Goodbye, Brian Wilson

Goodbye, Brian Wilson.

One of my earliest memories of the way I approached music is when I was five years old in the living room of the apartment where I grew up. There, a piece of furniture held vinyl records. I liked the way the needle rested on the black record and how, magically in that contact, the music appeared. The first record I enjoyed listening to was Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. I thought the cover with the young men feeding a goat was hilarious.

Ten years later I would go crazy and start my own search for meaning in the madness, until I came across the biography of Brian Wilson, leader and composer of the Beach Boys, to whom I dedicated this chapter in one of my books published in 2019. Thank you, Brian Wilson, the world is a better place because of your music.

The Landy Syndrome

The film Love and Mercy shows the drama experienced by Brian Wilson in his relationship with the psychiatrist Eugene Landy. The brilliant interpretations of the role of the psychiatrist and the role of the musician show how the process of forced mental health treatment can not only destroy a person’s life but transform him into an input for the drug industry. At the end of the film, it is reported that Landy lost his license for having psychologically subdued Wilson. Wilson finally, with the legal help of his family, regained his autonomy and with it his ability to make decisions about his own life.

I lived the experience of being subjected to psychiatry as shown in the film. After many years, I learned to call psychopharmacological treatment what it really is: a chain to the autonomy and decisions of the person. To describe these forms that mental health treatments often take, I use the neologism narco-therapy, which critically describes how psychology and psychiatry operate in concert to anesthetize, control and silence neurodivergent people like Wilson.

“Narco” refers to narcotics as anesthetizing emotions, ideas and behaviors but at the same time to the business of illicit drug use, and “therapy” refers to all kinds of therapies with anesthetic objectives, including psychiatric and psychological ones. I identified with Wilson’s character for all the years it took him to free himself from Landy’s treatments. The film opens up a series of questions about the experience of psychological and narcotherapeutic subjugation, using Wilson’s own life story as an example.

The film denaturalizes a socially naturalized problem and questions us in this sense: How is it possible to spend so much time suffering from being forced to take psychiatric drugs? Why is it not possible to simply say no? What happens to the person who is prevented from leaving psychiatric treatment?

All these questions haunted me while undergoing narcotherapy and after my release from psychiatry. Seeing the film left me with a certain sense of relief. A story that is the story of thousands of psychiatrized people had been told from the cinema. An act of justice. But the feeling I felt while watching was of having been abused and humiliated, like the musician who is subdued by the psychiatrist.

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological reaction in which the victims of an abduction develop a strong emotional bond with their captors—as in the incredible story of the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst. When psychiatric treatment begins after involuntary hospitalization, we consider it to be forced treatment. Involuntary commitment is compulsive, like kidnapping. Forced mental health treatment is coercive, like kidnapping.

The kidnapped patient experiences Stockholm syndrome with the psychiatrist who represents his or her kidnapper. Involuntary commitment and forced treatment, like kidnapping, involves depriving someone of his or her liberty. The substantial difference between kidnapping and forced treatment is that the former is illegal and the latter is legal.

All involuntary internment, like all forced treatment, implies physical violence, which is nevertheless legitimized and legalized by society. And all involuntary internment is a kidnapping, a capture, a retention against the will of that person, who at the very moment he is deprived of his freedom becomes a victim, losing all his civil rights. Now, this process is legitimized by the state, so from this perspective all forced treatment can be considered as state terrorism.

The fear that citizens suffer of being interned in an asylum turns all states in which forced treatments have been legalized and legitimized into terrorist states that have built a “chemical apartheid” for abnormal people.

This kidnapping is legitimized by civil society. Therefore, it is common to hear reactions from a relative promising “you will go to a place where you will be treated well”, or from a nurse assuring “this pill will help you to rest”, or from a psychiatrist promoting the forced treatment as “an opportunity to take a vacation from everything”. Everything that happens after the so-called “psychotic break” seems to be for the benefit of the person, but it is not.

The specificity of psychiatric abuse and the social emergence of crazy, autistic and disabled people as a political minority means that the description of the psychiatrist-patient bond needs its own term. It is a particular syndrome that has similarities with the Stockholm syndrome, but also differences that deserve to be highlighted.

I propose to call any psychiatrist-patient bond “Landy syndrome” to recall the world-famous case in which Landy was the captor, abuser and oppressor of Wilson. Unlike mental disorders, syndromes occur in the link rather than in the individual. A mental disorder is considered chronic, but a syndrome can be resolved, healed or cured when the patient frees himself from psychological dependence on his abuser.

This syndrome ends when the patient manages to free himself from oppression and begins to make decisions from his role as a “mental health service user”. The change of role from patient to user allows access to the exercise of rights that the position of psychiatric patient prevents us from exercising. For instance, it could lead the person to file complaints before the courts. To terminate this syndrome is the definitive step towards freedom, to achieve in a subversive act the “psychiatric discharge”.

It is not enough to get the mental disorder into a state of remission, but the definitive step on the road to independence from the mental health system is to get out of it. Getting “discharged” means staying within the mental health system, which means continuing to hold on to the chains. But to subvert the act of “discharge” is a matter of unsubscribing, like unsubscribing from cell phone service.

The path of madness begins in the passage of role, when one observes oneself as mentally ill, to then become a user of a mental health service and then to see oneself as a bearer of a psychiatric label in order to take a position as a survivor of psychiatry, which helps to finally become a former mental health user. The final identity step is to understand that the human essence is psychotic. In reality, we have all managed to be crazy people at some point, but we have culturally and socially constructed ourselves as sane and normal people. This final instance has nothing to do with proposing that we are all a little crazy, but that there are very few people who are actually crazy and they are the ones who have managed to stop being psychiatric patients. Julio Cortázar wrote that “Not everyone goes crazy, these things have to be deserved” and Samuel Beckett that “We are all born crazy. Some stay that way forever”. The sane society and the anti-psychotic culture educate and form us as sane people.

Looking at the past and the way in which the “psychotic break” was dealt with reveals that those moments of great suffering in which the patient may even think of taking his own life, are not so much due to the extraordinary experiences but to the desperate feeling of oppression produced by the forms of narcotherapy to which the patient has been subjected. In that discovery, it is revealed as an epiphany that the patient has survived various forms of narcotherapy. In order for this epiphany to happen, it would seem that it would be necessary to go through the horrible sensation of feeling victimized by the mental health system.

But this feeling disappears after the “survivor’s epiphany”, when it is understood that at each stage of the treatment, the patient was actually fighting for his own life, against the mental health system he was trying to chronify. All narcotherapeutic treatment of mental illness is intended to chronify the psychiatric patient, since by its very definition mental illnesses are considered by the mental health system as incurable diseases. Feeling like a victim is an extremely unpleasant feeling, because it is associated with humiliation, but this feeling disappears as soon as it is discovered that the person was not a victim, but that he/she was fighting an unequal fight, like David and Goliath.

This revelation in my case came from thinking of myself as a person who was a carrier of psychiatric labels for 22 years. One can avoid being seen as bipolar, as long as one can think of oneself as a carrier of the label of bipolarity, and the final step is rather simple, but no less important. One must give the label back to society to stop carrying that weight. I carried out this operation, which I called “giving back the label” through a performance for ten thousand people in a stadium. There I incarnated the role of David, returning the diagnosis through scenic art, in front of an audience that that day represented Goliath.

This semiological and identity path is described here in a simple and articulated way, but it is actually very complex, because when these identities start to function and circulate through the emotions and the body, a lot of imbalances are crossed that can be seen as “psychotic outbreaks” under the risk of being exposed to a new compulsive internment. There is no formula to go through this process, but it is important to emphasize that the subtle, sometimes invisible feeling of helplessness produced by being in mental health treatment is a learned feeling and should not be naturalized. It is possible to denaturalize this sensation and that the impotence becomes a power and even a libertarian act.

In short, by receiving a psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, one becomes a psychiatric patient, ceasing to be seen and treated as a “normal person”. During such treatment, one may feel victimized by a situation. If one manages to make decisions about that treatment, one can become a mental health service user. To the extent that these decisions are oriented towards social freedom and individual fulfillment, one may discover that the person actually survived psychiatry, to finally come to terms with the true nature of one’s madness.