy punctures the pages of Mental Shrapnel as we’re given multiple case studies of this medico-artistic hypothesis.
As a shrink in therapy, the protagonist analyzes himself being analyzed by others; "I noted I was noted.
I noticed I was noticed. I was supposed not to notice that I was being noticed so I played the game of not noticing that they were noticing I might be noticing" (p. 58). A beautiful and deadly panopticonic game of visibilities. An ocular nightmare of violent struggles, tactical reversals and power-relations. Knotted with the deeply political question, the violent trace left over from the war: "What happened in Bosnia?"
Chunks, debris and shards of painful memories percolate through the fatigue of manic episodes induced partially from the "Sinequanon" – textbook prescription biomedical pharma-mafia approach rehabilitation program – partially from the grief of loss and partially from the war itself.
An intense series of mental bifurcations drag Mahler from one encounter to the next comprised mainly of people reminiscent of Burroughs's characters from the Naked Lunch. O'Neil offers an exhilirating phenomenology of near-death, extreme-limit, pathological and adrenalized experiences, Mental Shrapnel delivers and continues to deliver consistently with an inertia that completely justifies the title. The text is a multifaceted treatise on violence itself; the hidden affectivity and contagion of violence as it blurs the distinctions between the physical and the psychic.
The book itself is structured like a randomly scattered cluster of me(n)tal shards; like so many fractured pieces of glass. The reader is forced to put the story together like trying to gather up a broken mirror. Each chapter is titled with a date and a city name. And no... of course not; most certainly, the dates are not ordered chronologically. It's not a history book it's mental shrapnel, which means it's up to you, the afflicted reader, to pick those pieces out of the flesh of this perfectly toxic thriller.
O’Neil, Phillip. (2020) Mental Shrapnel. Equus Press.