Jonathan Harnisch Podcast

Book Five of the groundbreaking bestseller Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography, Glad You're Not Me, takes the act of transgression to another level. Harnisch, the author himself, discovers he has been fictionalized as a character in an old friend's chapbook, and decides to come out of the woodwork as a real person, The Mentally Ill Artist, in this explicit transgressive reaction chapbook.

Book Four of the groundbreaking bestseller Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography, The Oxygen Tank, shows Georgie back in his morning routine of breaking coffee cups, falling in the shower, and of course, meeting Claudia for the first time. Georgie's house grows in size and grandeur with every dream. Claudia has an affair with Sir Tony Halldale and is caught by Georgie. Claudia is hit by a car and paralyzed. She then drowns when Georgie takes her boogie boarding on his boat. Georgie tries to kill himself. Ben is realizing that everyone is crazy in some way, not just him.

Book Three of the groundbreaking bestseller Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography, Porcelain Utopia, explores Dr C's interactions with Georgie and Ben. She thinks that dredging up Ben's past will somehow fix his present. Ben describes what went down at the holdup with the cell phone "bomb." He describes being booked into the psychiatric ward. Ben develops a strong obsession with Claudia/Heidi. Ben describes his first sexual encounters at age 10, in the Boy Scout treehouse. Ben describes some of his mother's abuse and neglect of him as a child. Dr C points out that Georgie looks more like Ben's mother than Ben does. Ben is haunted by a demon that resembles his mother. He remembers being sexually assaulted by his mother at age 11.

Book Two of the groundbreaking bestseller Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography, Freak, explores Ben's days at Wakefield. School is too traumatic, so Ben lets Georgie attend and take the abuse. The book explores Georgie's relationship with the original Claudia Nesbitt, the girlfriend of the jock Ozer, who tormented Georgie mercilessly. Claudia befriends Georgie and loves him for who he is. The other good part of Wakefield is Heidi Berillo's philosophy class, in which Georgie excels. Heidi encourages him to write an essay for the prestigious Winterbourne Scholarship. Georgie discovers alcohol and is constantly hung over. He is arrested for drunkenness and bailed out by Heidi, who keeps encouraging him. Georgie wins the Winterbourne prize but loses Claudia to suicide.

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 pro

Written in the vein of Catcher in the Rye or The World According to Garp, 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. In addition to When We Were Invincible, I have written several screenplays and the semi-autobiographical novel, Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography. My own diagnosis of Tourette’s Syndrome and other mental illnesses informs my work and helps educate the public on what it is to live with these disabilities.

Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography Reviewed by Alex FranksOctober 14, 2015 This, it is easy to imagine, is what life with mental illness is like for some: full of continuous questioning, rationalization, guilt, anxiety. Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography presents a simultaneously dazzling and frightening portrayal of mental illness through the eyes of several characters—though all embodied in the same being. The complex narrative is seemingly told from the viewpoint of Benjamin J. Schreiber, son of a wealthy blue-blood family who converses with his doctor (known as C). The privilege afforded to him by birth enables him to live relatively well off; his multitude of diagnoses, including Tourette’s and schizoaffective disorder, would effectively render him incapable of functioning in society under other circumstances. However, Ben doesn’t wish to talk about himself with Dr. C, but rather a fictional counterpart, Georgie Gust. Georgie, like Ben, comes from an aristocratic family and views reality from a different

At the opening of Living Colorful Beauty, the reader is presented with two protagonists. There’s Ben, the narrator of the preface, who relates the story of the awful sex education classes he sat through in middle school and of his subsequent discovery of his father’s collection of pornography; and then there’s Georgie, a sexual submissive with a foot fetish, who is obsessed with his beautiful and manipulative next-door neighbor Claudia. As the story progresses, however, it becomes clear that Georgie and Ben share a single three-dimensional body. Georgie is a character in a novel Ben is writing, and Ben maintains that Georgie is in fact no more than a literary device.  However, it is clear almost immediately that this is not the case. Throughout his life, Ben has received a number of psychiatric diagnoses, ranging from Tourette’s Syndrome to borderline personality disorder to schizoaffective disorder, and he displays some traits of all of these.  Yet amid all these diagnoses, the one thing that seems to have s

#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek Status Update: Every week should be #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek. It's always time to talk about #mentalhealth and #mentalillness: However, this morning I have come to realize that there is nothing more liberating and freeing than deciding to and committing to NOT doing, taking the full day off all work and activities, canceling all meetings, and so forth, just because I am overworked, and without sleep for days struggling with schizoaffective disorder, a mental disorder characterized by abnormal thought processes and deregulated emotions, in my case fluctuating with both bipolar disorder and depression. My diagnosis has been made because I have features of both #schizophrenia and a mood disorder. Mine has been recently aggravated with chronic insomnia. My responsibilities have already been taken care of. I simply NEED to, must and will stop everything and take the full day completely off, and I am. Right now. Thank you for sticking around as you are. I promise I will be checking thin

My name is Jonathan Harnisch. I have schizophrenia with psychotic features, but schizophrenia and psychosis do not have me. I cannot distinguish what is real and what is not real. My thoughts, mood and behavior are altered, and they change frequently. Sometimes I believe that I live in a psychiatric hospital and that my experience is worse than a hellish nightmare. At other times, I don't believe that I am in such a hospital. I see and interact with people who aren’t there, and I battle through countless other extremely uncomfortable symptoms. I believe that my medical team is currently taking me off all my medication. My overall goal online is to continue to inspire hope and resilience as a survivor of severe trauma that has led to dissociative disorders and schizophrenia. However, I struggle, not suffer. I post and publish what I want and what I feel, no matter what mood or state of mind I am in, but I always do my best to keep things positive. I admire people who keep as positive an attitude as they can. E

My name is Jonathan Harnisch. I have schizophrenia with psychotic features, but schizophrenia and psychosis do not have me. I cannot distinguish what is real and what is not real. My thoughts, mood and behavior are altered, and they change frequently. Sometimes I believe that I live in a psychiatric hospital and that my experience is worse than a hellish nightmare. At other times, I don't believe that I am in such a hospital. I see and interact with people who aren’t there, and I battle through countless other extremely uncomfortable symptoms. I believe that my medical team is currently taking me off all my medication. My overall goal online is to continue to inspire hope and resilience as a survivor of severe trauma that has led to dissociative disorders and schizophrenia. However, I struggle, not suffer. I post and publish what I want and what I feel, no matter what mood or state of mind I am in, but I always do my best to keep things positive. I admire people who keep as positive an attitude as they can. E

People with depression cannot “snap out of it.” My moods change frequently, and I am currently depressed. There is nothing more depressing than suffering from depression and still feeling sad. So, what's the point? Will it pass? No doubt. I forget what it's like to smile, and I mean for more than a couple hours now; I’m talking about now, not later. I forget what it's like to be a lovely or loving person, or if I ever was such a person at all – one of love, of goodness, of graciousness. I forget how it feels to truly live, much less how to live life to the fullest. I just exist. Right now, I simply exist, with my pulse and my breath and maybe some tears, if I am even able to let them roll a river down my face and flood the seas and the world with them, to get them out. I try to get myself out of this mood. This life. This episode of depression. Sure, I'll return to normal. Sure. Still, I have temporarily lost the point of living a life, pretending to smile or laugh, or getting a joke every darn hour when ther

The point of this series is to start a conversation about how those of us diagnosed with psychotic disorders get people to believe our truths. After all, once you’ve been diagnosed as being psychotic, your credibility is never the same, even when you’re speaking the truth. I have a podcast on iTunes in which I reveal a lot about myself, and lately I’ve noticed how much these podcasts have been teaching me about myself and what I’ve lost. This illness has taken a great deal from me, including my ability to gain recognition for my accomplishments. So, what I’d like to do here is recognize some of these accomplishments, knowing that had my life been different, they could have been acknowledged in a more public arena. Knowing, too, that, because I have schizoaffective disorder that is characterized by delusional thinking, hallucinations, and mood fluctuations, even when I speak the truth, I am often dismissed and not believed, with my truths described as mere delusions. I want to acknowledge my accomplishments no

Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography: Book ReviewThe author of this deeply moving portrait of a schizophrenic is afflicted himself with schizoaffective disorder, Tourette's Syndrome and a few other things. Jonathan Harnisch even calls himself “the king of mental illness.” Given those obstacles, it's a wonder he can write anything, much less a semi-autobiographical novel as fiercely intelligent and finely crafted as this one. First, a caveat: At 803 pages, Harnisch's cleverly named “alibiography” contains all the repetitions and anomalies you might expect from a writer with serious demons. There's also some gibberish. Sample: “Make it and makeshift it. Prototype it! Grab it! Snag it!” Little matter. The protagonist, a disturbed trust-funder named Benjamin J. Schreiber, who has a self-destructive alter ego called Georgie Gust boiling inside his head, may be the most compelling character in the literature of madness since A Beautiful Mind's John Nash. Unable to cope with dark childhood traumas, reclusive Ben trans

In the old days of war, the winning army pretty much got to loot the countryside and take what they wanted—wealth, crops, women, whatever. These would be the spoils of victory. In a relatively civilized setting, we tend to use this term symbolically or metaphorically. The winner (the victor, the victorious one, the one who gets the victory) gets whatever benefits go with the actual winning of the title, prize, award, office, or event. These can be formal or informal. That is, they can be a designated part of the prize (a gold medal, a contract with an athletic equipment manufacturer), or they can just tag along with it (celebrity status, free gifts, media attention, a boost in the winner’s love life).I don’t want to focus on the illness of schizophrenia when I don’t need to, but I do want to note some things I learned as I came out of my latest episode of delusion and minor psychosis, where paranoia was the overarching element.Early this morning, I am refreshed and out of any episodic states related to my ill

Paranoia: The word is there, no doubt, in the dictionary. But not the feeling. Derived from the ancient Greek, 'paranoia' originally referred to a distracted mind. But distracted from what? The definition claims that the distraction is caused by false beliefs that someone is persecuting us. But if you or I are afflicted with paranoia, we know, wholeheartedly, that these are not delusions. People are harassing and persecuting us. Who the hell are they? Why the hell are they following us? What the hell do they want? We have become the target of a vast conspiracy stretching on invisible webs across the surface of the planet. It lives in the telephone wires, the cell towers, the papers, and even online—perhaps even inside the dictionary itself.  It spills out of radios and, these days, my iPod… the damn TV too. It nests in the hearts and minds of my family, friends and loved ones. And it’s coming to get me. There might be many reasons why they chose me, and why they chose you. But we have—in fact—been chosen, you

My name is Jonathan, and I am a tobacco addict. Life goes on without smoking, but for now I fight for life. 

This was very interesting and well-written. I enjoyed your outlook on life, as I, like most others, have my bad and good days, and your piece really inspired me to put on a happier face. —Editor

New literary fiction by author Jonathan Harnisch, first edit. I am already drugged. I was, I am, and I have always lived in my own private hyperreality. That is what all of this, these words, the disjointedness, and the following fragmentation to come, the variation, and the skewed view of time, space, self, and others, and everything, is about. My consciousness has not been able to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. I do not live in any technologically advanced postmodern society. I do not live. I do not die. I am a walking thought. I am a collection of them. I am myself. I am you. I am everybody on the earth plane who has ever lived. I am everyone who has not, and this confuses me at times. I am not God, nor a god, nor anything, nor being of the Divine. I am nothing but a recorder of collected thoughts and pieces of the world. There is no point. There is nothing. There is everything. And I am a tiny representation of a speck of hyperreality itself. That would be the best way to put it, at lea

Uplifting, inspirational and heartfelt audio-essay regarding the famous saying, If you are going through hell, keep going.