A link to another article I found over on Ballastexistenz, originally posted by Amorpha.

It’s a sarcastic list of things they have learned through various shitty experiences in the mental health system. I’ve picked out a few which seem particularly relevant given some of the stuff i’ve been reading round the allegedly progressive blogosphere recently.

“When you are really having problems, nobody believes that you are suffering. When you are all right and working things out on your own, nobody believes that you are not disturbed and suffering.”

..

“If you ever, ever, at any time, even consider the possibility that you might possibly be able to figure out a way to work things out without the use of drugs, this is a dangerous delusion you must be talked out of at once.”

..

“If you disagree with the doctor’s assessment of whether you need a certain drug, you are being noncompliant. Noncompliance is bad. Noncompliance means you need more drugs.”

..

“If you ever state that you don’t need medication or help, or not the kind they’re giving you, anyway, this just means you’re too sick to know how sick you are.”

..

“Even if your anxiety or depression stems from something perfectly understandable, such as the death or serious illness of a family member, reacting to it in a way that leaves you unable to perform some daily tasks in the same manner as before doesn’t mean you’re having a natural stress reaction; it’s a symptom of your illness.”

..

“In fact, any time you have any kind of extremely strong emotional reaction in response to a life event, you’re never really acting in response to that event. It’s just a by-product of a chemical imbalance in your brain.”

..

“If drugs don’t help you in the way they’re supposed to, or if you ultimately find ways to get along without them, or are forced to find a way because the drugs cause too many problems, this means that you “never actually had that problem to begin with,” even if you had every single “symptom” of it or sounded exactly like someone else’s account of a worst-case scenario, the kind who “need” certain kinds of treatment.”

..

“And if you talk about your experience of how you learned to deal with things without drugs, you’re harming and undermining “the people who are really sick, not mildly afflicted like you were” (even if, again, their definition of someone who is “really sick” could have fit you exactly at some point in your life).”

You know that a person considers you less than human when they consider your non compliance as an indication of how fucked up you are rather than as an expression of your  autonomy.  Children are expected to be compliant or they are designated naughty and out of control, and in need of discipline, and “treatment”.  Most people are comfortable with calling these treatment programs aimed at children by their proper name, punishment.  They feel justified in punishing children for non compliance, seeing themselves as righteous judges with necessary authority over these lesser peoples.

People with mental and behavioral disorders are also designated naughty and out of control if they desire any say whatsoever in their diagnosis and appropriate “treatment program”, and therefore in need of discipline through a different treatment program decided by someone else.  To many of us who have been subjected to unwanted, unnecessary treatment programs, which we have experienced as being harmful to ourselves rather than as healing, we percieve this as punishment.  Not punishment for being ill necessarily, but as punishment for being different, as punishment simply for being who we are.  We percieve these treatments as a violation of our humanity and our right to autonomy.  We percieve those who insist on these treatments as authoritarian bullies with no respect for us at all.

As you can imagine, when the symptoms of our illness include paranoia and depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and a serious lack of self confidence, this punishment, by the very people we are urged to trust, is just another big setback, another huge knock, that brings on all the worst of the symptoms we spend every day fighting through.  All our own work on surviving and healing, that which we lead ourselves through, the most important healing work that most of us will do, is smashed back down to nothing.

When you hear the words “non compliance” used negatively to refer to a person with mental health or behavioural difficulties, try to imagine the positive words “expressing autonomy” were used instead.  All you need to do is see the person referred to as a human being with the right to self determination.  It’s simple really.

Hey, watch it, that’s attached! by Ballastexistenz

“To be cured, is to be brought closer to someone else’s standard of perfection. Resistance to cure, and to medical authority over what constitutes goodness or perfection in our lives, is sometimes the most important thing we can do, and one of the things we are least equipped to learn, because medical authority has a way of insisting that it is right and that we are wrong. “
..
“People do not generally understand the real reasons that many people are not all that interested in cures. Those reasons can include: Rejecting entirely a medical model of disability (or of some categories of disability), having different priorities in life than endlessly searching for a cure, the absence of safe and effective cures available, the fact that yanking on one thing may inadvertently yank on several others, believing that we have had valuable experiences that we might not have otherwise had, and believing that what other people call “our disabilities” are actually an important part of us. Those are the real reasons that I hear over and over again.”
..
“Trying to think in terms of cure squashes my mind into a narrow and grim way of looking at the world. The way that sees my own life as, well, narrow and grim. And medical. Very medical.This is not how I see myself.

I see myself as who I am, and who I have been, and who I will be. Even while experiencing things that are very unpleasant and that are categorized as medical, I don’t experience them as if they are things. This gouging pain around my right eye is just part of my head, I hope it will go away, but I won’t die if it doesn’t.

And things that get down right to the brain and the genes and how things fit together, I have a really hard time even conceptualizing in terms of cure. That is why I wrote the first section of this how I did. What right does the medical profession have to march in, declare my brain, face, and assorted body parts to be defective, and then “fix” me until I’m someone who would be, inside and out, unrecognizable to anyone who’s ever met me?”

..
“The thing I find the most intensely repugnant about the medical mindset is that chops and separates which parts of us are “really us” from which parts of us are “the disability”. They make it impossible to see all of ourselves as whole. And my visceral reaction to cure-talk, as well as all the concepts that go along with it, is rejection. It is not that medicine has no place, but the place it has taken is too large and too powerful. It wants everyone the same, it declares that particular kind of sameness health, and almost nobody questions it.”

I’ve always felt the people who think being dependent on legal drugs makes them better than those on illegal drugs are really the sanctimonious ones. I’ve been dismissed as a junkie, even during times when my drug use was very mild, by people only too happy to shovel prescription drugs down their throats. I think I can safely say that there are few more sanctimonious than those whose opinion matches that of a ruling establishment.

It’s interesting how this keeps happening. Here’s a list of people who I see called sanctimonious on a regular basis:- breastfeeding women; homeschooling families; home birthing women; people who use alternative therapies of any kind; vegans and vegetarians; feminists; anti-racist activists; anti capitalists of all sorts; anti pornography activists. It’s an interesting list. Anyone who resists the status quo risks being dismissed as sanctimonious simply for making their decision, even when they do it silently, let alone if they dare to ever talk about their resistance. If I dare to talk aloud of my reasons for home birthing, I will be called sanctimonious, I will be told off for “judging” others who dont home birth, I will be suspected of trying to force other women to do it my way. It’s why I never discuss breast feeding with my friends - because my decision to do it long term is deemed to be shaming of other women who dont. It’s why talking about home ed is so awkward - because people are so defensive, they assume that my decision not to send my kids to school is a judgment on those who dont. I have damn good reasons for all of these things, i’ve researched and learned through reading, discussion and my own life experience, i’ve made my decisions accordingly. Yet somehow I feel like i’m not allowed to talk about any of it, in case it makes other people defensive, hurts their feelings. These people have their opinions protected and promoted in society by powerful institutions - the education and medical establishments, and the media, for example - you would have thought they’d feel secure - and yet my silence about my resistance is apparently necessary to give them confidence in their sanctity.

So anyway, on depression and drugs. There are loads of people who have mental and depressive illnesses and choose not to take medication, for a variety of reasons, including previous drug addiction problems and a well earned lack of trust in the medical establishment. I am one of them - I deliberately choose not to take medication. For me, this is an important resistance against those who would tell me that its “all in my head”, that I merely suffer from a chemical imbalance, and that what I live with is not the result of a bunch of really shit experiences. I will not have my history erased, my abusers excused, like that - I will not be made to blame for my disorder, and I will not be silenced with medication. I am not “lucky” that I can choose not to take drugs. I struggle, mostly on my own and mostly silently. I go through periods of time where all I can think about is how I could get fixed up and it might make me ‘normal’. But one reason that I resist being made ‘normal’, taking medication that make me artificially ‘okay’, is that I’ve been there and done that, and had the breakdowns. No more, thanks.

I think it’s also important to be aware of the probable outcome of the general belief in chemical imbalances, and how depressed people can all be turned into productive citizens if we just gave them happy pills (which btw is such a wrong name, ‘normality pills’ would be more appropriate, because they dont make people happyhappyjoyjoy, rather they make us better able to function according to the generally accepted (and pushed) standard of normality - and that is a helluva temptation). Drugs can be forced on people, they have been in the past alongside various other dodgy treatments, they are still forced on those who can be sectioned, and it is not an uncommon opinion that those of us who are ill and allegedly “a drain on resources”, or “dangerous”, or whatever else they’re calling us today, should be forced into treatment of whatever sort happens to be trendy this year. It is not by accident that marginalised peoples are also the ones most discovered to be mentally ill, or that mental illnesses themselves are ‘discovered’ to explain away the behaviours of those who are marginalised and oppressed, in particular those behaviours that are aimed directly at those who oppress them. Forced treatment of mental (and behavioural) illnesses and disorders in the main affect those who are already most oppressed in our society.

When we say we won’t take medication, it’s not us being sanctimonious or unrealistic, and it’s not that we suffer less urgent or painful illness. There are many good reasons to choose to stay off drugs, but it’s a difficult choice to make and to live with. I feel tempted a lot of the time, just like I still feel tempted to find someone who will sell me some speed, despite not having done any for years now. It’s not the drugs necessarily I want, it’s the alleged normality that they could bring. If I could just score a couple of lines worth I know I could get my house tidy, my bills in order, go outside, even be sociable and fun. More long term, I could get a job, have some money, buy nice things, have fun with the kids, keep my house clean, write more and better, lose some weight, and feel less para about the way I look. All of this and more tempts me all the damn time, and I hate being such a fucking mess. But I resist because I’ve been down that road and i’ve decided its no good, the temptation is real but the promises are hollow. My road has to be different - I’m sticking it out as long as I can and I hope, I really hope, that I can learn to better recognise my triggers, better recognise when i’m going through or about to go through an episode or mood, learn to cope with them better. In the long term I think I will be better off seeing it through and relying on myself, than relying on anything prescribed by some guy I see rarely and who knows fuck all about me.

I have no time to go on, but i’ve seen some very one sided discussions on drug therapies for depressive disorders recently, which are insulting, and presumptious, towards those who resist, and I wanted to say something about that.

and called my last post a “stew of insanity”.

This is my blog.  On it I collect bits of news, I link to other articles that interest me, I do the occasional bit of analysis, I ask questions, I talk a very little about myself, I post photos of  sexism that I see around me.  I also on occasion use my blog as a space to ditch the heap of thoughts rambling through my brain, that stop me from sleeping, that make my head throb and make it difficult for me to concentrate.  I am bipolar, and i’m in the middle of a particularly horrible crash, and so I unloaded.  I’m not a “psycho”, i’m a manic depressive.

You can learn more about bipolar disorder here and here.