About Jonathan Harnisch
Celebrated creative artist, Porcelain Utopia, wildly eccentric schizophrenic, accomplished writer, producer and musician, developer, blogger, and podcast host. A flair for mental health advocacy, animal rights, New Age ideas and treatments, transgressive fiction, zines, and Duran Duran.
Jonathan Harnisch is a survivor of a rare schizophrenia spectrum disorder, PTSD, Personality Disorder-NOS, and Tourette’s syndrome. An accomplished writer, producer and musician, Jonathan is originally from New York, has lived and worked in Los Angeles, and currently resides in New Mexico with his wife on Fat Man Farms.
Envision a blend of a mentally ill mind with unsurpassed resiliency and fiery intellect and your result would be the brilliant Jonathan W. Harnisch. An all-around artist, Jonathan writes fiction and screenplays, sketches, imagines, and creates. His most recent artistic endeavor is developing music; a new-found passion with visible results already in the making. Produced filmmaker 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 is an alumnus of Choate Rosemary Hall. Subsequently, he attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he studied film production and screenwriting under Gary Winick and David Irving. During his studies at NYU, he held internships under renowned producers Steven Haft and Ismael Merchant. He is best known for his short films Ten Years and On The Bus, both of which boast countless awards including five Indie Film Awards, three Accolade Awards, and winner of Best Short Film and Audience Award in the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, to name a few.
Despite his impressive formal education and awarded honors, Jonathan is your normal, down-to-earth guy. Meditation, Duran Duran, vivid colors, Patrick Nagel prints, and rearranging furniture are some of his favorite things. Vices include cigarettes, Diet Coke, inappropriate swearing, and sausage and green chile pizza. He enjoys irony, planned spontaneity, redefining himself and change. Jonathan lives with his beautiful wife Maureen, their three dogs and seven cats, in the unique, desert village of Corrales, New Mexico.
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The Angel-Human-Demon Dichotomy of the Human Condition
Jonathan Harnisch is a survivor of a rare schizophrenia spectrum disorder, PTSD, Personality Disorder-NOS, and Tourette's syndrome. An accomplished writer, producer and musician, Jonathan is originally from New York, has lived and worked in Los Angeles, and currently resides in New Mexico with his wife on Fat Man Farms.
Home at last, many years too late. I disembark into a Porcelain Utopia, no bands, no flags, no welcoming crowds. It’s a sad life. Our lives have been permanently altered, people who don’t live with this illness will never understand us…but then I hear a sweet chorus of ‘welcome home’ from Jonathan Harnisch baring empathy and warm sentiments. And suddenly the lump in my throat is too big to swallow and tears spill down my face…I’m home.
You seem to be able to deal with your illness in a very positive way. I have schizo affective disorder and nine years ago a severe psychotic episode completely destroyed my life. It had been twenty one years since my last severe episode, and I had built a fulfilling and happy life. The curse of this disease came back to haunt me in such a profound and disturbing way that it has made me the anti-thesis of who I used to be, and I just don’t see the way back. What happened to me would make a very dramatic story, because in those nine years I’ve turned from a very dynamic and positive person, into an alcoholic tramp. A ghost that haunts the city that I live in. The trouble is I’m not a writer, I was a systems analyst/software developer before the episode, The psychosis caused a lot of damage to my confidence as an IT professional, because it was triggered by corruption and racism within the organization that I worked for. When I look at a guy like you, who copes so well, it makes me wonder why didn’t I? I allowed my illness to erase me from the system, when I believed I was so strong I could overcome anything. But I couldn’t overcome the loss of my family who became afraid of me and my illness. I used to be a funny, happy, sexy guy. Now I’m the most boring,miserable and depressed loser on the planet. I punish myself in my mind everyday for the inherent weakness in my brain that destroyed my life. I wish I could see it like you do, but the psychosis was so Apocalyptic to my identity, that it came across as an extinction level event. I study Astrology and my birth chart explains the whole thing to me. The problem is that science doesn’t recognize Astrology as a psychological tool. Science doesn’t see what it can’t prove. Anyway, as a very lonely guy that truly now see’s the irony in my life, I’m glad that there are people like you out there, who have the strength not to let the curse of this illness defeat them. It makes me think that maybe it’s not too late for a poor sap like me.
I wish you good health and long may you continue.