Finding Support Outside ‘The System’

Editor’s note: This personal story by the author known as ‘White boy’ originally appeared on our affiliate site, Mad in the UK.

This is the story of how a friend who wasn’t a mental health professional saved me from suicide by supporting me in a way my parents and the professionals hadn’t.

I’ve survived. Now, I must recover.

While I consider how I’m going to tackle this, I keep getting lost in the opening line of Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. For the first time in my life I’m forced to consider that part of what I am is an uncomfortable heritage — the constraints of kin and religion. God knows how I’m held together, but I must get on with it. If I can’t understand it, I have to accept it — those are my options.

Sadly, conventional therapy didn’t work for me. There are others for whom it hasn’t worked and I hope my insights and thoughts might help them and their families and the professionals caring for them.

Looking back, there are three things at the top of my list of things I wish I’d done earlier in life. I wish (i) I’d read a lot more, for self-directed personal development and enlightenment, (ii) I’d understood that anxiety has a natural purpose and that nature put the instrument inside me for a reason, (iii) I’d learned more about humanity, its nature and its history.

I’m still undecided what went wrong. I was there, it happened to me, but I’m not sure what the something was. I can’t even say that my memory is flooded by tears of nostalgia because my memory is non-existent below the age of 5 years and from 6 to 11 years it’s pretty vague. And, yet, I’m reliant on my memory to judge the veracity of my own memory, while the childhood I can’t fully remember clings to me. It’s no wonder some people hand the controls to God.

What I do know, crystal clear, as if it were yesterday, one night a wave of sadness and anxious foreboding swept over me. It was a feeling I was not able to talk about or process. Before I knew it, I was in ‘The System’, at the age of 12. The system is a huge network of trained professionals who pride themselves on being experts in dealing with human distress — they are effectively ‘professional parents’. They have carved out a lucrative role for themselves by turning everyday human distress into mental illness — and people like me into vulnerable dependent clients.

Over the next 30 years, I lost count of the number of therapists I moved between — it was endless. I experienced everything the system has to offer. No one seemed to acknowledge or appreciate how disgusted I was with myself, how stigmatised I felt and how I hated any reference to it. The professionals diagnosed me with six mental health disorders including ‘schizophrenia’, ‘bipolar’ and ‘ADHD’. They sectioned me and detained me against my will on three separate occasions.

I was clueless to the fact that some of their actions were a violation of my dignity or that some of them had become conditioned by the unfavourable reactions of other clients’ parents. I now understand that the professionals know that the transparency of the truth often results in the parents taking their child elsewhere. Parents who don’t want to take responsibility for their failure hurl abuse at the therapist and therapists have a natural desire to avoid having their brains tortured and thus become conditioned to avoid the transparency of the truth.

Knowing this is one reason my mind keeps floating back to: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. I had never before realised how common it is in society for couples to have a child to fix a relationship. I haven’t been raised with the heart to consider exploring this too much further. I didn’t realise that the choices our parents make influence us before we are born and we have zero control over them; I currently lack the capacity to process what might be true for me. I didn’t realise that there is a constant simmering battle for power between couples and that some children get screwed up in the middle. I don’t feel I’m yet ready to face my fears on this.

In sharp focus is the knowledge that therapists like the ones I was taken to are from homes like my own, from family backgrounds like mine, they have kids of their own (or they don’t). I’m no longer shocked or surprised when I read that ‘a therapist is on average more likely to fuck-up their child than a regular person’. It informs me that a therapist can only take a client to where they have reached in their own journey; they can only influence the client in the direction of their own experience and ideology. There is much that damages the integrity of the profession with therapists spanning the spectrum. Some seem to work to a sub-plot of ‘renounce your ignorance otherwise prepare for torture’, by which I mean, they are fed up with people like me, they consider me to be stupid and think they can fix me by shouting at me. While others were so hapless that they could barely repeat what they had learnt by rote on a training course. Others seemed to be in a competition to extract as much pain as possible from humdrum events of life — painting portraits of victimhood with the truth left on the wayside as ‘dry’ and ‘disappointing’.

At my lowest point, fearing that I was about to succumb to my suicidal thoughts, I took a chance and reached out to someone I’d met, not a proper friend but someone I knew had the experience to judge my situation, without judging me. His day job is as a practising dentist. The impact the experience had on me was extraordinary. I was so deeply touched that I felt the need to make a record of it in the form of a book called Nosedive — An Unconventional Rescue as my contribution to helping others stuck in broken parts of the system.

We might not have been friends but we did have a connection. He playfully referred to himself as ‘Brown boy’ and to me as ‘White boy’. He instantly felt that I was in a nosedive, and was reluctant to get involved. I believe I got lucky because after the experience he’s told me that at no time did he have the desire to save anyone from anything at any time.

Brown boy wasn’t working from any science or any textbook — he was working from his heart based on his experiences. He was carrying his burdens on his head not in his head. He told me he was reading between the lines and that doing so was as dangerous as it was necessary. He also told me he couldn’t do ‘sympathetic’ performatively and that every human interaction on the planet is 100% projection, assumption, suggestion, and inference.

There is no doubt in my mind that some people will throw scorn on Brown boy as the protagonist of provocative behaviour, while others, like me, will judge the results. He reached parts of me that the professionals never did — he saved me from suicide. The experience initiated my journey inwards and highlighted the deliberate obsolescence of the therapy industry and pointed out the heavenly deceptions concealed in religion.

Crucially, my recovery was initiated during the Nosedive experience when ‘Brown boy’ kept insisting time and again (and again): ‘Anxiety is natural’ and ‘You’ve been spoilt’ and ‘Fear is normal’ and ‘Worry isn’t’. He absolutely insisted that my life was supposed to have started with me understanding the nature of anxiety. And, that — it hadn’t. Time and again he told me that trying to keep the carefully crafted equilibrium of my early childhood undisturbed is what tipped me into the shit heap in the first place. He explained that my insanity resulted from the attempted sanitation of my humanity and he seemed to mock me with statements like, ‘The bedlam (and, a few ounces of filth) is a necessity’. The professionals call this stress-inoculation or psychological-immunisation, meaning a bit of discomfort and hardship is good for us. Sigmund Freud perceived it differently and called it ‘signal anxiety’.

The enlightenment wasn’t easy, nor was dealing with his confident manner. At first, I struggled with my ambivalence, he offended my civility, and his nonplussed expression was disrespectful. I pushed his grand ‘executive summaries’ out of my mind as utter garbage and as a tantalisingly simple explanation for all the complex, distressing symptoms that had unfolded in my life. But the idea that anxiety had been transformed into an unnecessary, misleading, and confusing series of purported disorders kept whispering.

I realised that there was a delineation between the trained mental health support professionals and Brown boy. While the professionals had been reluctant to engage in any awkward challenging discussions, Brown boy and I argued about things for a long time. We slogged it out — unrestrained as we were. The process opened up channels that hadn’t opened before. But, contrary to his belief, I wasn’t in denial, I was lost in ignorance. Or, perhaps I was mitigating my grief. He didn’t attempt to hold my attention with grace or authority. He didn’t need to; my desperation was enough.

On occasions, I took great exception to some of the things he said. I wasn’t ready for them, I still don’t think I am now — they didn’t sound like the reality I was after. On some occasions I almost literally heard my mind sneer and snap shut. It pains me to confess that he was right, though: rumour, misinformation and miscommunication within me was in the locality of paranoia, they were consistent with the logic of ‘Anxiety Dysfunction’, and they did operate in the vacuum created by the absence of an understanding of what nature intended the natural purpose of anxiety to be.

I have now accepted what he shared with me that feeling unsure, uneasy, awkward, nervously intrigued is a natural part of being a free-standing, self-sustaining, self-regulating, self-governing animal. These are natural feelings that we all have from time to time, they never ever go away. They are viewed wrongly by some people like me as anxiety, and we are the same people who make statements like, “I’m not like other people, I don’t fit in”. Mental ‘Illness’ is the desire to be rid of these natural feelings by mistaking them as ‘symptoms’. Anxiety is a whole different thing; it’s designed to protect us from danger. Anxiety ‘dysfunction’ is common across almost all diagnosed mental health disorders and may first occur when mum or dad or primary carers overextend on the natural desire to protect baby; they accidentally condition baby to avoid uncomfortable feelings. Remembering that anxiety is designed to protect baby from danger — it’s not designed to protect baby from discomfort. In situations where the parents neglect and/or abuse their children, these undesirable approaches can also result in anxiety ‘dysfunction’ and once initiated can escalate and become the gateway to other ‘disorders’. Although, of course, this is not true for the small number of individuals who are born with a neurological defect.

Brown boy told me unambiguously and without doubt that my only issue had been anxiety dysfunction and that because it had gone unresolved it had escalated into me displaying a host of behaviours which were indistinguishable from true neurological disorders. Thus, he explained, I had been diagnosed with disorders even though I wasn’t born with them.

The experience redefined my earlier perceptions of sympathy, empathy, love, compassion and kindness; they are now less sentimental and more transactional. I no longer believe feelings of ‘personal warmth’ and love are the same things. I’ve also reframed my understating of key concepts like psychological safety and positive psychology — they are important, and I now use them to my favour. I’ve enjoyed some psychological satisfaction and thankfully most of the time I’m generally moving towards becoming more psychologically intact.

During the experience I realised that people like me, whatever you wish to call us — ‘Aspergic’, ‘High-Functioning’, ‘Nerdy’ — need to read more, a lot more, for self-directed personal development and enlightenment. Then it dawned on me that perhaps all teenagers need to read more for self-directed personal development and enlightenment. I wonder if that’s the key to a society of empathic and compassionate amateurs like Brown boy who can make a real difference beyond ‘the system’.

In fact, knowing what I now know, Nosedive is the kind of book I wish I’d been forced to read and discuss with my peers and with my teachers (and, perhaps, even with my parents). We need a system that champions prevention by encouraging us to discuss our anxious thoughts and the lows with other stumbling teenagers, and delivers the information and knowledge through the formative years, as opposed to the current system which is failing to resolve issues retrospectively.

Other books I’d strongly recommend…

1. What Mental Illness Really Is… (And What It Isn’t) —by psychologist Dr Lucy Foulkes — talks about excessive labelling, over-diagnosing and reimagining anxiety.
2. The Blank Slate — by Professor Steven Pinker. He discusses parenting styles by looking at the nature-nurture debate and how it’s been distorted.
3. Good Reasons for Bad Feelings — Insights from the frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry — by Randolph M. Nesse. The American Physician who with the book Why We Get Sick established the field of evolutionary medicine.
4. The Chimp Paradox — by Professor Steve Peters — it’s an excellent book.
5. An Intimate History of Humanity — by Theodore Zeldin. It helps you realise that: ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’, and it helps defeat the modern thought: ‘I can’t be right unless there’s something wrong with me’.
6. Evolutionary Psychiatry — Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health —by The Royal College of Psychiatrists, UK.
7. George Kelly — The Psychology of Personal Constructs — by Dr Trevor Butt.