On September first, I sent the following letter to the president of the American Psychiatric Association.
September 1, 2025
To: Dr. Theresa Miskimen, President, American Psychiatric Association, 800 Maine Avenue, S.W., Suite 900, Washington, D.C. 20024, U.S.A.
Dear Dr. Miskimen,
I am writing to you to urge the American Psychiatric Association to make a solemn, public apology for having treated homosexuality as a mental illness. In 1962 my roommate at an all-boys’ boarding school in New England and I were forced to undergo two years of psychiatric conversion therapy to cure us of our homosexuality. We were sixteen years old. Subsequent to this psychiatric intervention, my friend committed suicide and I suffered an acute paranoid schizophrenic psychosis and was hospitalized for fifteen months and given large doses of Thorazine and Stelazine. In other words, psychiatrists destroyed our lives.
On December 15, 1973, the American Psychiatric Association decided that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. The Canadian Psychiatric Association had always said that it was not one. On June 21, 2019, the American Psychoanalytical Association apologized for having previously treated homosexuality as a mental illness. Conversion therapy for homosexuals is now illegal in all of Canada as well as in 26 American states. The Canadian government has declared it to be a form of torture.
Considering the harm that American psychiatrists did to homosexuals because of their mistaken view that homosexuality was a mental illness, it would be most appreciated to see the American Psychiatric Association apologize for the suffering that psychiatrists once inflicted on homosexuals. It is needless to say that psychiatrists pocketed thousands of dollars in torturing young homosexuals. The failure to apologize brings untold pain to us victims.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Dole, Ph.D.
She has not replied. I was tempted to write: “It goes without saying that she has not replied,” and then I wondered why I should have thought that she would not take the trouble to answer my letter. Any form of response would have meant so much to me, perhaps something so simple as “Although it is unlikely that the American Psychiatric Association will ever make a public apology for any of its former shortcomings, I would like to assure you that I am personally sorry for all the hardships that you and your friend went through during your adolescence.”
For four years, from the age of sixteen until the age of twenty, I was tortured by American psychiatrists who suffered under the delusion that homosexuality was a mental illness. To add to this injury of sixty years ago, I now receive the insult of being totally ignored by the president of the American Psychiatric Association. Simple politeness requires some sort of response to my letter, no matter how short it might be. So once again I am faced with what I discovered in my youth to be the real truth about psychiatrists: all that interests them is their power, their prestige and their money. They do no care about their patients’ wellbeing unless their intervention brings them greater power, prestige or money.
Saying that homosexuality was a mental illness was not the only mistake that psychiatrists made and that affected my life in tragic ways. The other mistake was their assumption that schizophrenia is incurable. According to Sylvia Nasar, in her book A Beautiful Mind, psychiatrists wondered if they had been wrong in giving John Nash the diagnosis of schizophrenia, since he managed to recover from his mental illness and “schizophrenia, as everyone knows, is incurable.” When I was incarcerated at McLean Hospital, I had to struggle constantly against my psychiatrists’ conviction that I was destined to be a psychiatric patient forever. One psychiatrist told me that I should never return to Harvard. Another one told me that when I arrived at McLean I was the most severely mentally ill person “that we have ever seen here.” My therapist ended every session with the quotation: “I never promised you a rose garden.” The McLean psychiatrists told my parents that they should sell their house since they expected me to be confined forever. Instead, my parents simply moved me to a less expensive hospital, from which I was liberated after just two months. For the past 59 years I have led a most wonderful life without once consulting a psychiatrist or taking psychiatric medicine.
My story is obviously a scandal, for it raises a very important question: since psychiatrists were wrong in saying that homosexuality is a mental illness and that schizophrenia is incurable, then is it possible that they are wrong about everything else? Contemporary American psychiatry is based on several false assumptions that result in absurdities.
The first false assumption is that a mental illness is an illness of the soma, or body, and not of the psyche, or soul and mind. Psychiatrists treat mental illness as though it were a problem of the brain, which belongs to the soma and not the psyche. Their obsession that mental illness results from a biochemical imbalance in the brain exemplifies this attitude. It has been documented by Robert Whitaker and others that pharmaceutical companies paid millions of dollars to psychiatrists for them to write positive reviews of their new types of psychiatric medicine. It was a gigantic hoax. You can put pills into the body but not into the soul. You can give electric shocks, insulin shocks, and lobotomies to the body but not to the soul. Medical doctors are intellectually unprepared to deal with psychological problems since they have not studied books dealing with the psyche. To do so, they should read the classics of world literature, starting with the Greek tragedies and the Old Testament. Biochemistry textbooks have nothing to say about the infinite mysteries of the psyche, the mind and the soul. It were as though psychiatrists simply denied the existence of the psyche. Consulting a psychiatrist who denies the reality of the psyche is as useless as being treated by a dentist who thinks that teeth do not exist.
Another false assumption of contemporary psychiatry is the widespread idea that pain and suffering are abnormal conditions that require psychiatric treatment. In reality, pain and suffering are permanent, universal aspects of the human condition. It is simply a delusion to think that any life can be lived without hardships and anguish. People simply have to learn to live with their pain as well as they can. Psychiatrists want their patients to think that they know more about their patient’s life than the patient does. However, the psychiatrist only knows what the patient tells him, and what the patient tells the psychiatrist about himself is only a very small fraction of what the patient really knows about himself. I remember sitting in front of so many psychiatrists who had nothing to say because they knew nothing about me. They knew nothing because I realized quite rightly that they were not intellectually equipped to begin to understand the complications of my life, the problems of my mind and the mysteries of my soul. When I realised at the age of sixteen that I should never trust any psychiatrist, I began on my road to salvation.
Since you cannot put pills into a psyche, with what can you feed it? With beauty, with love, with faith, with hope, with friendship, with kindness, with sympathy. These are the elements of good mental health and they cannot be found in a psychiatrist’s office or in a mental hospital or in a pharmacy. The central message of the Christian religion is this: that God came into this world to tell us to love one another. I believe that the only true cure for mental illness is love. The only employee at McLean Hospital who actually helped me was a young Afro-American janitor who befriended me and shared the secrets of his personal life with me.
Like so many schizophrenics, I struggled with God. I knew that no psychiatrist could begin to understand the importance of my relationship with God. The famous Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz said: “When man speaks to God, it is called prayer. When God speaks to man, it is schizophrenia.” I assumed that all psychiatrists were atheists and that they would have nothing but derision for my religious experiences. It is fashionable to say that God does not exist, but the relationship between man and God certainly does exist. I said to myself: “If I tell my psychiatrist that I am convinced that God loves me, he will think that I am suffering from delusions of grandeur.” And yet, now, sixty years later, I know for a fact that my faith in God, so profound, so mysterious, so precious enabled me to survive the horrors of psychiatry.
The following is the statement of the American Psychoanalytic Association in which it apologizes for having treated homosexuality as a mental illness. I would like the American Psychiatric Association to make a similar statement.
“New York, NY – June 21, 2019. The American Psychoanalytic Association is apologizing for their past views that pathologized homosexuality and transgender identities. The apology comes as the nation is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in New York City when patrons of that now-historic establishment fought back against anti-LGBTQ prejudice, hatred and oppression. The announcement kicked off the start of their 109th Annual Meeting taking place in San Diego.
In 1969, homosexuality was considered a mental illness and sexual orientation was conflated with gender identity by the mental health field. This led to many being coerced, either by force or choice, into traumatic and harmful methods to ‘cure’ homosexual desires and non-confirming gender identities. This belief also contributed to widespread discrimination and prejudice in housing, employment, healthcare, and in society at large.
‘Regrettably some of that era’s understanding of homosexuality and gender identity can be attributed to the American psychoanalytical establishment,’ said Lee Jaffe, president of APsaA. ‘It is long past time to recognize and apologize for our role in the discrimination and trauma caused by our profession.’
In the past several decades, APsaA has been advocating for LGBTQ equality. In 1967, the association became the first mental health organization to support marriage equality and has since been issuing position statements and lobbying to end conversion therapy, to lift the ban on LGBTQ people serving in the military, to address bullying and harassment of LGBTQ youth, and to advance civil rights overall.
‘While APsaA is now proud to be advocating for sexual and gender diversity, we all know that hearing the words ‘we are sorry’ is important to healing past trauma,’ said Jaffe.”
What You Can Do
Please tell the president of the American Psychiatric Association that you hope that her association will apologize for having treated homosexuality as a mental illness. You can write her a letter at the address given above in my letter to her, or you can send her an email at [email protected]. Or you can phone her at 202-559-3900. This issue is especially important now, since the United States Supreme Court has been asked to invalidate state laws that prohibit conversion therapy.
I need your help in organizing a Me-Too Movement for Victims of Psychiatric Abuse. Psychiatric abuse is a gigantic taboo. We victims should make our voices be heard.
The author’s criticism of the psychiatric profession’s smugness, apathy, and arrogance, as well as its harmful practices, is entirely justified, but I cannot accept his inappropriate characterization of emotional distress as mental illness of the “psyche, mind, or soul.”
Such terms as sickness, disorder, pathology, etc. are valid only in reference to conditions arising from an underlying physical cause verifiable through careful tests and findings. States of mind, being incorporeal, cannot be diagnosed or treated except in a metaphorical sense. The many hundreds of metaphorical labels arbitrarily assigned to widely disparate emotions, thoughts, and patterns of behavior are inevitably determined by the ever-changing cultural milieu–as one can readily see from the APA’s sudden reversal of its position on homosexuality in 1973.
In short, it’s high time to abandon the misleading use of medical terms that stigmatize individuals who struggle with problems in living. Their souls are not sick.
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Using terms of physical sickness to refer to unhappy states of the mind, soul, heart, or psyche is as old as Western Civilization. In the Old Testament we find these words: “I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love” (Song of Solomonm 5:8).
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But used as a metaphor.
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Exactly!
Why should the Old Testament or any other ancient western texts be considered the universally valid, authoritative basis for defining the nature of human suffering?
Other traditions–shamanism, Huna, yoga, for example–approach this matter from a different perspective.
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Each person has his own culture. When I refer to books, they are the books that I have read. I am more familiar with European literature than with Huna and yoga.
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“But used as metaphor.”
That’s the key distinction psychiatry takes advantage of.
They knowingly misuse metaphor to unconsciously dehumanize people for being who they are or how they feel: “depressed”, “schizophrenic”, “neurotic”, “bipolar”, “personality disordered”, or however someone identifies themselves sexually—or not.
Morally inspired immorality. The antithesis of diagnostic neutrality.
Psychiatric shaming has Judeo-Christian roots.
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“Sick mind,” isnt that a metaphor John Donne used?
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Loved reading this at 1 am, shared it to my threads.
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Thanks for a very well written article, you make great points. Psychiatry routinely claims an ability to be certain about its views, so it doesn’t have to listen to the “mad” people who challenge it. To admit being wrong about something important, even in the distant past, undermines that claim to certainty – so it is avoided. The sad thing is that psychiatry can actually be of some use if psychiatrists can admit to being uncertain – and I heard an Open Dialogue psychiatrist once talk about what a relief it was to start working in the Open Dialogue model where she didn’t have to pretend to be certain and could instead talk about various possibilities.
I also think the story about the janitor being the helpful one is very important. Being human is central to being helpful!
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Ron, if the fundamental premise of psychiatry (i.e. manifold states of emotional distress can be reliably divided into hundreds of discrete diagnosible and treatable disorders) is fallacious and merely a self-serving motive for often ineffective if not downright harmful practices, I fail to see what benefits it offers that outweigh its common well documented risks. Unless you can present convincing arguments to the contrary, further debate about reforming this pseudo-science in order to exploit its “various possibilities” would seem quite pointless to me.
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I certainly agree with you that the whole enterprise of dividing distress into hundreds of disorders is a flawed project, but I think if we dumped that idea, there would still be some use for psychiatrists. They would be much more humble, but they would still be able to offer the possibility of cautiously prescribing drugs when nothing else was working. And what we’ve found is that even with the most well informed psychological and social approaches, like Open Dialogue, there still are times when it may make sense to use drugs for at least a while.
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I see no possible justification for administering potent drugs to numb the brains of people whose emotional distress is due to harrowing circumstances, not to a physical illness such as dementia that disrupts their cognitive functions.
What exactly do you mean by the phrase “when nothing else is working?” ECT, lobotomies, insulin coma therapy, antipsychotics, and other brain-disabling treatments can certainly “work,” but in my estimation the harm they cause over the short or long-term is far too severe to justify their use.
Lastly, you speak of psychiatrists becoming “more humble.” Given the mindset typical of those who are drawn to this profession, this strikes me as an extremely unlikely prospect. Just read Dr. Phillip S.’s graphic account of the humiliation and physical torture he experienced at the hands of mental health professionals in the UK.
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I disagree with your use of extremely unlikely. It would be more akin to getting struck by lightning once a week for the rest of your life.
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While people’s distress and confusion is typically a reaction to what happened to them, once it gets going it is a big problem in itself, and can completely ruin people’s life if they can’t figure out how to deal with it. I think social and psychological approaches like Open Dialogue, individual therapy, hearing voices groups etc. should be what we try first, but if they don’t work for someone, I certainly understand why someone would want to try something like an antipsychotic drug despite its dangers. If we really want to support choice we do need to recognize that some people will choose drugs and will want someone with a medical degree to help them with that.
One reason I believe it is possible for psychiatrists to be humble is because some of them already are. I recently organized a webinar with one such psychiatrist, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZOVYXfmHog&t=1s
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Ron, the problem is that many people don’t choose to try antipsychotic drugs/neuroleptics. Lots of people continue to be routinely forced to take these drugs in mental hospitals. If I had been refusing to take a neuroleptic at the hospital, I would have been injected with it. I had no right to refuse it. No one asked for my consent.
Moreover, it is much more difficult to get any financial support from the welfare system if a person diagnosed with a psychotic illness refuses to take psychiatric drugs. I personally know a person in the UK who has been pretending for many years that he is taking a neuroleptic because he does not want to lose his benefits.
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Th other day I told a psychiatrist that anticonvulsants lower Folate and Vitamin B12 and he asked me if I was sure, and he’s been prescribing them for years.
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I just saw this TikTok where a young woman was absolutely losing it because ten minutes into her first appointment, her psychiatrist asked, “So, what do you think you should be prescribed?”She went off like: “Bro, that’s literally why I’m HERE. I’m paying you the big bucks to tell ME what I need, not to flip the question back on me! I’m not the one with the medical degree!” The whole comment section was people either relating hard or debating whether doctors should actually ask that. Wild.
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I agree.
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Well, Ron, I certainly support choice, but only if it’s based on INFORMED consent.
How many mature, intelligent adults would willingly choose to take antipsychotic drugs or undergo ECT if they were fully and properly apprised of all the well-documented risks? Needless to mention the elderly dementia patients in nursing homes, or underage children confined in juvenile detention facilities, who are involuntarily subjected to brain-disabling treatments on a routine basis.
Speaking from my own lived experience, and judging from numerous accounts by psychiatric survivors featured on the MIA website, finding a credentialed mental health “specialist” without an overblown ego and savior complex may not be impossible, but it’s quite unlikely. Just read Dr. Phillip S.’s story of his hospitalization in the UK if you need confirmation,
Let me conclude by paraphrasing Dr. Peter Goetzsche: The worst thing a person in emotional distress could do is consult a psychiatrist. The outcome of such a visit will invariably be a DSM-based diagnosis and a prescription for a potent neurotoxin.
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I agree, only informed consent is real choice. But while many would or do refuse psych drugs if/when fully informed, others would (and do) still see some use for them, often because they have terrible problems without them, and sometimes even seemingly good social and psychological assistance seems not to work.
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Ron, countless millions of people throughout the world ingest alcohol and mood-altering drugs, or smoke various noxious substances, in an effort to cope with their intractable “terrible problems.”
Psychiatry’s use of addictive neurotoxins, disingenuously promoted as “medications” for what is really a fictional chemical imbalance or imaginary defects of brain circuitry, is nothing but legalized drug-pushing. That being the case, this profession has no rightful claim to be a branch of medicine, which is meant to offer healing remedies for genuine medical conditions, NOT for existential problems in living. The psychiatric cult’s claim to legitimacy is therefore a baseless, self-serving justification for the widespread iatrogenic harm of its practices. The fact that such a situation is allowed to continue, unhindered by the regulatory agencies tasked with safeguarding public health and welfare, speaks volumes about the nature of our economic and political system.
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I would agree that a lot of psychiatric prescribing amounts to legalized drug pushing, because it is done without things like open minded evaluation of all the long term consequences, or the possible alternatives. But it is still possible for a person to be having severe problems with extreme states of mind, to have tried other options, and to want to have the choice of getting help from a medical expert in using a substance in the most helpful and least destructive way to help relieve the crisis. A person who can offer that help, providing accurate information and a balanced evaluation of the risks of either taking or not taking the drug, and honoring the right of the person to decide how to handle those risks, can be a helpful psychiatrist. This type of person may be rare, but is possible, so psychiatry does have some legitimate claim to exist, even if as you point out, most of its claims are illegitimate.
Anyway, those will be my final thoughts in this conversation…..
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Ron, these are my own final thoughts on the advisability of prescribing neurotoxins for people in emotional distress who cannot envisage any other alternative to ingesting substances that have been proven to cause conditions such as tardive dyskinesia, obesity, and permanent sexual dysfunction.
First, I don’t consider psychiatrists to be medical specialists in the strict sense of the term, inasmuch as the existential problems they deal with in the great majority of their cases do not arise from a verifiable physical disorder. Thus I think it’s totally inappropriate and even unethical for them to recommend brain-disabling treatments of any kind no matter how desperate a client may feel, unless a specific physical cause for his or her state of mind can be found and diagnosed. And as Thomas Szasz rightly pointed out, if and when such an underlying physiological factor is properly identified, the case in question should be referred to a genuine medical practitioner e.g. a neurologist, who has the qualifications to treat it. Otherwise, a psychiatrist will continue to randomly prescribe successive drug cocktails or recommend ECT, with their predictable debilitating outcomes, for symptomatic relief (i.e. possible emotional stunting and ahedonia).
In short, if all that remains for a psychiatrist to do in intractable cases is administering a chemical lobotomy, the very same numbing or euphoric effect can be achieved with alcohol, glue-sniffing, or a wide assortment of narcotics. No need then to consult a high-priced psychotherapist.
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Finally, some real insight that once again could only have come from a non-psychiatrist.
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I didn’t realize the APA never apologized but it’s not surprising . I have been reading a lot of psychiatrists’ musings on substack and I must say that acknowledging patient harms or discrimination against patients almost never comes up. In fact it’s a third rail topic even among non-psychiatric physicians. Doctors have a self-image of beneficence (that’s the actual word they use—like we are in the Victorian or maybe even Hippocratic era haha ) that overwhelms simply observing and acknowledging basic reality.
What you said about disregard for patient outcomes in favor of amassing money and power resonated.
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Too many psychiatrists are egotistical sadists with saviour complexes, just like cops. They love nothing more than dismissing a person’s entire life and torturing them “for their own good.”
Now they’d be like, “but if I’m not allowed to torture them, how will they ever get better?” Psychiatrists and cops would both say that.
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The psychiatric rationale for its harmful treatments is akin to the argument used by medieval inquisitors: torture the victim’s body for the sake of the higher purpose of purging and saving his immortal soul.
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Joel, in my opinion it is also crucial to remember that psychiatrists serve the interests of mainstream society. First of all, they protect the comfort of “mentally healthy”, but narrow-minded and intolerant people, including the parents, partners and other family members of the “mentally ill”. (Of course I don’t claim that every person without a psychiatric diagnosis is narrow-minded and intolerant).
Secondly, psychiatrists know that patients on neuroleptics tend to have a short life expectancy. So “maintenance treatment” can be actually a way of getting rid of “undesirable” people, even if psychiatrists themselves are not aware of this hidden motive. As I know from my own experience, a person can be pressured to take neuroleptics only because of his/her diagnostic label.
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Yes, Joanna, Thomas Szasz made that same observation decades ago, pointing out the psychiatry functions as one pillar of an oppressive social order, whether communist, Nazi, or neoliberal/capitalist. In fact, psychiatric hospitals are worse than prisons, inasmuch as patients can be held indefinitely at the whim of their overseers, whereas prison inmates receive a sentence.
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Joel, yes, I also find Szasz’s term “undesirables” very accurate. There is something so cruel in lifelong psychiatric drugging and people are so often brainwashed into thinking that they need these drugs. And yes, psychiatric hospitals are worse than prisons: there is no sentence and one can’t refuse to take psychiatric drugs.
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Robert, I am sorry to hear of the torment and tragic events you and your roommate endured because of psychiatry. Arrogance and inability to ever admit to a mistake, or even some uncertainty, is psychiatry’s mode of operating.
You state it well – “all that interests them is their power, their prestige and their money”.
I do agree with Joel though, in not characterizing emotional distress as mental illness of the “psyche, mind, or soul.”
There should be a #MeToo movement for those harmed by psychiatry. It would be massive! Sadly there are so many who have already had their voices snuffed out by psychiatry and are no longer able to speak out.
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Emotional distress is obviously not a physical problem. If emotional distress does not affect the psyche, mind or soul, then what does it affect?
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I think it’s more about the philosophy and epistemology behind the use of the word “illness”, or “disease”, “disorder”, etc. Illnesses are problems but not all problems are illnesses. Is a strained marriage suffering from a “marital detatchment disorder?”
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Dead soul,
People still use the language of “illness” metaphorically in such contexts. They may not call it “marital detachment disorder,” per se, but people use words like “healthy”/”unhealthy”/”toxic” to describe relationships all the time. These are all different versions of health/sickness metaphors.
-Jasmine
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Recently I suffered rapidly changing blood pressure that left me light headed, feeling like death and going to what in the UK we call A&E, in the US, Emergency Room. Tests revealed nothing and reasuring words from a Dr serms to have put an end to about a month of torment. So I say emotional distress, in this case health worries, kicked off spectacular physical health effects. All gone now, thankfully.
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Although emotional distress affects the mind I don’t believe it’s a “mental illness” or “mental disorder”, but rather normal, expected thoughts and feelings when having to deal with abnormal, cruel or distressing situations in life.
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I agree.
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Hello Dr. Dole,
I am currently in Massachusetts and would like to purchase a copy of your book about your experience as a patient at McLean hospital. I am interested in reading first hand accounts by former McLean patients. I have experienced- as a patient- some questionable treatment provided from the hospital. If you would be so kind to email me info on how I may read or access your book in America. I have only been able to find it available on Amazon in English in Belgium.
I look forward to reading it!
Thank You!
Kristina
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Robert, thank you for yet another really, really great essay!
But of course homosexuality is a mental illness – just like heterosexuality and any other sexuality, and all sexuality every other aspect of our human confusion/existence!
“La folie, c’est de n’avoir pas d’autres normes que soi-même!”
https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/smq/2015-v40-n2-smq02067/1033041ar/
“Emotional distress is obviously not a physical problem. If emotional distress does not affect the psyche, mind or soul, then what does it affect?” you ask.
I think “emotional distress” – stress – arises as and when the agitation of the mind affects the body – in the absence of (sufficient) oversight by our higher faculties, our “higher” or our “deeper” “self.”
I prefer the term “emotional disturbance” to “emotional distress” as I think the former is an even funnier tautology, emotions BEING disturbances:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/emotion ,
and even positive emotions leaving at least some taste of its polar opposite (more tautology!) in its wake, possibly as toxic by-products or breakdown products of the neurotransmitters involved in the positive emotion are metabolized, and/or as we crave the next hit or emotional high, and regret how fleeting and unsatisfying each one is?
I believe all emotions do affect the body, both in the short and in the long term (the adverse ones most negatively, of course), and that most if not all illness has at least some psychosomatic component, as modern medicine may now, at last, be ?rediscovering daily.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qINdA6E14Sk
I also suspect that our “neurotic conditions,” our anxiety-depression or anxiety/depression, in all its myriad forms, our fatigue, brain fog etc., but especially our more depressive symptoms, may at least sometimes represent a manifestation of general “sickness behavior” in response to either physical illness and/OR to any adversity:
“It has been proposed that major depressive disorder is nearly identical with sickness behavior, raising the possibility that it is a maladaptive manifestation of sickness behavior due to abnormalities in circulating cytokines.[28][29][30] Moreover, chronic, but not acute, treatment with antidepressant drugs was found to attenuate sickness behavior symptoms in rodents.”
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickness_behavior
I suspect much if not yet all spiritual teaching may agree on “Die before you die, and realize that there is no death” – except that of the ego, of the unobserved mind, of our thoughts/emotions when not overseen by our higher awareness, our “souls?”
“Deny thyself,” Jesus is reported as exhorting, presumably meaning your false self, your self which belives that you are merely your mind – “like a dead branch cut off from the vine.”
If we define our “mind” as our thoughts+emotions, and our “psyches” as our (seeming) individual consciousness, then our souls might be
our psyches minus our minds,
depending on whether or not one sees “spirit/”spark” as yet another element or aspect of the mix?
“Interestingly, in the classical Buddhist science of mind in which I am trained, there is no concept of emotion as a single category that precisely corresponds to the understanding of emotion in contemporary western psychology. Indeed, there is no word in either Sanskrit or classical Tibetan that exactly translates to the word “emotion.” Instead, all mental states are understood to include both cognitive and feeling dimensions to some degree, and to contain five omnipresent mental factors, of which “feeling” is one. The other four are discrimination, volition, attention, and contact. So even a cognitive mental process as simple as counting from one to ten is regarded as having some kind of “feeling” or “feeling tone,” which naturally is related to context.”
– from Page 115 of “BEYOND RELIGION Ethics for a Whole World,” by (“His Holiness”) the Dalai Lama XIV.
“Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body’s reaction to your mind — or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.”
― Eckhart Tolle, “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment.”
It may be that all the great spiritual teachers of the past might agree, also, that “the mind is maya,” that the mind, left to his own devices, is madness, is “sin,” is suffering,” is “mentally ill,” being mental!
And, as a professor of English, you probably know that various European languages lack a word for “mind,” and as a reader of the Gospel of Mark, you may know that Mark gave us two particularly interesting passages about the teaching life of Jesus of Nazareth, as he told it, one where “his family” felt that Jesus had lost his mind and another where he was very egoically provoked to anger:
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Mark%203%3A21
and
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/does-the-gospel-of-mark-reveal-jesus-anger-or-his-compassion/
And I love
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2024%3A36-41%2CJohn%2020%3A19-27&version=NIV;NET :
“Why are you frightened?”…..
‘Cos instead of knocking on our locked door and announcing yourself like a normal human being, Dude, you just bleeping appear in here, like a bleeping ghost, is why!
And then, perhaps in some “you-look-like-I–need-a-drink exasperation:
….”Do you have anything here to eat?”
…so that one more time we can try and go through all this ‘The-Kingdom-is-withIN-you, Dudes’ stuff, and the so-we-are-all-immortal-beings stuff, again?
And you just gotta wonder – I do, anyway – if Jesus not only lived and breathed (and lives, still, as I, for one, believe he does, like all our ancestors do), and if he had been gay or bi and come out, how very much different our history and not just our DSM’s would have been – even if his burn-out or “physician burn-out” escaped any DSM because it was characterized as “a psychological condition” and not as a “psychiatric” one, as a prominent psychiatrist publicly told me his profession preferred to call it, “rather than risk stigmatization and inhibiting colleagues from seek appropriate help!”
BTW: When I asked a top vet epidemiologist why they were covering up the untoward effects of culling badgers on bovine Tb in Ireland, he replied,
“You see, Tom, when you make a mistake, you can’t admit it,” meaning that, as a professional, he did not feel safe admitting to an error, and especially to one which might embarrass his profession, his profession’s governing body, the Veterinary Council of Ireland, and his civil servant superiors and his and their and political masters/mistresses – not to mention unleashing God knew how many class actions.
I think “Primum, non nocere!” is particularly pernicious first principle, and that by emphasizing SAFETY FIRST! instead of Safety Fourth (after 1. Try to keep your sense of humor; 2. Try to be comfortable; 3. THEN you will surely be humane…and 4. Safety should be a non-issue) if anywhere, it puts medical professionals on the defensive, and that defensive (a.k.a. c.y.a. a.k.a. cover-your-ass) medicine is downright dangerous, by its very nature.
Telling any professional “First, do no harm!” may seem harmless, like telling a child some Ten Commandments.
But is either helpful, actually – or more likely harmful?
“Why would I even think of deliberately doing harm?! What kind of a miscreant do you take me for?!” a young doc might justifiably ask someone asking her to so swear or affirm or undertake.
And if I were offered a job by someone who then emphasized to me that I must not cheat or lie or steal or sleep etc. on the job, or sleep with the boss’s spouse (even if a certain Commandment only tells me not to covet my neighbor’s wife, but not her or his husband!) on the clock, I hope I could and would look for work elsewhere!
What crazy worlds we have created!
“The human condition: lost in thought.” – Eckhart Tolle in “Stillness Sleeps.”
Thanks, again, Robert!
Comfort and joy, and many, many happy days!
Tom.
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This is such a long thread I have missed many comments! Thank you for making this point Rosalee.
Sometimes we are so – justifiably – enraged by our own experience that we forget they are common and ongoing.
We forget that people are dying (uncounted and unacknowledged) from the decades of continuing refusal to admit the harms of dangerous drugs and drug practices. Sustained by the ubiquitous dehumanising attitudes which are the direct result of the lies of the narrative of “diseases” and “illness”.
This can happen to the most privileged, and we – who have the privilege of speaking here- do not know about the lives lost or ruined – who have no support, no resources, no way to advocate for themselves.
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Hi Freya, Yes long threads now. There was no option to reply to your previous reply so I want to thank you for your very kind words. I am so sorry to hear of what your brother endured and how they were okay if he was to die. I am so glad he had you to advocate for him and is doing much better. Once a psychiatrist gives someone a mental health label they are easily dehumanized, considered defective and undeserving of dignity, respect or compassion. I believe psychiatry counts on people staying silent because of the stigma of the labels. I wanted others to know what happened with the psychiatrist I saw so I posted a review on RateMD. I made sure to follow the guidelines and only stated the facts as to what occurred with me. I tried 4 times. Each time my review was up for 2 or 3 weeks before ‘someone’ got it removed. It should not be possible for psychiatrists who are dishonest, callous and unethical to abuse their power to destroy innocent lives without any accountability or consequences. I do wish there could be a #MeToo movement as Robert noted, for those who have no support or way to advocate for themselves, as I am sure it would be massive. Thanks again, and much love and solidarity to you Freya!
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Thank you Rosalee,
There is a long lived movement called the “psychiatric survivor movement” – used as an umbrella term by a lot of us.
It’s fragmented and silenced by the structural barriers which prevent us getting attention and traction –
As you said this is due to stigma and discrimination – largely promoted and maintained by clinical attitudes and beliefs and the structural, cultural and narrative-controlling power that psychiatry has as a profession.
The actual power of psychiatry is the power to silence people and to lock them up and drug them.
Legal and material power to control both our bodies and our voices is what sustains and causes the stigma. Stigma is a product of this ability to inflict violence ( which is what I think we need to call it), not the cause of it in my opinion.
Many are working hard to raise awareness of the harms of psychiatry, I have seen #iatrogenicharm, #psychiatricharm and others. Don’t have public awareness enough – most have no idea of the reality.
But we keep going and connecting in places like this!
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Freya, what you say is very interesting, but how to explain e.g. the very positive changes in the situation of gays and lesbians? Systemic (including psychiatric) violence used to be perpetrated against them, but they are now much more accepted than psychiatric survivors. Conversion therapy was rejected because of changes in the attitudes towards gays and lesbians. Sadly, it is much more difficult to change the attitudes towards the “mentally ill”.
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Hi Joanna, I would say it is just a matter of a difference in the power and number of the structural barriers that exist (which I think I attempted to list somewhere else on this thread 😀 )
The one you mention – attitudes – are based in lies and myths about incompetence and danger and diseases, those ideas come from somewhere.
Stigmatising attitudes are supported by something (ideology, false narratives, power of medicine, legal and state power).
Other liberation movements faced stigmatising stories and discrimination too.
I think its a major factor that our bodies are still literally not free – we are disabled and poor from harmful drugs and iatrogenic trauma, we can be legally silenced and locked up if we disagree.
And, psychiatry and it’s stories are very convenient. It gives us a simple story for our distress or differences and keeps disturbing people out of the way when they aren’t doing anything which can be called criminal.
I’m probably not explaining well – because it’s The Question isn’t it?
But civil rights movements took time and still have not achieved their goals or full rights – some are going backwards – so it’s not surprising for many reasons.
I think most people haven’t even heard of the survivor movement because any who do speak up are faced c a be discredited and are just faced with the enormous financial legal and cultural power of massive institutions and industries. Even if they don’t have a stigmatising label. This website and Mad in movement is here because of those barriers and how powerful they really are, don’t you think?
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Thank you for your reply to my comment, Freya! From my personal perspective the main problem is stigma. Fortunately I don’t have a disability caused by psychiatric drugs (I took them only for a short time) and I don’t risk being involuntarily committed, but I am afraid of talking publicly about my experiences because of societal attitudes towards psychiatric survivors.
I am in a situation where it would be very risky to be open (I am not using my real surname here) – too many people continue to take psychiatric diagnoses very seriously. It’s really sad because I am a very good example of a person who has enormously benefitted from rejecting a psychiatric diagnosis and psychiatric drugs.
I totally agree with you that societal attitudes towards the “mentally ill” are based in myths and stereotypes on dangerosity, unpredictability etc. Moreover many psychiatric survivors accept the psychiatric narrative about them. And of course psychiatric survivors often live in poverty and isolation and have little (if any) influence on the mainstream discourse.
I also agree with you that the psychiatric narrative is very convenient and reassuring: according to this narrative there are simply some people with abnormal brains who should obediently take their medication and who should be treated in a patronizing way. People who embrace this narrative tend to assume that they are safe, that “mental illness” and all its consequences would never happen to them or their family.
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Thanks Joanna, I very much agree with you – sorry if my reply was a bit confused. I was thinking about how the stigma is so “sticky”.
I’m coming from the idea that stigma – or discrimination which is what it is – is not just a personal attitude, but is created and perpetuated by structural power.
I don’t use my full name – probably pointlessly -for all sorts of privacy reasons
But I think everyone here knows very well that it can still have very serious consequences to be identified as “mad” in certain places and situations, so anonymity is an important, rational action to protect our selves.
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Freya, I did not find your reply in the least confused. And I agree with you – the stigma towards the “mentally ill” is inextricably linked to the fact that they can be locked up and forcibly drugged.
Stigma is certainly never merely a personal attitude and I, too, think that it is impossible to overcome this stigma as long as most people see forced psychiatric treatment as justified.
Regarding anonymity, I do hope that one day psychiatric survivors will be able to talk about their experiences without fearing stigmatization and patronization.
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“There should be a #MeToo movement for those harmed by psychiatry. It would be massive! ”
Agreed. If *I* hadn’t have gone through the system since July 2012, I would’ve never believed anyone.
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“Me, Too” started with a single post on Twitter. Anyone want to get us started?
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Emotional distress affects the mind, but not in the same way as a genuine illness like dementia. You mistakenly conflate metaphor with physical reality-a conflation that provides biomedical psychiatry with a convenient rationale to administer its sinister brain-disabling treatments under the guise of therapy.
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Precisely.
Psychiatry’s power lies in weaponizing metaphors with moral implications—blaming the person themselves for the psychic distress society, and psychiatry itself, creates.
Which then creates a never-ending cycle of linguistic deception meant to protect psychiatry’s HOLD ON POWER.
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Yes, all authoritarian and totalitarian systems of control seek to manipulate and distort language in order to create an alternate reality in which people find it increasingly difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood.
Psychiatry’s penchant for “weaponizing metaphors with moral implications,” to use your apt expression, is a graphic example of such linguistic legerdemain. Over the decades its deceptive jargon has so shaped public perception of emotional distress that even supposed advocates of psychiatric reform often continue to make use of medicalized language, e.g. mental illness, symptom, disorder, behavioral dysfunction disturbance, psychotherapy, psychopathology.
This deliberate conflation has serious consequences for those who are stigmatized by degrading labels and subjected to ineffective or harmful treatments for states of mind that are only hypothesized, not proven, to have a physical cause.
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Thank you, Joel. I really appreciate your command of the English language.
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Thanks for the kind compliment, Birdsong.
I was a professional translator and occasional editor, so I’m sensitive to linguistic nuances. Psychiatry’s use of misleading medicalized metaphors is egregious and grates on me.
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Hello Joel, Just out of curiosity, which languages did you translate? I also worked as a translator, so we have much in common.
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I mostly translated professionally from Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian, less frequently from German, Hungarian, and Czech. I majored in Slavic languages and can read all of them with varying degrees of fluency.
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Hello Joel, That is fantastic! I am always interested in polyglots’ stories. Did you grow up in a bilingual or polyglot environment? In which university did you major in Slavic languages? Which eastern European countries have you lived in?
Just by listening to Zelensky every day, I have been learning Ukrainian for the past three years. Would you agree with me that Ukrainian is closer to Polish than it is to Russian?
We thus have four languages in common: English, Polish, German and Russian. I also know French, Spanish and Italian. I have spent more of my life in French-speaking countries than in English-speaking ones. I learnt Italian with an Italian patient when I was locked up in the McLean Asylum for the Insane, as it was originally called. When Italians ask me where I learnt Italian, I always answer: “Nel manicomio,” “In the insane asylum.” Reactions vary.
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Robert, I appreciate your interest in my career, but I think this website is not an appropriate place for such a discussion, so let’s drop the subject.
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Robert, as a Polish person who learnt some Russian at school I would say that Ukrainian is much more similar to Russian than to Polish. And both Ukrainians and Russians use the Cyrillic script, unlike Poles. I would have to learn Ukrainian to understand it and when I hear Ukrainian migrants or refugees in my country, I don’t know if they speak Ukrainian or Russian.
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You are all right, yet do nothing about it. The human rights activists have achieved much yet the victims of psychiatry have changed nothing in 90 years. I agree being labelled with a psychiatric disorder and committed is worse than prison where you are not forced to lose your mind and take harmful life shortening drugs, and have a life sentence.
Phillip
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Phillip, there have been some important changes. Lobotomies are no longer performed and there are countries where a patient (even if s/he has been sectioned) has to consent to ECT. It’s very sad that Britain is not one of such countries.
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Joanna, is it really true that lobotomies and other types of psychosurgery are prohibited everywhere? If so, when did that ban go into effect and is there a body that closely monitors its enforcement and punishes offenders?
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Joel, they have been banned only in some countries, but it seems that they are no longer performed. As an example, the author of an article from a respected medical journal states that “frontal lobotomy (more commonly known in the UK as ‘prefrontal leucotomy’) is an extinct procedure. It was historically performed in cases of intractable psychiatric illness.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4533630/
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They have drugs now that chemically do a very similar job, if not quite so permanently.
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Droga Joanno, Twoim językiem ojczystym jest polski, a dla Ciebie rosyjski i ukraiński są językami obcymi. Być może dlatego ukraiński wydaje się bardziej podobny do rosyjskiego niż do polskiego. Ale kiedy słucham ukraińskiego i dużo rozumiem, zadaję sobie pytanie, czy to przez mój polski, czy rosyjski, i odpowiedź zawsze brzmi: polski.
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Steve, it seems that the effects of frontal lobotomies were completely unpredictable. Some people were able to function after undergoing the procedure – like Howard Dully who got a college degree, was able to work, started a family and published a memoir – whereas many others were very severely disabled.
I don’t know if neuroleptics can cause the type of brain damage comparable to the one experienced by McMurphy in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. I suspect that neuroleptics always cause permanent brain damage when they are used in the long term – even in the case of seemingly highly functioning people – but it seems that this damage never gets as severe as in the case of many lobotomies. However, I may be wrong, maybe I simply have not heard about people with very serious brain damage caused by neuroleptics.
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Drogi Robercie, bardzo mi miło, że napisałeś do mnie po polsku. Widzę, że świetnie znasz ten język. Jestem zresztą bardzo mile zaskoczona, że znacie go i Ty, i Joel – to niesamowity zbieg okoliczności! Rozumiem, co masz na myśli, pisząc, że dużo rozumiesz z ukraińskiego dzięki znajomości polskiego. Na pewno jest wiele podobieństw między tymi językami. Sama akurat lepiej znam rosyjski (uczyłam się go przez parę lat w szkole).
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Phillip, that is a very ignorant statement. Psychiatric survivor activism has a long history and continues – although we have made changes in the last 30 years – it is a massive structure we are up against and there are massive structural barriers to overcome:
– all patients are systemically silenced by the myth that we are incompetent- thus our testimony is routinely dismissed and silenced
– most survivors who recognise the harms of the system, through the lies, have been disabled and impoverished and isolated by a lifetime of psychiatrisation and have no resources. Many are barely surviving in dire poverty and extreme disadvantage. Others are languishing in state-“homes” and wards, sedated to the point of helplessness or dying by over medication .
– survivors can be force medicated and incarcerated – dissent is supressed by systematically undermining credibility, or just forcing people onto sedating drugs – often for life
– so-called “mental illness” has been framed as shameful and a moral failing for ever, hidden and not talked about. I am old enough to remember that time. Survivors who speak out had to be incredibly brave. This effectively kept survivors isolated from each other.
– the lie of “brain diseases” is incredibly powerful , backed by the power of medicine and science and the law
– the Mental health industrial complex is a massive industry on which millions of livelihoods depend – vested interests in maintaining the status quo are incalculable
– psychiatry has legal powers other “medicines” do not – psychiatry is convenient to the state and the public in legally containing and controlling people it does not know how to deal with and can’t criminalise
– psychaitry has no scientific basis so any criticism can quickly be incorporated and overcome by a change in rhetoric and framing- this is obvious in its recurring historical shifts – ideological power.
– marketing marketing marketing profit profit profit
Despite this, thanks to sites like MIA and activism all around the world – and the hard work of the pioneers in activism – awareness is growing and more survivors are speaking out. I have worked as a peer supporter to provide advocacy. This resistance is continuously incorporated by the power structure, because that is how they work, but i hope and do see signs of changes in awareness . Now I can only cheer others on and share my experience to support others because of disability from a lifetime of psychiatrisation. We do we can to support each other.
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Hi Robert,
First of all, thank you for sharing your powerful story. Though disappointing, it did not surprise me at all that psychiatry wouldn’t own up to its wrongdoings or apologize. I think you really hit the nail on the head with this line: “My story is obviously a scandal, for it raises a very important question: since psychiatrists were wrong in saying that homosexuality is a mental illness and that schizophrenia is incurable, then is it possible that they are wrong about everything else?” Bingo!!
Second of all, I wanted to offer another perspective on what I see being contested in the comments. From my understanding, commenters appear to be objecting to the phrase “illness of the psyche/mind/soul” because they are interpreting it as a pathologization of the person’s soul, but that is not what I got from Robert’s usage in this piece at all.
When it comes to physical illness, there are broadly two types: those which are caused by a defect from within the body (like an autoimmune disorder) and those which are caused by a pathogen/contaminant from the environment (like the flu). So when used as a metaphor for “mental illness,” it can be used or taken either of these two ways. For example, when talking about a rapist or murderer, people might say they’re “sick in the head,” or they have “soul sickness” — that something is wrong with them/their soul, it is “corrupt” or “defective” in some way. On the other hand, people might say that someone who is depressed or showing signs of trauma is “unwell” or has a “spiritual illness” — that they are afflicted by something toxic or troubling in their environment. But because the same word is being used, confusion arises. It also inadvertently creates a lot more stigma by conflating pain/suffering with immorality/corruption.
-Jasmine
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Hello Jasmine, I am often surprised by some commenters’ objections to what I have written. I had assumed that all victims of psychiatric abuse would show solidarity and respect for each other, but I was wrong. I must say that I am very much out of touch with today’s politically correct vocabulary. I left the world of psychiatry 59 years ago and I left the United States and the English-speaking world two years later. If having schizophrenic hallucinations and delusions is not a sickness, then I do not know what it is.
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Robert, the states of mind you call “hallucinations” and “delusions” may be regarded as symptoms of a severe illness by western-oriented psychiatry, but not so in other cultures and traditions, some of which I mentioned in a recent reply to you. I don’t accept the notion that psychiatry is or should be the supreme arbiter of appropriate thinking and conduct.
Why do you choose to define your identity with the stigmatizing label of “schizophrenia,” a condition whose very existence is hypothetical and not demonstrable by any medical test?
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When I had my Beatific Vision in 1963 at the age of 17 I immediately told myself that psychiatrists would call this experience a schizophrenic hallucination. I was terrified by the possibiity of being locked up in mental hospitals for the rest of my life. I was forced to spend 13 months at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where psychiatrists did indeed give me the diagnosis of schizophrenia. But I have always thought to myself that my religious rapture was a revelation of absolute Truth, which means, according to psychiatric thinking, that I still suffer from delusions of grandeur and that my schizophrenia is indeed incurable. Insisting that I am a schizophrenic is my way of proving that psychiatrists are wrong in saying that schizophrenia is incurable. In today’s intellectual world, the term schizophrenic hallucination is acceptable whereas the term Beatific Vision is not. And yet they refer to the same phenomenon. Which do you prefer?
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I have no preference.
Emanuel Swedenborg and William Blake, among many other mystics, had otherworldly visions. Shamans in various cultures experience similar ecstatic states. I don’t take it upon myself to judge the reality of such experiences.
I will just say that in today’s intellectual world as I perceive it, the term “schizophrenic hallucination” is hardly acceptable, especially to those in the mental health field, with which the MIA website is primarily concerned.
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Pani Joanno, ja z kolei podziwiam Twoja wrecz rewelacyjna znajomosc jez. angielskiego! Mowiac szczerze malo ktory obcokrajowiec pisze tak plynnie po angielsku. Jednym slowem odbierasz mi mowe!
Swoja droga ja w swoim czasie przetlumaczylem 9 opowiadan S. Lema z “Dzennikow gwiazdowych”, przeklad ten pt. “Memoirs of a Space Traveler” jest nadal do nabycia. A dwa lata temu wyszlo moje tlumaczenie niegdys glosnej ksiazki “Nieuchwytna Sila’ autorstwa dziennikarzy M. Rymuszko i A. Ostrzyckiej; dana pozycje pt. “The Elusive Force” mozna zamowic poprzez http://www.amazon.pl lub http://www.ceneo.pl. To arcyciekawa relacja o niesamowitym przypadku paranormalnym nastolatki Joasi Gajewskiej z Sosnowca w latach 80. ub. w.
Jezeli zechcesz korespondowac ze mna podaje moj adres emailowy: [email protected]
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Panie Joelu, bardzo dziękuję za tak miłe słowa! Bardzo wiele dało mi to, że od lat dużo czytam po angielsku. Na pewno zdarza mi się coś napisać niezręcznie, ale cały czas się doskonalę. Zresztą ja też tłumaczę książki, choć rzadko kiedy literaturę piękną. Bardzo dziękuję za informacje o Pana przekładach i za Pana adres. Napiszę do Pana mail, żeby tu za dużo nie pisać o niepsychiatrycznych sprawach i w dodatku po polsku 🙂 Bardzo serdecznie pozdrawiam.
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Robert, as someone who has also experienced hallucinations and delusions I personally have no objections to your views. However, I think that we can question the very concept of “schizophrenia”, especially because “schizophrenia” tends to be seen as an incurable and debilitating “brain disease”.
As to hallucinations and delusions, the belief that they are merely symptoms of a mental disorder is one of the possible interpretations. In many cases they can actually be seen as a meaningful response to trauma. And some people perceive them as signs of a spiritual crisis. In my opinion the psychiatric interpretation is not the “correct” one.
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Joanna, you raised an interesting question regarding the comparative effects of lobotomies and neuroleptics. You might find some possible answers in Dr. Peter Breggin’s writings, such as “Toxic Psychiatry” and “Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry.”
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Thanks a lot, Joel. I have just found the passages on lobotomy-like neuroleptic effects in “Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry”. However, it seems that Dr. Breggin talks about lobotomies in general, without differentiating between the types of brain damage caused by this procedure.
Can neuroleptics have an impact as devastating as in the case of Rosemary Kennedy (who became unable to walk, incontinent and severely intellectually disabled) or in the even more terrifying case of McMurphy (fictional, but clearly inspired by Ken Kesey’s experiences on a psychiatric ward)? The mortality was also very high in the case of lobotomies (14% in the case of the ones performed by Walter Freeman, https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2022/12/essay/lessons-be-learnt-history-lobotomy). Despite the obvious similarities between the effects of lobotomies and “chemical lobotomy” it seems that lobotomies were much more dangerous.
By the way, I have also found an important article by Dr. Breggin, “The Return of Lobotomy and Psychosurgery” – it is definitely worth reading http://www.ectresources.org/ECTscience/Breggin_return_of_psychosurgerry_1982_with_cite_.pdf
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Hi Robert,
I totally understand and feel the same way myself sometimes. I agree that all victims of psychiatric abuse should show solidarity and respect for each other! Yet unfortunately, that is not always the case (in my experience as well).
Just to clarify, when I said “I want to offer another perspective,” I intended to address this primarily to other commenters, not you. I think that the reason for their disagreement was a misunderstanding; not because your word choice was “wrong” necessarily. I think that you should get to use whatever words you see fit to express yourself/your experiences. I was simply trying to point out that different words mean different things to different people, in different contexts, and maybe they were interpreting it differently than you meant it. I hope my intention was clear, but I apologize for any ambiguity.
-Jasmine
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Thank you very much for your support. As you know, it is very hard to write about human suffering, especially when referring to oneself. You have nothing to apologize for.
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You’re welcome, Robert. I totally understand.
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Jasmine, the objections to Robert’s use of “mental illness” and “schizophrenia” weren’t misunderstandings at all. They were deliberate refusals of psychiatric language, because many of us know those terms have been weaponized. To reframe it as a matter of comprehension is not only inaccurate—it muddles the point. The issue isn’t whether survivors understand psychiatric terms; it’s whether those terms are stigmatizing.
To demand “solidarity” is to misunderstand what solidarity actually means—it’s not about conformity, it’s standing together while honoring difference. Which means survivors can respect Robert’s story while refusing the psychiatric language that has harmed them.
MIA exists as a space for critical psychiatry, where dissent and debate are essential. It’s not a stage for total validation or mindless applause.
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Yes, Birdsong, you put it nicely: respect and understanding for a person’s lived experience do not necessarily imply complete agreement with his or her point of view, which, in Robert’s case, is the questionable notion that what biomedical psychiatry calls “schizophrenia” can best be understood as an illness of the psyche, soul, or mind. This is a colorful and convenient metaphor, but metaphors applied inappropriately may have harmful consequences.
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Thank you so much, Joel 🙂
I always appreciate your fair-minded analysis of potentially contentious topics.
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Birdsong, your comments are always spot on! Same with Joel and moderator Steve McCrea. I wish you, Joel and Steve would all publish your very wise words in blogs on Mad in America.
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I agree, Joel. Using the word “illness” has been misused by psychiatry when applied to distressed psyches, souls or minds. Such language conflates metaphor with medical reality, and that distortion has carried harmful consequences.
This misuse of metaphor has allowed psychiatry to cloak suffering in medical jargon, obscuring its human truth.
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Beautifully said Birdsong!
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Actually, Birdsong, I think psychiatric jargon should be a very important issue because language can have such a powerful emotional effect . Nebulous voguish expressions I have found in several MIA articles, such as “embodied attunement,” “distributed relational beings,” “emphatic raptures,” “affective porosity,” etc., serve to create a certain cultish aura around mental health practitioners that leads to the general perception of them as an objective intellectually superior elite uniquely endowed with the ability to understand and “emphatically attune” with their clients.
Changing this distorted public perception will require a different, non-medicalized language to describe emotional distress.
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Thank you, Rosalee! I always love reading your thoughtful posts 🙂
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Thank you so much Freya! 🙂 I enjoy your comments as well.
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I totally agree, Joel. Mental health practitioners using evocative terms like “embodied attunement” can be just as seductive as psychiatry’s medical jargon.
If mental health practitioners used simplified terms they’d be out of a job—as they should be!
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Hi Robert, thanks for your article and your brave actions to challenge and bring to light some of the shameful history of psychiatry. I believe we need to know and remember our history as psychiatric survivors – to recognise the violence is not accidental and that resistance is possible.
Please don’t mistake disagreement with lack of solidarity. It’s so vital for us to share and discuss ideas – even if we don’t agree.
I see diagnostic language as a form of violence – it is used to legitimise actual violence and denial of human rights – as you know. In fact this could be one of its main functions, certainly legally.
So psychiatrised language and diagnostic language can be felt as upholding that system of violence.
I do understand your idea that your use of the term schizophrenic is an assertion of your survival against the pessimistic determinism of psychiatric dogma.
Some people speak of “having a diagnosis of ….” In respect of the fact that most diagnoses are not chosen and that a diagnosis subjects the person to presumptions of “incapacity”, as well as “moral deficit” which still linger, are unfounded, and have real-life consequences.
Language does matter, it’s important to discuss it I think.
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Freya,
I think you’re forgetting that the word “Mad” itself — as in “Mad in America,” “Mad Pride,” or “Mad Rights Movement” — is a reclaimed label that has historically been used to dehumanize & justify violence. We are not the first social justice movement to make use of such linguistic reclamation of derogatory terms or slurs. (E.g. the LGBTQ+ community reclaiming the former slur “queer.”)
That sounds similar to how Robert explained his relationship to the label of “schizophrenia.” In another comment, he said, “Insisting that I am a schizophrenic is my way of proving that psychiatrists are wrong in saying that schizophrenia is incurable.” Sounds like a radical act of narrative reclamation to me!
-Jasmine
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Hi Jasmine, I didn’t forget, I just didn’t think it was relevant.
I was talking about diagnostic language. The word “mad” is not a diagnosis.
I don’t really think that expressing disagreement is infringing on anyone’s right to perform “acts of radical narrative reclamation”.
I do dispute your definition of “radical” – upgrading to a narrative which simply reinforces the dominant psychiatric narrative is not radical and does not challenge the structural basis of psychiatric power. I have already said that is perfectly valid to feel good about surviving a diagnosis, but it is not our responsibility to uphold a false narrative to support an individual choice – we can respect as well as disagree with it.
Meanwhile I believe that kindness respect and sensitivity can go both ways . Some, if not all speaking here have our own stories of lifetimes of psychiatric violence and I tend to assume that everyone’s knowledge has been just as hard won.
Performative politeness – which is what you are asking for – is no more kind than honesty and respect for others’ intelligence.
I’d rather think about how to change the narrative than reclaim it and how to protect my loved ones, myself and others from more damage than engage in symbolic flag waving to be honest.
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Freya, As per your reply to Robert….
“Please don’t mistake disagreement with lack of solidarity”.
“Language does matter, it’s important to discuss it I think.”
Agree and well said.
Psychiatric survivors experience harm in differing situations so it’s likely there will always be some differences in viewpoints. We may have some differences but at the core we all agree psychiatry is self-serving, oppressive and harmful.
My brother lost his life at age 40 due to psychiatry. He had temporary sadness due to divorce and no longer seeing his sons everyday. He was put on anti-depressants and then given ECT. Due to the drugs and the ECT he became dysfunctional at his job as an engineer. Then one day we found him dead in bed. His autopsy states his body had not been sufficiently metabolizing one of the psych drugs and a level high enough to be fatal, had built up in his liver and caused his death. He had been very healthy prior to psychiatry but in the final months of his life I was concerned as he had began to look quite unwell. The psychiatrist never even noticed and was shocked to hear of his death.
While I was in cancer treatment I had my own encounter with an unethical, dishonest psychiatrist I was sent to see for ‘help’ with sleep meds after chemo drugs and steroids caused issues with insomnia. I didn’t find out until a year and a half later that she published a 4 page psych ‘report’ along with 4 damaging psych labels onto wide spread electronic records. (I only found out because I questioned why I was being repeatedly denied referrals regarding health services.) The psych labels are totally fabricated and unfounded but as you said, they have long lasting “real life consequences.”
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Thank you Rosalee,
I’m so so sorry for what happened to your brother and you, heartbroken to be honest. My own brother nearly died of over-medication which supressed his respiration- Side effects which are well known of each of the drugs he was on. I raised this with his support service for months. His psychiatrist even (callously and casually) mentioned to me she thought he was not going to live much longer, but still could not see that it was the drugs. They simple expect people to die and imagine it’s the illness. He was only 50 then. I could not get them to listen to me while he was just totally sedated, unresponsive and completely unable to help himself or advocate for himself for over 2 years – which they explained to themselves was just the “illness”. The lack of simple curiosity or any interest for our rights to health shows the extreme dehumanisation of their perceptions of people like us. When he nearly died, finally his meds were reviewed by the hospital. He is now completely himself again. No one apologised, no one admitted what had happened to him for 2 years of his life, no one even recognised they had nearly killed him. I am so very sorry for your loss. I am still haunted by the thought of many others neglected and dying this way, with no care or even imagination for them live a normal and active life.
I also know that extreme powerlessness which happens when you find out you have been (falsely) pathologised and you are subjected to discrimination in other health services because of it. The secrecy is quite common I have been told by a nurse..I don’t know if it is just utter contempt for our rights or an inability to see us as having a consciousness at all?
Solidarity and love to you Rosalee!
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Apologizing for calling homosexuality a “mental illness” would open a can of worms psychiatry refuses to deal with.
It would start a cascade of lawsuits that would cause people to question the validity of the entire DSM.
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This is exactly what I want.
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Hi Robert, I agree, any challenge to the violence of the psychiatric system it’s important – an apology is a public admission of harm and hopefully an assurance it won’t happen again.
I have a dream of a Human Rights Truth and Reconciliation process to be held on behalf of all psychiatric survivors whose lives have been destroyed by psychiatry. I hope that soon we will see legal actions and class actions towards this.
Psychiatry has been unaccountable for too long for the harm of too many.
Hopefully it could become a process that would recognise and represent all groups and individuals who have been harmed. Truth-telling is essential as well as legal actions to stop this endless cycle.
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Robert, that would be a gift for the entire human race, not only those cruelly labeled “schizophrenic” or pathologized for their desires.
Psychiatry’s DSM—cleverly marketed since 1980—still seduces even the most “scientifically informed” by exploiting vulnerabilities: fear, insecurity, hunger for certainty that provides the ideal script for intellectual posturing.
The result is a world overrun by scientific absolutists—unknowingly insecure, clinging to certainty as if it were salvation.
This doesn’t mean anyone should deny another’s psychic struggles but rather interpret it for what it truly is: a complex response to a complex world. Or however an individual chooses to interpret it—including spiritually.
Perhaps the more realistic hope is simply waiting for psychiatry’s hold on the collective imagination to fall of its own weight, as the chorus of non-believers grows with each passing day.
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“Scientific absolutists” is an oxymoron. If one is being an absolutist/authoritarian, one has stopped being a scientist. I know you know this, but I think it bears reminding folks. There is nothing “scientific” about insisting that the DSM categories are real, despite a total lack of objective data.
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Thank you for making that clarification, Steve. Much appreciated 🙂
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I think what Birdsong had in mind was “scientism”–the dogmatic view that any phenomenon that cannot be explained by western scientific methods is a hoax, misperception, or delusion.
True science, on the other hand, should be open-ended and willing to revise its current paradigms if new cogent evidence warrants it. That’s exactly what happened, for example, with Wegener’s Continental Drift Theory back in the 1920s, which was initially rejected by the scientific community but is now accepted by mainstream geology.
Such a paradigm shift is long overdue in biomedical psychiatry. The first, necessary step should be a re-evaluation of its medicalized language, which continues to sustain the popular belief that emotional distress can be attributed to hormonal or genetic abrnormalities, defective genes, brain pathology, and similar hypothetical conditions.
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It reminds me of the case of Ignaz Semmelweis, who instituted handwashing before childbirth back in the 1860s and saw the childbed fever rates drop precipitously. He was fired for his efforts and his new plan was scuttled by the Powers that Be, and the rates immediately rose to the alarming levels they had been before. He actually went kind of nuts and ended up being institutionalized, though I do have to wonder if he might have been institutionalized to shut him up permanently. Medicine has never really been a primarily scientific endeavor.
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Yes, Steve, that’s a graphic example of hidebound “scientistic” thinking as opposed to a truly scientific approach.
Iconoclasts like Szasz, Goetzsche, and Breggin have faced the same obscurantism on the part of the APA guild, which feels threatened whenever its pet theories and practices are called into question.
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Birdsong, I have also thought that the power of psychiatry is rooted in language. The material power of legal control over bodies, is dependent on the ongoing cultural power and legitimacy which is based in the power to control language. As you say, stunningly – in weaponised metaphors and linguistic deception.
I think Szasz talked about psychiatry as rhetoric?
(Thanks for your kind reply too!)
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You’re so welcome, Freya! 🙂
Thank you for mentioning Thomas Szasz. He indeed said psychiatry rests not on medical science but on rhetorical persuasion. This has been catastrophic for many, as you and I well know from personal experience.
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A number of commenters have suggested that I should not refer to myself as being a schizophrenic..”Schizophrenia” is such a horrible diagnosis to have to live with. Perhaps schizophrenia was invented by psychiatrists who were unable to appreciate how creative and brilliant schizophrenics can be. Yet I persist. I am really very proud of having survived schizophrenia without any help from psychiatrists or psychiatric medicine. If schizophrenia did not exist, then I would have nothing to be proud of.
I would like to change society’s attitude towards schizophrenia. First of all, I would like to tell people not to trust what psychiatrists say about it. Their most blatant error is saying that it is incurable, and I am a living, walking, breathing proof that they are wrong. Most people think that all schizophrenics are dangerous people like the Unabomber. In reality, some of the most admired people in philosophy and theology have been diagnosed as being schizophrenic, from Isaiah to Jesus to Nietzsche to Tillich.
Greta Thunberg has created a more positive image of autism by acknowledging that she is autistic. I would like to do the same for schizophrenia.
I have published a number of books and articles about schizophrenia in both French and English. Curiously, the French-speaking world is much more sympathetic to my story than the English-speaking world. My book Comment réussir sa schizophrénie received two literary prizes, one in Québec and one in France. A film showing me talking about schizophrenia in French, called Rencontre avec Robert Dôle, also won a prize. Yet I am not allowed to advertise my English-language book about schizophrenia, What Rough Beast, in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Schizophrenia Bulletin has refused to publish an article about schizophrenia that I submitted. It was eventually published in Mad in America.
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I understand your approach, Robert. I also think that people should not be criticized for using certain terms while talking about themselves. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia more than 10 years ago and I certainly don’t see myself as a person with an incurable mental illness. I came off neuroleptics after a few months and have never used them again.
However, it seems that your definition of schizophrenia differs from the psychiatric one and is more similar to the definition of psychosis. In fact, psychiatrists tend to assume that schizophrenia is lifelong and that people with this diagnosis will almost unavoidably get worse if they are not on neuroleptics.
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Cześć Joanno,
Almost everything that I have to say about my own schizophrenia and the schizophrenia of people that I have read about is an attempt to show my disageements with psychiatrists. The biggest mistake that they make is to underestimate the fact that every human being is totally unique, which means that his mental illness is also unique. I try to avoid psychobabble as much as possible. My mission in life now is to convince people that psychiatrists are wrong in saying that schizophrenia is incurable and that patients will get worse if they do not take their neuroleptics. Your own life story is like mine and we both contradict psychiatrists’ assumptions.
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I understand, Robert, and I really like your approach. I don’t really have a problem with the diagnostic label in itself – and I would certainly not say that I merely had “problems in living” or “emotional distress” because it does not describe my experience. Just like you, I am simply against the idea that this is an incurable illness which necessitates lifelong “maintenance treatment” with neuroleptics.
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Robert, I hope no-one has said you “should not” call yourself anything, just raised the idea that using psychiatric language could be contradictory to the aim of making the world a kinder place for people who are seen as different.
As others have said, it is not that people here don’t understand your position, some of us just disagree with it and with what it means.
Your strategy, if I read it right, is to remove discrimination by changing people’s individual beliefs about differences, and their attitudes towards people who seem to have them. Changing the social “value” of those differences. This is could be seen as a position taken by “Mad Pride” advocates.
Another strategy is to question the false claims to “knowledge” of a system which has the power to actually define those differences and code them into structures of material power – like psychiatry. Structures which determine who and how people classified as different can be legally and socially (mis)treated.
My problem with “pride” narratives is that they exclude the many people who do not take pride in their diagnosis – who profoundly disagree with the legitimacy of any psychiatric diagnosis, and who are forced to experience material loss and disadvantage – including loss of human rights, health and resources – because of a label which – crucially- they do not have any choice to refuse or accept.
As hard as your struggle has been, you were able to make the choice not to have psychiatric “treatment”. I’m sure you know not everyone has the power to refuse it.
Having pride in our survival is understandable but ignores and excludes those who failed to survive. It is privileging the lucky survivors in an unequal and inhumane system. In my opinion, those of us who survived (more or less) and can speak here, no matter how hard we feel we have it , are just lucky and lucky enough to have access to material and social resources (however small) which others don’t (who are not speaking here at all).
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Freya, it’s not only about material and social resources or the choice to refuse psychiatric treatment. Some psychiatric survivors have been simply lucky enough to avoid another situation where they could risk forced psychiatric treatment. I guess that Robert has not experienced a “relapse”. As Phillip S.’s story shows, even a high social status does not always protect people from forced psychiatric treatment.
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Thanks Joanna, my point is just that access to resources is more likely to affect survival and health outcomes than anything else.
People who are forcibly and legally drugged because of an (unproven) diagnosis – have no option to choose to protect their health. I’m not sure why this even an issue of disgreememt?
It is well known from research that socially and economically disadvantaged people are diagnosed more, with more “serious” diagnoses, and forcibly drugged more.
Talking about survival as if it was a choice is pretty insensitive in my opinion.
In my experience a psychiatric diagnosis, and psychiatric drugs, directly causes a loss of health, job, community and economic security. If you have more resources you have more power to survive that – obviously?
Re Phillip S – I did say that all of us “able to speak here” are *relatively* well off. I work with many people who are so disabled (by psych drugs) and poor they cannot access the internet, or even have the ability to engage in a debate, they are locked in wards or siloed in community “homes” or aged care “homes” where they are so heavily sedated they can’t read.
Economic and social resources don’t protect us from falling into the clutches of psychiatry, but they do offer some choice and protections which you and I and Phillip, obviously have. If I had not been able to advocate for someone close to me, they may well have died, because they were too sedated by over medication to advocate for themsleves. This is not unusual. We just don’t see or hear about it – which is exactly my point.
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Freya,
Research & statistics reflect population averages, not individual experiences. I’m not necessarily talking about the poorest of the poor. Not everyone who is, say, middle class or above survives the mental health system. Not everyone who had “access” to the same “choices” or “resources” as a survivor did ends up surviving themselves. Does agency count for nothing, in your opinion?
You said earlier that “Having pride in our survival is understandable but ignores and excludes those who failed to survive.” First of all, that’s simply not true. At the last Mad Pride event I went to, a large part of the time was spent commemorating a member of the local Mad community who had just been shot and killed in his own home the week before. There was a memorial tent set up where people could mourn the loss of his & others’ lives. I think there is definitely a place for grief & remembrance of those who’ve been lost to psychiatry in the context of Mad Pride; they’re not mutually exclusive.
Second of all, the notion that we shouldn’t do anything that those with the least amount of “privilege” wouldn’t be able to participate in because it would be “excluding” them sounds a little absurd when the “un-privileged” in question are literal dead people. I mean, there’s not much that *doesn’t* exclude them.
You said that “Talking about survival as if it was a choice is pretty insensitive in my opinion.” Of course it’s more than “just a choice.” I don’t think any of us are in disagreement on that. But to me, it’s just as insensitive to discount a person’s survival and chalk it all up to mere “luck.” You also said, “As hard as your struggle has been, you were able to make the choice…” Ah, but there’s the key. Not everyone who is “able” to make that choice *does.* A lot of people give up. That is not to “victim-blame” anyone. But I think we survivors deserve to take some credit for our resilience, after all the world has taken from us. “those of us who have survived… no matter how hard we feel we have it, are just lucky…” That little word “just” reads as inherently discrediting & invalidating. Again, not everyone even with the same amount of “luck” or “privilege” would’ve survived similar circumstances.
I recently read the book “The Perils of ‘Privilege’: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage” by Phoebe Maltz-Bovy, and I highly recommend it. Here’s a relevant quote: “The biggest glitch in the privilege framework is the it-could-be-worse component… this supposedly hypersensitive way of looking at the world manages to be incredibly dismissive of any plight that isn’t quite as bad as another.”
-Jasmine
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Freya, of course people who are socially and economically disadvantaged are more likely to be forcibly drugged, but it can also happen to other people. It happened to me when I was an academic. I was on a locked ward in a public hospital. I was not treated better than the other patients.
A psychiatric diagnosis and psychiatric drugs do not always cause a loss of health and job. I had a psychotic episode during summer holidays, so no one at my workplace found out about it. And my health was not seriously harmed because I decided to come off neuroleptics (without any support).
Of course I can access the Internet and I am able to engage in debates, but I am definitely not a well-off person. I have not had a steady job for years. If I were one of those people who get “relapses”, I really don’t know what my situation would be. I actually know about a former academic with experience of psychosis who now lives in a care home. Phillip also lives in a care home – he said it in his article.
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Freya, I would also like to add that I did personally experience overmedication and being heavily sedated. And it was not because of my own decisions, I was on a locked ward.
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Joanna, I think this discussion is getting falsely polarised.
I think you are taking ideas from a personal perspective which I am trying to discuss from a structural one. Perhaps I have just expressed my ideas badly, or you are misinterpreting – either way there’s no point in me repeatedly responding to arguments about things which I have not actually said..
I am very sorry for what you have experienced and I share your experiences. I assume many of us here share them and understand how devastating they are.
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Freya, unfortunately I also feel that you misunderstand me. I am not talking only about my personal experiences and I really don’t expect you to feel sorry for me (I have emphasized that I am one of the lucky people).
Where I disagree with you is that you put too much emphasis on access to resources (e.g. you wrote “access to resources is more likely to affect survival and health outcomes than anything else”). You forget that – independently of social status – people who have had only one psychotic episode (like Robert and me) tend to fare much better than others. You also forget that the impact of neuroleptics is harmful independently of social status.
Two people with a similar social status can have completely different outcomes. I have mentioned a former academic who is now in a care home. She had better access to economic and social resources than me, but is now in a much worse situation. One of the main differences between me and her is that I have rejected neuroleptics and have had only one psychotic episode.
I also know other upper-middle class people who have been on neuroleptics for years and are functioning much worse than me despite their social status. I have even read about upper-middle class people who died because of neuroleptics like Clozapine. Money does not protect people from the impact of these drugs.
At the same time I know a person on benefits who has been using neuroleptics only occasionally and has not been harmed by them. Unlike many well-off people, he did not obey psychiatrists and this is what has protected him – not his access to resources.
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Jasmine, like Joanna, you seem to be manufacturing arguments to ideas I have not expressed, or which I have already answered. Words can always be cherry picked, decontextualised and reframed.
From what I can tell, the offensive idea seems to be that “access to resources is more likely to affect survival and health outcomes than anything else.”
This is quite a banal and inoffensive idea to me, but of course, anyone is free to disagree. As we are not prosecuting a legal case here, I think disagreement is fine. Or put it down to misunderstanding.
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Jasmine, many thanks for your comment. I totally agree with you that all the survivors deserve credit and respect for their resilience. And focusing on a person’s socioeconomic status can be very misleading.
In fact, I think that in some respects people who are middle-class and/or highly educated may have some difficulties “the poor” don’t have. E.g. finding a suitable job can be very difficult for a middle-class person who is a psychiatric survivor (e.g. because of gaps in his/her CV).
I also think that middle-class people actually tend to be much more prejudiced towards people with diagnoses such as schizophrenia. They usually don’t know well anyone with such a diagnosis and can have all kinds of negative stereotypes.
As an example, a young translator in one of my online groups was once talking with disgust and contempt about his neighbour who is “schizophrenic”. To him “schizophrenics” were clearly horrible people who turn others’ lives into hell. People like this young man don’t even realize that someone from their social class could have a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
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Freya, I have not been “manufacturing arguments”, but merely expressing my opinions. I did not say either that I felt offended by something you had said.
Like Jasmine, I simply disagree with your belief that access to resources is the most important. As I explained earlier, exposure to neuroleptics is a crucial factor which affects people’s lives and health even when they have a high social status.
I also think that both me and Jasmine have a problem with the idea that psychiatric survivors who leave comments on MIA are “privileged” when it comes to access to social and economic resources.
First of all, it is not true (as I said earlier, I live in poverty and isolation). Secondly, I refuse to see myself as a “privileged” psychiatric survivor who does not know e.g. about heavily sedated people in care homes. I know about such people, but I have no power to change their situation.
And I refuse to feel guilty for not doing more for others. In the past I was literally attacked by other people with the same diagnosis when I was criticizing psychiatry. They were not in the least grateful, they were hostile. One of the women who were attacking me died some years ago and her death was probably related to Clozapine. I was unable to change her approach towards psychiatric labels and drugs. Our abilities to change other people’s attitudes are very limited.
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POSTING AS MODERATOR:
Hi, all!
Some of these arguments are feeling a bit personal. It seems to me we have a simple difference of opinion being described, and I don’t sense any intent to insult or hurt anyone, even though it is apparent that some feelings have nonetheless been hurt. I ask folks to consider whether we haven’t each had the opportunity to say what needs to be said, and that other readers have had a good chance to hear both sides of the issue. Maybe it’s time to move on?
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Steve, I agree with you: I think that this discussion has unnecessarily become personal. My own feelings have not been hurt, but I certainly don’t want anyone to feel upset by my comments.
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Steve, Freya, Jasmine, Robert and others: probably my main goal was to emphasize that no matter what resources people have or can access, rejecting or at least questioning the mainstream psychiatric approach is very empowering in itself. If one unquestioningly embraces this approach, one will be disempowered independently from one’s social status.
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I believe you are absolutely correct. Social or financial privilege does give one more options, the most salient being that it’s easier to avoid the psychiatric world if you realize you need to do so. But it’s very clear that once swept up into the psychiatric system, patients of any sort have little to no protection, even if they have money or status. Any status is very quickly erased by a serious psych “diagnosis,” and there’s no amount of money that can keep them from trying to force their “medications” down your throat, quite literally.
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I totally agree, Steve. Social status has little importance when one is perceived as “mentally ill”, as proved by what happened to Phillip S.
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Thanks Steve and Joanna, I agree with you both and, if I may also be permitted to have a final word, I don’t believe anything I have said contradicts your points 🙂
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Thanks a lot, Freya, I don’t think it either 🙂 I would say that we simply focused on different issues in our comments.
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Thank you Joanna, my understandings and perspectives are empowering and helpful to me.
The idea that Robert or you or anyone here is “privileged” was not the meaning of my words, but I understand how they could be interpreted that way. I apologise to Robert for any hurt caused by any careless words.
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I should have said more clearly that I also live in poverty and isolation (my early life was different because it was worse, but I assume that is a common story too). So privilege is not something I assume any one in the system has 🙂
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Freya, I have enjoyed reading all your thought-provoking comments in this discussion. Yes, living in poverty and isolation is unfortunately the experience of too many of us…
As to privilege, I do think that some psychiatric survivors have e.g. economic or educational privilege and we can definitely talk about it. Of course people can forget about their own privilege or be unaware of it.
If a person rejects psychiatric labels and drugs, his/her life will be much easier if s/he has access to economic and social resources. In fact, if one is poor, it is difficult to get financial or other support for people with disabilities if one has a psychiatric diagnosis and does not want to take any drugs.
In this sense the poor are often coerced into taking psychiatric drugs (or at least into pretending that they are taking them) even if they are not forcibly injected or made to swallow tablets.
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Joanna – that is very much what I was thinking about.
Thanks for your kind words.
I agree – “privilege” is totally relative (aaarggh!) 😀
I think “privilege” is a bit of an impossible idea to apply to individuals at all. It’s hard to think of it as some “thing” people “have” – someone can be privileged in one way, time or place and not at all privileged in another.
Your comments have been thought-provoking too – I am now thinking about how I can hold both in mind : – that our experience is valuable and important knowledge, and that our experience sits in other contexts which we don’t always have any control over. …. 🙂
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Freya, yes, probably most people are “privileged” in some sense compared to many others. And I would say that people who have many various privileges are often unaware of them. Such people may even be convinced that if bad things happen to others, it’s mainly because of their bad choices, negative way of thinking/energy etc.
When it comes to contexts and structures we have no control over, I just think that especially if one is marginalized in some sense, dwelling on the unfairness of life can lead to an even greater suffering.
If we focus too much on structural barriers and forms of oppression, we can end up feeling powerless and miserable. I have known some people who have spent years being angry and bitter because of some injustice and constantly talking about it. I can’t help feeling that this was a waste of their time and energy…
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On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to get really pissed when it seems that others have an unfair advantage and that you are being punished for being who you are. It’s a complicated issue to deal with, because I agree that focusing on lack of privilege can be disempowering, but at the same time not recognizing its existence can leave folks feeling quite hopeless and blaming themselves for situations they don’t really control. Not sure what the best answer is – probably has to be judged case by case based on what works for an individual person’s needs and personality.
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Yes, Steve, this is what I was hinting at in the first paragraph of my comment: if one does not recognize the importance of various privileges, one risks embracing the narrative which blames people for the bad things which happen or have happened to them (“it’s because of your poor choices”, “you simply did not try hard enough”, “good people attract good people” etc.).
I think that it is crucial to try to find the right balance between being aware of structural factors and other things we don’t control and dwelling too much on thoughts about them. I believe that it is very often possible to reframe a situation in a way which makes us feel more peaceful, less bitter and more empowered.
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I’m not sure who “we” is Joanna – I am neither miserable nor powerless nor bitter. As I have said, I find my ideas empowering to me.
I said that the idea of “privilege” is too vague and relative, not that it doesn’t exist. I prefer terms like “poverty” or “isolation” or even “access to resources” which are more specific and there is -usually- some shared consensus on what we are actually about.
If, as you suggest, we should not discuss structural issue on MIA, then I have blundered naively as I thought this was exactly the place to discuss them. But as I’m not a big commenter here I don’t know the rules and conventions of what is acceptable to discuss. I’m not being facetious, but genuinely confused.
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Freya, I think that you have unfortunately misunderstood me. Please reread my latest comments. I did not imply in them that we should not discuss structural issues – I actually said the reverse! And I was certainly not criticizing your approach.
However, in my opinion focusing too much on various kinds of injustice and oppression can lead to a feeling of helpless anger and bitterness. I was not talking about you, I have simply noticed a tendency in many comments left by psychiatric survivors (I have been reading them for years). Some survivors portray society in a way which leaves very little (if any) place for hope.
I am absolutely not implying that you are miserable and bitter or that you feel powerless. But thinking e.g. about the suffering of heavily-sedated people in care homes (one of the examples you have mentioned in your comments) can be very depressing because this is something beyond our control.
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I don’t think that inequality, material disadvantage, or overmedication of vulnerable people, are things beyond my control to change. Its difficult but I can try – that’s hopeful to me.
Overmedication very nearly killed my vulnerable and disabled family member in community care (sedation and respiratory suppression) and is killing unknown others still who don’t have any family to advocate for them.
I don’t believe these things are beyond “our” control to change- as collectives we can share ideas, raise awareness, act as advocates for each other etc. So I will keep thinking and talking about those things if that’s ok 🙂
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Freya, just like you, I am merely sharing my thoughts. I am not in any sense implying that some ideas or issues should be avoided in comments on this website.
Each of us has had different experiences, has a different personality and is struggling with different problems. Because of my situation I have to focus on myself and my family members. At the same time I am fully aware that there is plenty of suffering in this world.
Advocating for family members and friends is crucially important. And I was doing it myself when my brother was in a mental hospital a few years ago. But I am unable to advocate for complete strangers. Some MIA users work in the mental health sector, but I am not one of them. I simply have to stay realistic.
And even if one works in the mental health sector or is an activist, it is crucial to remember that our time and our energy are limited, and that our own needs are not less important than the needs of “people who have it worse than us”.
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Joanna, that is true, often all we can do is just survive and protect our loved ones. And I think support and affirmation of ourselves and each other is just as valuable as campaigning for rights or talking about positions. Just looking after ourself can be a powerfully positive action in itself.
I try to remember we’re all just doing what we can in our own small way, I’m sorry if I seemed to imply anything else 🙂
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Freya, I totally agree with you! As you said, we’re doing what we can.
Stigmatization is also a serious barrier to activism. I have once contacted an NGO which is providing sanitary pads etc. to women in various institutions. I wrote to them that women have no access to such things on locked psychiatric wards (this is unfortunately the reality in my country, unless a patient is getting such things from family members or friends who visit her in the hospital).
A person politely responded to me and asked if I could provide more information about this situation. Unfortunately I did not have enough courage to say that I had been on a locked ward myself and I did not reply to her email…
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Joanna, that’s a very good point – it took me years to feel safe enough to talk openly and there are still plenty of circumstances I won’t . As you said earlier – it can be actually unsafe to have other people know our history, or we just don’t need the ignorant attitudes. It is often just rational self-protection to stay silent. It’s true that public stigma can be worse or better in different places too. It seems everyone is talking about having a diagnosis here in Australia, but mostly only the less stigmatised ones!
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Yes, Freya, many people are now open about many psychiatric diagnoses, but diagnoses of psychotic illnesses – especially “schizophrenia” – unfortunately remain very stigmatized, perhaps even more stigmatized than before.
I fully agree with you that staying silent about our experiences is often a very rational approach. I certainly don’t want to be treated dismissively and patronized only because I have been to a mental hospital. Moreover, I know how risky it would be to be labelled as a mentally ill person (I have a rare surname).
And sometimes people can hide their prejudice for a long time. My brother used to see a person as a very close friend. For some reason this man decided to end the friendship. Later another person told my brother that this former friend had mentioned his stay in a psychiatric hospital as a negative thing. And my brother does not even have a diagnosis of mental illness, he was in the hospital because of suicidal thoughts!
So this guy was prejudiced towards my brother, but hid it so well that my brother was not aware of it. Another depressing thing is that people diagnosed with severe mental illness can stigmatize other people with the same diagnosis (even if the latter function very well).
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You’re right Joanna, stigma is subtle, and prejudice can be hidden – I forget that sometimes. What really gets me is when it’s used to just dismiss what we say – ‘you’re angry/upset/passionate/not-credible etc, because of your “pathology”’ – they don’t even have to say it outright because that attitude is just there. Or as you say, it comes out later in people we thought understood us. And that attitude can have real effects on our lives.
Thanks for your very kind compliment- I’m really not always 😀 – we just try don’t we?
Thanks for all your reminders actually, about the complexity of our experiences- it’s been really helpful in understanding and thinking about where I am. What’s clear to you I’m still working out. It’s like coming out of a fog sometimes because the whole story psychiatry ‘sells’ is so powerful and just everywhere!
Re how psychosis-type experiences are possibly becoming more stigmatised-I agree. And I think they are getting more marginalised by the “popularity” of less stigmatised diagnoses so that people forget (or ignore) that there are some diagnoses which can get you legally locked up and force drugged.
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Yes, Freya, one of the problems is that people can see someone’s psychiatric label as a reason to be very dismissive about the person’s emotions, beliefs and views. An even worse problem is that people with certain psychiatric labels risk not being taken seriously if they experience e.g. sexual violence.
I actually can’t say that I now have clarity about my experience of psychosis. I don’t know if I could experience it again, so I am always careful. And I am not strongly attached to my own vision of what happened to me.
If someone had told me: “Maybe you have been simply able to avoid another psychotic episode thanks to your lifestyle”, I would not get upset. In fact, it is very true that I have an unusual lifestyle – I work from home (and much less than 8 hours a day) and I have very limited contact with other people.
If I were constantly exposed to very high levels of stress and/or to people who would act in a toxic way, I really don’t know how I would feel. So even if someone said to me: “I think that you may have schizophrenia, but you have been able to avoid a relapse of psychosis thanks to your lifestyle”, I would not get angry with the person 🙂
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Hello Freya, For four years I was forced to have psychiatric treatment, two years for curing my homosexuality and then two years for curing the schizophrenia that resulted from the first psychiatric intervention. I know that I have been very lucky amidst all this bad luck. When I was released from the lunatic asylum in 1966 I immediately landed among hippies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose general attitude suited me perfectly: the crazier you are, the more we like you. Then I moved to Dublin, Ireland, a city that adores eccentrics. Then in 1970 I started teaching in France and have spent the rest of my life in different countries where English was a foreign language. I always had this defence: if I say anything crazy in French, German, Polish or Spanish, people will just assume that I have not learnt the language well enough. My life has not been easy, but it has been interesting.
My advice to young Americans who are faced with psychiatric problems is simply to refuse to see psychiatrists, never take psychiatric medicine, learn foreign languages and move to a less violent country.
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Robert, thanks for your kind reply. I feel very much for your experience, and believe stories like yours should be told – our history as survivors is so important and sharing our experiences of psychiatry is vital to changing things.
I feel too that your pride in surviving is justified and important.
(I have tried to say this a few times but perhaps not clearly enough)
I honestly didn’t think I needed to say to anyone here (because it is so common) that I have experienced the violence of psychiatry in multiple ways, and my own and my loved ones, lives and health, have been devastated by that.
I try to avoid comparing and just assume everyone here has their own story, Looking at the bigger picture, or taking a political view, can be seen as not paying enough attention to personal experiences, because most of us are all so devastated and need to be heard. It’s natural to focus on our own story and to read my comments in a personal light. All of our stories are incredibly important and sharing yours is an act of generosity. As is using your experience to change things.
I’m glad you understand that I am just speaking of different political ways to think about how to change this awful reality.
Thank you for sharing some of your amazing story and how you have survived and made it meaningful.
Solidarity and love to you 🙂
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Joanna, I’m so sorry for what you have experienced.. I share your experiences and understand how devastating they can be to our lives.
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Thank you, Freya. I have actually been very lucky because I have never had again another experience of forcible treatment.
What I wanted to emphasize in my comments is that there are many factors which influence the life of psychiatric survivors. Resilience and the ability to identify toxic thought patterns are among such factors. In my opinion they are much more important than economic resources or the size of one’s social support network.
I think that one of the crucial things is finding a way not to feel powerless and trying to focus on the good people and things in our lives. I don’t know why I have avoided a relapse – maybe I was simply lucky. But I feel that my decision to focus on my mental well-being has played a huge role.
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Thanks Joanna, I replied above (glitches again- moslty in my brain!) that I think you might have misread my words, or taken them out of context, or I just have not been very clear. I was not really talking about individual or personal factors at all, which are of course involved.
It seems that we just disagree over the relative importance of those individual and structural factors to individual health.
My own early life experiences, as well as volunteering and working with people who live in poverty and isolation, many without housing, has made those structural barriers to life and health very real to me.
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Freya, we simply have different experiences and in consequence a somewhat different perspective. I live on a very low income and in isolation, so the structural barriers you mention are very real to me. I am certainly not denying their importance.
I have simply noticed that neuroleptic exposure in itself has a considerable impact on people’s lives. The longer someone is exposed to neuroleptics, the more s/he will be harmed by them, independently from social status. When I listen to middle-class people who have been on neuroleptics for years, I have the impression that they have experienced some form of brain damage.
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“But thinking e.g. about the suffering of heavily-sedated people in care homes (one of the examples you have mentioned in your comments) can be very depressing because this is something beyond our control.”
Could it be that we are all entangled particles, and that they more we thnk of one another, the more closely entangled we become, and the more powerful our prayers for one another, accordingly?
I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know. But I know I have nothing at all to lose by trying, and absolutely everything amd much more to gain.
“Certainty of death! Small chance of success! What are we WAITING FOR?” – Gimly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8EpoFnNNb4
I don’t know, but I do know I prefer to believe that, for now at least, I am not meant to know, for sure.
I don’t know if it is entirely woolly-minded, delusional, mere wishful thinking to suspect that….mere wishful thinking might actually work, time and time and time again and again, even if rarely absolutely precisely as I wished it to?
How often have I been thinking of someone I had not thought of or been in touch with for weeks or months, only to meet them or receive a message from them?
How often have I stared at someone’s back only to witness them turn around and look in my direction?
How often have a waved at a stranger only to immediately receive an almost exact replica of that wave back?
How often, on a telephone, have I felt someone’s intense attention, of their distraction or disinterest?
How often have I tried to send someone goodwill, only to find, the next time I met them, that they behaved more codially than before to me?
How often have a felt like veritable waves of good will or of disapproval as though emanating from their being?
How often have a gazed into the eyes of someone, even behind dark glasses, and sensed love or fear?
How often have I looked in the eyes of another human or other animal and asked myself how anyone could believe that all they or I am seeing is cells dead and living, tissues, adnexa, sclera, cornea, iris, pupil…?
How often have I wondered what it is about a newborn animal which is so…different?
How often have I felt transformed by the listening of another, or even by a mere knowing, loving glance from a stranger?
How often have I asked myself when am I going to sit down complete my list of all the ways in which prayer MIGHT work?
How often have I tried to remind myself that, if a newborn infant or I can somehow clap my hands together as to make a noise, or to raise a hand on command, or to pee at will, I really have no excuse for doubting that absolutely everything is a miracle?
How often have I reminded myself that, if everything is indeed the will of Allah, and of “God’s Nature,” then everyone’s will, my own included, is, too, so that, ultimately, I should not fear doing “wrong,” because I have nothing to fear, and because only Fear and nothing but Fear would have me believe I can act outside of God or Nature, and act accordingly?
Day after day, I meet homeless folks who seem immeasurably more peaceful and contented than the world leaders I see on tv.
Week after week, I meet very elderly folks in a memory care unit, many of them more peaceful and contented that I appear to be, some of them deeply demented, and yet able to laugh aloud whenever I ask if they have any really, really bad jokes for me, please?
Yesterday, once more, I was absolutely lost in wonder and in admiration for the ever laughing, radiant Arsenio and for all the a mazing women who work with him in that old folks home.
But, instead of allowing myself become too miserable by comparing myself to those angels, and by dreading that I may end up deeply demeneted and in need of care of people like them, having read yoiur heartfelt comments above, Joanna, I have reminded myself that I can always pray for all of those residents, for all of their families, and for all of their carers, and that, by holding images of of the individuals involved in mind as I do so, I cannot be certain they will receive the slightest benefits from my mere wishful thinking, from my prayers….but I have reason to believe that, if they do, it should no more amaze me than if I can continue to applaud the work of others, or to type at will, or “as the spirit moves me to”….or to pee on command, and only then, as long as ever I can.
My first comment here,
https://theconversation.com/absence-of-evidence-is-not-evidence-of-absence-and-that-affects-what-scientific-journals-choose-to-publish-264854#comment_3049425
in response to the very first comment by Terrence Threft, enumerates (badly) some of the ways I think Science still denies that mere wishful thinking might work from a distance, despite an abundance of evidence that it might.
Joanna, thank you for what I read as a very timely call to prayer!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuLwrs3bqJ0
Thank you!
Tom.
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Tom, many thanks for your comment. My reply is going to be much shorter.
First of all, as I have found out myself, people don’t always respond positively to our friendliness or kindness. When someone was hostile towards me, in the past I tried to show the person that I was friendly. Unfortunately it often made the person even more hostile and aggressive (especially online).
“Mysterious” things like unexpectedly getting a message from someone we have been thinking of can happen, but some of us also find out in a painful way that our thoughts don’t have a magical power when it comes to relationships with other people.
As to thinking about others, I would say that the crucial thing is to notice people in our closest environment (including our families) we can help – and not only through prayers. Kindness is very important, every kind gesture can mean a lot to people who are suffering or lonely. I feel that this “ordinary” kindness is too often a forgotten virtue in our times.
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To put that comment into context Tom, it was based on personal experience with a family member.
On a more positive note – legislation has very recently been changed where I live, to address the overuse of psychiatric drugs causing fatalities in aged care.
This would not have happened without awareness and people talking about it.
I’m hopeful awareness of overmedication practices in mental health and disability care is increasing, there is talk here, but no action yet.
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Freya, thank you very much indeed for these responses. (I love your very wonderful name – like Joanna’s, also – and their very special meanings, too, by the way!)
We give; we get. We all figure this out – that it’s neither selfish nor altruistic to want to try and help others – it’s simply wanting to try to help yourself. It’s….awareness, “awakened Consciousness, isn’t it?
Awareness?
Consciousness?
Zen?
The Kingdom of Heaven?
In my opinion, if he lived, then, just like any other decent spiritual teacher, Jesus of Nazareth appears to to have done his best to teach Zen, and to help so elevate folks to their highest levels of consciousness through a transformation of consciousness – “metanoia,” later “repentance” – that they could experience Zen, and Paradise-on-Earth – and that this work continues today so that it may bring us all back together in peace and joy and love and no longer instead cause divisions – “fire and the sword, brother against brother” etc. and families and nations divided and dehumanizing and demonizing one another etc.
Some of my own sweetest tastes of Paradise-on-Earth have been brought to me by demented old residents of certain homes and by the most extraordinarily loving beings, the “ordinary” women and men who look after them there.
And I have no doubt in the world but that this same unconditional love which I have witnessed extended to residents by staff has indeed very often brought those elderly folks lasting glimpses of Paradise, too – perhaps even when oversedated, overdrugged, too.
Martin, a general practitioner in Ireland, told me of visiting, back when he was a young resident, a dying old bachelor in a hospital ward. Martin begged Tom’s nephew to stay with the old man one night, as he felt he was about to pass on, but the young man had a date and left.
“So I sat down at the end of his bed myself, Tom. You see, I had this old, this old country superstition, I suppose you could call it, that no one should ever be left to die alone, you see. And, after a few minutes, I said to him, I said, ‘Tom, do you know where you are now?’ And he opened his eyes a moment, Tom, and he said to me, he said, ‘I’m in Heaven!’ And then he died.”
Shortly after my own mom’s 86th birthday, I think it was, my dad, 8 years her senior, but still fit and well, wheeled her in from a visit to the daffodils in the garden of the nursing home.
“Denis, Love, where am I, at all, do you know, please, Love?”
My dear old dad might, as usual, I guess, have once more explained to Vera exactly where she was, but something halted him. Perhaps, as Mom, with a wink, used to say, “as the spirit moved him, Lovey.” Perhaps somebody had been or was right then praying for Denis?
“Where do YOU think you are, Vera?”
“Oh, I’m in Heaven, Love!”
“But on he moves to meet his latter end,
Angels around befriending virtue’s friend;
Bends to the grave with unperceived decay,
While resignation gently slopes the way;
And, all his prospects brightening to the last,
His Heaven commences ere the world be past!”
from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44292/the-deserted-village
If Jesus actually lived and breathed and spoke of “The Kingdom of the Heavens” or “The Kingdom of the Skies,” synonymously with “The Kingdom of the Father,” or “The Kingdom of God,” or “His Kingdom,” or “My Father’s House,” I believe that Eckhart Tolle was right (as usual) in suggesting that he was using such idioms to refer to…well, a realm, to the realm of the heavens, of the skies, metaphorically meaning the realm of what some Buddhist call “Emptiness,” or to Spaciousness – to the realm of formless consciousness. If this is so, then, suddenly, he is making sense, after all, and we can experience not just every possible hell but also every conceivable and inconceivable heaven while yet here on Earth.
“In my Father’s House are many mansions….”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons
The Kingdom. Seek first His Kingdom. The Pearl of Great Price. The Light of the World. The I-AM. The before-Abram-was-I-AM. The Before-you-were-in-your-mother’s-womb-I-knew-you-I-AM. The I-AM-that-I-AM. Like small children. Your “sins” are fore-given you. “Sin” no more. He did not “sin,” nor did his parents “sin.” Like maidens with their oil-filled, lighted lamps. Like guests accepting an invitation to the feast. Deny thy SELF. All things possible to one who believes. Such things they will do and greater. Not one small bird falls from the sky…every hair counted [“The snow falls – each flake in its appropriate spot”]. Worry not about the morrow. Behold the flowers of the field [or the Lotus flower}. The Kingdom is within you. Thy kingdom come [like, NOW, please!]. Thy will be done [like, NOW, please!}. Etc. etc. etc.
We did not understand Zen then, I believe, and we still don’t, but I think there are abounding signs, subtle, such as you mention, and not so subtle, that we are all rapidly getting there now – together. And that all the work of Bob Whitaker and of Steve McCrae and others in MIA is helping this happen in a particularly significant way.
“‘But why on Earth,’ you may ask, ‘should it be necessary for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness?’
This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead… I can only make a confession of faith:
I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of the primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is. The entire world round me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fully conscious man.” (CW 9i, §177).
Freya, thanks a million, again, for all you say and do, and for all you’ve undoubtedly been through!
Tom.
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Tom, thanks for the lovely stories and words which remind me that perspective is so important. I can get tunnel vision at times- like anyone (I hope!)
Some of my most precious experiences are being with people who are struggling and experiencing their grace and generosity in what we might think of as severe adversity. As are my experiences of extraordinary kindnesses of staff when I was struggling.
Altruism and selfishness are too polarised, taking care of ourself is just as important as taking care of each other or humanity, and I don’t see the difference really.
And yes, we owe a huge thank you to Robert Whitaker and Steve and MIA for the way things are changing and for bringing survivor’s voices together with others to raise awareness so powerfully.
I have just looked up the meaning of Joanna’s name 🙂
Thanks for the kind and wonderful words!
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Freya, I agree with virtually everything you are saying – I was only not lucky enough to experience a lot of kindness from staff. The kindest person was a nurse who talked to me on the first evening of my stay in the psychiatric hospital. Many other people seemed to have become callous and one nurse was actually acting in a toxic, spiteful way (not only towards me).
I have also looked up the meaning of your name and it is very beautiful!
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Thank you – I wish I was more “noble”, or maybe a goddess! 😀
Joanna has a beautifully hopeful meaning, so appropriate indeed 🙂
Many nurses do seem to become callous and forget we’re human altogether. Some might be overworked, but I’ve met others who were spiteful – I’m sorry you have too, because they can be terrifying when you’re practically helpless. It makes the kind ones more memorable at least!
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Freya, you actually do come across as a very noble person who highly values justice and cares about other people, so your name fits you very well 🙂
I agree with you about nurses. In my own case I am sure that the nurse who was spiteful should never work in a mental hospital. Fortunately my family members, especially my mum, visited me every day in the hospital – otherwise I would have been much more vulnerable.
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Many thanks, Joanna!
Isn’t live music better, then, after all – and was Neil Young as well as every Young’s Double Slits experiment in error, too, then, after all?
And as long as Psychiatry holds that consciousness is limited to the brain, dismissing the belief that consciousness can have any direct effects outside the brain as “magical thinking,” I see it as being incompatible with any other religion and with all spiritually…and doomed to proceed to pretend to think otherwise only to humor the lunatics and maintain its own place as state religion, don’t you?
Thank you for a most fascinating point or three!
Have a wonderful day!
Tom.
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Tom, thank you for your kind words! Can consciousness have direct effects outside the brain? Maybe yes. But I know that we sometimes hope in vain that our own thoughts and emotions will have an impact on another person. Well, maybe they do have an impact, but we don’t always see it.
Do things like telepathy exist? Sometimes I think that they do. When I talk to my mum, she sometimes unexpectedly says something I had thought myself seconds ago. But maybe it is simply because of similarity between our ways of thinking. There was a time when I believed that I had a telepathic connection with a person, but I later realized that my mind had been misleading me. So I remain sceptical 🙂
I wish you, too, a wonderful day!
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Joanna, heartfelt thanks!
Maybe you need a little more practice?!
If you consistently give all your attention to another human who is unaware of you, or to animal, especially a bird, you may begin to consistently notice interesting, even intriguing responses! It can be really, really fascinating!
It’s also amazing, I find, to observe how the more and more nonjudgmentally one listens to someone with what seem to you more extreme (political or religious or other) views, the more quickly they seem to moderate them, even as you listen!
I asked a guy how he had healed my skeptical and cynical colleague of her fibromyalgia in their third session together. He insisted he did not heal her, that she healed herself. Later, I pressed him to know how he helped folks to heal themselves. He said he listened to them.
We humans are very often conditioned to so despise ourselves as to almost wish ourselves sick. WHen we meet a person who knows how to listen to us with unconditional love and without the slightest judgment, I think we are often empowered to heal ourselves.
Prof. Howard Schubiner explains the science behind this awfully well in just about any of his YouTube presentations you might watch, including at Min 37:59-38:07 of this,
“#199 UNLEARN YOUR PAIN – HOWARD SCHUBINER, MD …” with Richard Atherton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qINdA6E14Sk
Howard reminds us that old emotional issues which cause psychosomatic illness may do so in the form of chronic pain, anxiety-depression, insomnia, fatigue, fibromyalgia, brain fog or a whole host of other manifestations such as vertigo, tinnitus, GERD, IBD etc. or a combination of these.
I have found cats to be very reliable detection devices when it comes to my being awake or asleep, alert+relaxed, agitated etc. But all animals respond to our state of mind/consciousness, I believe, and can do so from a great distance, behind doors and walls, and when sight, sound and smell can be ruled out.
Transformative listening can happen face-to-face, as Albert Einstein experienced one mid-May evening in 1905, I think it was, when his friend Michele Besso listened to him so well that Albert finally could make his Special Relativity breakthrough after six long years of work on it…or down a phone, of course, when two fiel;ds of consciousness can also fuse, or so it seems to me:
“When two or more are gathered in my name,” as Jesus reportedly put it – or in the name of Love – in loving cooperation, the sum is always greater than the parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyUxYflkhzo
I assume just about every man in history has wished to be a better man than his dad, especially if he becomes a dad, stepdad or foster dad..
As a student, I traveled around the Irish countryside with Mike, a wonderful vet, who told me one day:
“When I was about 17 – and I suppose I WAS a bit Bolshi [slang Bolshevik, I believe] back then – I can remember saying something to my poor old dad and he became very, very angry.
‘MY God, Mike,” he roared at me, ‘one day, one day, one day, I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope you have a son JUST like you!’ And I do, NOW: He’s an absolute BAStard!”
I reckon the best advice I got on dealing with one’s own teenagers may have been to love them enough to accept their rejection of you, but the best practical piece was, if ever you found yourself beginning once more to get into with them, to just quit, go to another room, go down on your two knees and pray for them. I found that doing so may or may not have had a direct effect on our teenager, but it sure as Hell changed me!
We all have had the most mindblowing coincidences happen to us in our lives. Jung and Nobel physicist Pauli worked on synchronicities together, I believe, but we can analyze our own, if we wish. Call them a wink from the Universe or whatever you like, I think they are reminders that “the snow falls, each falke in its appropriate spot,” not one small bird falls from the sky by our “Heavenly Father” knows it, wills it – always: We ultimately could do no ultimate, cosmic wrong if we tried…and the more we can accept this, the more we cease even trying to do wrong, or being tempted to – the more enlightened I presume we must be and behave?
I can plan to try and let you know if I ever get there, Joanna!
I can go on planning to list all the ways I can think of in which prayer appears to have worked for me, too – and always in the absence of “an interventionist God,” by the way!
Nick Cave – “Into My Arms:”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG0-cncMpt8
Comfort and joy, and THANK YOU, Joanna!
http://www.maidofheaven.com/joanofarc_chesterton_quote.asp
Tom.
PS: I heard recently that if Jesus started ascending toward some extraGalactic “Heaven” all those years ago, traveling at the speed of light, he would not yet have exited our Milky Way.
If he returned tomorrow, somehow, what more could he tell us, yet again, than that “The Kingdom is withIN you!”, though?
‘3) Jesus said, “If those who lead you say, ‘See, the Kingdom is
in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they
say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you.
Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.
When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and
you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living
Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty
and it is you who are that poverty.”‘
http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/thomas.htm
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Tom, many thanks for sharing all these thoughts with me. I agree with you that nonjudgmental listening often has a very positive impact on other people.
I think there are actually quite many people who are open to dialogue and who don’t want to hurt others. I am quite outspoken during online discussions and I sometimes assume that I am going to be attacked for my comment(s). (I don’t mean the MIA website where the atmosphere is very friendly!). To my surprise, I am usually not attacked and other people often engage in respectful dialogue with me.
I guess that it is because I don’t come across as an aggressive or sarcastic person. It seems that many people can sense that I have good intentions, so they tend to treat me well even if I have different views or criticize something they had said. This is very uplifting. I have also learnt to avoid interacting with people who clearly want to say hurtful things to others.
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I don’t know if this comment will ever be read/seen, since this is now a relatively old post, but it suddenly occurred to me that no one here on MIA has ever taken issue with my choice to self-identify as someone with an eating disorder the way that commenters here have taken issue with Robert’s choice to self-identify as someone with schizophrenia. I wonder why that is.
–Jasmine
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Jasmine, it is probably because the very concept of schizophrenia has been very often questioned. There is no convincing proof that such an illness exists.
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Joanna, my confusion/curiosity is not due to a lack of understanding. I understand that there is no convincing proof that “schizophrenia” is a mental “illness,” or even exists at all. But that is not unique to “schizophrenia”; it is true of all so-called “mental illnesses.” Including eating “disorders.” I was pointing out the double standard.
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Jasmine, I think that there is a very important difference here. There are really people (mainly girls and women) who starve themselves because they keep thinking that they are “too fat”. Many of these people unfortunately die. There are also really people who induce vomiting etc. in order not to gain weight. These behaviours are clearly disorders, it is impossible to see them as normal.
I also disagree with people who think that there are no abnormal mental states, that e.g. psychosis does not exist or is a fully normal reaction to distress. Hallucinations and delusions seriously distort people’s vision of reality and can be a reaction to trauma. As a person who experienced psychosis I know that it was not my normal reaction to distress.
Regarding “schizophrenia”, in my opinion this is a completely different problem. The concept of “schizophrenia” is usually based on the assumption that it is a lifelong and incurable illness. “Schizophrenia” is also frequently portrayed as a brain disease. These beliefs about “schizophrenia” are based on assumptions which are very pessimistic and which have been questioned by many researchers.
To sum it all up, one can question the concept of “schizophrenia” without rejecting the very idea of mental disorders/abnormal mental states. I did experience psychosis and I have no problem with this term. In any case, this state was not my normal state. But I clearly don’t have a lifelong and incurable illness and the fact that I was diagnosed with such an illness has had a negative impact on my life.
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Joanna, I find your reply rather offensive. I don’t need someone to tell me that “there are really people who starve themselves/make themselves throw up/etc.” It feels like you think I am ignorant and do not know what eating disorders are. I don’t just know about them; I have lived them.
They are not “clearly” disorders any more than any other so-called “disorder.” Are they behaviorally normative? No. Are they physically healthy? No. But does that mean they are brain diseases? Also no.
Similar to “schizophrenia,” many people do believe that eating disorders are lifelong & incurable, especially after one or more “failed” recovery attempts. It’s probably not as bad as the stereotypes about “schizophrenia,” yet there is still a lot of stigma and pessimistic assumptions about prognosis.
I’d recommend that maybe you read one of the articles I’ve written on this site about eating disorders to help you gain a better understanding. Then maybe you’d realize that they’re not “mental disorders,” and are indeed reactions to trauma/distress, much like other so-called “mental illnesses.”
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The various states of mind that you pejoratively label as hallucinations, disorders, delusions, and other types of supposed distorted perception of reality obviously do exist, but the way in which they are viewed and defined is wholly conditioned by the religious, cultural, and other traditions prevailing in a given society at a specific moment in time. Hence, any judgment on the soundness of a particular thought, emotion, or pattern of behavior cannot be scientific or medical in nature, unless a real–not a hypothetical-illness is verified to be their causative factor.
Let’s consider, for example, the matter of eating disorders. Among pious Jains, those who consciously starve themselves to death in order to escape the bonds of samsara (the eternal chain of rebirths) are revered as holy, not pitied or ridiculed as lunatics. Do you think people who hold this belief and sometimes practice extreme self-mortification to the point of death are victims of mass psychosis?
Such vague terms as a “distorted vision of reality” and “normal reaction to distress” are meaningless when divorced from their wider context. Reductionist, culture-bound western psychiatry ignores this elementary truth.
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Jasmine, you wrote in your earlier comment: “I understand that there is no convincing proof that “schizophrenia” is a mental “illness,” or even exists at all. But that is not unique to “schizophrenia”; it is true of all so-called “mental illnesses.” Including eating “disorders.”
So in your earlier comment you actually seemed to imply that there is no convincing proof that eating disorders exist.
I did not claim that eating disorders are “brain diseases”. And I disagree with the view that the term “mental disorder” is somehow offensive.
Regarding “schizophrenia”, let me be more clear. “Schizophrenia” is sometimes diagnosed in people who have had only one psychotic episode. These people are told that they have an incurable mental illness and that they need lifelong neuroleptic treatment. Even if these people no longer have any symptoms, many (if not most) psychiatrists assume that the schizophrenia diagnosis was correct.
Neuroleptics have a very negative impact on the lives and health of people who take them. So the harm of a “schizophrenia” diagnosis is not limited to stigmatization and pessimistic assumptions.
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Joel, I don’t find terms like “hallucinations” and “delusions” pejorative. As someone who has personally experienced hallucinations and delusions I can say that they seriously distort the person’s vision of reality. My approach is not “Western”, but based on my personal experiences.
Everyone has the right to interpret his/her own personal experiences as s/he wants. I disagreed with those who have been criticizing Robert for using the term “schizophrenia” while talking about his experiences. And I also have to disagree with the view that my comments about my own experiences are somehow inappropriate or incorrect.
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@Joanna: By the way, I realized that I didn’t respond to the part of your comment about psychosis vs schizophrenia. I want to clarify that I’m not denying the existence of the experience of what is called “psychosis.” That is very real and I know many people experience it. I simply don’t agree that it is an “illness” or even a “disorder.” I also don’t believe in dividing mental states into a “normal” vs “abnormal” binary; I simply see it as all part of the continuum of human experiences (including those brought on by trauma). Of course, you’re entitled to frame your own experiences however you want.
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@Joanna, I can see where the misunderstanding might’ve come from in my earlier comment. What I meant was that I don’t believe eating disorders are “mental illnesses,” like so-called “schizophrenia,” and I don’t think they are caused by brain disorders. Not that I don’t think eating disorders are real. The set of experiences and behaviors that we label as “eating disorders” in our society are certainly real.
Btw, I was antipsychotics (or “neuroleptics” as you call them) as well, even though I didn’t have psychosis or a schizophrenia diagnosis. They were prescribed to me “off-label.” So I am quite personally familiar with the harms.
I also agree with what you said above regarding everyone’s right to interpret and/or label their own experiences as they wish. And I disagreed with other commenters who were criticizing Robert as well.
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Jasmine, I totally agree with you that psychosis is part of the continuum of human experiences and of course we can and should question terms like “normal” and “abnormal”.
What I meant is that I disagree with people who – without really understanding what psychosis is – claim that all “mental disorders” are merely “problems in living” or forms of “emotional distress”. In fact, I feel that in a sense it invalidates the experiences of people who have had psychosis. Phenomena like hallucinations and delusions should be named, not treated as unimportant.
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Jasmine, in fact one of the problems with the term “psychosis” is that it is too vague. As an example, some people claim that they had “psychosis”, but could normally function (go to work etc.) and were never hospitalized. It was definitely impossible in my case or in Robert’s case. People who don’t know anyone with such intense and distressing experiences may not realize what impact a psychotic episode can have on a person’s life.
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Jasmine, yes, this is where the misunderstanding between us came from. I agree with you, I don’t think that eating disorders are mental illnesses and I certainly don’t believe that they are caused by brain dysfunctions.
I was on the verge of anorexia as a teenager and it was clearly linked to my experiences and my way of thinking – I did not feel accepted by my peers and I thought that getting thinner would help me. Of course I was influenced by the toxic beauty ideal promoted by women’s magazines etc.
As we both know, the idea that psychosis, depression and other “mental disorders” are “brain diseases” is used to deny or minimize the impact of people’s experiences and life circumstances on their mental health.
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Schizophrenia remains a great taboo. People are afraid of it. The thought of becoming schizophrenic horrifies people. An eating disorder is not so frightening. The solution seems simple: learn to eat a healthy diet. Whereas there is no simple remedy for schizophrenia and for escaping from mental hospitals, from psychiatry and from psychiatric medicine. A person can go for a job interview and simply say that he has an eating disorder and still expect to get the job. But if he says that he is schizophrenic, there is no chance that he will be hired.
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Of course, you are aware that learning to eat a healthy diet has exactly nothing to do with what is called an “eating disorder?”
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Exactly! Not to mention that diet culture promotes a super fucked up idea of what “healthy eating” is, so many eating disorder behaviors are normalized and seen as “healthy.” Ya wanna know how many times I was praised or even envied for being “healthy” during my anorexia? More times than I can count!
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Robert, I will not deny that schizophrenia is more stigmatized than eating disorders. In fact, I think schizophrenia is arguably the most stigmatized of any psychiatric label. But I think a lot of your other assertions about eating disorders are false, and quite frankly, rather offensive.
You say that “an eating disorder is not so frightening.” Did you know that eating disorders have the second highest mortality rate (just behind opiate addiction) out of all psychiatric diagnoses? Did you know that every 52 minutes 1 person dies as a direct consequence of an eating disorder? As someone who nearly starved myself to death just over 2 years ago, I can assure you that eating disorders can be absolutely terrifying.
As someone with lived experience with an eating disorder, the solution is NOT that simple, though it may SEEM simple to someone who has never had an ED & doesn’t know much about them. Eating disorders can stem from complex trauma, fatphobia/diet culture, and a myriad of other factors. They are often a way of coping with immense emotional distress — like substance use or self-harm — and therefore it’s not that “simple” to “just stop.” It’s not about “learning to eat a healthy diet” either — in fact, many eating disorders actually stem from an obsession with eating “healthy.” Furthermore, after starving myself for years, there are physiological effects that do not go away overnight. One such effect is that your digestive system literally atrophies from underuse & malnutrition, making eating & digesting extremely physically painful. I’m still dealing with these effects over 2 years into recovery.
Even though (like I said) eating disorders are not as badly stigmatized as schizophrenia, they are still very VERY stigmatized. Depending on how outwardly visible your ED symptoms are (not everyone’s are), there is a high chance that you’d be judged on appearances alone at a job interview without even having to disclose the fact that you have an eating disorder. This could definitely impact someone’s ability to get a job. A lot of people hold harmful biases about people with eating disorders, including that we are “unstable,” “fragile,” “attention-seeking,” and less capable and less competent.
Additionally, eating disorders rarely happen in isolation, so they are often accompanied by trauma histories, self-harm, suicidality, substance use, and other psychiatric labels — all of which carry their own set of stigmas. Carceral psychiatric intervention is quite common in eating disorder treatment, similar to schizophrenia, and because of their medical complications, forced medical interventions may occur as well. All of this can result in spotty work histories from being in and out of hospitals or treatment centers.
I personally never went inpatient or residential (largely because my family could not realistically afford it), but I still experienced trauma as a result of the eating disorder treatment I had. I was coerced into taking multiple psychiatric drugs, including antipsychotics, and I had to fight to break free of psychiatry’s grasp & recover on my own.
Please be mindful next time before you make assumptions about other peoples’ psychiatric labels or experiences that you may be less familiar with. I don’t hold it against you, but I did find your comment really insensitive and minimizing of what I’ve been through. I was hoping a fellow psychiatric survivor would be more understanding.
If you want to learn more about eating disorders, I’d recommend you read my personal story, or one of the other articles I’ve written on here. Perhaps that will help you gain some perspective on these issues.
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Jasmine, I’m impressed by your very eloquent and convincing response to Robert’s rather cavalier attitude toward the nature of eating disorders. In fact, I think your arguments hold true for the vast majority of mental states that are unjustifiably pathologized by biomedical psychiatry. I appreciate your insights, which are not abstract but grounded in lived experience, and thus all the more pertinent and valid.
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Thank you Joel! Your comment made me smile!
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If I understand your story correctly, psychiatrists did you more harm than good. Is this correct?
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Yes, absolutely. I think we have that in common!
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Robert, I am very happy that you mentioned the impact of a schizophrenia diagnosis on people’s job opportunities. I have personally never mentioned my diagnosis in a professional context. I have had many opportunities to see how even highly-educated and seemingly open-minded people tend to perceive people diagnosed with this illness.
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I apologize for offending people with eating disorders. I had no intention of being so insensitive. The truth of the matter is that I know absolutely nothing about eating disorders. All that I wanted to say is that having an eating disorder is probably not as dreadful as having schizophrenia. Several people who have written comments about my writings in Mad in America claim that schizophrenia does not exist. Have you ever been told that eating disorders do not exist?
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Robert, I do not know if it’s true that having an eating disorder is not as dreadful as having schizophrenia. I haven’t had both experiences, and I don’t think it’s worth arguing who “has it the worst.” I will say that being LABELED with an eating disorder is probably not as dreadful as being LABELED with schizophrenia. I already acknowledged that schizophrenia is far more stigmatized — arguably the most stigmatized among all psychiatric labels — yet I refuse to pretend like eating disorders are not stigmatized at all. Or that they cannot be as traumatic or potentially life-ruining (and health-ruining).
I do not recall if anyone’s ever said it directly to my face, but I’ve definitely heard people say things like eating disorders aren’t real, or that people with EDs are just faking/making it up for attention, or just fundamentally misunderstand what EDs even are. People have said to my face that they don’t think MY eating disorder is real, that I don’t really have one, including doctors. I’ve also been praised by others for being “healthy” when I was literally starving myself to the point that my hair was falling out and my bones were showing.
Trust me, it’s pretty dreadful to be pondering your own mortality at 22 years old when suddenly realizing that you don’t actually want to die once you fear it might be too late. It’s pretty dreadful to be now 24 years old and still partially disabled by the damage your eating disorder has left on your body.
Again, I don’t want to compare experiences, but I also refuse to downplay mine. You seem very self-assured in asserting that eating disorders aren’t as bad despite admitting to know nothing about them. I personally can’t imagine being that confident in making assertions about something I know nothing about, let alone assertions that compare/downplay someone else’s experience. Perhaps you could read my personal story or other ED articles, like I’d suggested, for a better understanding.
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It is never productive to measure whose pain is the greater! Pain is pain, and it hurts, no matter what the source.
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I totally agree, Steve!
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Thanks, Steve, this is exactly what I was trying to communicate!
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Pain is pain, perhaps, but it is not what Science says it is (supposedly the uncontrollable or unavoidable product of “nociceptors,” anf their unavoidable reactions to outside stimuli or stressors) – just like “mental illness” (the supposedly uncontrollable or unavoidable product of certain brains’ unavoidable responses to outside stressors) and “personality disorders!”
Sin, the precursor of “mental disorder” theories, was another misconstruction, except when seen S haplessly, heedlessly, helplessly “missing the mark,” the point of human existence.
No fear, no pain.
Sensation + fear = physical pain, even when that sensation is phantom and/or produced by the brain in the absence of actual tissue-damaging or threatening sensations in the body part)s seemingly affected.
Emotional or psychic pain is fear, on some form/s.
Fear, or danger alarm, or aversive response or resistance or “psychological resistance” to what already IS, is obviously irrational, while utterly natural, of course.
But when we see our pain as being generated by outside stimuli rather than by our reactions to certain stimuli or events or sensations, we tend to remain stuck in pain, at that level.
Ditto “mental illnesses” or “personality disorders” which we are made to believe we cannot escape.
By understanding our own responses for what they are, we can render the unconscious conscious.
This is the alchemy Jung knew and wrote about.
This is the metanoia, the transformation of consciousness and, with it, the transmutation of physical and of emotional/psychic pain which Jesus, like any half-decent (spiritual) teacher tried so hard to teach, and that Prof. Howard Schubiner and others now teach so well.
https://youtu.be/pv8PtT_4rjk?si=NpwRNPgwHn1GRZ87
Much love.
Many thanks.
Tom.
And much mirth, too!
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Robert, there are many people who differentiate between “psychosis” and “schizophrenia” which is widely seen as a lifelong and incurable mental illness. The term “schizophrenia” has been frequently criticized, including by many researchers.
As an example, the psychologist Richard Bentall wrote in one of his articles: “…the concept of ‘schizophrenia’ has been used to denote a strikingly wide range of behaviours and experiences, including hallucinations, delusions, passivity experiences, cognitive disorganization, disordered and impoverished speech, anhedonia, flat affect and social disabilities. These behaviours and experiences are rarely all present in the same
individual. As a consequence ‘schizophrenia’ is a disjunctive concept, such that two people may receive the diagnosis while having little if anything in common.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247508239_Deconstructing_the_concept_of_'schizophrenia‘
Of course there are people who are chronically psychotic or who often have relapses of psychosis, but in many cases it may be linked to neuroleptics, social isolation etc. I also know two cases of women who became psychotic while using an antidepressant, so it seems that in some cases antidepressants can trigger psychosis. Both these women have been diagnosed with “schizophrenia” and believe that they have a lifelong mental illness.
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I am interested in being a part of a Me-Too movement of victims of psychiatric abuse. I would like to hear stories of people whose lives became worse as a result of psychiatry, and stories of people who managed to rebuild their lives on their own, without psychiatrists and without psychiatric medicine. This is the story of my own life, and I know that other people have had similar experiences. There are so many different routes to salvation that do not involve psychiatry. I was hospitalized for schizophrenia at the age of 18. When I was 22 I moved to Ireland and the magic of Ireland cured my wounds. I have a tee-shirt that says: “I don’t need therapy. I just need to go to Ireland.” I believe that people should do all that they can to save themselves on their own terms, to trust their instinct, to remain positive, and to keep some kind of faith in the divine, and to look for love and share love. I know that it is not easy, but it is certainly worth the effort.
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When I was 22 (I think it was), Robert, I went to Quebec, funnily enough – from Ireland – and was so struck by how Catholic churches had become places of entertainment etc: Roman Catholics had so died out that I’m not sure that s cathedral on the city of Quebec was still being used as one.
Heating bills?
Returning to Holy Ireland, years later, when I told folks I had gone to Heaven three times in two days, obviously without dying (as I thought), I was locked up and drugged for 82 days by men and women who had forgotten that we are all immortal as, after all.
When released, I fled Ireland a fast as I could, for good.
I believe there is not just an infinitude of parallel universes here, but of Irelands, of Canadas and of Quebec, too….
Much love.
Many thanks.
En amitie, et en vous rassurant de mes sentiments les plus respectueux et tout ca, et cetera,
Tom.
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Tom, thank you for this great comment. Yes, your experiences prove that there is plenty of psychiatric oppression in Ireland, too.
I would say that the most helpful thing is simply rejecting psychiatry, its labels and its drugs.
As to churches in Quebec, what you are saying is sad! In Scotland even very old churches are now being sold by the Church of Scotland, including the 13th century Culross Abbey church.
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You are extremely kind, Joanna, but give me too much credit, again, thank you!
I doubt I made myself clear. My apologies.
My understanding is that Jesus tried to emphasize our universal Original Innocence and to teach Zen and to live Zen…while Saul/Paul, for whatever reasons, managed to very successfully hijack and distort those teachings, and, instead, to emphasize Sin, Sin, Sin, Sin, Sin, Sin, Sin, and that these two philosophies or belief systems are utterly incompatible, although the latter aligns well with the prevailing point of view of mainstream, coercive, Psychiatry or Psychopharmacology – that we are not all “sinners” but that we are none of us immune from the threat of “mental disorder” and/or from the possibility of “personality disorder.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYH2WS3CU6A
If Jung were alive today (I suspect he is, but…), and I asked him if, given our contemporary (Western) use of the terms “religious” and “spiritual,” I do not know if he might agree that the latter gets across his meaning more faithfully than the former when he wrote,
“I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, “Modern Man in Search of a Soul.”
If, as I believe Jesus tried his very best to teach and to show, “the Kingdom of Heaven” is within each and every one of us equally, there and there alone to be accessed, then what need does anyone have of any religion anymore?
When Jesus wished to pray, I believe he sought out a quiet place.
When he ventured into places of worship, I believe he repeatedly got himself into serious trouble…
“God” rest you merry, and thank you for the ongoing therapy, the healing!
Tom.
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Tom, the problem is that the closures of churches in many Western countries don’t mean that people have found spirituality elsewhere. As we know, lots of people have been seduced by consumerism and workaholism. Lots of people don’t have enough time and energy left to think about spiritual or other deeper issues. And far too many people mindlessly copy what others are doing.
In order to access “the Kingdom of Heaven”, one has to know how to find it. We live in times when selfishness is often portrayed as the normal, rational way of thinking. We also live in times of very addictive online content. Many people now spend far too much time glued to their screens and disconnected from nature and other human beings.
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You know, Joanna, that they say that every time Secretariat lost a race, he went out and broke the course record in his next one, and that maybe Seabiscuit did more to drag the US our of depression or out of The Depression than…and that some horses, at least, like elephants, know more about death or “death” than we do…
…and that, asked by the King of France what reward she would like for having driven the English out of France, Joan of Arc said she wished to return home to help her Mom with the housework….
and that, while done say the difference between religious and spiritual folks is that the latter do not kill one another, and others say it’s that the former fear Hell while the latter have been through it, or hells, Eckhart suggests that being “spiritual” has nothing to do with what one believes, everything to do with one’s state of consciousness?
Joanna Badura, I cannot tell you how grateful I feel to you for teaching me that any moment I am not laughing, I am very probably being a total idiot again, having forgotten, once again, that The Kingdom of Heaven is not coming by signs to be observed etc.,but is ever with me and all creatures and all things, and outside, and spread out all around and and and…
Thank YOU!
Tom.
PS. What was funny was how dismayed I felt to discover how les Québécois, or many of them, seeeeemed to have outgrown their Catholicism…and to anticipate that we Irish soon would, or might, too……..!?
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Thank you, too, Tom! I would just add that there are many religious people who have “gone through the hell”. I would also say that there are now many very negative stereotypes on religious people – that they are backward, narrow-minded, fanatical etc.
In reality religious people are as diverse as other human beings. And there are many positive things about Catholicism (and Christianity in general, and religions in general), contrary to all the negative stereotypes.
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Hello Tom, I really think that it is a change of country that helps people recover from psychosis. I have heard of an Irish teacher who suffered from a psychosis and then moved to Wales, where she quickly recovered. I wanted to flee American psychiatrists, and you wanted to flee Irish Catholicism. I have never been a Catholic, but I can understand how a Catholic childhood in Ireland can be a traumatic experience. This is what James Joyce is all about. Of course I enjoyed liberating Irish boys and girls from the sexual inhibitions that the Catholic Church had imposed on them. Love, Guinness and the smell of turf fires, what more could a man want?
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Robert, I would say that it’s different for every person. I did not have to move to another country to recover from psychosis. And for some people going to a different country actually increases the risk of psychosis. My own psychotic episode began in a country where I don’t usually live.
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What more, Robert?
Zen?
Any suggestions, at all, very welcome, please!
It wasn’t the Irish Jesuit school which Joyce attended, but another one which I phoned and where I asked that sweet and loving and extremely patient priest if one would not or should not “be in Heaven” if one believed one were “doing God’s will,” and who replied,
“I don’t know how to answer that question!”
Any suggestions, at all, very welcome, please!
With heartfelt and soulfelt thanks for all your missionary work in Ireland and elsewhere, to this day, Robert.
PS: Wales IS special, whether or not it produced Maewyn Succat, St. Patrick of Ireland:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-EKY7z_jeE
PPS: Quebec City in summer was simply Paradise-on-Earth, I found!
Wishing you mirth, and much, MUCH of it!
Et bon courage, mon vieux!
Tom.
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I am so glad that you enjoyed Quebec City. I love Quebec. I have been living in Chicoutimi, 200 kilometers north of Quebec City, for the past 49 years. The only missionary work that I did in Ireland was helping young Irishmen and women to liberate themselves from Catholic sexual inhibitions. I never talk about my religious ideas, since I know that they are based on my mental illness, and that would be enough to scare anyone away. It was not so much moving to Ireland that helped me recover from psychosis as simply moving to another country and another culture. It was like pushing a reset button for my soul and my psyche (which are basically the same thing). Take care, Slan leat.
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Joanna, heartfelt and soulfelt thanks for your latest response, too!
If we really trusted in “God” with all our hearts, would or could we still worry about…. ANYTHING, all all, do you think, please?!
Much love.
Tom.
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Tom, first of all humans have free will and unfortunately can do evil things, including hurting other people or being indifferent to their fate.
Secondly, regarding worrying: some people lead pleasant, peaceful and predictable lives and indeed have very little (if any) reason to worry. However, not everyone is in this situation. Many people have to face real difficulties.
There is an important scene in the novel “Petals of Blood” by the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. People from a village struck by draught visit a Christian clergyman, hoping that he will help them (a boy is seriously ill with a fever).
The clergyman claims that the villagers’ problem is a “spiritual lameness” and that they are not ready to work hard (which is not true). He limits himself to praying for them and then tells them to leave his house. And he adds at the end: “As for the child who is ill, I have already offered prayers for him. Go ye now in peace and trust in the Lord.”
Unfortunately religion and spirituality can become ways of justifying one’s own indifference to other people’s suffering.
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To answer my question myself, I do not see how I could possibly fret, worry or suffer so long as I trusted an infinitely powerful and loving God, Joanna.
Not can I see how I could possibly claim to have (full) free will as long as I cannot control my mind, or my own reactions or responses to painful stimuli, be they physical, verbal or otherwise.
And so I do not claim to trust fully in God or “God,” but I do keep on trying to, and I believe that the more I trust, the more gentle and patient and compassionate and caring and capable I must become, don’t you?
I see the acceptance of the utterly unacceptable as being the message of the Cross – at least for me.
If I were to attempt to save a drowning person, I think a cool, calm head might help is both more than my panicking at their distress…
Every blessing and many more!
And thank you!
Tom.
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Tom, people can and do suffer even if they trust God. E.g. if someone is being mistreated and humiliated, s/he is suffering, s/he is feeling pain. As you said yourself, we can’t control our mind and our reactions.
If a person never suffers, it’s simply because the person does not experience situations which lead to suffering. Suffering is one of the basic human experiences. Some even say that if a person has never suffered, s/he has never really lived.
As to free will, we can’t control our mind and our emotions, but we can control our behaviour. As an example, we can control the way we act when we get frustrated or angry. Violence (whether verbal or physical) is not something unavoidable. We can feel furious, but refrain from doing something we might later regret.
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Fear, pain and suffering come from the feeling that things are in any way not as they ought to be right now.
https://youtu.be/DYH2WS3CU6A?si=rbDX7s4Py8PtEvIi
“Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.”
https://youtu.be/HIzu1US3JNQ?si=LH39Mwq38wFTnc6q
I am guessing you pray some version of that prayer in English, Joanna?
If you do so, and if you believe it is much as Jesus suggested, do you not think its/his intention is that the person praying it accept NOW that “God’s will” is done NOW and that, accordingly, equally, “The Kingdom” come NOW, rather than at any point in the (indefinite) future,, please?
Put it another way, is not full attention in the now and to the now not also full acceptance of the now, of all that this God-given moment contains, and of all that reality now is, as it is right now…and can any problem or pain or suffering truly still survive in that full acceptance of the now, of this present moment with all that it contains, of reality?
Is not any form of fear a resist to, a rejection of, an argument with reality, with this moment and all it contains, with God’s will?
No fear, no pain, surely?
And
physical pain = sensation + fear;
emotional pain = fear.
And FEAR, or False Evidence Appearing Real, is this not “Satan,” “the Devil?”
“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.” – ACIM.
I don’t know if Jesus managed to laugh or smile from the cross. I doubt he cursed.
To feel fury, I believe, is already to wish another ill.
Like Marcus Aurelius and countless others, I believe no one can ever do “wrong” except through ignorance, forgetfulness: “They KNOW not what they do.”
I bet we are here to learn to love and help everyone, and that to do this we learn to control our hearts, minds, emotions, reactions and responses, not just our behaviors.
“Since wars begin in the minds of men and women, in the minds of men and women the defences of peace must be constructed.”
https://share.google/ihRKstNdoFeALLC2V
Psychiatry appears to remain unconscious of the unconscious, but it is only by making it conscious that we may overcome fear and transcend suffering through transmutation of it to love and to joy, I believe.
Heartfelt and soulfelt thanks, Joanna.
Tom
“The measure of Love is to love without measure.” – Francis de Sales.
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Hey Robert,
I was thinking of you & your story when youtube decided to suddenly show me this video! It’s only about a minute long, and I wanted to share it with you & others here because you might relate to this person’s experience with kinds of attitudes & beliefs people hold about “schizophrenia.”
https://youtube.com/shorts/o0HMBTB1Ksg?si=U3UCleHtGm4PfxoW
Thanks,
Jasmine
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Hello Jasmine, Thank you so much for the video. I identified with everything said in it. The people I talk to about my schizophrenia know very well that I am not dangerous, and they know that I have a great sense of humour. Of course living in a French-speaking country puts a great distance between my present self and the self locked up in an American insane asylum sixty years ago. Sometimes I think I should stop calling my condition schizophrenia and call it mysticism instead. The two words refer to the same phenomena, in my case at least. Whereas “schizophrenia” sounds horrible, “mysticism” can seem exotic. I tell myself that, in the Middle Ages, religious people yearned to have mystical/schizophrenic raptures like mine.
Then I wonder if all Judeo-Christian religions have their origin in other people’s schizophrenic-mystic ecstasies and visions. Unfortunately, no one can answer my questions and most people do not even want to hear them. Thank you again for thinking of me.
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A correspondent named Kristina would like to read my book What Rough Beast, with its lurid account of my torture at the McLean Asylum for the Insane. But I do not know how to reach her. The book is very hard to find. However, I have a few copies in my house and I would be willing to send a free copy to anyone who wants one. Just give you your name and mailing address and I will send you a copy. My email address is [email protected].
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