Driving to work in my car this morning I was struck by a sudden thought; the problem with mental illness is not that people have it but it’s that they BELIEVE they do.
When I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in an extreme state I was promptly restrained, drugged and awoke after three days to find myself in another kind of state altogether that was so strange to me it was like I had been taken over by an alien. I literally did not recognise myself in a mirror.
I looked around and saw dribbling, drooling, shuffling ‘patients’ and I knew I was not one of them. And yet, within six months I found myself living with relatives; shuffling up the main street of small town New Zealand having been diagnosed and medicated for a ‘mental illness.’ How had I suddenly gone from being ‘Tracey’ to ‘Tracey with a mental illness’? This was totally beyond me, and luckily (just how luckily I didn’t fully comprehend till many years later) I didn’t actually believe this was really possible so I rejected both the ‘illness and drugs’ as soon as I possibly could and the ‘alien’ me didn’t stay too long. However, the experience of being in those extreme states and the trauma of receiving the diagnosis and ‘treatment’ lasted for many years to come.
Those who work in mental health are starting to hear a lot about the terrible statistics and outcomes for people being treated in the mental health system and we are now constantly hearing about the burden of ‘mental illness.’
However what hit me in a sudden flash this morning in my car was that the problem/burden – or whatever we want to call it – is not that anyone actually ‘has’ one of these ‘mental illnesses.’ Because these fictitious categories of ‘illness’ are actually just invented; mostly by people who have not actually experienced these states and are therefore not qualified to discuss – let alone decide whether someone fits into one or another of them. No; the problem is not with the diagnosis or the diagnosing of these ficticious illnesses, rather it is that people actually BELIEVE in them.
This is not to dismiss in any way peoples’ actual experiences of extreme mental states and distress in all its forms; voices and visions – wondrous, relentless, terrifying or overwhelming – or the seemingly bottomless pits of sorrow and grief or any of the other confusing, staggering and mysterious places our psyches can take us to. Because all of these experiences are completely real to those in the middle of them.
The real problem we have in mental health is that people who experience these states have accepted and allowed their experiences and themselves to be defined, conceptualized, diagnosed and framed by others. People have given up their power to ‘experts,’ who take this control – sometimes out of benevolent motives – but always out of misguided and misinformed ignorance and, at its worst, out of indifferent greed. And the experts are able to do this – at least in New Zealand – because it is currently santioned by the government under the legal power of compulsory treatment.
Of course there are some people who, right from the beginning reject outright anyone else trying to tell them what their experinces are about. I did this when I first woke up in the hospital in a drug-induced daze. At first my resistance only happened in a tiny space buried deep inside of me, closed up tight in a box and hidden in a place that was untouchable by all the drugs and ‘you have a mental illness’ messages. However, it can and does take an incredible force of will to hold and nuture this resistance when you are up against a culture of compulsory hospital treatement, forced drugging, direct to consumer marketing, big business, anti-stigma campaigns that tell us all about how we need to ‘accept’ people with mental illness, and a society that has – on the whole – bought into the concept of mental illness and the ‘science’ of psychiatry.
Those who gain the most from the current system have literally ‘bought’ the shares, with those on the receiving end of the ‘care’ provided currently losing about 25 years of their life; which tends to include very poor health (mostly caused by the drugs), poverty, unemployment and being the recipients of numerous ‘services’ they do not necessarily want, delivered by people who may or may not have any understanding and empathy.
I am not saying that ‘treatment’ for the multitude of distress and trauma us human beings experience is all bad. Six years of regular psychotherapy (chosen and controlled by me) helped me navigate traumatic past experiences and gain validation and confidence in myself and my instincts. However most ironically the majority of what I needed to navigate, unpack and work through to become completely whole again, was the diagnosis and treatment I received for my apparant mental illness, which gave me nothing but pure trauma. It wasn’t until this work had been done that I could get beyond all that I had ‘received,’ and to the root causes of the extreme states I had experienced, which as it turned out was the beginning of an amazing journey of revelation and healing.
Today we find ourselves living in the middle of a ridiculous belief system called ‘psychiatry,’ which proposes itself to be science though it has no basis on which to claim this, and which has become so intertwined with profit and status that it has now completely lost any helpfulness it ever had.
This system takes our human experience of grief, loss, abuse, neglect, genius, vision, sadness, etc., and squeezes it all together into some kind of banal sausage meat, then churns it out via a DSM diagnosis with its associated standard treatment of drugs and therapy (if you’re lucky). Those who have been on the receiving end of this process instinctively know it to be a hopeless waste of time. I have never met a person who has been diagnosed with a mental illness who doesn’t believe there is more to the thiings they experience than they are being told to believe. No one who is going through an extreme life crisis or trying to recover from abuse or neglect or who has experienced visions or voices ever says “what I really need right now is a psychiatric diagnosis and some drugs, some supported accommodation and a work rehabilitation program me.” What people actually say they want is validation, safety, somewhere to hide, someone to listen, a space to be heard, maybe to scream and cry, time to explore and to not feel alone.
There never has been any ‘mental illnesses’ and there never will be; they simply don’t exist as ‘scientific’ or any other kinds of entities. There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance in the brain that ‘causes’ these experiences. Its highly likely that chemicals in the brain do change during times of extreme states and the brain almost definitely undergoes changes as a result of extreme trauma, abuse and stress, but this does not mean someone has a ‘mental illness’ – it is simply a by-product of the experience.
We have had well over 100 years of demonizing, stigmatizing, separating and labeling people as lunatic, insane, mad (or, these days, the politicaly correct ‘mentally ill’). It’s time to stop and say enough – ‘mental illness’ is a concept whose time is up.
The impact of believing you have a mental illness does so much more harm than good that it is no longer serving us as a society, and while this might sound apallingly simple; We simply need to stop believing in it.
So here is the revelation that came to me on my drive to work this morning;
Nothing more is needed for us to stop believing in mental illness, no one has to give us permission, come up with a clever strategy, help us write a plan or set a goal – we can just do it!
For people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness; unless this is working out really well for you, and you’re happy with your life just the way it is I suggest you stop believing in it right now and do any or all of the following; Join with others who feel the same way, extract yourself step-by-step-by-step from the pills, the doctors and the programmes and replace these with what you truly desire; reject the belief that you are somehow different from others, somehow damaged beyond repair, somehow not as worthy of the life you truly want and somehow not capable of achieving your wildest dreams. It may take some time to do this but a step in any direction away from believing in mental illness is pretty well guaranteed to be a step towards a better life. Many people have done it before you and many will do it after, and you’ll probably be helping others along pretty soon.
We are bigger and better than we can imagine and together we will get rid of this outdated, damaging and ridiculous idea of mental illness and create a world that is accepting of difference and responsive to human distress, trauma and grief. Together we will stop beleiving in mental illness and start believing in ourselves, and we will change the world in the process!
Love it! This may sound weird and I hope people understand, but the first time I heard of Torrey’s concept of “anosognosia” I thought, “Hmm, anosognosia, works for me.” I’m often driving around in my car reflecting upon how well it’s worked for me and just feeling so damn lucky and glad.
I really like this article too. I think the author describes probably the worst thing (of course there are many) that psychiatry does to people: it destroys their self respect. And the first step to reclaiming their lives, I agree, is to refuse to accept the subhuman identity that psychiatry offers –no, demands– and start thinking of oneself as a valuable human being who can take charge of their own life.
Even though, because I was not drugged, I came out of a childhood spent on psych wards more or less whole, or at least able to function, it took me a long time to develop self-respect.
Here I will diverge from the article a bit, and say that our movement ought to be helping people reclaim, or learn, that they are good and valuable human beings. But my experience in the movement is one of experiencing constant attacks from people, often, I think, from jealousy. I am happy when others do good work and get recognized for it. But how are we going to change anything if being an activist is a constant emotional drain?
Maybe the draining part is trying to be an activist in a system that is structured around mental illness Ted ? I do still work in the ‘system’ but my work is in such a narrow and restrictive area (forensic psychiatry) that in some ways there is quite a bit of freedom to advocate for better treatment of consumers who are subject to many more forces than are usual in mental health ie pressures of extreme public and societal opinion and government responsibility and the very real protective measures both for and from the people subjected to treatment in the services. My ‘activism’ is now outside of mental health as i have come to believe that the belief system of mental health and ill health is so fundamentally flawed as to be irreparable, so the information i am aiming to spread is that of people deciding for themselves what their experiences mean.
Though my praise of your article (below) stands I would also caution against the use of the word “consumer” (as in “consumers of mental health serices”). This is an innocuous-sounding euphemism which was first used during the period in which the mental patients’ liberation movement was being coopted and taken over by opportunists — something from which we have yet to recover.
yeah you are right of course oldhead. ‘Consumer’ is just as awful as anything else we get called ! Its hard to know how to describe the people i work with. They are actually ‘inpatients’ in that they reside in a hospital. These hospitals (in NZ anyway) are really the last bastion of institutional care and are in dire need of transformation !
OK in that case i think they would offficially and legally be entitled to the designation of “inmate.” I’m pretty sure, but I’m not a lawyer.
Anyway, once again, great article!
Ted wrote “how are we going to change anything”.
I guess you don’t understand the power structure? I will explain it to you as I understand it.
Only Doctors can question other Doctors. Doctors lie and get away with it because no other doctor challenges them.
A prime example of lies is electroconvulsive therapy E.C.T.
Some Doctor claims ECT is
1) safe
2) effective
3) low intensity
4) no pain
E.C.T. is not safe in my opinion. Who judges the treatment safe? A Lobotomy (the inventor Dr Moniz was given a Nobel Prize in 1949) was also judged safe because the death rate was relatively low. Having a living breathing patient but with no mind is considered safe by people who are litteral about the definition of death.
E.C.T. is not effective in treating depression and schizophrenia. How does a physical proceedure work on a non-physical illness (mental illness)? I suggest the idea of E.C.T. is to make someone forget. Trying to force the person to forget the reasons why they feel depressed does not work. Force does not work 1)because the destruction of memory in the mind from the electricity is random. The person could lose good memories as well as the bad ones and 2) the only way to fix a problem is to know what the problem is. Even if the memory erasure is successful the persons (unchanged) environment and situation will make them depressed once again.
E.C.T. is not low intesity. The human body works with tiny amounts of electricity that can be measured in an EEG, an electroencephalogram. Dr Hans Berger recorded the first human EEG in 1924. The brains electricity has to be amplified 1,000 to 100,000 times to get a measurement.
E.C.T. does produce pain, that is why the patient is unconscious. Ask yourself “Why do we feel pain?”. We feel pain because some damage is occuring in our body and our body is trying to warn us to the problem. To be unconscious while the pain is occuring is cheating . Only real life and death physical desease such as an infected apendix warrent the need for surgery, which means anesthesia. Electricity passing through the brain is an invisible knife.
But I am not a Doctor, so my opinion means nothing.
A hundred thousand people protesting ECT will not change the “science” of the claimed benefits of E.C.T.
You are a general without an army. If your army was to exist, they would have to be fed and housed by someone. This cost money.
We are the army.
There is money available if we organize.
There are organisations that give money to campaigning organisations.
We have a valid cause.
At one time no one thought there would be majority rule in South Africa. At one time no one thought lesbians and gays would have civil rights.
We can win if we try.
It was like that for me (and actually took only a few weeks, maybe because I have some experience in detecting bs). I spend a few days thinking and literally having conversations with imaginary people in my head (representations of actual psychiatrists) because I had this nagging feeling that something was not right, something didn’t make any sense yet I could not figure it out immediately – I lacked the language. And when I finally figured it out it seemed like no one would take it seriously or even want to discuss it. That’s MIA is so therapeutic to me – since people here have similar experiences to me and I see that it’s not only in my head but there is an alternative way to think about mental distress.
Btw Ted, I have great respect for you and how you managed to have a productive life and be an activist despite the enormous abuse from such a young age.
It’s so inspiring every time someone “new” breaks through the programming and the psychiatric word games and begins articulating their insights in a way that can enlighten others. The psychiatric empire has no clothes & we should all be unapologetically clear about that in our dealings with one another and the world at large. When we look at reality free of the smoke colored lenses we’re expected to wear it’s actually a much harder bit of mental gymnastics to believe in “mental illness” than not to, since after all we have reason on our side.
I guess I’m kind of thankful that the impostion of a form of sharia law by the psychiatric industry isn’t enforced severly. One can choose to believe or not believe in our society. Kuffar are tolerated as long as they gain no traction with the general population. And if they do start to have an influence then the enforcers of the state will move in and deal with them.
So we are free to not believe, but recognise the danger of expressing this if people start to listen. There may be consequences.
Really ? – how much more ‘severely’ do you imagine the law could be enforced ? Currently people can be held down, tied down, forced into solitary confinement, locked up and forcibly injected with mind altering substances against there will, have their children removed if they refuse to allow them to take psychiatric drugs and be forced to have electricity zapped thru their brains….how much more dangerous do you think it can get ?
Well, my governemnt has made attempts at passing legislation for forced sterilization of 11 year olds without parental consent. A hypothetical was put in parliament where a child may go out, be arrested by the police, hospitalized, sterlized, and then return home to parents and then theynbe informed.
A massive expansion of the numbers of people being brutalized could occur. See CTOs and their use in Australia.
Mental health workers may be issued with firearms to protect themselves from the dangerous people they have to deal with. I know in my case the damage that was done by these people, I would have preferred being placed on my knees and shot in the back of the head.
I guess my point is that we are free to believe or not, but there is no escaping the brutality if you dont. We are free to speak about the abuse, as long as no one listens.
On this issue of issuing firearms.
At present in one hospital I know of each nurse is issued with a security guard, who has pepper spray and night stick. They are calling for more security in the name of “patient safety”.
So in a sense they are armed by proxy.
The same happened in Otto Wagner Spital in Vienna, Austria. they now have private security guards to protect doctors. If your patients hate you so much they want to beat the crap out of you or kill you, here a thought: maybe you’re doing something wrong.
So how can this change if we don’t change the beliefs…and expose them for what they are ?…i think it will only be when the lies are exposed and ‘gain traction’ with the general public that the establishments will have to change – i don’t know much about sharia law, but the ‘bar’ for what is considered ‘normal’ gets lowered every time the drug companies need or want to expand their markets a bit further, thus the growing push to ‘psychiatritise; children – the expansion of the ‘law’ is happening right under our noses anyway…whats the alternative to speaking up – just letting it happen ?
Agree entirely about changing beliefs Tracey. I would make Szasz Myth of Mental Illness compulsory reading if I could.
An the term ‘exposed’ hits the nail on the head. Nelly Bly Ten Days in a Madhouse did it back in 1915 (?) Rosenhan in the 1970s. We need to get in behind enemy lines and expose these abuses to the general public. New technologies provide excellent opportunities for this, but a plan will need to be developed (much the way Rosenhan’s experiment was).
What I’ve found in regard the sharia law reference is that whilst Western societies claim to have separated church and state, this has not occurred. The psychiatric system is being used as a form of ‘morality police’ enforcing standards that do not breach any laws, but which are seen by some as being immoral. I’ve expanded on this in the forums under a thread titled The Morality Police. It is psychiatry, once again being used for purposes other than that which it was ‘designed’.
I agree also about speaking up, it is one method if we can get anyone to listen. What I’ve found is that those charged with protecting those subjected to abuses seem to require some medical assistance with their hearing abilities.
There are other alternatives, though they can become ugly.
@ J Hoggett. I know I certainly see it as part of other repressive measures in our societies. I think that mental health was shown to be the ‘canary in the coalmine’ in NSDP Germany.
This is where they will start and expand from.
Just a couple of points that come to mind.
The forced sterilization laws I mentioned above were discussed minus the stated aims. Anyone who was discussing them knew that they were directed at our aboriginal population, but not one soul ever mentioned this.
I think they thought they would be passed because they would not be applied to white folk. Though some must have recognised that this then became a possibility.
The (non) protections of our Mental Health Acts are being adopted into new terrorism laws. Evidence based laws don’t seem to be working, so the new laws will allow detention and torture on the basis of an allegation alone. Community fear is exploited, and with laws that require no evidence, people can simply be swallowed into the system on the basis of a suspicion.
I guess B the more it looks like a prison the bigger the chance that people will wake up to whats going on. Putting a stethoscope round the neck of a prison guard might fool some of the people ….
I wonder if you see this as tying into more repressive measures in the rest of society?
I wonder if there is some link to the prison abolition movement?
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/august10/politics/abolition_alternatives.html
Of course the problem with mental illness is not that people have it but it’s that they BELIEVE they do because a self for-filling prophecy needs a belief to work.
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.
The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.
Nice post, Tracey. “For the prophet will cite the course of events as proof he was right from the very beginning.” I, too, was one who didn’t believe the label. How can a person whose never suffered from either mania or depression, and had no family history of any genetic mental illnesses, actually be bipolar? How insane psychiatrists are to think they have a right to go around defaming others with fictional mental illnesses, oh, and based upon a list of lies and gossip from the people who raped my child, too? What psychos! The psychiatric drugs cause the symptoms of the mental illnesses, however.
But what’s good is now we know the likely cause of the most serious mental illness, schizophrenia. There are no genetic links, but 85% of schizophrenia patients had childhood trauma ignored, and diagnosed as schizophrenia instead. Then they had their brains damaged by psychiatrists with their neuroleptics. And I’m certain I’m not the only “bipolar” patient who had “bipolar” created completely with drugs, to cover up easily recognized iatrogenesis and child abuse either.
Don’t let someone else tell your own life story, be the best you can be instead. And to those with delusions of grandeur it’s your right to dictate someone else’s story, shame on you.
Thanks someone else. my point is that so called mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar don’t actually exist other than in the minds of those who collected together a group of random experiences and decided to label them as something.
I absolutely agree, Tracey. What the psychiatrists did was get together and compared the symptoms of their patients, and voted “diseases” into existence. But in regards to schizophrenia, for example, where all the patients were on neuroleptics, the psychiatrists ended up merely documenting the adverse reactions of the neuroleptic treatment. But instead of acknowledging the “symptoms” as adverse effects of the drugs, they called it a “mental illness” instead. And look up iatrogenesis in Wiki, the first “disease” it lists as “partially or completely iatrogenic” is bipolar.
But the belief system is imposed isn’t it ? – The concept of mental illness is a total fallacy, but its one that is held in place by those who benefit from it; ie the providers of the services who make their extremely good living from it and the drug companies who rake it in by the billions. Its a particularly cynical and evil concept because it preys on people who are at their most vulnerable and gives a completely false impression of what is actually going on. I don’t think there would be any ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ if people were asked ‘what happened to you’ and what do you need instead of being told ‘this is whats wrong with you and this is what you need’ – oh and ‘if you don’t like it we’ll force you !’ or at least the ‘self fulfilling’ part would at least be free choice – at the moment there is no free choice so there really is no ‘self’ in the ‘self fulfilling’ prophecy is there ?
Re: if people were asked ‘what happened to you’ .
When I was made sick with psychiatric drugs and was showing up at the hospital in distress no one ever asked “whats wrong, what happened, why are you feeling this way” ? During the wait sitting in observation alone naked in the gown I would start putting together an explanation for when they asked but no one ever asked. I wanted to tell someone why I bugged out.
Patient in observation room 3, anxiety agitation, has broken brain, give disabling pills… Next. That’s today’s psychiatry.
Has broken brain due to treatment would have been somewhat accurate.
And of course psychiatric drugs make the prophecy that recovery is not possible come true too, see how sick you get when you try and quit them !
Beautifully written and most needed humane words with understandable meanings – for severe distress as despair and desparation, for altered affective and perceptive experiences as extremes of spiritual and symbolic, challenging and alerting explosion of wider meanings/processes of the soul, heart and mind.
What I wish to highlight, however, is the unfairness of presenting the state of affairs as beng one where the person with changed perceptions and energies had any choice of how to interprete them. In the general culture the knowledge of how oppressive, abusive relations disrupt and distort bodily, emotional being in the social world, the turning ghostly of the self and others, the inference of many troubling perceptions, are not available.
The first framing people in distress, altered ways to experience themselves and the world, are exposed to nearly always is the one of biopsychiatric mental illness diagnosis, prognosis and drugging with neuroleptics. There is scientific and legal power given to this fraudulant and harmful knowledge gained in ‘evidence based’ drug trials, voted by psychiatric guilds in hidden meetings, reinjected in the technical science fiction of studies designed by people with no experience of altered affective&mental realities (apart from falling in love, the terroer of being in a car accident, etc. which should be enough to forget about ‘normative daily functioning as sole standard).
The legalized and scientized powers behind the psychiatric diagnoses and treatment are the medical institutions and representatives a person in some extreme condition, thus confused or agitated, encounters. The person being ‘naive’ and in a ‘confused’ state, meets up with the doctors trusting their ‘expertise’. She has no idea of the falseness of the whole ‘enterprise’ and thus many ‘patients’ first believe that they really have a mental illness (‘broken brain’, ‘chemical imbalance’). So people in distress or agitation are lied to and given harmful treatments, also psychoeducation on how to be a schizophrenic or bipolar patient for the rest of their lifes in self-surveillance of mental illness prodrome or symptoms.
This is actually most similar to early modern times ‘witchhunts’ and other inquisition, most similar alliances of governing power elites, institutions, norms, legislation and ‘treatment’, percecution, harm, terror, even murder. But under the guise of science fiction and neuromythology the neophyte is made to trust and belief the medical and legal experts. Therefore it is not about the person in extreme agitation or confusion or unnusual beliefs having any choice.
It is about exposing the criminality of the psychiatric diagnoses and mal-treatment system. About exposing that biopsychiatry defines and executes modern witchhunt, terror and ‘soulmurder’. Only if this is done for the general public, would it be correct to state that people becoming confused, agitated, experiencing distorted selves and altered realities have a choice to believe
– wether they struggle with the embodied, affective and mental consequences of abuse, repression, exclusion, social abjection or
– they believe to have a ‘broken brain’ or other mental disease/disorder/illness, with no unique/specific neuro-hormonal processes or bio-markers to qualify any.
For the time being it is highly unfair to talk as if the ‘neophyte in psychiatry’ had any choice what to belief. And those of us who have been in the psychiatric system know what happens if one protests and resists their diagnoses and other assessments, alarmed by the negation and distorsion of ones’ experiences. Coercion, forced treatment, ‘legal guardian’, never ending re-definition of ones thoughts, feelings, beliefs in the most brutal and harmful ways as symptoms of madness. It is the same as inquisition and witchhunt and needs be exposed as the same brutal institutionalized, legalized and pseudo-scientized terror.
Phew ! – yes i completely agree. But we can choose -at least we could if there was a choice….and i guess that’s what im trying to highlight. If you read about where there has been alternatives to the psychiatric system like Diabasis (John Weir Perry) in the late 70’s, its clear that given a completely different approach to ‘altered ways to experience the world’ it is wholly possible that people can go through these experiences and out the other side without having to take on any of the forms and assumptions that are imposed on them by the current mainstream system. In fact they are able to move through these transformative experiences to a place of integration and can benefit hugely from what the experience itself is trying to achieve….that is healing and wholeness – you may be familiar with this but if not I’d highly recommend reading ‘Trials of the Visionary Mind by John Weir Perry – it doesn’t have to be this way !!
LOVE this one! i do not think you wrote one thing i do not believe and have always believed. took my husband (dragged us through a psych system nightmare) ten years to believe, but you have perfectly written the truth i have always known. it is unreal how difficult it is to knock this sense into others, especially others who are suffering and would be so greatly helped if only they woke up to the truth!
ty for sharing and good luck in your quest to share this all-important message.
all the best
erin
Hi Tracey, You totally get the point across of the rigidity and defensiveness built in to harboring belief in your mental illness. As far as psychiatry’s prospects and efficacy, I think that many parts of what they do can legitimately attain scientific status, but the behavioral fields all need to make the fact that treatment is pseudomedical explicit and clear. I am not pushing for the idea that psychiatry is automatically anything good, of course. At best, in rare situations, it could work out humaely, compared to the inescapibility of its dictates that we face today. Rather, I am still in the thick of what you have reported about here, committed to looking into every nook and cranny of my encounter with people and situations for what the difference is between seeing myself up against something that is my responsiblity to handle, and letting myself get talked into “having” some discreet disorder or disease to get treatment for. Although never believing in the latter, even giving credence to discussions by those who do, so as to understand in their terms their sincerest concerns leaves a film of superstition and pseudoscientific goop to scrape away and clean out of your mind.
On that note, I want to say that the worst thing still happening just is forced treatment, beginning with the fact that no matter what you do in checking into hospitals for help with your problems in living or your mental distress, that however responsibly you intend to do yourself good, your effort is immediately ruined by the lessening of your liberty and the doctrine of non-responsiblity that most every “well-meaning” staff person intends as to the patient’s favor. Obviously, psychiatry as practiced just serves as a means to create the classification of defective persons and hopes to tether a group of sufferers to itself for life. Patently, psychologists go right along with helping the psychiatrists enforce the paradigm of “care”.
I love
Every
Inch of this
Tracey.
Keep tracing
The circumference
Of the chemical walls
That hold us
Behind them.
Hi Tracey,
Thanks for a great article. I would love to know more about the work you are doing in NZ as I hold similar beliefs to yourself and want to see change in our system here in NZ. I’m based down in Nelson and at times feel very isolated in my views. I know there are many of us kiwis who want change but feel our voices are kept well divided and it is time we all got together to present a united voice. Better alternatives need to be made available. It would be great if we could connect.
Pauline
Hi Pauline, Thankyou ! …its great to know there are people who feel the same way !! – Please do get in touch…not sure what the right way to do that is here – maybe get in touch via the facebook page Pot of Gold – if you are on facebook…or let me know how to get in touch with you ….we’re keen to form a NZ wide network…and are working on a website etc, but all in my spare time so might take a while – actually you could also call a work number with your contact details – and leave me a message if im not there…only there half time – (09) 8155164 extn 5253
This is a fantastic article.
Well, I could quibble with the statement in the first paragraph: “the problem with mental illness is not that people have it but it’s that they BELIEVE they do.”
In a sense, you are right, because perhaps if most people did not believe in “mental illness” as such, they would be more open/understanding/supportive of people going through crises, not treat them as alien “other,” and this would go a long way towards the person’s so-called mental health. However, this is still an “if.” It’s still possible to not believe in “mental illness” as such yet be completely unsupportive if not abusive to those going through emotional/psychological/life crises.
My main thought about that line was that: what gets called “mental illness” is still a major problem in and of itself, even if it is divorced from the biopsychiatric b******* (not sure if we can curse on here!).. So to dismantle the biopsychiatric paradigm is a major part of the solution, but the other part is effective prevention and/or “healing” (an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure) of these problems (where they exist) in the first place.. which itself is a tall order but must be done! Proper understanding of what the problems are about is of course the crucial first step.
hi ssenerch, thanks. I guess my take on the ‘problems’ we experience is that they would not even be thought of as ‘problems’ if we responded differently ….and from a constructive and compassionate framework. Currently we are totally socialized, schooled and brainwashed into believing that some kind of supposed ‘consensus reality’ is the only normal that should be tolerated. I think that even the framework of prevention and/or healing of ‘problems’ is part of this. We (well many…i don’t anymore) believe that there is something wrong with mental experiences that are ‘other than the norm’. I have come to know that for myself the experiences that i had were essential to my growth process….mind you i had no idea of this at the time and i became completely isolated and had to go through my own personal hell alone. If i had have had a cultural framework that included and valued altered states as meaningful and important then most of the distress an fear that was associated with my experiences need not have happened….so i think we need to head for a place where these experiences and the full range of human response to …well being human i guess is accepted, embraced and supported…am sure that’ll be easy to achieve 🙂
Regarding [Well, I could quibble with the statement in the first paragraph: “the problem with mental illness is not that people have it but it’s that they BELIEVE they do.”]
Every human being makes mistakes. The trick is when the person is fooled by psychiatry into believing the mistake they made was “mental illness” a permanent lifelong disease.
Tracey Cannon , you must not forget THE FAMILY of the mentally ill person can also believe in the diagnosis/ be tricked into believing .
When I was drugged, I am sure I looked crazy to my visiting family. Unable to speak. This ( also convincing the family) completes the con job.
“What people actually say they want is validation, safety, somewhere to hide, someone to listen, a space to be heard, maybe to scream and cry, time to explore and to not feel alone.”
I agree 100%.
If you are “schizophrenic” you must believe you are ill.
This article is a joke to the involuntary patient.
An excerpt from successful schizophrenia
{The resident said “Tony, your behavior is sick. We can treat you here as an out-patient, but you must understand you are mentally ill before we can make any progress.”
Tony shouted “No, I’m not. You doctors are crazy if you think I’m mentally ill!” }
http://www.successfulschizophrenia.org/articles/dblbinds.html
I do know what you mean markps2. I have worked in ‘involuntary patient’ care for 13 years (in a forensic hospital) – it is my role to ‘represent’ the interests of the patients (we call this a consumer adviser) – and of course to get out of there they have to completely accept the medical model. The very occasional person will manage to ‘play the game’ without the powers that be discovering this, but this hardly ever happens. I have successfully managed to get current patients sitting alongside staff in ‘consumer rep’ type roles in decision making forums and we have just appointed another part time consumer adviser who has been through the hospital and is now a health board employee. There are quite a few staff who are aware of the charade of ‘mental illness’ but they choose (like i do) to stay and try to help shift things in tiny stages away from the medical paradigm. I have seen some of these shifts in my time.
“There are quite a few staff who are aware of the charade of ‘mental illness’ but they choose (like i do) to stay and try to help shift things in tiny stages away from the medical paradigm. I have seen some of these shifts in my time.”
Tracey,
I find those lines chilling, as I presume that thousands of psychiatric “hospital” workers, in every country, are likewise aware of that charade and, probably, most of them, likewise, aim to “shift things in tiny stages away from the medical paradigm.” But, a shift in tiny stages seems a very far cry from what’s really needed.
These “consumers” need to hear the truth, imho.
So, I wonder, are you completely honest and up front with the “consumers” whom you’re assigned to serve?
For instance, have you been sharing your blog post (above) with the inmates who are being called “mentally ill” (“consumers”) in your “hospital”?
Your blog post is very good, Tracey, so I hope you are sharing it with them…
Respectfully,
Jonah
P.S. — I most definitely agree with commenter oldhead’s expressed view, in his comment (on September 7, 2014 at 9:40 pm) about your use of the term “consumer.” You work with “involuntary patients,” Tracey; they are “consumers” of psychiatric ‘services’ much like ducks and geese destined to become foie gras are “consumers” of corn.
You are right Jonah, the shift in small stages is not enough anymore. No i am not honest at all. My post is printed off in colour and on my office wall – but very few patients are ever in my office and i wouldnt bring it to thier attention unless they asked about it. – i rant away in places like this…..and have started an ‘alternatives’ group as a place for people to discuss, plot, plan and gather support for the changes we want to see – but its not enough anymore and i have to get out. Its hard because although it might sound strange i think the ‘best’ of what i take when i go into the ie inpatient units is my profound love and respect for the involuntary patients – i have known some for 13 + years and to me they are freinds – i dont care about boundaries (just about getting caught) because we are human to human in there. I make no attempt to conceal the impact the pain i know people are in has on me….and i NEVER lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day i walk out free and they are being forcibly drugged and are often unaware they have been insidiously convinced they are better off being ‘compliant’ and accepting all that goes with that. So yes i must get out as soon as possible; am working on that right now….and i LOVE your ‘consumer analogy thanks – am gonna use that one !! XXX
I hear what you’re saying here and I know exactly what you are feeling.
There are two of us peer workers in the same state hospital where we were once held against our wills as “mental patients.” Watching the constant drugging of “patients” is wearing both of us down. We have a grand vision of changing the hospital from the inside but I have big doubts that we’ll ever be able to accomplish this.
Almost all the staff where we work totally buy into all of this ridiculous bull manure, many of them are voluntarily on the very “antidepressants” and benzos that they help force on our “patients.” Working like this helps me to understand how the people in the French Resistance who fought the Nazis and the French sympathizers felt during the War.
The two of us are expected to coerce the “patients” into compliance but we refuse to function like that. It goes against our training and our beliefs and feelings. The small changes are not enough. We both wonder how long we can and will last at that place.
I, like Jonah, must say that I can’t stand being called a consumer. I was not a “consumer” of services when I was forced to take the toxic drugs and agree with the so-called “treatment plan” that they concocted for me. We are never consumers but we sure are commodities for the system to use and abuse and make lots of money off of.
Tracey, I loved your comment on how those who have never experienced any given state of mind should have no authority to decide who else does. One of the things that I found to be both fascinating and terrifying when I was locked up by psychiatry was that virtually every “patient” recognized that I had been incorrectly labeled, and yet, this was only recognized by three low-level staff members. I was locked up on the premise that I was “delusional” because that particular hospital had arbitrarily decided that a medical condition that multiple physicians had diagnosed me with was “not a real disease,” thus deeming my debilitating physical symptoms psychosomatic (I’ve written more on this at http://www.thesystemisbrokenblog.org/2014/03/26/i-am-justina-pelletier/). During my “hospitalization,” I had the following conversation with at least one “patient” on a daily basis:
Other person: “Nothing’s wrong with you. What are you doing here?”
Me: “These people are idiots. They’re trying to claim that I’m not really sick and that I’m, therefore, delusional.”
Other person: “You could walk when you got here- now you can’t.”
Common sense, right? If my issue was truly an emotional one, then arguably (meaning, based on psychiatry’s pseudo-scientific arguments), immediately taking me off the medication/supplement regiment that was carefully dictated by my real doctors and essentially forcing me onto neuroleptics would have been helpful, rather than leading to disastrous medical consequences. However, while my fellow “patients” understood what was really going on, the only staff member who immediately understood was a night-shift worker who happened to have a brother with one of the same medical diagnoses. The other two, who eventually understood to a degree, only did so because after three days of this, one of them bothered to speak with my therapist, as I had requested from the moment I got there as I knew she would confirm everything I had told them (the psychiatrist had barred staff from speaking to the medical doctors who called on my behalf, as I was told it would “feed into my delusions,”). It’s a bit ironic that all of these folks who were labeled “psychotic,” “incompetent,” and “without insight,” outnumbered the staff who seemed capable of making an accurate “diagnosis” at least 8:1.
Hi Tracey,
I was able to find your article and read it! I love it! Thanks so much for sharing your story. I love what you write here: “However, it can and does take an incredible force of will to hold and nuture this resistance when you are up against a culture of compulsory hospital treatement, forced drugging, direct to consumer marketing, big business, anti-stigma campaigns that tell us all about how we need to ‘accept’ people with mental illness, and a society that has – on the whole – bought into the concept of mental illness and the ‘science’ of psychiatry.” I think it takes so much strength and courage to go against the mainstream. And yet it sounds like you knew right off the bat that “Tracey with a mental illness” was a lie. You rejected that “alien” construct right from the start. And I know how strong you were and are to do this. It’s so terrible to be put in a box (0f pathology) that as you write has been defined by people who didn’t have the experience. And the message (from the mainstream) as you further write is “that you are somehow different from others, somehow damaged beyond repair, somehow not as worthy of the life you truly want and somehow not capable of achieving your wildest dreams.” This is a terrible and frightening message. It can literally be soul crushing. I’m so happy that there are people like you urging people to not believe in this dangerous sham. And “to start believing in ourselves….” That’s what it really takes. Last of all, I wanted to say that I deeply related to the long lasting impact of the abusive “treatment.” I also spent years dealing with it in therapy. A terrible trauma!
Thanks again Tracey. I’m so glad I read your article…. Keep up the good fight!!
Take care,
Elizabeth
“……Six years of regular psychotherapy (chosen and controlled by me)…”
Same here – and this was why it did me no harm.
I had refused medication initially but years later when I attempted to quit medication I found I couldn’t survive – and then I believed in the “illness”. But it dawned on me that – it could well be the drugs. So I tapered carefully and was successful.
The thing is, that Psychotherapy was what I had asked for at the very beginning.
I was disabled, a danger (to myself) and expensive to the taxpayer while I cooperated with psychiatric drug treatments – but I made recovery and became independent of the taxpayer as soon as I stopped.
You are amazing we need to teach people how to demand therapy in a system that targets medication as cost efficient, time efficient and then has to deal with the expensive post medication effects.
Lucky or brilliant that you found a good therapist….can you share what insurance plan? or is it private pay?
Hi Margie,
A lot of my therapy was in the community and for free, and the therapists had no opinions on medication or diagnosis.