Jonathan Harnisch Podcast

"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

I just wanted to share this with you guys. 

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 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

“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. Cla

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

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 pr

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.

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 g

"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 of

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 pr

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for thirty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes, or it seems to, but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the trut

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for thirty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes, or it seems to, but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the trut

"Be a doer and not a critic," Tony Blair once said. Pastiche, it is, in response to the heavily criticized and controversial author Jonathan Harnisch's (Porcelain Utopia, 2016, etc.) work and life. He offers this colossal work of erotic literary art that mixes styles, materials, etc., wildly varied in style and content. "I am a troubled man," the author confesses, "with feelings. I am not good, but I know how to be good. I burn bridges and build better ones. I can’t make my mind up because my mental landscape is full of wondrous things! I can love, and I am learning to be in love with myself. I don't know how to trust, but I trust I am alive. I make more mistakes than I should so I am continually learning. I am always sorry, and I always forgive myself. I never change and yet I feel changes. I am afraid of letting anyone else in my life too close and yet I find I'm not running away because I am curious. The door to my life is open because I am genuine and authentic and real. People will come and go, and I am

"Be a doer and not a critic," Tony Blair once said. Pastiche, it is, in response to the heavily criticized and controversial author Jonathan Harnisch's (Porcelain Utopia, 2016, etc.) work and life. He offers this colossal work of erotic literary art that mixes styles, materials, etc., wildly varied in style and content. "I am a troubled man," the author confesses, "with feelings. I am not good, but I know how to be good. I burn bridges and build better ones. I can’t make my mind up because my mental landscape is full of wondrous things! I can love, and I am learning to be in love with myself. I don't know how to trust, but I trust I am alive. I make more mistakes than I should so I am continually learning. I am always sorry, and I always forgive myself. I never change and yet I feel changes. I am afraid of letting anyone else in my life too close and yet I find I'm not running away because I am curious. The door to my life is open because I am genuine and authentic and real. People will come and go, and I am