Wannabe Saviours

I still feel like crap, but I’m continuing to take all of my vitamins and supplements and homeopathic stuff and the last psych med I’m on, Epival. The blockage in my throat is mostly gone, there’s just a dull pain there now. For the most part I don’t really know what’s going on in my body. I think these recurring illnesses are really bothering me. I’m seeing my g.p. tomorrow, so I’ll see what she has to say about it. God I’m cold.

I didn’t really expect that this attempt at healing would be so painful, I mean, physically painful. I suppose that’s what happens in healing. And I’m also having trouble dealing with incredible bouts of anger and sadness related to being hospitalized.

Last night I was thinking about this idea of spiritual pain and being victimized by the psychiatric industry, and then I was thinking about what it does to the perpetrators of psychiatric abuse. I mean, they think they’re doing good things, they honestly believe they are helping people, and they get feedback from people around them that they are doing good work. But there must be some kind of huge spiritual damage that they’re wreaking on themselves. I’ve never thought about the negative stuff that happens to perpetrators before. I know at death people have to face whatever pain they’ve caused in their lifetimes that they never atoned for. I don’t know what that would look like for someone who has hurt hundreds, thousands of people during the course of an illustrious career.

I’m sure there are people working in that field who haven’t hurt others, but a lot fewer than you would expect. Even people who are very kind are still complicit in what happens on psych wards.

I can’t change the past. And I can’t make people who hurt me see that they hurt me. I wish I could get some kind of compensation for four years of hell, but I probably can’t. And I wish I knew for sure no one would throw me in a bin again, but I don’t know. My mom doesn’t even recognize when I’m being discriminated against for being a nutter, and for the most part other people will agree with me in principle that psych wards are abusive, but won’t do the work to find out an alternative for me. I’m applying to grad school now to write my thesis on alternative ways of dealing with people in psychosis, which will be a fun project. But then I’m worried even after I do that, even after I lay out an entire blueprint for people to treat me humanely, it won’t be followed. It’s frustrating.

Maybe people will kill me with their kindness. I don’t know. I don’t want to be another statistic, one more person killed by meds, or restraints, or whatever. But I can’t help it much either, except to keep doing some kind of advocacy and activist work around raising awareness.

And really, the psychiatric industry is crumbling. People are starting to realize that new illnesses are being invented for things no one really worried about before. I mean, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, ugh, what a crock. Mother Jones had ODD don’t you know? Med students don’t want to go into psychiatry anymore, in the medical field it’s viewed as a bit of a sham.

I’m not saying mental illnesses don’t exist. I am saying, however, that psychiatry has limited the scope of how we can identify and properly treat mental illnesses. A quarter of people being treated for MI’s actually have physical illnesses creating their psychiatric problems. And while the DSM says once an underlying condition is discovered, the psych label has to be abandoned, it’s not happening anymore. Now people have the psych label in addition to their thyroid condition or epilepsy or whatever is going on. And I think the reason for that is purely monetary, big bucks can be made in making sure someone is still identified as a psych patient.

Maybe there are some people with the brain chemical thing going on. But I am seriously doubtful that brain chemicals account for all MIs.

Personally, I think something like bipolar disorder refers to a set of symptoms more than an actual disease. I think a LOT of things cause bipolar disorder, and it’s different for everyone. And our health care system isn’t responsible enough these days to actually provide thorough medical work ups of people with bipolar disorder to find out how to adequately treat them.

So I dunno, it’s a strange thing. I know one thing is for sure, whoever puts me in the hands of the psychiatric industry again in the future is not going to be in my life anymore. I can’t hack the wannabe saviours.