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Society is the Real Disease!
They paved the road to my own hell alright: something like 9 years of being a guinea pig for drug companies, not being taken at my word or seriously (I started to make up lies for this reason even, I was pissed), being stuck in the psych ward for a suicide attempt fueled by the drugs and the marginalization (at least ultimately, other proximate causes happened related to a fight with my folks but at bottom it was that) when I was 17, from the age of 9 to 18 that was my own personal hell: a land of Ritalin, Prozac, Lithium, Paxil etc… (almost any you can name cause nothing ever seemed to “work right”, they gave me nightmares, speeded my heart beat, eating disorders, mood swings, in fact most of the things I was said to be “sick with” were either exaggerated by, or sometimes directly stemmed from, these damn little pills…you know, maybe they had no damn business being in my body?), being locked up for “my own protection”, being stigmatized among my peers in behaviorally based classes I was segregated into (because I had the nerve to stick up for myself, oh no!), leading to more bullying, leading me into more fights, being talked down to, the list goes on and on. I turn all this logic on it’s head because it is bullshit! It is almost never the individual who is “sick” and almost always the context that is the wrong place for the individual. But what we call therapy is not really about solving problems, even if it’s advocates would like to think it is. No, much like school is not really about learning and one must be acutely aware of the “hidden curriculum” to really understand how education works as a moralizing tool, so too said “therapy” is just another form of social control to be abolished! My problems were not based on an “illness” anymore than “evil” unless we think of a sick society as the illness. This same I can safely say about most other patients I have met even though they might have been convinced (through years of “therapeutic” pressuring) to say otherwise. In almost every case I have seen I note a bigger problem that sets the pattern: being raped, being bullied, being lied to repeatedly, having ones hopes smashed under the cruelty of the social design after one was told such things as “if you try hard and believe in yourself you can do anything” and other stupid lies (since this society turns them into lies with it’s conditions, of course! Maybe not all of us want to be capitalists anymore than we do workers, ever think of that?), being fucked over by people who you thought loved you, the list of contextual problems is virtually infinite. But these are not treated as contextual problems, rather the individual and their sense of themselves vs. someone else’s outsider views on the subject (which for that reason they couldn’t possibly really understand) are treated as the issue. If the piece doesn’t fit the puzzle then we don’t look for a better puzzle for the piece to fit into, to speak metaphorically, we hack and slice at the piece till it fits and if it doesn’t fit we can confine said piece to the box (of institutionalization, for example, the name says it all folks!). Of course the sickest thing I note in this chamber of horrors is that there are people in it who know better and who do not really act on this for fear of their careers, like the psychiatrist I used to see briefly in my teens who I used to go to church with (different times, very different times, not a praying man anymore), who was so nice, so caring, so understanding…and who took one look at my case history and was horrified. But the pills didn’t stop coming and that is cause even if he said something his voice was drowned out by others on the board, as these things tend to go, and one does not fly in the face of such decisions unless one wants to lose ones license…even when one knows better and this was far from the only case of this I observed and none could get past condolences before I was subjected to more “therapeutic” cruelty till I could quit the whole thing once and for all at 18. By the way, though the results may have ultimately in their way been for the best this also cost me a nervous breakdown: I hated my pills so much I didn’t realize how accustomed my body had become to them and I would pay dearly for this as my reality was smashed into a million pieces and I spent a couple years living in what an existentialist might call “fear and trembling, sickness unto death!” Thanks, psychology, for the wonders you work! It is amazing how all pervasive this notion is! Just turn on the TV and you will see commercial after commercial asking if you are depressed, angry, anxious etc… and then offering you some drug to make you different, after rattling off as quickly as possible and posting in fine print at the bottom of the screen possible side effects (sometimes including even death). The message being sent appears to be that we are supposed to be happy all the time, basically satisfied with what we have no matter how disagreeable, and if we beg to differ? Well, one could take dope or go sit down and have some academic idiot savant tell one what to think and feel and invalidate ones own reasons for feeling the way one does! No, depression, anger, anxiety etc.. are not mental illness, they are a social phenomenon by and large that takes place in a context: they are various reactions of a highly cognitive organism to unfavorable circumstances. Of course the usual retort is the whole dime store “overcoming adversity” self help clap trap where we are fed some human interest story about how someone suffered through, this, that or the other and managed to always keep a positive outlook. Yeah, some of these stories are indeed very touching…but to cram them down the throat of someone whose suffering shows no signs of abetment, someone who in fact suffers from the very nature of the society they are trapped in as well as other more personal things? Give me a fucking break! The common thread in all such stories is this: no matter what these people were going through there was “A light at the end of the tunnel” something to remain strong for in other words. I am very sensitive myself (though it may not show here), but despite this if I thought I had something waiting for me that made this existence worth it I could suffer any amount of horror and maintain such a positive attitude despite my pessimism. Well, I don’t. What I am often haunted by is that I am going to die alone, never feeling fulfilled, in a social arena I have nothing but contempt for with neither my personal nor my social desires met no matter how hard I try and in addition to this my species is killing itself and many other things…tell me to maintain a positive attitude here! What I hate most is the people who say things like “be glad your breathing at least”, as if life were about mere survival, as if we were just machines that ate and drank, intake oxygen give off carbon dioxide, create waste, and eventually run down and die after reproducing as much as possible (as some scientific popularizers would have it in their own morality they go to great lengths, usually, to hide)! Of course we are such things (though not machines!) but that is merely the background, the basis for what we really are and what, to me, is more important: creatures that have goals and desires! I will grant this much and no more ground to mental illness: one is mentally ill only if one thinks of oneself that way, all else is an encroachment of society. That is right: I am taking the popular notion that the “craziest people” are those who do not see themselves as insane and turning it on it’s head: in order for one to be insane one actually does have to see oneself as insane. This makes perfect sense to me for what is sanity really anyway but either a normative or some other idealistic text book definition of a person (usually, and very tellingly, based on the concept of adjustment)? My sanity will look different from your sanity then, yours different from the next persons and so on, each conforming to some idealized type that doesn’t quite mesh with reality precisely because of it’s ideal nature. So then if someone has nothing but reasons to be happy, according to their own definition of what these reasons are, and one doesn’t feel happy but depressed, angry or anxious, maybe then, and just about only then, one can really be defined as mentally ill. This is something I have put to people who have found themselves in the same situation as I have and who have become convinced that the diagnosis was correct (the shifting nature of my own says it all: throughout my life it has been switched from ADHD, to bipolar, to obsessive compulsive, and even Aspers syndrome, a form of high functioning autism, and when I hear this one people usually try to flatter by saying it is an illness of geniuses) I ask if they have reasons to be happy, how’s life? If they say they do and still feel that way, fine, they are mentally ill if they feel they are, if not and it is contextual they should tell the shrink to shut the fuck up! Adjustment is something we need to lose. One does not adjust to a situation one get’s nothing but pain from, one is better off to try and destroy the situation! What is needed is not pills and therapy, not hospitals, what is needed is the destruction of this social order. Happiness, to me, is found in relationship as well as in the attainment of the goals which make up ones desire (at least until and if the point comes where one feels different). If one is to be happy then, the way I look at it, one needs the opportunity to mold their own life, sometimes alone, with most of us in concert with those we share affinity with. What this society does is the opposite: it attempts to mold personalities to it’s own ideals, for a plethora of reasons many of which are dogmatic illusions. Sure, life is give and take, compromise is involved in it, and you can’t always get what you want…but that is not the end of the story either, if it were we might as well just go ahead and kill ourselves as far as I am concerned cause then what is the fucking point? Like I said life is give and take, that means to take as well as to give, neither to the exclusion of the other. If I feel like I am taking something from the situation than the better I am able to give to it, if not I can only long for it’s destruction. If we are all honest with ourselves I really don’t see how this could be otherwise. Anything is possible but I really don’t see it, and so fuck both the notions of mental illness and mental health! I will be my own weaver of these definitions and you can do the same! |
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I couldn't relate any more
I couldn't relate any more to this. I was a pill rat from 8 - 19 and a drug addict from 12 - 22. I went through the psychiatric labrynth of diagnosis and cocktails. I had my breakdowns and suicidal episodes as a result of the various pills as well. Zyprexa being by far the worst, with Prozac and ability on top of it. Indeed, I also studied psychology for years in college and met many "mentally ill" persons who are definitely frustratingly warped by their theraputic manipulation. Psychiatry is fucking absurd. I'd highly recommend reading Foucault's writing about the roles psychology has played in State oppression throughout the modern period. Also, if there is any one honestly realistic psychology, it is the existential psychoanalists who take the cake... I also like Fritz Pearls Gestalt theories. Popular psychological theories are way outdated and are undoubtably a result of population control, the prison reform movement, big pharma, and the criminal system. Literally, not just theoreticly sound: Western Psychology as practiced the past couple centuries is an institution that grew out of the State, it's needs to categorize and document the subjective qualities of it's populations, and the capitalists who both for reasons of "better marketing" and social control turned "laziness" or "unwillingness to work" into the basis of diagnostic mental illness. That is why you get "maladjustment" as the major normative qualifier for mental illness. There is no question that Freud, Reich, and Psychiatrics has been a tool of the State to manage unruley populations (see the Judicial Authority psychiatrists have in the West: to detain, diagnose, criminalize, and control).
Now, Foucault himself was a victim of this shit too. Makes sense since he dedicated his life to dismembering "biopower". I never felt better in my life until I stopped withdrawling from medications, was honest with myself about society and my personal history in it's institutions, and fell in love. Most, if not all people permitted to live as "outpatients" (on probation in other words), are people who have felt the heavy hand of normative social control and failed to blame themselves - or blamed themselves ENTIRELY! Psychotic episodes of hallucinations and delusions aren't even cause for identifying a subject as "sick". The disorders of the DSM have been created incontrolled experiments out of "normal" subjects time and again. Even animals show signs of "affective disorders" under circumstances where they lose hope in themselves to be self-reliant and meet their needs/goals. Anyone that believes a species of beings that simply can not survive in isolation ( and are therefore social and interdependant), can be understood as pure autonomous subjects or automotons is a real fucking idiot. They don't call infant mortality due to lack of affection an infantile disorder because it's obviously how human beings have evolved. Love, affection, stimulation of the organs, loving touch, social standing - all of these things are just as much a factor of a person in good conditions as food, shelter, and safety are. But if social psychologists god forbid shout too loud about the scientific proof of our societies systematic problems... well, they are loonie too!!!
Join the Radical Psychology group on Yahoo! Groups if you are really interested in getting the facts and most recent legal battles of patients against big pharma or psychiatrists. They're a bunch of psychologists who recognize the obvious problems we are talking about and work towards fighting the specific oppressions of Psychiatry. Check out Dennis Fox's writings... I think he is an anarchist but can't remember.
Remeber that you are right and that you create the terms of your contentment. When being an anarchist gets ahold of your sensitivities and gets you down, remember we are all with you to fight this system and you can always chill out on your struggle, create a little project to work on, and enjoy nature (what's left of it) - talk to the Earth and remember that the Earth is always going to "want" whatever you give back to it.
-Squee
Nice stuff,the revolution
Nice stuff,the revolution begins in the cerebrum.The ethics of the Western society haven't changed much over the last few hundred years,nor the normative pressures they impose,which cumulatively reify mostly as institutions not concerned with changing the status quo,but infact perpetuating it.What can one expect but otherwise from an hierarchical overlord?The physical laws of depletion apply to the organism aswell,and it will suffer from an inferior diet and mediocre psychic/physiological instructions it receives from the ruler,called education.
The subjectivity revolts instinctively until it is broken,coersed or intimidated by the masse conformity,only some get spewed out stronger at the other end,a time to rejoice!
i still have to deal with
i still have to deal with this bullshit. they say they took me off of it but i honestly think that they're still doing it. it takes me two hours twenty pages of a book i like. and i know it isn't me because when i stopped eating home food for a week i was able to remember every moment of a movie for three weeks
Do not despair.It seems that
Do not despair.It seems that other food affects you, you may be sensitive to certain chemicals.Try eating raw fruit and vegetables,peanuts,unsugared tea,fruit and vegie juices,for a week,then slowly one at a time reintroduce you favourite foods,or experiment with vegetables and spices,other wholesome stuff.Stay away from institution foods,masse outlet takeaway and capitalist restaurants, or your bodys'cells will be re-enacting the extinction of the dinosaurs on a miniscule stage.