Every time I put pen to paper about my story I shiver for I do not know what my pen will blacken the paper with. But I let it blacken, for maybe some part of the narrative will give further courage to another.
That night, I donât know when, perhaps in October 2024, my sister was rushing me in her car through the night. Our destinations were psychiatric hospitals or wards within general hospitals where my blood pressure and pulse could be brought down. She took me to three in the city, big ones. But to her and everyone who saw me I remained seemingly coherent, intelligent and threatening with legal action if they tried injecting anything. I told each person that I knew the law and they better be wary of me. I was calm and loud.
In one final location after which we returned home a young senior resident engaged me in a conversation and we talked mental health. I told her I had a PhD in the field and my new book had recently been released. She checked it out on her phone and found it true.
I was what could in psychiatric terms be seen as âpsychoticâ but I would not be bullied or pushed around, medicated or fussed over. My sister and mother for some time believed it was a psychiatric âillnessâ but I told them they could not prove me and my doctoral research wrong. There was no âillness,â only a grief in which I had gone overboard.
So what had happened?
Earlier in the year, in January of 2024, my father passed away. He passed away unexpectedly for me, perhaps a little expectedly for others. My father was laid in bed for a short span, the worst being the last four months. One day as he lay in bed, I was by his side and he said,
âI know you will go away.â
I said, âNo, Papa, there is no question of going away. Why would I? I have come here to be with you. I will not go away, no matter what.â
I do not know whether it placated him but he saw no efforts in me to leave the house I had returned to after 16 years. I had returned having settled my pets, my dear little dogs and cockatiels, at a friendâs house before embarking on distant voyages. Those voyages depended on many factors while Papaâs sudden infirmity featured nowhere in those plans. It was a possibility for a second doctoral research at a European University whose ball was in my court to put the tail end together, the dues they wanted cleared.
The PhD work would have been exciting and perhaps my dream project of doing music-based therapeutic peer work would have come together easily. Yet the soul has its own calling and seeing my father, the single propeller who fueled my musical engine, in such debility left me with little choice but to be by his side. On the 3rd of October 2023 when he went to hospital for the last time I had a meeting with my soon-to-be PhD supervisor, online. She was going to introduce me to a second supervisor-to-be. But Dad going to hospital a mere half an hour before the meeting changed the course. I met the two supervisors-to-be yet also felt the futility of everything I was vested in. I discussed research design nuances with them, yet bade adieu.
While concern for my father was the paramount issue, it took little to look away from something I had dreamed about for decades, crossed numerous stages to reach within a touching distance. The invitation letter had come, some fellowships had followed and a fee waiver, which left me with a small sum to pay.
But it was my father, ill unlike ever before. I kept thinking he would get better, for that was the norm in our family, we had all dealt with intractable health issues. Was I not healed from bipolar, after all? That too a disorder in which my life had been as though in a movie: hit or threatened someone or by someone in the neighbourhood, summoned to the police station, public brawls with I do not remember who all, singing in odd places and sleepless for long spells on multiple occasions. As I once wrote somewhere, âHow easy can it be to express your own chaos, even in hindsight?â
In addition to the pain of my sudden return to a city I was not fond of, seeing my dad suffer was heartbreaking. He was yelling in pain throughout the day. For one who had always been stoic, calm and commanding, seeing him suffer plunged my heart into helplessness. I did whatever was within my capacity, as did we all, but our combined helplessness and his shrinking form were truths I was unwilling to acknowledge.
Toward the end of my father’s life I could not sing, nor did he enjoy any music. But our past had been dotted with music in so many ways. For instance this ghazal, he had composed and nudged me to learn, but I had refused. Later I gulped my pride and saw how beautiful it was. I recorded it in 2005. Its lyrics roughly translate to: âYou have made this world so beautiful, it is easy to fall in love with it.â When I had lesser appreciation for this genre of poetry I thought the song was written for someoneâs sweetheart. Much later I learned that all such poetry was written to the infinite cosmic dimension of the universe, call it Supreme or God.
My father, an atheist his entire life, was still a man full of profound love; an ethical, deep, committed person in all roles he played. It was the love we received at home and the freedom to engage ideas of any kind, especially anti-authoritarian, that gave us the courage to question handed-down knowledge. The courage to question psychiatry principally came from my home environment. The comfort and love we all received in our home was a world of beauty, security, and ideas we imbibed from our parents, which make me still want to do something for another, regardless of my insufficiency or other disabling circumstances.
With Papa gone the house became empty. That five-storeyed house which always had people moving around on at least three floors became silent. One parent no more, the other left with a sibling and all others, the paid caregivers and the scores of people who would drop by to meet Dad, rang the doorbell no more. I only had a few students learning music, and the odd client who came for counseling. I tried other means of connecting back with the world but few expect someone in their fifties to need help. Few called to offer support to me. Though I had grown up in the city, the lack of continuity of connections, the severed links from the past, the hibernation due to years of study left me negligible options to connect back.
I do not say it was a world lacking in richness or depth, but it certainly lacked people. On the one hand it gave me the opportunity to delve deeply in relationships with whoever engaged with me from time to time, on the other it left me with a lot of time to grieve over my father and revisit the unacceptable reality of his demise and the emptying of the house.
That unending grief whose sources poured like little rivulets from different streams brought the âmeltdown.â I could not sleep and would remain awake through the nights working on music. I felt as though I could hear some celestial music and see things in realms unfathomable. I believed I could make sense of nonsense music and there was a universal harmonics at play whose code I had decoded. (I still believe this, though not the decoding part!)
The grief, lack of sleep, lack of food, and lack of day-to-day company of anyone except animals, plants and birds fissured my psychic defenses without me realizing.
Human suffering has diverse faces. To grind them down to behavioural problems, call them âillness,â goes against my grain. I do not believe anyone has a mental illness, or that there is an illness out there which the mind is afflicted by and with proper chemical intervention it can be overcome. My first book was about this idea, which came after decades of churning through mazes and hazes of burnouts, chemical and social violence(s) of diverse kinds and all sorts of experiences with alternative sources of healing, each beneficial to some extent. The presence of my Jungian therapist remains a bulwark of stability, a calm voice I turn to when everything seems to go against me, especially as there have been next to no friends.
For decades of my life I have been interested in understanding other perspectives on so-called mental health issues. After this latest experience, I am convinced more than ever that purported mental illness is nothing but a claim by a professional class whose interests and prestige are served by keeping people in the patient role. That is the subjectivation I am keenly aware of and now capable of extricating myself and others out of. What I have written about above happened in September-October 2024. I am back in form and the breach has been mended. But I was also acutely aware of many things, responsible for many and aware of responding to my physical debility. In the absence of these abilities and discernment for grounding oneself, anyone can go berserk, running helter-skelter, joining all the dots possible in the universe, all unfathomable communications.
I am not fond of the word âsurvivorâ for myself. I recognize that some feel it denotes valiant overcoming or possibly resilience, for me it simply does not work but I have no problem if someone uses it for themselves. Whichever storm it be, they survived it and came out alive. In our context it may be the storm of âpsychoticâ fury or the storm of psychiatric violence. I survived neither. Beyond the point where I gained enough capacity to keep my eyes open in spite of the raging blizzard I simply refused to be blown away. I was not medicated by anyone, nor allowed it, after the first 18 years of being in the patient role!
I think this capacity came from âgroundingâ over the years, in labours of diverse kinds â in music, writing, research, gardening, tending to my dogs, my home and tending to people wherever there was a scope for it. Living by myself I also had enough time to read and delve into ideas for years. Scores of these ideas are in diverse, unconnected areas and I continue on that path, reading and irrigating my mind from different channels. I have also been drawn into understanding my own experiences labeled as âpsychosisâ for decades of my life, a task enriched by my therapist who introduced me to Jungian and transpersonal psychology. From where I stand today I see an overlap between comparative mythology, consciousness studies, the collective unconscious, personal memory, spirituality, shamanic rites of passage and whatnot into experiences of sudden ecstasy, simplistically classified by the psychiatric professional.
In all spiritual traditions of the world there is evidence of spiritual and sudden experiences of âawakening.â In India there is the paradigm of the subtle body and at its base a coiled energy, the kundalini, rests. The latter is akin to a serpent that is gathered in a heap, dormant, yet keeps stirring and has sudden jumps and starts due to traumas and other experiences. The serpent power as it is called is a human potential within every person, and if this serpent power is awakened without due processes and mediation by the proper teacher, it can make someone go berserk. The sudden meltdown is what the professional tries to control but ends up harming profoundly, without a care for the one they claim to offer care to. When will they self-reflect on the nature of their âcareâ? Who needs such violent âcareâ?
Almost two decades ago I began an exploration into understanding transpersonal states and now dwell in a location where these states are not distant possibilities. With music and other nature-oriented engagements I stay closely connected with many states and sounds, my world richly populated with ideas, tones and harmonics. For me the entire world is music. Not full of music, it is music in its embodied form. People are music, whether tuneful or otherwise. The more we tune with Nature and reflect our inherent potential, the greater it syncs with our capacities. This sensibility constitutes the ethos of my work in peer psychotherapy (about which I will separately write someday) â how to tune people with their highest potential, and not let them languish in their psychiatrized selves.
No matter how many times I scatter, I gather my pieces every time and get down to my garden where souls dwell, waiting to be tended. After another such scattering this is the first article I write. The task of rebuilding has begun afresh. And no, I never sought refuge in psychiatry, not at all. I knew it was beyond them, beyond their capacity to comprehend. Having deconstructed âsubjectivation,â the least I can do is become a subject again.
“…I am convinced more than ever that purported mental illness is nothing but a claim by a professional class whose interests and prestige are served by keeping people in the patient role.”
That’s the God’s honest truth.
It would probably be easier to disabuse mental health professionals of their collective delusions regarding “mental illness” if prestige weren’t such a big part of the package.
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“The more we tune in with Nature and reflect our inherent potential, the greater it syncs with our capacities.”
Communion with Nature is the missing link in most people’s lives.
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Thank you @Birdsong, life in cities, packed quarters everywhere is particularly suited to mental suffering. The closer we connect with species beyond our own, the more we will relax at a deeper level. I am not particularly fortunate to have access to green spaces and that was a reason for the “meltdown” I wrote about but that does not take away the recognition of what matters. Sooner or later we have to get to what really matters, to heal our broken selves. Not giving up matters.
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Prateeksha, thank you for sharing your story. It is truly inspiring.
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Thank you for your deeply personal, brutally honest and courageous article – I am sure many, like me, will find strength to face our own demons and still sing to heal.
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Thanks @Arati Chokshi. I sincerely hope you, and others, will take a sliver of hope from this, for there is no reason I have for writing this except help build the capacity of another soul in pain to distinguish their pain from pathology. let it not keep you/another stymied from reaching y/our fullest potential and expression. Please sing if that is a source of your healing and let your Self heal itself from within. Singing has no substitute. I hope you know that too. Even though I myself am not singing these days, except with students, I hope to soon resume and get back on the path of self-reclamation
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Great article. Thank you.
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Thank you too @Julie.
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Dear Prateeksha jee.
Your life is full of courage and honesty This article is a manifestation of harsh realities of your life.
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I loved reading your article! May your courage always guide your footsteps. I am learning from you.
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