THE HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY

Waging a war against ignorance, intolerance, indignity, and inhumanity is a valiant war indeed. I don’t mean the kind of war that requires bloodshed and lifeless bodies. I am talking about the kind of war that can be won with education, open-mindedness, love, and kindness. Healing from life’s wounds, constant conundrums, and its bitter irony is something no one should ever have to face alone. War is always a dark path, but sometimes with the correct strategy this path can lead to hard won humanity, and hard won spirituality marked by the brilliant, golden, warm light of divine love. Some struggles indeed set us free and yet bring us together in the oneness of all existence. Becoming free loved and whole, stokes the embers of our soul’s fire. It seems so profoundly simple, yet so many obstacles are placed on our paths. This is the kind of blockage that frequently prevents us from joining each other in oneness.

People with emotional wounds are often left out, imprisoned by the locked doors of Psychiatry. All of us have emotional wounds to heal; however, some of us end up on the cold side of the locked door while others remain free. Those of us behind the locked door accumulate additional, unnecessary scars. It is true that people with disabilities are marginalized like so many others. Yet people with psychiatric disabilities experience a special kind of marginalization; one that threatens to drown the fire of our souls. We won’t truly be free until the door is unlocked and the obstacles are removed. When the current trend is broken and we shed our fears, then we can celebrate the “inmates running the asylum.” Until there is no need for asylums will we all be welcomed into the warmth of the oneness. Someday…someday there won’t be asylums.

The fog lifts and I am painfully brought back to reality. Was I dreaming? Or was it the gift of a vision? As I rub the sleep dust from my eyes and begin to hear again. I hear words that are real, words that sting.

“You can’t come in here. You can’t be in here without ‘staff.’ We don’t want your kind in here. What if you hurt someone?” Attitudinal barriers, another way of saying discrimination, are well known by people with psychiatric histories. People who are institutionalized in mental health facilities are often distrusted simply because they’re known to be from an institution. Fear is what truly disables us all. People with psychiatric labels are mostly feared.

I call myself a psychiatric survivor, not because I survived my disability, or my traumatic past, but because I survived the mental health system. I am not ill. I am disabled from a past filled with unspeakable horrors. I am traumatized, but I am also strong. They didn’t kill me. The cult’s torture pushed me beyond my breaking point. I came close to death. I pleaded for the relief that death would bring me, and held onto suicide as my liberating friend. It was the only thing that I could control. But instead of death I found relief in another way. I fragmented. I held on as each piece, each fragment gripped a piece of the torture until my core could stare it down. I adapted and am alive now because I bested the cult’s torture with the creative mind of a very young child. Others didn’t make it. Were they praying for death also? The others who didn’t come out alive most likely did pray for death. In my case dissociation saved my life.

As an adult, the fragments came home to me causing depression, anxiety, thoughts of suicide, and dark terror filled nights. I tell my story in honor of those who didn’t make it. Maybe they didn’t know how to fragment.

The world being what it is I was a natural candidate for psychiatric oppression. Let me explain what I’m describing. The history of psychiatric practices is both barbaric and archaic. Icepick lobotomies, sterilization, and insulin-induced shock are just a few examples of psychiatry’s shameful past. Such practices hardly ever offered anything close to human care and kindness for those experiencing the sometimes-overwhelming emotional pain of life. Throughout history large numbers of patients described their distress as a spiritual crisis. I believe this is what I struggle with. Unholy politics also apply to a long history of incarceration of strong women, timid men, indigents, eccentrics, people with other types of disabilities, and ethnic and religious minorities.

History doesn’t disappoint; the current situation hasn’t changed much. Discrimination frequently occurs when someone acts differently. People who talk loudly, or make noises, or behave in what are considered odd ways are targets. More often than not those without psychiatric histories want to get rid of us, get us out of the store, out of the restaurant, out of the theater, out of the church. Me. People want to get rid of me! Choosing to be honest about my experiences frightens even the most open-minded individuals. My truth makes them uncomfortable; it makes them squirm. Eventually I began to seek a healing community where I could learn to the comfort of worship. This congregation is not the first Unitarian Universalist church I have ever been to. This church is just the first that hasn’t asked me to leave simply because I present differently than someone who hasn’t been traumatized.

I guess I should feel lucky, but then again I am not harming anyone, or endangering anyone’s safety. I have as much right to worship here as anyone. I say that, although I don’t really believe that. Not always. My self-esteem falters even though I try to hide it. Maybe if I tell those of you who have never been on the other side of the locked door what it is like…maybe I will be able to unlock the door for myself and others as well. Maybe I can unite two vastly different worlds.

As a patient in a mental hospital I found the experience to be totally demoralizing. As part of the ‘treatment’, we are routinely overly drugged often with medicines that have permanent and dangerous side effects. Psychiatry always did have as its base societal control. We inmates are eventually deprived of all control over our own lives. Such ordinary decisions as when to eat, go to the bathroom, or go to bed are made by staff. A natural result of being subjected to such regimens is feelings of depersonalization. These very same feelings are frequently considered primary symptoms of psychiatric “illness.” The whole experience of psychiatric hospitalization promotes weakness and dependency. Thus originates the term, ‘learned dependency.’ Instead of being helped, we find ourselves unable to trust our own judgement, and become indecisive, overly submissive to authority, and frightened of the outside world. Too often the trenches of this war between patients and staff is tremendous; we are viewed as sick, untrustworthy, and in need of constant supervision, while staff members are seen as competent, knowledgeable leaders.

Staff control of us is an ominous, relentless presence. Power is manifested through chemical and physical restraint, seclusion, forced ‘treatments’ such as electroshock and experimental medicines regularly ordered by the courts. All of this can be done against our will as long as it is in our ‘best interest.’ Such ‘treatments’ are meant to destroy our brains, personalities and souls. Additionally the removal of ‘privileges’ is invoked. Civil rights that you had on the outside become ‘privileges’ as soon as you go through the locked door. We are forced to re-earn our rights/privileges. Staff consistently usurp their power by removing such freedoms as phone use, use of a blowdryer or other personal items, smoking cigarettes, going on a small daily walk, and even having visitation. Therapy, empathy, dignity, and love need to replace the relatively new “biological theories” of what psychiatrist, activist, and author Peter Breggin calls the “New Psychiatry.” How can our congregation become more welcoming to people with psychiatric histories? At first glance achieving unity appears easy. However, education, the release of fears and the respect of differences must be in existence. Only with the presence of these items can we create a solidly built bridge over the trenches of this war of misunderstanding.

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