I believe that those of us who have had the good fortune, whether through some combination of talent, opportunity or blessing to move out of our mental patient roles, have an obligation to use what we have learned to help others.
I am honored that so many have come to hear me speak. I always know a few of the faces. Some of them have seen and heard me before. I remember their stories, I wish I could recall their names. I want them to know how valuable they are.
How do I dare tell my story and say I am a survivor of psychiatric abuse like them? So many talks to similar groups do not stop my hands from trembling and my voice from fluttering. No more self-criticism, no more hiding my emotions, I let myself feel; emotional sensitivity is my strength. I am not the stone cold macho male I grew up aspiring to be.
I see how important my words are to them. I know of their daily efforts to reconstruct smashed hope. I am humbled yet enthralled by the power their rapt attention bestows upon me. Alert eyes devouring my words sharply contrast with the public stereotypes. The painful struggles we have shared makes us peers.
I like the recruiting slogan of the Army “ Be all that you can be.” To be all that you can be should be available to everyone.
My fall from the main road, the path approved by society, onto the less travelled road that many of us know too well began in 1966.
In 1966, president Lyndon Johnson tried to implement his vision of a “Great Society” of social programs. Riots and racial conflicts were occuring in most of the country’s major cities in the aftermath of assassinations – Martin Luther King; and also Bobby Kennedy. At this very same time, while President Johnson was constructing a wobbly safety net for poor people, the war in Vietnam was firing up and government officials were carefully managing the information released to the public. Seeds were being sewn for radical changes in society: there was the greater sexual freedom “free love was a very appealing mantra or slogan for young people; Timothy Leary’s “drop out and turn on with LSD”, the women’s movement, black pride, hippies, war protesters, communes were emerging everywhere. But for those of us struggling to find ourselves there was only more confusion. While some enjoyed the fruits of new adventures and possibilities, some of us just tried to keep from drowning.
All of our stories are shaped by what goes on around us – in our families, in our neighborhoods, in the schools we attend – in the historical period within which we live. It is important to remember what shapes us, but we also act to re-shape ourselves. Throughout our lives we must continue to develop. It is unnatural to be stable; to stagnate – to not grow and develop. A Buddhist teaching tells us that all pain emanates from our attempts to hold back change rather than to flow with the rhythms of life
That summer in 1966 marked the end of my years of half-hearted participation in an educational process that culminated in my getting a Masters Degree in psychology. I was about to lose my way. No longer could I trick myself into thinking that my self-confidence and happiness would magically appear at some future time. I was ill-prepared to leave the school womb but I also knew that I could not continue hiding in graduate sanctuaries. Only 22, I was not the person I wanted to be and did not like or respect myself.
Pain, confusion, dis-satisfaction – having to change my childhood dreams and hopes of what I would become – then having to invent new dreams. Some of us get lost in that process and reluctantly our journeys get trapped in the altered states of consciousness called mental illness.
My 23rd birthday was spent in the seclusion room of a mental hospital. I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After 4 months of trying to medicate me back to normality with massive doses of thorazine and stelazine, they gave up on me… or so I thought. I believed they were just going to let me go – accept who I was. I thought I had defeated them, proved that I was right and they were wrong. But what they really thought was that I was beyond medicating back to health. And since I had full health insurance coverage, insulin coma therapy was next. The treatment: With daily high dose injections of insulin, I was put into an coma 5 days a week for the next 8 weeks. Since I was considered hopeless, they thought I had nothing to lose. I am grateful that a few years earlier, psychiatrists were no longer performing lobotomies.
A professor I know, an expert on stigma and discrimination, asks this question in his research, “If you had a daughter, who would you most oppose her marrying: 1. A convicted criminal; 2. A drug addict/alcoholic; 3. A person with schizophrenia?”
Psychiatric survivors know the answer. We are the lowest members of the most dis-enfranchised segment of our culture. Situated lower on society’s ladder are only those fellow travelers whose mental illness labels are defined further by stereotypes associated with age, gender, minority race or ethnicity, outsider sexuality and frightening communicable diseases.
I know now that many of us “hopeless schizophrenics” found ways to hide our psychiatric histories and re-enter mainstream society. But it was not until I decided to be open about my history that I discovered that I was not alone. I was not an anomaly. I became part of a community of people who cared and fought for equal rights.
Hoping to be inspired by its rich history of activism, I was among the thirty psychiatric survivors/ex-patients who gathered at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. We were intent on planning a strategy to change the oppressive and damaging mental health system. We left that educational institution, where Rosa Parks and other civil rights heroes met and planned their strategies, with a renewed sense of commitment and ready to re-double our efforts. And at our last meeting we crafted the “Highlander Statement of Concern” and promised to disseminate it as widely as possible.
Highlander Statement of Concern
In the tradition of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt and thousands of men and women concerned about social justice and progressive change, thirty people with long histories of fighting for human rights in mental health gathered for three days at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. We argued, came to consensus, and then quietly shared our pain, our concerns, our fears, and our hopes for the future.
We came to understand that our personal stories have power and that they must be heard. We must tell them to other people who have been damaged by psychiatric treatment, to the public, to lawmakers and to political candidates as well. We are compelled to share our collective struggle and claim our place as a civil rights movement along side of those who have been similarly discounted, disenfranchised, and marginalized: people of color; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people; people with physical disabilities; women; people belonging to religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities; and people forced to live in poverty amidst the great wealth and abundance of corporate America.
We are obliged to be vigilant and to help others realize the horrible consequences that arise when certain groups are seen as less than fully human and less deserving of basic civil rights. We must never forget that mental patients and people with physical disabilities were the first groups killed by the Nazis. These deaths served to desensitize the German population into accepting the attempted genocide of Jews and other oppressed groups labeled “defective” during the Holocaust.
In the Highlander tradition, we came away from those three days on the mountain determined that we will not allow anyone do for us, to discount us, or to pat us on the head instead of looking us in the eye. We came away invigorated and ready to act individually and collectively to insure that self-determination, respect, ethical behavior, and humane voluntary services and supports become the foundation of a reinvented mental health system. This system must first and foremost do no harm.
We came away ready to make this a reality.