Speak Your Mind

Ann Palmer

For us consumers, living the reality of recovery goes beyond what the mental health service delivery system and psychiatry offer. Through peer-based psychiatric rehabilitation, spirituality, and many forms of counseling and holistic therapies, we have gone beyond traditional treatment. We identify ourselves as ex-patients, survivors, persons in recovery, peers. We Are In This Together.

Our challenge as recipients of those psychiatric diagnoses is to create meaning in these disorders, these disabilities. Do we balk at being called persons “suffering with” mental illness? Can we own this suffering? Tell our truths? We find meaning in life first through the words we use to convey that experience.

When professionals label our circumstances, I want to tell them, “we’re drowning and you’re describing the water.” If this feels like it is happening to you, know that Buddhist thought offers help in breathing in the pain, breathing out the soft compassion. Release, let go, we are instructed. The memories may haunt us, though.

We feel the need to talk about what we have endured, and are enduring. The stories we tell are cautionary tales, science fiction, absurdities. To choose to share and try to make meaning of our suffering is a somewhat radical choice. For, despite the unspoken warnings or actual advice of the psychiatric professionals ( “Don’t go there, for therein lies the abyss, where I cannot reach you . . . ”), we - the diagnosed consumers of mental health services - may choose to speak of the psychotic, depressive, desperate pasts we have endured. Expressed, the emotional baggage could release its secretive hold on our souls and esteem. WE MUST SPEAK OUT.

Psychiatry gives names to symptoms. Certainly those words can label us, limit us. Their terminology describes and explains our experience and behavior. Psychiatry reduces the puzzle of the individual into factors, typologies. Some therapeutic specialists assert that mental illness is a brain disorder and the things that occurred in psychosis have no meaning and are best forgotten. Yet many of us consumers choose to seek meaning out of our experiences, our suffering. It bears mentioning that Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, advocates this very principle of finding meaning and purpose even in the most horrifying or tragic of circumstances.

There is danger in helping professionals telling us not to explore the meaning of that for and in our lives. Further, psychiatric care (inpatient care, particularly) implies that the diagnosed patient (a/k/a the client, the consumer) should fix or alter one’s experience of reality so that it aligns with that of the majority. Simply, the only “cure” some therapy offers the patient is that mental pain is best disregarded.

Manic or schizophrenic speech has long been disregarded by acute care professionals, many whose opinion on the matter is “If they can’t speak proper English and tell us what’s going on for them, we can’t help them.” Mental health treatment seems a vicious cycle: “If you’re going to continue to exhibit symptoms of your illness (manic behavior, seeing and hearing things that we do not), we will not help you. Due to boundary rules, some professionals do not acknowledge comprehension of, let alone permit patients to engage in, psychiatric behaviors, They call them symptoms, known as pressured speech and plays on words like rapping, rhyming (‘clanging’), chanting, etc.

We recall difficult moments within the psychiatric hospital setting, medication-dulled days and nights, where one would think memories would be wiped out by all that “medication to help you sleep.” We remember these times, we still hurt and we want relief from that pain.

We, the mentally diagnosed, have undergone various treatments (Haldol injections, seclusion in the quiet room, straitjackets or four-point restraints, electroconvulsive therapy, and treatment at the hands of psychiatric staff) in the name of science. We have endured the effects of our treatments (med-induced catatonia, short and long-term memory loss, weight gain, inability to experience pleasure, sexual dysfunction, drooling, stiff hands and fingers, mask-like set to the face, again and again.

We have seen ordinary sights as spectacular or ominous. Common sounds and events took on a new degree of tonality, vibrancy, buoyancy. Some simple thing was interpreted way over the heads of others.

We have suffered the ridicule of people who responded to our behaviors as crazy antics, an amusing show. The manic highs brought us to (re-) hospitalization; we felt so out of control, so at the mercy of strangers - healthcare workers: nurses, mental health aides/assistants - who used force to control us, spoke in cleverly disguised power ploy ways. We hurt from their help.

We are ostracized and stigmatized by the predominant culture that wants little to do with us except perhaps as a punch-line to a joke about eccentricity, or worse, pity over the lifetime of suffering that must lay ahead of us.

Pressure from authority and peer pressure is strong. It is not easy to live, think and believe as we, those diagnosed with mental illness, do. We may understand and discuss some complicated concepts when manic, depressed, or psychotic. We consider far out ideas that are cosmologically and cross-culturally significant, pacifism-based, transmogrification-related, biologically-determined, and recombinant-DNA-like-theoretical experiences. We think about and experience “the crazy things” others only hear about.

As those diagnosed and/or affected by psychiatric diagnoses, we share our thoughts and experiences, including all those “crazy times and weird ideas.” What does the expression of these memories (these personal, painful experiences and interior lives) hold for us consumers of mental health treatment? Despite the cycles of desperation, the seasons of darkness, we “sufferers of mental illness” must give voice and light to perhaps the strangest times of our lives. Years ago, I saw a T-shirt that read “Hold onto your delusions. These are your dreams.” The very message struck me dumb. I was awed and shocked at an inclusive perspective for those with psychiatric symptoms. Encouragingly, Jungian perspective tells us our stories (and our dreams) are full of rich, symbolic imagery, if we have the courage to examine the darkness as well as our bright, vivid natures.

Our “better world” supports the understanding that there is no lasting shame in pains shared, accepted, and, with any luck, released. We hope to smile, laugh often, and let go, making way for better memories and new experiences to come forth. With mutual respect and compassion, we can recover ourselves from the shattered lives that were created by symptoms that nearly destroyed our lives. If, in any way, we unite into a “community” (mental health-based or otherwise), we can share our selves, integrate differing wisdom, and, with any luck, move on to better days.

Getting over the shame (the stigma that still binds our hearts) is made easier when we build positive regard for ourselves and others. When we allow ourselves to discuss all matters, even the touchiest ones, we recover from the shame of secret-keeping.

Some therapy suggests that sharing stories removes the shame, reduces the experience, sheds light on the secrecy, and promotes health - if only in the feeling “I, too, have been there.” A common ground is implicit. In understanding another, explanations are seldom necessary and almost defeat the meaningfulness of the experience. Once a solitary happening is shared, it is given validity and normalcy, in a way. Whatever language is used - that of symptoms, of archetypes, of metaphors, of a language friends understand - the response is acceptance and tolerance. The psychotic and manic experiences we have had separately, have joined us in a rare kinship.

Thinking of the dark memories alone is uncomfortable. Recounting these experiences with friends or counselors you trust helps. We all need to express ourselves. Sharing feelings about past manic, crazy, wild, and/or shameful experiences can lead to a release of emotional pain. (It’s a wonder that we can recall some of these experiences at all, but we do.) We recall some strange moments: those behaviors dubbed manic, psychotic, delusory, or hallucinatory.

Survival is a matter of coming to terms with all of one’s feelings - panic and despair especially. We must believe in another chance. And another. And another. Success is getting up one more time than you fall down. The worst misfortune is that many words of wisdom seem empty and useless to one in psychic or psychotic pain. Help anyway. Listen to the tales of hellishness. Love. Forgive. Accept.

There are those of us who have moved beyond despair, after living the horror of psychosis, the wordlessness of catatonia, the emptiness of depression, again and again. A life lived in anxiety, despair, poverty. We emerge emptied, beaten, and, dare I say, oddly purified from within and without.

We have faced other people who want to help yet embitter us with forced wisdom, forced help, forced treatment. They’re doing it for our own good because they believe we are not capable of choosing an appropriate good for ourselves.

No matter - I’ll use the medication; I’ll attend the counseling sessions; I’ll even modify my behavior - if that what it takes to recover. In pursuing what is required for recovery from mental illness, I might lose old ways. First to go is my illusion of control. Second is the belief that I had all the answers. Third, I am not alone in this.

Of our subculture of insanity little is known, and we are greatly feared, little understood, and much maligned. We have approached the issues of parity, empowerment and recovery as issues of civil rights, patient rights, human rights. However we are behaving, love us anyway. We’re doing the best we can, as we’re sure you are. Thanks for your love, support and acceptance. We really appreciate it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you want to give voice to your story, this journal welcomes your perspective on what has helped (or hindered) you in your journey to mental wellness. What has your experience been in treatment, in the mental health system, in recovery? Please snail mail or email your story to us. We will acknowledge receipt of your article. Editors will review and submit articles for publication in a future issue of Mental Health World. If published, you will receive a free subscription to our journal.