Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on our affiliate site, Mad in the UK. Jo Watson, psychotherapist and founder of Drop the Disorder! and A Disorder 4 Everyone (AD4E), interviews Cathy Wield about her new book, Unshackled Mind.
Jo: Hi Cathy, thanks for joining me to talk about your new book Unshackled Mind: A Doctor’s Story of Trauma, Liberation and Healing. Can I start by asking you about your reasons for writing it?
Cathy: Initially I wasn’t keen on writing another book. But by the time I returned to the UK in 2019 after a few years in Denver, Colorado, I had done a complete U-turn in my thinking about psychiatry, and what had happened to me during the two decades when I was a psychiatric patient.
I had already gained the insight that my original emotional crisis back in1994, was not in fact the beginning of what was later diagnosed as severe ‘treatment resistant depression’, but a completely understandable reaction to the then current circumstances and my childhood trauma. To put it bluntly, my problems had been medicalised and what followed was decades of psychiatric ‘treatment’.
At the end of 2001, I had a temporary reprieve. During that time, I wrote ‘Life after darkness’, my first book, a memoir about the seven-year nightmare of ‘treatment resistant depression’ which had culminated in psychosurgery. I thought I had recovered. I was the star patient, my psychiatrists endorsed and contributed to the book. But within a year of publication, I was back in hospital, ‘relapsed’ apparently. I went on to write a second book educating the church about stigma. But in writing both these books, I had unwittingly supported the psychiatric propaganda.
So by 2019, I was acutely aware of the importance of putting right my views which were already out in the public arena.
Yet, I still felt isolated because I didn’t know any doctors who would see my experiences through anything other than the lens of the traditional biomedical psychiatry, let alone validate what I now believed was the truth. So, it was a tremendous relief when I came across Sami Timimi and was introduced to the critical psychiatry network. Then I found Mad in America, Mad in the UK and finally AD4E……
Initially I felt ashamed, wondering how I could have been so blind and how I could have been duped for so long into believing and actually supporting the biomedical model of psychiatry. But once I began to understand something of the power that the psychiatric institution held over me, over all of us, and the myths propagated by the medical profession—I knew I had to go public and tell my story.
Jo: What a journey you’ve been on! Can you share a brief synopsis of the book please?
Cathy: Unshackled Mind starts at the beginning, to show the reader how my childhood was so linked to my later breakdown—I survived 8 utterly miserable and traumatic years at boarding school and had also come to believe that my core self was wicked, which directly led to my involvement in a toxic form of Christianity.
I went on to university to study medicine, and I thought I had left all my childhood trauma behind, completely unaware how the past had not only shaped me but also followed me. It reared its ugly head in my early 30s and led to an emotional crisis. The first visit to my GP kickstarted my long and painful career as a psychiatric patient.
I wrote most of Unshackled Mind in the third person, because it felt easier to be objective when narrating the story about myself, as a suicidal, self-harming, and a revolving door patient, who was so messed up on a cocktail of drugs, often sectioned and having multiple ECT and finally psychosurgery.
Unshackled Mind continues where the first memoir left off. I was still heavily influenced by what the psychiatrists repeatedly told me, and thought I had come to accept that I would never fully recover from this very biological depression, that I should expect serious relapses, and that I would have to live with the unpleasant and life-diminishing side effects of the drugs for the rest of my life.
But little by little, I was becoming less convinced of their rhetoric and manage to disentangle myself from psychiatric services and get back to work despite the poor prognosis. By the time we have moved to America, I have decided to stop all the psychiatric drugs.
It was fortuitous that I met a therapist who interpreted my experiences completely differently to the psychiatrists and NHS therapists who had cared for me in the UK over the previous 20 years. It felt as though my whole life unravelled, as I started to process it all.
Even when we returned to the UK, I was still coming to terms with the truth that all those years of psychiatric treatment had not just made things worse for me and my family, but had also prolonged my state of ‘dysfunction’.
Jo: Tell me about how it changed. How did your disillusionment with biomedical psychiatry happen?
Cathy: In 2007, I was discharged from the six-month hospital admission for ‘relapse’ on a cocktail of four different drugs. I started a new type of therapy (CBASP) which focussed on relapse prevention, but I kept bringing up the past, wanting to talk about my childhood. Every time this happened, the therapist told me we couldn’t talk about it, it wasn’t relevant, and it could be detrimental.
But the real game-changer was in 2009/10, when I discovered that people taking antipsychotics died around 10 years earlier than expected. When I discussed this with my psychiatrist, he kept telling me that I was more likely to die if I did not take my flupentixol, but I stopped it anyway. The same thing happened when I read that benzodiazepines or Z drugs also increased mortality. I was strongly discouraged from stopping them, but chose to ignore the advice.
Meanwhile my husband was doing counselling training and he was drip feeding me alternative ways of looking at emotional distress…..But we were both still terrified by the psychiatrist’s insistence that I must take the remaining antidepressants for the rest of my life or risk a serious relapse. The fear of ending up back in hospital again, meant that I continued taking high dose venlafaxine and trazadone for a very long time. I had such terrible side effects, and each time I reported them to the psychiatrist, he would tell me it was a sign that I was still depressed. So I stopped reporting them.
By 2016, I was confident enough to believe that the psychiatrist was wrong, and though hesitant at first, I slowly started to decrease the doses.
I remember when I first started to FEEL things again. After years of feeling completely numb, it was so amazing that I didn’t completely freak out even when it was seriously intense. I just held on, telling myself ‘it will pass’ and it always did. Being able to cry again felt like what had been bottled up for so many years was finally being released and I saw it as part of my recovery. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a picnic, and it took years to completely wean off the drugs. In fact, I didn’t do it right—I was impatient when I was down to a low dose of trazadone, and stopped it abruptly Two days later, the severe pain and burning in my feet started—later diagnosed as small fibre neuropathy. Despite the neurologist’s denials, I don’t think that was a coincidence.
Jo: What would you say your main message in the book is?
Cathy: Apart from don’t stop your psychiatric drugs abruptly! My major message is, don’t give up hope. It’s never too late to seek another explanation for the problems you’re facing. It’s never too late to change your mind and get your life back. I believe in people. We’re valuable and resourceful and while we may need support, we’re still the ones who know ourselves best and can put things right in our lives. It went wrong for me, when I thought doctors & psychiatrists could fix my emotional and life problems. They can’t. Pills can’t. Even therapists can’t fix people—even though I’m very grateful that I found the right therapists to support me.
Jo: I’m very glad you did too. How are you doing now?
Cathy: I am not on any psychiatric drugs. I still have the painful neuropathy but It’s manageable. I remain well emotionally, (psychologically).
To take back ownership of myself, I had to find out what really happened, learn to believe in myself and understand that I was fundamentally good…Going over old ground was hard work, but worth it. I was traumatised as a child and then harmed again by psychiatry. But although I am scarred, the wounds have healed. Even though the scars are painful sometimes, I think I have grown as a result.
No one knows what’s around the corner, but having lost a lot of years, which hurt both me and my family, I believe I owe it to myself and my loved ones to enjoy life while I can but at the same time to speak out about what is right.
Hearing similar stories of suffering because of toxic psychiatry as well as needless childhood neglect or trauma from boarding schools, makes me feel so sad and so angry. But at least I can use the anger to fuel the determination to keep speaking out. I have met many inspiring survivors who have overcome so much in their lives. I can’t give up hope for systemic change that will stop others from being pathologized, drugged and having their brains damaged by ECT or other horrific so-called treatments. I wouldn’t wish what I’ve been through on anyone else, yet I acknowledge that it has made me who I am today.
