Editor’s Note: This article is being simultaneously published on Mad in America and on our affiliate site, Mad in the UK.
Why do I do the work that I do? It began with a childlike desire for those I believed in to believe in me. Later, I wanted people experiencing suffering as I once did to know the possibilities of connecting with the joy within. I was optimistic, thinking, “Look at what I have learned. You could do the same.” I had no idea that there are forces resistant to change. For many years, I received mental health services and accepted the “mental illness” diagnoses, which I now call labels. I knew nothing about the history of people losing their human rights. I didn’t realize that others were actively fighting against what they call the mental health system or psychiatry.
My experience was compliant. I needed help, asked for help, and was directed to psychiatric services. At twenty-three, I didn’t know what I know now. Since childhood, I have had an innate desire to share knowledge with others. Learning has helped me regain my strength, and I see how possible it is for others as well. I no longer see myself as naïve or unworldly. I understand now that there are many paths in life, and this is just a glimpse of my journey. There have been many hills, valleys, potholes, straight roads, curvy roads, and sometimes very slippery icy roads, where I’ve had to stop and find my footing.
When I consider another aspect of why I do the work I do, using information from various sources, the truth is that, at one point, I believed it was the only way to get anyone to listen. Think about the socialization of who should be heard or seen in society, then add the aspect of discussing mental health as a Black woman who once used those services. I think of the horror, but I’ve learned to laugh at my thoughts. The “mental illness” language, created with good intentions, discredited the pain and suffering of my human experience and undermined my belief in myself for a long time. The road paved for me, defined by labels for the pain and suffering I experienced, made me feel like I was trapped in hell with no way out.
Why was I so compliant? I grew up without television in Jamaica. When I first encountered television and movies, I was fascinated by technology, though I didn’t know the term then. I became curious about how it all worked, but with no one to ask, I spent many hours watching and feeling emotions for characters while neglecting my own. This had a significant influence on me. The depictions of who is worthy and who should be seen, heard, and respected often didn’t look like me. Unconsciously, I learned what society wanted me to think about myself, influenced by the ideas of Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who classified people into racial categories.
Linnaeus proposed four subcategories of Homo sapiens: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeanus. Blumenbach added a fifth category, resulting in Caucasian (the white race), Mongolian (the yellow race), Malayan (the brown race), Ethiopian (the black race), and American (the red race). Their classifications created a misconception that one group of people is superior to others, causing moral injury and separation into race as a concept. Dr. Joy DeGruy, in her book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, explains how these beliefs allowed white people to brutalize Black people during and after chattel slavery and not feel the empathy and compassion needed in humanity.
I mention Dr. DeGruy’s book with the intention of promoting her work so that more people may recognized what happened to us matters and the work and trainings that she does is powerful. However, personally, I avoid using the terms “syndrome,” “disorder,” or “post-traumatic” to describe the cruelty Black people face whether in the past or today. My perspective is that there is continuous traumatic stress in society, and we should look at systemic oppression and individuals’ life circumstances, rather than using labels, when providing services. An excellent source on this information is Dr. Paula Joan Caplan work Psychiatric Diagnosis: The First Cause of Everything Bad in the Mental Health System among others including the work at A Disorder for Everyone: Challenging the Culture of Psychiatric Diagnosis.
I know people are suffering and I could only imagine how deep the rabbit hole goes. When I hear the words “serious mental illness,” I’ve trained my mind to think of the ongoing violence and people struggling to live or sometimes giving up—in poverty, bullying, abandonment, domestic violence, workplaces, and poor education in inadequate schools—because the burden of exploitation becomes too great. I use the term “pimping” to describe workplace exploitation, where people use titles and roles to morally injure others. P stands for privilege, I for ignorance, M for money, and P for policies and procedures.
I believed societal messages through media: that titles, money, skin color, and positions determine worthiness. This belief prevented me from seeing myself as worthy. I thought that if someone with a title defined me, they knew what was right. But no external validation can suppress the truth within us. Eventually, the pain of believing others’ opinions becomes too great. We are always learning and observing beyond the stories we are told and experience.
The mental health system is deeply ingrained in our culture. New, hopeful individuals are gaining awareness through life’s ups and downs, using mental health services and advocating for change. I initially supported the “stop the stigma” movement and encouraged seeking mental health services, as that was what I had learned and promoted. However, while this message gains approval and funding, people remain stuck in poverty and unresolved emotional distress. I’ve become less naïve about the gatekeepers, but my hope for change persists. I still want to learn and share with others so they don’t spend decades waiting to live, thinking a drug or a label will save them.
I began documenting my journey about twenty years ago, intending to show the process rather than just before and after pictures of weight loss. It turned out to be a spiritual journey, which I now call soul work. Every experience brings new insights. I am currently sharing my documented work on Substack, called Just Doing the Little Things, and on my blog at www.mitzysky.com.
My work aims to provide information that people can use to advocate for themselves and others without viewing emotional distress as an illness. Distress often results from violations of our bodies and the sting of societal oppression, as I mentioned regarding socialization. Don Miguel Ruiz, in his book The Four Agreements, refers to this as the domestication of the planet. For me, this points to the spiritual journey, emphasizing the importance of focusing more on the spiritual and less on personality. Gary Zukav, in his book The Seat of the Soul, states that psychology is about the study of the spirit, but it has never been that; instead, it focuses on the five-sensory personality, which cannot heal at the soul level (paraphrasing).
What else didn’t I know? I was unaware of the spiritual journey or the concepts of spirit and soul. I am still learning and growing in this awareness because it is a lifelong journey. I didn’t know about Redlining, the Three-Fifths Compromise, colonization, Jim Crow laws, Reconstruction era, the 13th Amendment, Black Codes, Sharecropping, or the deep-rooted racism in society’s structures worldwide. I wasn’t familiar with stories like Emmett Till’s, and I didn’t understand the origins of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Many involved in its creation have spoken out about its flaws, yet it continues to dominate society. In this talk that you can find on YouTube, Dr. James Davies author of Cracked talks about The Origins of the DSM.
I understood classism but thought that if I educated my children, everything would be fine. I didn’t realize the importance of relationships or the connections I lost with nature, my children, and myself. I didn’t see how underfunded school systems serve as pipelines to prison and mental institutions, especially for those in poverty. I believed in the American Dream and didn’t recognize how these systemic issues were stacked against me as a Black person. Now, I see it as a multi-layered system of oppression and no longer blame myself. Learning helps me to stop internalizing oppression. I am responsible for quieting my mind and finding peace. That’s why viewing psychology through a spiritual lens is crucial for my overall mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
I no longer seek external validation for peace of mind. I’m reminded of Rumi’s quote: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Protecting oneself from traumatic experiences leads to many thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Gabor Maté in The Wisdom of Trauma, ask the question, “Can our deepest pain be a doorway to healing?” I heard him say and I am paraphrasing, that trauma is not what happens to us but what happens inside us. My thoughts, fears, judgments, unforgiveness, competition, condemnation, and comparison caused disconnection. Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now, reminds us, “We are not our thoughts,” and Ram Dass advises us “to be here now,” encouraging less mental engagement in the mind of thoughts and more presence.
I was in pain, wanting a better life for my children and myself. I sought help and followed the prescribed path, as I mentioned earlier. I was compliant. Almost twenty years later, I began to question, “What is happening? Why am I still stuck? How do I get unstuck? How do I live a beautiful life? Who am I? What is my purpose? When does someone declare me well?” These questions multiplied, but I stopped relying on others for answers. I had to start doing the work of paying attention. I observed people who seemed to have a wholehearted human experience despite their struggles. They found their way and lived exceptional lives, according to their definitions. I realized that I am responsible for creating that for myself. I had people who supported me in moving away from mental health services and towards achieving my life goals. Most importantly, I embraced my creativity and understood that I must do the work.
As I edit this paper now in 2024, which I wrote two years ago, I’ve learned about casteism. I bought the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson and look forward to reading it once I get it back from my sister. I watched the movie Origin by Ava DuVernay and participated in the play The Ubuntu Project by Rev. Ina Alisa Anderson of Emerging Voices Production. I learned about caste at a time when I was preparing to share more stories of inequality, inequity, racism, and oppression. When I read lines from the play The Ubuntu Project, I thought, “This is what I’ve been talking about but didn’t have the words for.” Now I can ask, “How can you place me in a sexist, racist, caste system of oppression, and when it breaks my spirit blame me and call me an illness?” This question for me shows my ability to be humble, practice forgiveness, stay aware and to continue learning. Ubuntu, says “I am, because we are!” The healing happens or the awareness rises in the context of sharing our stories with each other. I continue to write and share my story because shame can’t live in the light and I found the veil of shame from what happened to me kept me from living fully in the present moment.
What you say is imbued with deep insight, but overall I find you too obsequious towards, to apologetic for, too compliant with the society that not only nearly destroyed you but destroyed the whole Earth and Mother Nature. And if one wants to understand Mother Nature, I feel one has to understand a black woman. I don’t know why I feel that but I’m not the first to say it. But hold up – I’m that black woman too. I may be male and white but was also crushed by the disease process that was the white society and the white mind. White is not skin colour. White is foaming at the mouth, dying, dead. It’s the disease that destroyed the world and either destroys or dominates every single one of us. Let’s me and you destroy the disease and shoot the world with black songs.
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I find that knowledge IS ignorance. Ignorance is the shadow cast by knowledge, but this knowledge is also ignorance, for if it was not ignorance it would realize that it is mere representation, like an artists painting at best, of the real, and no painting can know the original scene, so how can knowledge know anything at all? It represents: and it says: it doesn’t know. So knowledge is ignorance, and when we think it is actual knowledge this is an illusion, a purposive socially conditioned illusion, not a fact.
But ignorance is also ‘true knowledge’ in the sense that if one realizes they know nothing, which is pure ignorance, then they know this, which is really all there is to know, so this pure ignorance is also pure knowledge, which means they have knowledge (a representation in the form of an idea in the mind) that knowledge knows nothing, which is the truth of knowledge and the truth of it’s absolute ignorance. But this isn’t actually really knowledge: one UNDERSTANDS that knowledge knows nothing not through memory or thinking or reason but through observing and understanding the movement of thought and the social currency that we call knowledge and mistakenly believes CORRESPONDS to reality when actually it construes. And therefore knowledge conditions perception because it is wholly our social conditioning, even when it is come about through our own efforts because it is social forms conditioning the brain and making the latter believe knowledge is knowledge rather then thought, illusion, and the ignorance it is contrasted with but which turns out also to be pure knowledge.
Moreover, when we accuse someone or something of ignorance, this is one of the only examples of true ignorance, because if you accuse me of ignorance, I will reply, ignorance about what? And you will say this or that, but I will say this and that is your intellectual assertion, and I have heard it through your lips, and I am not ignorant of that assertion, so where is the ignorance actually? They will want to persuade me that ignorance is my inability to see what is not there, but somewhere else, even though everything is here in awareness and nothing is not there. I will reply that I am aware of what is as it is, so there is no ignorance – ignorance, like the thing that is not there, are these hypothetical thought assertions that try and create a reality that itself is not there. If something is not here it means it is not here, not that I am ignorant of anything. If I say “I didn’t know it wasn’t there” this is a factual account of what actually is, so where is the ignorance actually? Do you see? The thing that is not there is your idea and assertions, but I am not ignorant because all there ever ACTUALLY is is this phenomena of awareness of what is and I am always awareness of what is, so where is the ignorance in it? There is neither ignorance or knowledge, but this thing we call seeing, or perception, or awareness. You see ignorance is merely hypothetical. Thought posits something that you don’t know, but this is thought positing something, not me being ignorant.
It is only when we live in thought that knowledge and ignorance appear to have a reality, but when you begin to live in seeing and the silent understanding that flows from it, you realize that knowledge itself is ignorance, and ignorance true knowledge, yet these are just intellectual conceptual tautologies of the thinking mind and left brain, and not actualities at all. In truth all there is is awareness of what is, and awareness neither knows or is ignorent. If awareness falls upon these phenomena of knowledge or ignorance then it is aware of the actual phenomena directly, and in this perception there is no knowledge about what is perceived or ignorance about what is perceived because there is ONLY perception, and in that perception is a particular thought or word form (which thought labels knowledge) or an actual brain state (which thought labels ignorance), yet these are just labels, words, for something beyond words and the perception of that which was beyond words was neither knowledge nor ignorance but was merely the means through which the underlying phenomena beyond these concepts was grasped by mind in the first place. So where is the knowledge or ignorance? Knowledge is mere representation and awareness doesn’t know – it sees, and through seeing there is understanding which is not a linguistic phenomena at all and is probably the thing we confuse with this feeling we mistakenly called ‘knowing’.
So knowledge IS ignorance but it is doubtful we can call it knowledge. Ignorance IS knowledge, though it’s doubtful we can call it ignorance. But if we call knowledge ignorance and ignorance knowledge, that may be a reasonable intellectual correction, but it cannot possibly make either of the concepts true. We could put them back in their original places through reverse logical arguments, but it does demonstrate the absolute vapidity of our ‘knowledge’ of knowledge and ignorance which is actually nothing whatsoever to do with understanding our reality, which is through perception, but rather is the means by which the social process captures and conditions and regulates your perceptions and enslaves your thinking mind toa knowledge economy dominated by the interests of the power economy that dominates and exploits you. This latter point you must be able to see, and I sense that some of you might see this already and find, like me, that it’s an outrage. The oligarchs who decide social knowledge are neither the more committed to truth or the more intelligent or wise in their use of the mind. Their work is instrumental domination and enslavement of us all through the conditionings of our mind. They propagate the representations that they have and make us have of ourselves and our relations to each other and the world, something I think Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes wrote about last century but which clearly didn’t leave a significant enough impression on the evolving Western mind. I’m sure it’s day will come, and hopefully it’s today ‘cuz there ain’t gonna be many tomorrows.
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Sorry, one more thing. What you said about watching TV and technology in Jamaca was amazing. And what you said about the representations of people as they were supposed to be, the representations that the powerful have and make us have of ourselves and the world (I think Barthes said almost this phrase). And it has to do with how all of the trauma you and I have experienced is related to the problem of truth.
Why is the truth so important? Because a lack of truth causes real, actual, profound harm that people generally don’t understand, but that you understand well if you are a black woman or a man, or a white working class British kid, particularly male kid, or someone in a deprived caravan park in America, or people with the manifold consequences of grievous social trauma – addiction, what we call criminality, what in our ignorance we call ‘mental illness’ but is actually the real spiritual and psychological harm caused by an ignorant, brutal, greedy and judgemental society, the harm and the trauma experienced by such groups is all the result of a lack of truth, or more specifically, the consequences of human judgement, which is not factual, which can never be the truth, because the truth is what actually is, which includes all this trauma and the actual conditions which produced it. Instead we take our own judgements of the traumatised people as the truth, and this is a profound perversion and distortion of reality if you ask me and to see it as it is is quite a radical realization.
What do we think produced this trauma? Do we think it was a defect in the infant human brain, heart and body handed to us by Mother Nature? Does Mother Nature produce such pathologies in the natural world? Was it caused by wrong thinking on behalf of the person, when all thought is the product of a mechanical process involving the social conditioning of the brain and the conditioning of all our thinking, action and life activity which is all a process that overtakes the brain of the growing child before it could ever be remotely conscious of what is happening and probably never will? Are we to blame that person or ‘their’ thinking when this thinking is part of the sprawling disease of our whole social history, a collective human phenomena that conditions the brain and thinking styles and attitudes and behaviours of each subsequent generation? Or was all this trauma caused precisely by the ignorance of this thought process, this intellect of humanity, this disease process that outwardly we call the civilization that’s destroyed the Earth, and inwardly we can discover is the socially conditioned thought process that pretends to be me but is actually social in origin and orientation, and is more like a disease process that conditions and destroys the unity of the organism by dominating and controlling the brain and thus harvesting it’s activity and life energy for the manifestation of a vast and actually demonic life system that is the social historical process of humanity.
For me, civilization IS our karma manifest. It is the things we yet need to learn and understand, because when we understand something, we become free of it and can put it away. When we understand the vacuity and intrinsic meaninglessness of certain forms of popular entertainment for example, or the falseness of ossified old religious practices, we can put such things away. When we learn the worthlessness of seeking transcendence through sex and drugs, or the immeasurable cruelty of eating meat, or the immeasurable stupidity of trying to understand yourself and your life by following another, then we put away these things from our minds. When we understand the whole system of wealth which is based on exploitation and greed, we feel the dirty energy of money with our hands and eyes and smell it in the atmosphere of the rich, and do not want to touch it, even when we must, so put it away rom us as far as we can and hope to go beyond it. After all, money is other people’s blood, sweat, and the tears of a meaningless social existence turned into a liquid asset that is accumulated by the rich and greedy who obviously never did a fraction of the work and never actually sacrificed anything at all compared to all the life energy that went into making that wealth in the first place, because for the rich their work is their pleasure and delight. But for every million dollars made, there are uncountable millions of hours of wasted human potential and wasted human lives that went into making that money.
I realize why I think and write so differently. I can’t help seeing a single issue in relation to a whole and feel compelled to summarily reconstruct the whole that one sees through that part, if that makes sense. And it is exactly what perception does – see things as a whole. It’s also what the right brain does, seeing the parts only in relation to the whole. But the left brain breaks it all up but in my brain it’s being well behaved and sticking to the rules of the right brain. And if I don’t mention that here as it occurs to me I’ll probably forget it and never remember it again.
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“How can you place me in a sexist, racist, caste system of oppression, and when it breaks my spirit blame me and call me an illness?”. This thought-provoking question challenges those who unquestioningly rely on the flawed Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) for diagnoses. It calls attention to how societal systems of oppression, such as sexism, racism, poverty, trauma, and caste discrimination, are attributed to ‘mental illness’, and raises important inquiries about the practice of treating these social issues as individual problems.
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