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South Carolina Client Network: An Initiative to Organize for Respectful, Client-Delivered Services
Artwork of Jamie Dakis
Found at Inkdroppings
Be
by James
be still,
quiet
careful not to stand out
behave,
don't make trouble
don't cry,
don't ask for attention

be perfect.
don't mess up,
don't be an embarrassment
be strong,
never show fear
never leave the background
be perfect.

you can do better
this isn't your best
you're not trying
this should be right be perfect.

hide your true feelings
cry in your bed
don't let them see you
keep safe in your head
be careful.

Don't raise your voice
never talk back
it's better to take it than try to fight back
be cautious.
they know what you're doing
don't step out of line
don't give them a reason to be upset with you
be good.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Gone
 by Sue Poole
The little flame
Dwindles to darkness.

I have no more. I have no more.
I would have given my all
For one chance, one chance
To know this flame
Did not burn in vain.
My candle was so small
In the deep valley
Of desolation.

The dark swallowed it up.
The powerful winds blew it out.

A little light is gone.
It's no use to mourn.
The purveyors of despair
Jeer even at our slow and regular tears.

An inferior candle
A weak flame
Consigned to the utter dark
Of the deepest valley In mandated obscurity.

Mandated.

So, our fates after all
Are fixed and immutable.
No recourse.

No little niche
For the brief burning
Of hope and common sense.

It's only one candle
Condemned to burn In a valley
Where nobody goes.
And the flame has been
Snuffed out.

This is social death.
It cannot be undone
When all the little candles signaling hope
Are blown out
By the sweep of contemptuous winds.
 
 
 
 
 
The Value of Speaking Klingon
 by Sue Poole
Maybe the revolution will come when we stop being afraid and begin to use...imagination...across the chasms carved out
by the "us/them"mentality of those who set themselves up as authorities to suppress ways of being that don't reflect their own cramped, violent and self-serving values.

Be joyously mentally ill. Think of the mentally well culture as generally sick (with random exceptions here and there) and in dire need of the empathy, kindness, knowledge and dialogical invention the mentally ill can offer across the chasm.

Expose doublespeak as doublespeak when you hear it.
Turn doublespeak around and claim the inverse of opposite fourfold.
Plus further permutations thereof.
Be multiple in style. Be most yourself in the dance of any dialectic.
Speak journalese, lawyerese, advocatese, organizerese, supplicantese, bureaucratese, mathematicese, politicese.
Lay tender, unintrusive hands upon your friends, hug them and cherish them and heal them.
Bring them blankets and Enfamil in subzero winds in defiance of someone's apathy.
Send them books and seashells and little cards in your own handwriting full of yearning speech and beautiful wishes and thanks and bitter remorses.
When you can't stand it any more, learn Klingon
And give another silenced person a good opportunity to work with you.
Resist categorization.
Be creatively maladjusted, as Martin Luther King Jr. once suggested, because that makes you an agent of the salvation of society.
 
Sharewrite 1997 Sally Clay
sallyclay@earthlink.net
Permission is granted for personal distribution of this document as long as it is unchanged in any way and this notice is included. For permission to reprint it for general publication, contact me at 220 Moon Glow Avenue, Lake Placid, FL 33852, or by e-mail.
Ode to Bureaucracy
by Sally Clay
The principal characteristic of a bureaucracy
Is that no one is responsible for it.
Its first function is to ignore the heart.
It is impossible to change.

Ask any bureaucrat and you will find
Someone who despises the rules and whims
Of someone else's bureaucracy.

The system and its files belong to no one.

Some bureaucrats are victims of proliferating paper,
Some bureaucrats learn to manage paper and profit by it.
Others try to dodge the system and remain human
While at the same time being bureaucrats.

The bureaucracy is a monster
That we invited home to dinner,
Efficiency with a case of cancer.
Sally Clay January 19, 1991
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Sharewrite 1997 Sally Clay
sallyclay@earthlink.net
Permission is granted for personal distribution of this document as long as it is unchanged in any way and this notice is included. For permission to reprint it for general publication, contact me at 220 Moon Glow Avenue, Lake Placid, FL 33852, or by e-mail.
People Who
by Sally Clay
Those people lock the door before us
And stay on the other side.
They inject us with poison
And electrocute our soul.

They are those who hold the keys
And pull all the strings.
Those people take our money
And use it to build prisons.

They go home at night to suburban houses
Where we are not allowed to live.

We the people are People Who
Are cherished by none
Except our own.

Our feet move to the beat of free verse,
And our souls sing in silent places.
Warm blood flows through invisible hearts
That can't be treated.

We are not puppets, there are no strings attached.
We cut the cord and walk through open doors.
We are People Who
Leap and dare to imagine.
We spend our talent
Furnishing the place of hope.
We are people who will treat those others
By acting out, and dreaming.
Those people are People Who
Are our own.
We are people who
Also care for them.
Sally Clay Million Mad March May 2, 1998
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Sharewrite 1997 Sally Clay
sallyclay@earthlink.net
Permission is granted for personal distribution of this document as long as it is unchanged in any way and this notice is included. For permission to reprint it for general publication, contact me at 220 Moon Glow Avenue, Lake Placid, FL 33852, or by e-mail.
Invitation
by Sally Clay
I know the unnatural jangle of medicated nerves,
The terminal dryness of mouth and mind,
The side effect of drugs whose sole purpose
Is the side effect itself:

The attack of a symptom as yet undefined,
The management of spirit.
I know the holocaust of solitary confinement
In a place of mercy, where mercy itself Is defined by the cruelty
Of a door slammed on soul,
And the only escape
Is beating out brains on bare walls,
I know.

Electrodes attached to human temples
Constitute treatment of the ultimate sort:
The parental kind which says, "I do this because I love you,"
And the blow follows
(Cold heat of destruction)
And the brain burns.

I know the years of life promised as a chalice
And given as medication.
Pollution of wine
Is the final desecration, but we drink what we can
Or what we must.

Stumbling to the table
We feast on a banquet of bruised peaches
And stale crusts, the crumbs themselves
The only reminder of life promised,
The soggy fruit our only taste of sweetness.

The integrity of the guest is a matter of courtesy
And pity reserved for the reluctant host.
We were invited to a table of spoils
And we accepted.
Sally Clay Human Rights & Anti-Psychiatry Conference Syracuse 1981
 
 
 
 
Ezra Pound was charged with treason for serving as a propagandist for fascism, was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial and spent 13 years as an inmate of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, where he continued to work on major books of poetry. He is most remembered not for his political views but for his influence as a great craftsman in the history of the English language.
Commission
 by Ezra Pound

Go, my songs, to the lonely and unsatisfied.
Go also to the nerve-racked, go the enslaved-by-convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.
Go as a great wave of cool water,
Bear my contempt of oppressors.

Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.
Go to the bourgeoisie who is dying in her ennuis,
Go to the women of the suburbs,
Go the hideously wedded,
Go to them whose failure is concealed,
Go to the unluckily mated,
Go to the bought wife,
Go to the woman entailed.

Go to those who have delicate lust,
Go who those whose delicate desires are thwarted,
Go light a blight upon the dullness of the world;
Go with your edge against, this,
Strengthen the subtle cords,
Bring confidence upon the algae and tentacles of the soul.

Go in a friendly manner,
Go with an open speech.
Be eager to find new evils and new good,
Be against all forms of oppression.
Go to those who are thickened with middle age
To those who have lost their interest.

Go to the adolescent whoa re smothered in family-
Oh how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together.

It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotting and falling.

Go and defy opinion,

Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.
Be against all sorts of mortmain.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
WRITINGS AND ART
To submit your art or writing, email dsupoole@bellsouth.net to obtain a mailing address. All clients of mental health, whether receiving state or private services, are encouraged to participate in showcasing the talents of persons labeled mentally ill.
Sue Poole - Manifesto Essay VI Pat Risser - Recovery
Fred Schnetzler - Voices and Paranoia Essay Pat Risser - No Pity Politics (Coming Soon)
Sue Poole - The Value of Speaking Klingon Timothy Steele - Wait
Sue Poole -Gone Author Unknown - Happiness Is a Psychiatric Disorder
Sue Poole - Absolute Care
Sally Clay - Ode to Bureaucracy
Sally Clay - People Who
Sally Clay - Invitation
Bonnie Schell - Cold Blooded  
Bonnie Schell - A Boy Not Counted in the Census
Bonnie Schell - Excavations
James -Be
Ezra Pound - Commission  
Walter Shwe - Letter to the Editor  
Thomas Hoccleve - Complaint  
   
 
Please do not change anything in this work if you reproduce it or any portion of it. If you choose to publish or distribute it, notify the author of its placement by emailing Bonnie Schell . Thank you.
Cold-blooded
by Bonnie Schell
The man in the Hyatt Regency lobby had shoes with bruised toes, too-short denims. Camel wool blazers and dry-cleaned jeans stepped around him, following arguments, The Patients Rights' Advocates made speeches in the Banquet Room.

From the garden of the Hyatt Regency I followed the mental patient with the odd-looking cane.
His chin sagged below a protruding tongue.
His body wobbled to the left,
His task to continually correct his direction.

The man in the Hyatt Regency ballroom made three clicks with his cane of assembled sticks,
interrupted tight faces crumbed with croissant.
The man waved his sticks over the delegates.

One stick was a teacher's pointer for repeat patients,
one, a long trembling limb beset by Parkinson's,
one like a simple parson's cross held against the powers of darkness, the last, Attila's sword.

He looked like a killer. The crowd turned from their parfaits, held forks tight in their laps without plan.
The crowd shrank from the aisle as he advanced, too close to those on the left, an iatrogenic ugly bride given by Uncle Sam to Medicaid.

The hand-made cane made the man a tripod, the third leg straight, not veering.
His tongue tested the perimeters of chapped lips.

"My name is James Guy. See how you have treated me? Look here. I took your medications and advice. You said you would make me feel safe. Now I'm a chronic burden on your rolls, no more to be done. I'm miserable and I want you to end my life. How can you decide now That it is not in my best interest to die?"

The moderator thanked Mr. James Guy for sharing quickly brought the man a chair, gave him a list of agencies by County.

They said it was not the proper time for public comment. And Jimmy sat dry-mouthed in front of the delegates.
Before doctors and lawyers he slumped, folded his sticks.
Providers of mental health care relaxed. They could keep an eye on the old man who looked like a cold-blooded killer.

He would probably be more comfortable if someone walked him elsewhere, perhaps back to the Hyatt Regency garden.
There's a service that replaces sad-looking flowers with new ones every month.

- from notes made 11/6/94 at the NARPA convention in San Diego.
Printed in The Rights Tenet May 21, 1996
 
Please do not change anything in this work if you reproduce it or any portion of it. If you choose to publish or distribute it, notify the author of its placement by emailing Bonnie Schell . Thank you.
He's a boy not counted in the census
by Bonnie Schell

When Arthur calls, he gets his parents' machine,
Arthur needs the quarters for the Laundromat
But if he washes his clothes that stink he'll be naked under florescent bulbs.

In a blanket from a woman living in a grocery cart he wraps his pale legs, his projecting ribs, and his head
where tunes start over and over and over…

He thinks he'll start the New Year right, clean up his act.
The free bottled juice is apple, fermented, it turns his stomach inside out down his legs.

At the Drop-In the few men's clothes are all gone.
Women's stretch pants feel like pajamas, a baby's blanket.
Their jackets zip right over left. People notice.
Is it "Hey man!" or "Hi, Honey?"

In his condition he wants to hide.

He could get some shelter if he had a case manager.
The County could get Arthur a case manager if he had Supplemental Security Income for disability
He could get SSI in a year and a half if he had underwear and clean clothes to see a doctor for a diagnosis or consent to an injection.
He has symptoms, they say among themselves. Avoids social interactions. Displays poor hygiene.
Appears to be pre-occupied. A face with flat affect.

At Risk.

Arthur is not counted in the patient load.

Last year he was a sophomore at Berkeley.
Changed his major from Microbiology to Music Composition.
At Easter Arthur couldn't go home
The money for spring quarter didn't find him.

This year he's not on any roll.
Last Christmas his step-father sent a man with a sleeping bag in a box.
Now the bag is stolen, but Arthur has the box.

He chooses big hedges near churches. Sleeps there wrapped in newspapers inside a box.

He saves the classifieds before holidays, wipes his teeth, tongue, underarms and bottom with dew soaked Camellia leaves.
He prays and makes music in his head, hoping all night neither the police nor priests will find him.

Published in Coastlines 1997
Please do not change anything in this work if you reproduce it or any portion of it. If you choose to publish or distribute it, notify the author of its placement by emailing Bonnie Schell . Thank you.
Excavations
by Bonnie Schell
Scientists can smell for death The method is old
They use the nose raising the probe over seven thousand Muslim men under a farm in Branjevo.
Investigators yellow-tag the bones.
The mentally ill under Housing and Urban Development lose bladder control
They pace and smell until found dead with prescriptions robe pockets full of bottles
No one writes their obituary It's too embarrassing.
 
 
Please do not change anything in this work if you reproduce it or any portion of it. If you choose to publish or distribute it, notify the author of its placement by emailing dsupoole@bellsouth.net. Thank you.
Voices and Paranoia
by Fred Schnetzler
My disclaimer is that I'm not a therapist, or anything close. This is just a description of what I did to confront my problems with voices and paranoias. It was most assuredly not a "quick fix". I do not have a clear recollection of how long the entire process took. It did eventually do what needed to be done.

Having, I hope, made that much clear.... What helped me with paranoia was, instead of allowing my mind to explore the various reasons it could find for weaving its own web of fear, I forced myself, at first, to look at the alternative side, and to really try to come up with reasons to believe "they" were not "out to get me". I know that's a stereotype of paranoia, but simply put, "they're out to get me", is in fact, the way my own paranoia manifested. When I first started with this process - and it did definitely take time - a few reasons to disbelieve my routinely repeated fearful thoughts sufficed.

It was enough in the beginning to start simply with a few contradictions to counterbalance some of the imaginings that usually caused me fear. I had to put some effort into allowing those "positive" thoughts to just sink in for a while, and not quite simultaneously allow any other usual fear-based thoughts to just fall away with as little attention as possible. Instead of letting my mind run its own course and drag me into *feelings* of fear associated with the thoughts, I fastened my mind to myself, in just the simple state of being in the reality of the present moment, one in which I was obviously not being harmed. I let myself dwell with my mind - in manner of speaking, with-in my mind - peacefully. I watched, but not on edge, for signs of any thoughts that spontaneously arose, and how they may have tied into the otherwise peaceful passage of thought content. In those bridging ties between thoughts, I further looked for ways to affirm and trust that some of the various connections I usually made were actually not warranted or logical, watching for subtleties where I may have been "letting my imagination get the best of me".

If I had to, I backed up and found some new reasons to negate whatever regularly occurring thoughts I had that held content involved with the cycle of fearful feeling. I worked on building up and emphasizing those reasons I found to doubt my paranoid fears, and as I became more familiar with the cycle, I tried to compound thoughts that contributed to the reduction of habitual concepts that led me back into the feelings of fear. I can also say that I noticed I had a certain reluctance toward reasoning against the various fantasies. That somehow the fearful paranoid thoughts were attractive and I had a resistance toward letting them go. But trying to take any of that to deeper levels and find an explanation for my attraction to the repetitive cycle was really superfluous to the task at hand - and actually counterproductive.

It was more important to deal with just the thoughts themselves rather than analyze what "subconscious" stuff made me that way, or why I was stuck in that type fearful cycle in contrast to others who weren't. I didn't try to go into anything remotely "psychological" like that. It was enough to concentrate on working with the paranoid thoughts alone, and supply the reasons they were invalid, and how they didn't actually represent reality. Eventually I did prove to myself that lots of thoughts were either fantasies or they were at least extremely extremely improbable because they bore such a close resemblance to so many other things that I had feared, but when I looked at them honestly, they only consisted of fear itself and never represented a reality that came to pass. The voices? My dad told me a long time ago to just tell the voices to go away, and you know what? That's what I did, and the voices went away. Not immediately, but in fairly short order.

Later I figured out that it was fairly easy for me to put my own thoughts in the form of another person's voice, and shape that process into an imaginary conversation with a person - even if I borrowed the voice from a radio or TV personality. I had told myself the voices were ESP and other things. Why did I do that? Once again, it wasn't important to me WHY. It was only important to have the voices/imagination interplay reduced to the point of extinction. I simplified what I said above about my dad's suggestion, but that little anecdote really is true. Actually I used the same technique as I did with the paranoid thoughts, finding reasons to NOT believe the voices were real, and that "they" were merely the product of my own overworked imagination.

What I've explained as best I could is what did work for me to get me through those particular nuisances. It was a different intensity actually grappling with the problem than just recollecting the process. There were times I can remember slipping back into the fear, and maybe forcing myself to read something that would take my mind off the cycle, or maybe just bluntly bearing it until it passed. Actively looking at the fears and the flawed thinking behind them seemed ultimately to be the most effective and reliable method I think. TV tended to make the problem worse - it was far too distracting to allow me to remain aware of my own thoughts. Plus, broadcasting fear is one of TVs main features. I assume that there are most probably intricate personal variations of the reasonings and justifications of the fear phenomena which are self-customized by the individual being troubled by the voices/paranoia experience.

But I think the individual already has "what it takes" to dismantle his or her own troubling constructions piece by piece from within. This is my own experience and these are some of the actions I took to rework my relations with the world from within. The external world will not be free from the many stimuli which aggravate the tendency to fear for a long time to come. Something I had to consider along the way was the loss of an inclination to be engaged with "that which thrills", an admittedly odd perception of being watched, targeted or persecuted (even from another "dimension") that allowed me to rationalize that I was somehow "special" or uniquely important.

As I diminished the self-aggrandizing/self-terrorizing cycle I found my daily life to be less "exciting" because of the absence of the voices and paranoia and the way those hooked into the world around me. But it was also quite a relief to learn to be without those peculiar forms of negatively exciting intrigue, and to have accomplished my own liberation from them despite the many professionals determined to have me believe that my problems were due to "biological origins" and therefore required a chemical remedy.
 
 

The Criteria of What Works and for Whom Part II
by Sue Poole
Current modes of care, including incarceration, forced drugging, the use of restraints and forced electroshock, are dehumanizing and stigmatizing, cutting off psychiatrically labeled person from community support by alleging they are dangerous and in need of control, rendering them quasi-criminals.

In "The Dinosaur Man:Tales of Madness and Enchantment from the Back Ward," psychologist Susan Baur discovers a touching humanity in imprisoned old men confined to the obscurity of locked wards at the institution where she is employed. She befriends one of them who shows her his visions of dinosaur families browsing the green grass of a valley, inventing himself as the child of a brontosaurus mother and a member of a gentle brontosaurus society.

Baur discovers a common thread of abuse, overcontrol and emotional abandonment in the early histories of these men labeled chronically psychotic and relegated to the status of society's castaways, unheeded and unknown. Baur believes delusions and hallucinatory thinking become defenses against processing the pain of early childhood emotional and physical abuse. The hospital setting, with its infantilizing rituals and restrictions on liberty, can only recreate the hostile early experiences and prevent breakthroughs. Baur quotes Emily Dickinson, who described the emotional defenses against abuse this way: "There is a pain so utter, it swallows distance up/Then covers abyss with a trance so memory can step/Around...across...upon it, as one within a swoon/Goes safely where an open eye/Would drop him bone by bone."

Baur's approach is the practice of presence and active listening to find "useable past memories" and gently guide the fragmented psyche toward full identity by linking positive past experience with "present useable memories." She also advocates the therapists as assistant presence, not as imposer of reality or enforcer of conformity. Finding present useable memories in the confined chaos and mindless regimens of a loony bin, she suggests, is problematic. The aim is not to squash imagination or capacity for fantasy but to aid people in recognizing their metaphors, like belonging to dinosaur families, as personal symbols of their unmet needs or most repressed wishes.

While these metaphors may seem alarming to those unable or unwilling to communicate symbolically, they have their own raison d'etre in the minds of people whose personalities were early crushed and mangled by damaging family dynamics. Baur considered herself privileged when an obscure old man on a locked ward confided to her his deepest wishes to belong to a family and a society of peaceful, if alien, creatures with simple needs and desires. Only when therapists believe admission to the private worlds of people in their care is a privilege, not a right, will psychiatry get it right at last. Only when therapists believe the imagination is a phenomenon to respect, nurture and MUTUALLY explore, an undiscovered country, a rich territory of personal meanings integral to the identity of their patients and not a disease symptom to be eliminated and controlled, will psychiatry get it right at last. Only when the therapist and client share experiences and insights in the context of trust, mutual respect and an attitude of openness to learning from each other can psychiatry begin to offer true help by recognizing the value and humanity of every human being, no matter how odd his/her surface appearances may seem.

Hannah Green's autobiographical novel "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" details the success of psychiatrist Freida Fromm-Reichmann, who worked Green's fantasy world and its characters into the therapy, affirming the fantasies as a product of Green's own barely articulated pain and rich creativity, as well. Fromm-Reichmann empowered her client by validating an awesomely rational, structured inner world of demons and angels, giving Green the freedom and choice to shape the contents of her own imagination, freeing her from subservience to her own imagination by taking seriously the voices, visions and events Green shared. Ultimately, by sharing her inner world with a trusted friend who also happened to be a therapist, Green was able to begin correlating her powerful fantasies with her actual experiences, learning to distinguish between the fantasy and the reality.

Fromm-Reichmann exerted no force, pushed no drugs, felt no fear, imposed no alien identity on Green. She gave credence, acceptance and listening presence, giving Green opportunities to separate the mythic defenses of her own mind from the life events and conditions her fantasies actually paralleled. "We may take the rationalistic psychiatrist's behavior as an allegory of our modern age," says May. "When we in the 20th century are so concerned about proving that our technical reason is right and we wipe away in one fell swoop the 'silliness' of myths, we also rob our own souls and we threaten to destroy our society as part of the same deterioration."

Sir Peter Medawar, quoted in Hans Eysenck's "Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire", mourns the failure of psychoanalysis alone to shore up the ruins of a fragmented, impoverished and disintegrating culture, which is creating more fragmented, impoverished and disintegrating people...aided and abetted by the medical model of so-called mental illness. "No better theory can be erected on its ruins, which will remain forever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of 20th century thought," Medawar declares. Medawar is both right and wrong. While no better theory can be manufactured, a paradigm of praxis by recognition of common humanity and the value of individuals and their inner lives contains the seeds of hope, regeneration and reconstruction. Compassionate and respectful care in the context of mutual trust is both the baby and the bathwater.

Going beyond the medical model means acknowledging there is no magic pill. To subdue imagination with heavy neuroleptics and apply coercion to force conformity can only exacerbate the brokenness and suffering of people who need the support of community acceptance, heedful presence, affirmation, wise guidance, compassionate response and open-ended choices to recover - or recognize for the first time - their innate worth as members of the human species. Medicine may be an adjunct to that process, and the therapist's first choice, in the interests of our common humanity, should be the mildest one possible. Harsh forced treatment with dreadful effects can abort or impede the task of building or discovering an integrated identity.

Coercive tactics can only erode the trust and mutual communication necessary for rebuilding both shattered lives and viable communities. Locked wards, restraints, punitive measures, threats, isolation rooms, ignorance of the patient as a personality with hopes and abilities, negation of the inner life...these can only cause misery, failure, frustration, fear and indignity. The therapist's task is not to doom individuals to lifetimes of failure and dysfunction but to nurture and guide the dawning light of consciousness, to help create a useable present that can be linked to a useable past. Loony bins can never accomplish the task. The therapist's task is not to snuff the imagination with harsh drugs but to validate its creative potentials and guide its efforts toward cogency. Restraints and electroshock cannot accomplish the task.

The therapist's task is assisting the distressed individual to grow and develop, not to adjust, obey, comply and conform. Force and seclusion cannot accomplish the task. The therapist's task is helping the individual to build emotional bridges spanning the gap between imagination and society's demands, not to punish or condemn brokenness. Ghettoization and absolute judgments cannot accomplish the task. The therapist's task is to be ancillary mind, not demigod. Coercion is destructive to human growth and development, which is an ongoing and lifelong process needing the support and encouragement of community, which psychiatry eliminates through fraud, force and brainwashing strategies.

Common humanity and basic decency cry out for alternatives to the oppression, destruction, broad social control and force currently masquerading as somatic and psychotherapies. When hurt, confused people reaching for full identity are locked up, overdrugged, criminalized and stigmatized, the system is compounding emotional stress by undermining their very personhood. The human personality is dynamic, not static. Mainstream psychiatry with its labels, coercions and absolute judgments denies personal strength and abilities, devastates hopes for the future by systemically paralyzing and further fragmenting its alleged beneficiaries. To pretend that such barbarity is help is criminal fraud.

When the focus of treatment is entrenchment of a self-serving status quo rather than the care, nurture and guidance and development of broken people, the time for a new paradigm is long overdue. Mainstream psychiatry, by its backwards fight to preserve economic investment in perpetual fragmentation, is aborting human growth and development. There is a black evil inherent in declaring harmlessly eccentric individuals diseased, irreparably damaged and unfit for social inclusion, dooming them to indigence and separation from life's mainstream, pronouncing them unfit to participate in the vital processes of life itself. The disease model divorced from human considerations of life situations and personality dynamics sustains the implication that individuals in treatment are inferior and ensures society's perceptions of them as inferior. "The cogs grind on, the wheels turn and the mental health machine races toward the abyss as if to its own salvation," Farber says. "We are not dealing with an ontological entity but with an interpretation of behavior...that serves the interest of the psychiatric establishment and reassures those who worship at the altar of modern medicine that we can trust the doctors to save us from the problems engendered by a social order that is disintegrating."

Primitive societies valued the "psychotic" experience and revered those who sought it as spiritually enlightened leaders whose experience contributed to the entire tribal ethos, passed down into the social fabric as legends and myths that shaped the moral sense and made bearable the unfathomable mystery contained in consciousness and existence itself. Anthropologists have demonstrated that the consciousness crisis of the future shaman, or wise person, is phenomenological and behaviorally indistinguishable from what psychiatry calls psychosis, as are the practices of glossolalia and agitated trance states of Pentecostals and other religious denominations. In a condemnatory, materialistic, Puritan-Calvinist culture without referential guides for comprehending and shaping such experience, the inevitable result is intensification and prolongation of suffering. The disease model, divorced from acknowledgment of common humanity and crisis as a growth opportunity, denies the individual's quest for meaning, community-building and unfolding personal identity. If this model prevails, the human species is indeed decreeing its own extinction by extinguishing the life force itself. "It (the medical model) interprets the suffering of individuals who seek psychiatric help as a manifestation of their alleged worthlessness and inferiority," Farber says.

In "The Politics of Experience," dissident psychiatrist R.D. Laing says madness need not be confined to existential death and breakdown but may be a signal of liberation, breakthrough and renewal. Certainly madness in our day is a wake-up call for the destructiveness, bigotry, institutional persecutions and oppressions, mass xenphobias and cultural insularities of a society undergoing its own biogenetic crisis. "Our society may itself have become biologically dysfunctional," Laing suggests, and psychosis may an expression of awareness, "of alienation from an impossible world." "In a society as destructive as our own, going mad may be an adaptive response. It may be that those who do not go mad are less aware," Laing says, echoing Hannah Green and others who are calling for recognition of the both the mythic dimensions of imagination and for a sane respect for differences among human beings.

Who benefits from the institutional imposition of conformity on society? Who benefits from the extraordinary power to lock away persons who have committed no crimes and have no histories of violence? Who benefits from the pathologization of behavior? Who benefits by appropriating power to define what is and is not normal behavior? Who benefits by assigning psychiatric labels to millions of people and then shuffling them into the welfare system that pays billions of insurance tax dollars to psychiatric clinics? What is working for psychiatry, the systemic persecution and devaluation of sensitive people, may not be, after all, in the best interests of its subjects or of society at large.  
END
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Happiness Is a Psychiatric Disorder
by Unknown
Happiness meets all reasonable criteria for a psychiatric disorder.

It is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, there is at least some evidence that it reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system, and it is associated with various cognitive abnormalities--in particular, a lack of contact with reality.

Acceptance of these arguments leads to the obvious conclusion that happiness should be included in future taxonomies of mental illness, probably as a form of affective [mood] disorder. This would place it on Axis I of the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual."

With this prospect in mind, I humbly suggest that the ordinary language term "happiness" be replaced by the more formal description: Major affective disorder, pleasant type.

In the interest of scientific precision and in the hope of reducing any possible diagnostic ambiguities... Once the debilitating consequences of happiness become widely recognized it is likely that psychiatrists, social workers, and other mental health professionals will begin to devise treatments for the condition and we can expect the emergence of happiness clinics and anti-happiness medications in the not too distant future.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Wait
by Timothy Steele
(from The Poetry Anthology
Daryl Hine and Joseph Parisi, eds.
Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston 1978)
Six beds in a square room: you give your name
And sleep for days. Then, the comeback...the shame,
The Thorazine, and long walks in the sun
As though retreats from oblivion
It took on trust. And through it all, you sense
Only your ruin and fatigue as dense
As sleep. What happened?
They won't answer you,
But just solicit your submission to
The judgment they'll "in due time" forumulate.
And till then. Get some rest. Be patient. Wait.