To Readers: I’ve decided to sway, briefly, from my traditional story-telling style on this blog in order to post my short speech from this weekend’s ‘Occupy APA’ event in Philadelphia.
Ā ——
It is an honor to be in Philadelphia, the city of ābrotherly loveā, as one voice among many in this Occupation of the American Psychiatric Association, brilliantly organized by MindFreedom International.
It is an honor to be a part of a civil rights movement so vital to our age, yet still so invisible to the majority of our country and much of the world.
It is an honor to be able to call myself a psychiatric survivor, especially one representing my generationā the medicated generation, a generation in which facing the emotional upheaval that comes with hitting puberty has meant being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, ADHD, depression, anxiety, or schizophrenia and subsequently medicated with brightly colored capsules and bitter-tasting tablets.
My generation has grown up believing that if we canāt focus on our work because weāre distracted by the boy we have a crush on, by the upcoming game weāre playing in, or by the constant bombardment of media from which we canāt escape, we have a brain disease.Ā If we find ourselves experiencing intense emotions that seem, at times, unbearable, we must go to psychiatry to tell us how to bear them.Ā If we have thoughts too intensely creative, we are āgrandioseā, ādelusionalā, or even āpsychoticā.Ā If our thoughts move so quickly that we chase after them with our spoken words, we have āpressured speechā or ātangential thinkingā.Ā If we feel misunderstood, marginalized, isolated, or disillusioned by this complicated thing called life, we have a chemical imbalance with only one solutionāa solution that means turning our agency over to a psychiatric label and our sense of selfā our livelihood, our ability to feel innate feelings and think innate thoughtsā to a bottle of lifeless pills.
To stand here before you as a person who ingested the intoxicating language of psychiatry and began to speak it as her own, who incorporated the clinical gaze and began to see herself entirely through its lens, brings a flood of emotions that I am proud to say today is completely, entirely human.Ā My feelings are not āsymptomaticā of illness, and I do not ālack insight into my mental conditionā.Ā These emotions bring with them the pain that came with being labeled āabnormalā and unacceptable by society for my most formative years; with carrying a diagnosis after my name that meant I would always be different, always fighting to appear like everyone else, struggling to manage life instead of living it.Ā I was bipolar, from my teenage years until age twenty-seven, and I was convinced it was all I ever would be.
I became adept at staying on top of my āsymptomsā, of letting my psychiatrist know when I was having āracing thoughtsā or ruminating too much on the meaning of life and my part in it so that she could adjust my medications appropriately, or maybe throw a new, more āsophisticatedā prescription into the mix.Ā I thought I was making my psychiatrist proud by learning the language of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to describe myself, and knew that because Iād never be successful at anything else in my life due to my āchronic mental illnessā, I could at least excel at becoming good at being a patient.
During my thirteen years in the mental health system, I believed that I was broken and incapable of being fixed.Ā That I needed psychiatry to create a life that came anywhere close to being considered ānormalā.Ā That my emotional suffering was due to something wrong with my brain, and not to the fact that I was a young girl trying to make sense of herself in a culture based so much on performance, achievement, and perfection.Ā That the emptiness I felt inside, beneath the masks I wore and the parts I played to keep up with everything I saw around me, was because I was severely āborderlineā.Ā I kept waiting and waiting for the day to come when my psychiatrist and my medications would give me a life worth living, and that day never came.Ā Instead, my life became lonelier, emptier, and number than it had ever been before, and living it grew increasingly more challenging.Ā Desperate for relief, I spent more and more hours in psychiatric treatment and left many months with an additional prescription in hand.
I am proud of my story and at peace with my past, with the dark depths to which I went before I found my way to the light of my recovery from psychiatric labels and psychotropic medications.Ā This is the beautiful paradox of it allā that in order for my life to be what it is today, full of meaning and purpose, everything that happened on my journey into psychiatry and out of it had to happen just as it did, from having dreams and aspirations for the future fizzle to being entirely stripped of any meaningful sense of self.Ā I have accepted my past, and, in a strange way, am grateful for it.Ā The profound anger I have today, for those still labeled and still trapped within the biomedical paradigm of psychiatry, is a healthy one that fuels me and motivates me to do whatever I can to make a change, from sharing my story at madinamerica.com, to working as a peer specialist in the belly of the beast, the mental health system itself, and to participating in amazing events like this one, today.
It is one of the greatest existential insults to slap a biomedical label onto the experience of being an emotive human being, no matter how well-intentioned the labeler may be. Today, label-free and in recovery, I am genuinely connected to a sense of who I am and of what I believe in, and I experience my emotions with the beautiful knowledge that I am no differentā no better, no worseā than anyone else.Ā I am a thread in the greater human fabric that weaves us all together and unites us, regardless of the emotions we feel and the thoughts we think.
If you are here today and believe that the speech I just gave is all the more proof of how āmentally illā I am, I respect your right to believe what you want, and only ask that you keep an open mind and an open heart to what we have to say today.Ā If you are here today and have freed yourself from psychiatric labels, I send you a deep and loving congratulations.Ā If you are here today, still enslaved by your labels and the ātreatmentā they require, and want liberation, join this movement and find your own path to recovery.Ā We are here waiting for you, to walk together on this journey towards equality and justice for everyone, regardless of how uniquely each of us experiences this complicated, painful, and unbelievably beautiful thing called life.
Related Items “In the News“:
Schizophrenia Outcome Still Better in Developing Countries
DSM-5 Field Trials Fail to Compare New Diagnostic Criteria with DSM-IV Criteria
Incoming APA President Emphasizes āPositive Psychiatryā
Antipsychotic Drugs and Relapse
Weak Field Trials Scuttle DSM-5 Diagnoses
Benzos Quadruple the Risk of Suicide in Schizophrenia
DSM-5 Retreats from Some Controversial Diagnoses
Ethics Complaints Over DSM Filed With the APA
Great speech!
Report comment
Thanks, Alix!
Report comment
Beautiful, Laura. Thanks for standing up.
Report comment
Thanks for the support, Altostrata. And thank you for the amazing internet support community you’ve given life to. ‘Surviving Antidepressants’ helps so many people move through the withdrawal experience– something that no one should have to do alone.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
GO LAURA!
Report comment
Thanks Lowry!
Report comment
Thank you for that beautiful speech.
It was good to see you among that wonderful group of courageous people who gathered in front of the Philly Convention Center.
I was saddened by the psychiatrists (sporting LABELS on their chests that prominently identified them as such!!) who snickered or who patronizingly sneered when they saw the signs and the protesters. Some didn’t….some actually appeared to commiserate, but they were such a tiny fraction of all who passed through or around the protesting crowd….most wearing psychical blinders that didn’t permit them to look left or right or take any of it in. They stared straight ahead as if afraid if they looked it would contaminate them.
Paradigms, like operating systems in a computer, can only run programs that fit their working code, even when it means ineffective application and system dysfunction.
The doctors haven’t been able to raise their own consciousness to this simple fact….
I guess the other thing that struck me so much Saturday in Philadelphia was how greatly the collusion between PHARMA and the medical practitioners SHOULD BE indictable under the RICO act. If nothing else, the simplest tenet of the Hippocratic Oath says “Do No Harm” . . . and any physician who breaks that oath has moved beyond responsible behavior and the laws that protect them ought no longer apply.
Psychiatrists are particularly guilty of failing to honor that oath.
I wonder if a class action suit filed by ALL who have been damaged by medications and psychiatric treatments against the entire APA and AMA and drug manufacturers would have merit……?
In a sane, and just world, it thoroughly would.
But in the world we have, the laws protect the criminals, not the victims.
Report comment
“I was saddened by the psychiatrists (sporting LABELS on their chests that prominently identified them as such!!) who snickered or who patronizingly sneered when they saw the signs and the protesters.”
Well of course, they don’t believe we are human hence the reason they don’t believe we deserve human rights. Human rights are only for humans.
Report comment
take comfort in these words from the late great Bob marley: “only a fool leans upon his own misunderstanding”
Report comment
Hi Robert,
A really insightful comment. I do think there has been some (very slight) shift on the part of psychiatry considering that *maybe* the revisions and expansions proposed in the DSM-V are going a *bit* too far… but that “mental illness” is still real and medications are still the real solution to this medical ailment. To me, of course, conceding that ‘Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome’ is jumping the gun is not anywhere near adequate; however, at least some of psychiatry is starting to rethink the lengths to which it is going to diagnose people as “mentally ill”.
This, of course, is no defense of psychiatry, but more a hopeful wish that should this questioning of the DSM-V latch on, however slight the questioning may be, and should the public take notice that even psychiatrists, themselves, are considering it (and not just the “crazy” people at protests like ours this past weekend), maybe this leaves us an opportunity to carry the message of ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ and the broader mental health recovery movement to a larger audience. At least, that is my hope. Sharing my story is my small way of making a dent in the seemingly impenetrable shell that protects psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry from being disassembled by the message we are all striving to carry– that this is a CIVIL RIGHTS issue that goes so much further beyond simple over-diagnosis and over-medication. That we label people ‘abnormal’ in the first place, as America has done for generations upon generations with race, gender, sexuality, and so forth, is the issue at the root. The more we deliver the message at this very fundamental level, the more I hope it will catch hold.
Thank you again for the wonderful comment.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
And again, thank you, Laura.
When you said so well “That we label people āabnormalā in the first place, as America has done for generations upon generations with race, gender, sexuality, and so forth, is the issue at the root.”
I immediately thought “But it’s not the “abnormality” that is most troubling….it’s the hierarchical inferiority in the social context that that abnormal label implies.
And so the true nature of the problem has to with the invention of an arbitrary hierarchical strata with those passing the judgements looking down on those they deem different than themselves.
Psychiatrists, like many who have ascended to a “higher” position in society, are positioned (or position themselves) to be “better than” those they treat.
Genuine shamanistic healing means joining as profound equal with the other…..this is what they don’t understand….and never will as long as they hold on to their position in the hierarchy.
But you know this…
I’m just singing to the choir here.
Love,
RDColgan
Report comment
Dear Robert,
How true you are. At the end of the day, this is a conversation about power, and the acquisition of power through the construction and dissemination of ‘elite’ knowledge (medical knowledge that only doctors can create, know, and utilize). The “truth” that society holds– that emotional suffering can be explained by ‘abnormality’ (of the brain, of behavior, of thought, of communication, etc.)– is not Truth (what is, really??), but rather, one particular, entirely subjective body of knowledge that has been constructed by a particular group of individuals (medical doctors) in such a way that it has outsiders (non-elite laypeople) believing that medical language is more valid, more legitimate, and more True than any other language one can use to describe oneself.
Have you read Michel Foucault, by any chance? A lot of his work addressed this very topic in the most profound of ways.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
I would go further: The irresistible fantasy of pharmapsychiatry is not only Power but Power without Responsibility.
This is what enables the ordinary well-meaning doctor to ignore obvious adverse effects of drugs and deterioration in their patients.
“I’m the Hero! This can’t have gone wrong!”
Report comment
They aren’t going to admit to anything because then they might have to give up their title of Doctor and they’d have to give up the big money that they make off of “treating” people with toxic drugs. They have lifestyles and egos to maintain and nothing is going to get in the way of that.
Report comment
-“If you are here today and believe that the speech I just gave is all the more proof of how āmentally illā I am, I respect your right to believe what you want, and only ask that you keep an open mind and an open heart to what we have to say today. ”
That’s how I feel. People can believe whatever BS they want I couldn’t give a rip. It’s when they use the commitment laws to force the BS they believe on me that is unacceptable. In Iran the state religion is Islam, in the West, the state religion is labeling everyone brain diseased without any evidence. I’m sick to death of it. Other people have a human right not to have your reckless beliefs forced on them by the government.
Get your ideology the hell out of my neurology!!!
Good speech.
Report comment
Dear Anonymous,
You are so right. That a person’s rights can be stripped of him/her with no due process, no immediate access to a lawyer, no phone call, and all simply because one psychiatrist has slapped an arbitrary label on that person and his/her lifetime of experiences that was decided upon in 15 minutes is beyond a travesty. as daniel hazen so poignantly said in his speech on Saturday, there are many people right now who have been stripped of their rights and who are being forcibly medicated, held against their will on locked units, and even shocked with ECT. that we are out in the world with our freedoms and they are not is all the more reason for us to fight harder. it is a gift that i made it out of the system, and it is a gift that all of us who are free from psychiatry- literally, emotionally, and psychologically- need to work hard to pass on to those still imprisoned.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Very Moving, stirring stuff.
Report comment
Thank you, Jeremy!
Report comment
Psychiatry is unworthy of respect.
Report comment
Dear Demo,
I do think there are psychiatrists out there who either ‘get it’ or who have the potential to ‘get it’… Doctors like Alice Keys, who blogs here, will be the trailblazers to lead the way for those who are still too scared, too proud, too greedy, or too insecure to come forward and join her.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Laura,
Thanks for reminding us that every individual in “category” is not identical.
Thanks for supporting my writing here. I hope there’s room at the table for all kinds of thought and input. It’s going to take every resource we can come up with to find new and better ways.
There has to be room for psychiatrists (and everyone) to change how they think. Peaceful nd respectful conversation are essential ingredients for successful change.
Psychiatrists may even bring a good idea of their own from time to time. It may be that one or more of those less than welcoming psychiatrists you saw at the APA could become strong advocates of change. These things happen.
All the best,
Alice
Report comment
Wish I would have been there. I am learning so much about who I am, what makes me who I am and who I want to be, how I want to live life. Thanks, great food for thought and education for this newbie to living life for the fun of it. I gained much from my pain but I don’t want to sit in it anymore life is to precious.
Thanks for sharing
Report comment
Dear Celeste,
Great to see you here on the website. Have you considered writing your story? It has been a tremendously healing, cathartic, and awakening experience for me. You have a message, and an important one too, that you can share with others. Gaining the capacity to see life as something that is full of meaning was a huge gift for me, and it sounds like you’ve discovered it, too.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Thank you for sharing your passionate and eloquent speech!
Report comment
Thank you, Darby!
Report comment
between privatized prisons, predatory lending, the military being the only occupational option and Big PhRMA peddling their pills, a low income person doesn’t stand a chance alone. We’ve got to stand together.
Report comment
Dear Rogi,
You are right– without community, without shared experience through pain, oppression, and most importantly, hope, this movement will make no progress. It is so good to know that none of us has to go it alone, and that the louder our voices are, the more people still silenced or isolated by their experiences in the mental health system will hear us and join the movement.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Thank you Laura for sharing your experience. I would like to know more about you and your organization.
In the 60’s when this society was first falling in love with ingesting chemicals, young people who were counter culture chose their own drugs which determined the way they were “enlightened”. Now days, somebody else is choosing the drugs for these young people. It’s no longer the counter culture who has control over how they are “enlightened”. If we thought the first option ended up being a bad idea with too many negative side effects, can we deduce the same outcome for the second option?
In the mean time, people who are empathetic, idea driven, or have any kind of an “out there” idea are muzzled and put back in the box. This leaves the compliant, socially manipulative, ridiculously pragmatic and those easily distracted by sports or celebrities to their own devices with little insight from a unique perspective. This contributes to why our economic/political systems and even our information stream, has gotten so far out of balance. Society functions as a whole, we need the input of everybody to be a healthy functioning system.
Report comment
Dear T.,
Your point about “illicit” versus “licit” chemicals is one that few in the industry will recognize, because few in the industry are willing to admit that psychotropic medications are powerful enough to form physical and psychological dependency. That the withdrawal process from these medications is so catastrophic and debilitating doesn’t seem to be sinking in to psychiatry, who still say that these meds aren’t “habit forming”… In my experiences, the medications I took for ten years did the exact opposite of ‘enlightenment’ to me. They numbed me, sedated me, shut me off from myself, and left me feeling empty and robotic. Coming off the meds, and finding meaning in my new life, free from labels and medications, is what has been enlightening.
You are surely right that the people being diagnosed and medicated are the ones who bring creativity, progress, inspiration, discovery, and beauty to the world. Many people talk about what would have happened to art, science, literature, mathematics, and so forth, if people like Mozart, Van Gogh, Hemingway, and countless others were born in our era– indeed, they would have been medicated beyond recognition in no time.
Thanks for your comment.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Thank you Laura, I wish I could have been there. I have seen the damage psychiatry has done. How can I help?
I have been diagnosed ADHD at 8 years old and fell into the hype again at 25 in collage. My father was labeled Schizophrenic at 24 and was on Haldol and many Psychotropics.
I found that there is a strong Gluten intolerance in my family and have been Gluten free for over 5 years. The results have been remarkable.
I can’t think of anything more important than getting our kid off the meds. Please join my discussion group.
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/addfree/
Thank you
CJ
Report comment
Dear CJ,
Thanks for your response. Nutrition is one of the biggest parts of my own recovery, so it’s great to hear that you’ve had success with eating gluten-free. It is great to see your commitment to the cause!
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Thanks for sharing your story. I always look to see what you have on your blog. Thanks also for standing up and standing out at the convention this weekend. There is nothing in my state that a person can get involved in to make a difference in this crazy system of torment versus treatment that is carried out against us. I look to this website to find the inspiration needed to keep going back and trying to change the system. Thanks again for your work.
Report comment
Dear Stephen,
Thanks so much for the comment. I agree that the ‘Mad in America’ community is a really inspiring place. What state are you from? I’m curious to know… Policies in Massachusetts are moving more and more towards the peer/recovery model, although I do worry about the integrity of the peer position in overwhelmingly clinical settings. Maybe you can be a groundbreaker in your state!
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Laura,
Thanks for your courage to stand and speak your truths in such a public (and unwelcoming) venue. I regret that there is not yet an open forum inside APA meetings for the voices of “patients” and former “patients”.
There is much that needs to be learned by doctors. Open minded listening by psychiatrists would be a good place to start. We psychiatrists are supposed to be specially trained with this skill. We are also supposed to be advocates for those we work with.
You’re right that the field of psychiatry has gotten extreme about labeling and pathologizing many aspects of the human condition and exsistence. So much of the labeling begins early in life, inside the education system, as your story so clearly reveals.
Your writing is eloquent, your story poignant and your energy powerful.
Keep up the good work. Keep writing and speaking. All ears are not deaf. I’m listening.
All the best,
Alice
(Alice Keys MD)
Report comment
Thanks so much, Alice.
It is definitely my hope that, one day, labeling (of any kind) will no longer be the means through which psychiatrists work to help their patients make sense of themselves. Based on my own experiences, there was absolutely nothing constructive about being told I had a “mental illness”; in fact, it was nothing but destructive.
That being said, I am not anti-psychiatry (I try to not be anti- anything these days). I agree with you completely that listening and advocating should be two of the most primary goals for psychiatrists– not “What can I tell this person about him/herself, whether via labels, biomedical language, or some other form of categorization, to “fix” him/her?” but rather “How can I help this person connect with who he/she already is and might just be disconnected from, deeper than any word or category or classification I, as a psychiatrist, could come up with?”
To borrow a phrase from the peer movement, I am the only expert on myself, just as each person who has ever been labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis is the only expert on him/herself. The second a person is convinced otherwise, forgets, or loses the inner-confidence to believe this, I believe that recovery becomes impossible. The second a psychiatrist becomes the expert, which happens over and over and over again because this is the nature of modern American psychiatry, the person ceases to be a person and becomes, instead, the ‘patient’– the passive/subordinate/disempowered half of the dyad. Even attempts at ‘shared decision-making’ mask the dilemma at the root- that the second a person becomes a ‘patient’, the very role itself necessitates that the individual see him/herself as carrying a sickness that only a doctor can heal.
I am so glad we share this space together at Mad in America, and I’m so glad you’re speaking publicly about your experiences working as a psychiatrist who has been trained in a system she believe needs to change.
All the best,
Laura
Report comment
“Youāre right that the field of psychiatry has gotten extreme about labeling and pathologizing many aspects of the human condition and exsistence.”
Care to tell us your version of a less extreme psychiatry? What behaviors and thoughts would still be pathologized if you ran the show?
Report comment
Demo,
In the highly unlikely event that I “ran the show” I would have everyone lay their anger to one side so that we can work together to make things better. Anger clouds thinking when we need clear thought. Anger divides us from ourselves and others when we require unity.
If I “ran the show”, respectful and loving conversation would be how all people everywhere communicated. It would be natural because everyone knew it to be right.
If I “ran the show” everyone would be invited to the table on equal footing and every voice would be heard and valued.
If I “ran the show” everyone would already know in a deep personal way that we are all one; hurting you is the same thing as hurting me. Loving you and loving me is the same thing.
Thanks for asking a great question. You could ask yourself this question as well and see what you’d come up with. I suspect we are surprisingly close together on this.
Perhaps we do “run the show”.
My deepest respect,
Alice
Report comment
I’ve been following your story. You are an amazing being Laura and I hope the rest of your life is filled with creative endeavours and much happiness.
All the best to you from me.
Lori
Report comment
Thank you so much, Lori. I wish you the very same, for your life.
Sending the best right back to you,
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
I was in the audience. What you didn’t mention here was that you cried. I was deeply affected by the emotion behind your speech. I loved the atmosphere in the room. Everybody had a story to tell in five minutes and tell it they did. I’m very sorry I wasn’t able to stick around for the protest march, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about the outcomes of the protest.
Report comment
Hi Rossa,
Boy are you right that I cried! I knew I would, I just didn’t realize I’d be crying throughout the entire speech… It was quite a cathartic moment for me, actually. I too loved the atmosphere in the room on Saturday– it was a space of pain, anger, and frustration, but also love, hope, and healing, and all of it was shared. A really amazing experience. I’m so glad you were there, and wish we had a chance to meet in “real life”, but I’m sure our paths will cross soon enough.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Excellent, Laura, thank you for sharing!
Report comment
Thanks so much, Giles!
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Laura, it was great to meet you in Philly and to hear your moving speech. You are truly an inspiration and living proof that buying into the psychiatric paradigm leads down a very dark path. Thanks for your inspiration and for taking a few minutes to share your experience with me directly. Hope we’ll meet again!
—- Steve
Report comment
Hi Steve,
It was so great to meet you, too. I feel compelled to share my story to show that, yes, while the path that leads a person deep into the biomedical paradigm of psychiatry is very dark, it is entirely possible to leave that path and find a new one that brings emotional and physical health, agency, a genuine identity, and inner peace. Thanks for the comment, and thanks for taking time to speak with me in Philly. I’m sure our paths will cross again, hopefully soon!
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Ideologies are formalized grudges,
All but ubiquitous solutions
To the uncertainties of life.
Would that we come into the world
Insulated from the locally inexplicable,
But that is not the fate of most.
However well equipped our predecessors,
We each will develop
From what we have
Who we are.
About the result
Opinions vary.
Through all,
A witness may persist.
Report comment
Artudi,
What a beautiful piece of writing. As a society, we do surely try to find answers to life’s uncertainties, answers that often come in the form of ideology, and that drive to know, to gain power through the creation and acquisition of knowledge, is one that makes true equality seem nearly impossible. Today, I try to find the beauty in my life’s uncertainties, and in the freeing realization that I don’t have to have a label, an answer, a concrete explanation of who I am and of why I am who I am.
Thanks again for this.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Laura I just watched the video of you reading your manifesto. Your pure, radiant and shameless emotional truth made me cry tears of grief and gratitude. I’m so glad you survived and I mourn the awful pain you went through.
You are speaking for so many countless young people still trapped in the bio-psychiatry gulag. But you bring them the soul filled good news they can hear. Thank you and bless you for doing it so braveley in your speech in Philadelphia, on your blog, and at your job.
Your manifesto and blog are now part of the ever growing new canon of hard won emotional truth that makes the DSM look like a dessicated piece of soulless propaganda.
Report comment
Hi Michael,
Reading your comment has put such a huge smile on my face. As I wrote above in a comment to Rossa, I knew I was going to cry when I spoke, but I wasn’t expecting it to be throughout the whole speech! Although phrases such as “emotionally labile”, “tearful”, “unbalanced”, and so forth still insert themselves into my own thoughts about myself from time to time, I’m quickly able to reorient myself and remind myself that crying deep, uncontrollable tears is not symptomatic of anything. That self-diagnostic process my mind still goes through is not my own voice, but rather the inner voice of psychiatry that still occupies a small corner of my mind, although I consider myself freed from it today.
As I was so psychologically institutionalized for all those years, I have to accept that this self-diagnosis won’t just disappear from my consciousness in the snap of a finger. I know it will fully depart, in time, and all that matters is that when it does creep into my consciousness I’m able to recognize it not as coming from me but rather from all the psychiatrists whom I saw over the years in the “best” psychiatric institutions in the country– for indeed, I was “privileged” enough to have access to Massachusetts’ and New York’s best private hospitals.
To be able to speak my story proudly today is the direct result of the blog I’ve been slowly writing here these last eighteen months. Writing my story has given me the courage and the self-acceptance to speak publicly from the podium and to know in my heart that this is my life’s calling.
I encourage anyone out there with a recovery story to write it, show it to others, and be proud of each and every detail of it. There are so many people out there who hide behind closed doors due to shame, fear, and self-loathing. I know I did for many years, and those feelings held me even further back from ever finding recovery.
Michael, you are such an important voice on this blog, and I am honored to share space here with you! I hope our paths will cross in the “real world” some day soon. Thank you again for refilling my tank of motivation and determination to keep doing what I’m doing.
Be well,
Laura
Report comment
Hi Laura,
I’m very glad my comment made you smile!
Sometimes I think of those psychiatrically inserted, self diagnosing tape loops you so wonderfully describe such as – “unbalanced, emotionally labile” etc., as a form of secular catachism we are indoctrinated with that does take time to extract.
But sometimes “NO!” can be a complete sentence. That is what I say inside whenever any self denigrating, shaming or diagnosing self talk starts up- for me it thankfully works.
But because of the power of the medical model of human emotional suffering and madness, at a deep level of our psyches, it’s almost like so-called minor and major psychiatric symptoms have replaced large and small sins that we must self monitor ourselves against, lest they gain momentum and result in a huge fall from grace or- as psychiatry would have it- a decompensation and fall into an episode of so-called mania, psychosis or a chemically imbalanced brain indudced depression.
Our redemption from our emotional deviance from the norm, is mediated by the culturally installed functionary of the psychiatrist, whose doctrines of pathology have the full weight of a secular, scientific based dogma at tiames
Reading about you going to the best psychiatric hospitals money could buy, I thought about the possible downside to that. I hope it wasn’t a factor for you, but for some teens and young people of a privileged background, there is already a learned prohibition that the dwelling on or expressing of emotions is unseemly and plebian.
I have known this to be especially inhibiting for young upper class females who carry the burden of being expected to be “ladylike” too.
Before the advent of the DSM and psych meds, many a ‘high strung and hysterical’ young woman of privilge was sent to a sanatoriuum where hysterectomy was performed to “calm her down.”
Psychiatry to me, is a secularized tool of the patriarchy that lives to supress the feminine and all forms of emotion. As a Jungian, I sense that the anima or feminine soui dwelling in men, is a target of psychiatry too.
We are programmed to be stoic or martial if the state requires our services to make war, but emotional men crying is taboo. That is why I respect men like Ted Chabasinski who can openly weep for the child victims of psychiatry.
The high end private psych hospital I worked at for a year, before I thankfully went to serve at the med and diagnosis free medness sanctuary, had an unspoken contract with the wealthy parents who dropped thir childrenn and young adults off there-“We will place all causation in your child’s tragically injured brain, and never ask or confront you about any family issues or dynamics, just pay our fees.”
Sometimes the worst psychiaty has to offer is the most expensive.
It’s ironic that the med free sanctuaries that provided the best care, all were funded by public monies and staffed with civil service workers!
Laura, I hope our paths cross in the real world soon too! You and young souls like Sasacha Dubrul are the future, and that fact makes this old soldier sleep much better at nighht! Best wishes, Michael
Report comment
Hello Laura,
I am sorry that I missed the Occupy APA event; it sounds like it was inspiring. I am especially sorry to have missed your speech; you are remarkably eloquent!
But I’m not sorry that I missed sneering shrinks; the arrogance of self-righteousness and privilege while causing such harm to the community would be hard for me to tolerate.
Thank you for your service to the community.
Best wishes, Steve
Report comment
The mental health services deliberately set out to brain- wash you into believing that you are mentally ill. I watched in amazement it happening to my son when he was in a run-down and drugged up state. It would have worked too if I hadn’t been sitting there telling him not to believe a word of it. So they took him out and worked on him behind my back. He is well now, he knows that he is not mentally ill but now and then he gets flash backs of what he has been told and needs then to talk about it and some reaasurance that it was just a ploy by the “recovery team” to frighten him to get him back on medication.
Report comment
I am also a peer specialist and your comments sound very much like mine when I tell peers they don’t have to wear those labels all of their lives. I feel so much happier since I found alternatives to taking medication, too. Keep up with this exciting part of your life journey.
Report comment
Dear Laura,
I appreciate the courage you displayed as you spoke out against the machinery.
If you’re interested in learning how to actually create space, help your body heal itself from emotional trauma, contact me on my website.
You would be amazed how simple and effective my style of advanced emotional freedom technique is.
With kindness,
Randy
Report comment
Dear Laura,
I, too, am a psychiatric survivor. My “treatment” began at age twenty and continued until thirty-one. I was taking three to six “medications” for over a decade. These drugs took away my energy, my interests, my ambitions for my life. I was among the walking dead as psychiatry gave me no hope of recovery except for the promise of new and/or different drugs. I feel lucky to have over a year of sobriety. I am still trying to make sense of my experiences, and in particular, the notable absence of a voice against a multi-billion dollar industry doing more harm than good. Before coming upon this, I had no words to describe my hopes for others to resist the lies of psychiatry. Do you really think it could be a civil rights issue? Thank you for your groundbreaking witness and leadership.
I am eager to read your blog,
Emily
Report comment
First of all, congrats on your bravery to fight towards your own health and recovery, regardless of the labels and prescriptions of authority. Your courage is amazing. I was in tears watching your speech, I wish I could have been there.
I battle with extreme emotions and substance abuse and like you, was “stripped of my sense of self” by psychiatric descriptions of my spiritual life when I was twenty one years old. I recently beat a decades long addiction to benzodiazepenes and am feeling like a million bucks!
The societal pressures of “performance, achievement and perfection” are starting to lesson their grip on my consciousness and I now enjoy long walks and bike rides and create peaceful works of visual art.
Your words hit home with me. I had to let you know how powerful your presence and bravery is, even online.
Many blessings to your health and well being!
Report comment