The No Hope Myth
mental health issues primer #4
produced by

The No Force Coalition

a group of individuals and
organizations against force in
psychiatry.
Ontario 2000

Some Key Points:

1. "Relax. Everyone is crazy to someone.... So much of what is called 'mental illness' is really a consequences of our troubled society.... In my 30 years in medicine, I have often found that mental patients who are given love, creativity and community find the peace that they are reaching out for."

-- Dr. Patch Adams, psychiatric survivor, House Calls: How we can all heal the world one visit at a time, 1998.

2. "Don't let anyone mess with your dreams. I wanted to come to university and nearly didn't because a psychological assessment done at the Clarke predicted I would fail. That was about six years ago. Now, I'm a year away from finishing my second degree."

-- Ali Lennox, student, survivor, advocate.

3. "Even if you are in the hospital, you still have a mouth. Use it! If you do not, you will remain there for a long time."

-- Leo Anter, psychiatric consumer survivor, advocate.

4. "Did you know that our community has a video? It is a one hour documentary, highlighting the lives and daily struggles of psychiatric survivors working in survivor businesses. 'Working Like Crazy' dispels the many negative stereotypes associated with 'mental illness'. It is available through the National Film Board."

-- Scott Benness, consumer/survivor, employee of A-Way Express Courier.

5. "Alternatives do exist. They include private homes, peer-organized and -controlled group homes, safe houses, drop-in centres, hotlines and mutual support networks. Becoming politically conscious is the first step in conceptualizing and creating innovative alternatives to the brutal mental health business."

-- Persimmon Blackbridge and Sheila Gilhooly (survivors), Still Sane, Press Gang Publishers.

6. "We must take ownership of this issue. And banish the word 'hopeless' from our vocabulary."

-- Scott Simmie , survivor and award-winning journalist, "Shadows in Our Midst", The Toronto Star, October 11, 1998.

7. "Working at this business gives me the motivation to get up in the morning. It keeps me busy and makes me feel good about myself. I think I would become sick if I stayed home all day. It's so depressing! Working keeps me positive and I think that applies to all survivors."

-- Employee, A-Way Express, "Yes We Can....And We Are!!!!", a publication by the Ontario Council of Alternative Businesses, Toronto, Ontario.

8. "There are many days when you may wonder if it is all worthwhile; but then you have someone give you a hug and say, 'Thank you for loving and caring about me,' and you know that it is."

-- "Being There for Each Other", Phoenix Rising, November 1987.

9. "Psychiatric drugs silenced my voice and my spirit and numbed my feelings. Feelings are what make me human; spirit and voice are what keep me connected and alive. I am grateful to have them back and will never again put myself into the hands of a psychiatrist nor will I take psychiatric drugs."

-- Sasha Claire McInnes, psychiatric survivor, UnrulyWomen International, Canada.

10. "Sure I consented to barbaric and degrading treatments. What choice is there inside a locked ward without the privilege of uncontrolled information, external visits, clothing, ID, cigarette breaks? There were no physical tests done, no open rational explanations for decisions that cost me my job, apartment, and friends. As the drugs wore me down, I started losing my ability to resist and analyse, believing anything they said. I got out of the system thanks to other survivors and a supportive family."

-- Erick Fabris, psychiatric survivor, Queen Street Patients Council coordinator and advocate.

11. "I wanted to move. After finding a place and applying, my application was rejected because the landlord found out that I was a consumer-survivor. I sought the help of an equal rights organization. They phoned the landlord and stated that if not resolved they intended to pursue a human rights complaint. I now have that apartment, in a good building with a magnificent view of the city."

-- Graeme Cushing, consumer survivor.

12. "Over a hundred psychiatric survivors and supporters braved an icy west wind to protest the Harris government's stated intention to vastly increase the power and scope of the Mental Health Act. Speaker after speaker made the links between the proposed CTO bill and the systemic process of social cleansing the Province and municipalities are currently engaged in."

-- Graeme Bacque, psychiatric survivor, activist.

13. "I was asked by A-Way to do an interview with Don Weitz at CKLN radio station (88.1 FM, Thursday evenings, 7-8 pm). ShrinkRap is a radio show that totally deals with issues involving consumer/survivors of the mental health system."

-- Richard Smith, psychiatric survivor and administrative clerk, A-Way Express Couriers, from A-Way Expressions, Spring 98 issue.

14. "I have learned from my own suffering that we must come to accept our many-faceted selves. That to alternate between highs of ecstasy and lows of despair, to indulge in fantasy and vision, to act self-destructive or lethargic, to refuse to conform, to lunge forward in spasms of creativity only to retreat to depths of inactivity, to cry, to mourn, to suffer, to create new visions-- is to be human, not sick."

-- Janet & Paul Gotkin, Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears, A Personal Triumph Over Psychiatry, Quadrangle/ The New York Times Book Co.

15. "Up until 1980, I really believed I was crazy. I had been screwed up by the shrinks. After 38 shocks its little wonder. Then I joined On Our Own and Phoenix Rising and found friends who convinced me I had a good sound mind. It has taken me since 1982 to learn to cope."

-- Mel Starkman, psychiatric survivor, activist.

the next points are found online only, due to space:

16. "Psychiatric patients don't make good workers? Next time you hear this myth, tell people about the old brick boundary walls on the Queen Street grounds that were built by unpaid patients in 1889. These walls still stand as a silent testament to the skills of supposedly 'unproductive mental patients'. There is plenty of hope in those old walls and in the hands of the people who built them."

-- Geoff Reaume, ex-psychiatric patient, historian.

17. "Psychiatry exists to steal our hope. They rob us of it, commodify it, and sell it back to us as 'treatment'. When you're supported by a fellow survivor, you get the help and the hope - without the middlemen and the high cost of doing business with them."

-- Lana Frado, Executive Director, Sound Times Support Services.

Some People Considered Mentally Disordered by Today's Psychiatrists:

Hans Christian Andersen, Buzz Aldrin, Lionel Aldridge, Honore de Balzac, Beethoven, Ingmar Bergman, Irving Berlin, William Blake, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Art Buchwald, Robert Burns, Barbara Bush, Dick Cavett, Ray Charles, Christian VII, Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill, Rosemary Clooney, Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen, Copernicus, Francis Ford Coppola, Noel Coward, Michael Crichton, Oliver Cromwell, Sheryl Crow, Daumier, Gaetano Donizetti, John Dowland, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Dostoyevsky, Dickinson, Mike Douglas, Patty Duke, Einstein, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Farmer, Edward FitzGerald, Stephen Foster, Connie Francis, Robert Frost, Peter Gabriel, John Kenneth Galbraith, Mahatma Gandi, Paul Gauguin, Cary Grant, Vincent Van Gogh, Shecky Greene, George Frederic Handel, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Abby Hoffman, Victor Hugo, Henry James, John Keats, Vivien Leigh, Abraham Lincoln, Liszt, Jack London, Salvador Luria, Martin Luther, Gustav Mahler, Kristy McNichols, Burgess Meredith, Sarah MacLachlan, Michelangelo, Modigliani, Marilyn Monroe, Spike Mulligan, Edward Munch, Nebuchadnezzar, Isaac Newton, Vaslov Nijinsky, Emperor Norton 1, Unslov Nijinsky, Eugene ONeill, Charles Parker, Boris Pasternak, J.C. Penney, Jimmy Piersall, Sylvia Plath, Plato, Edgar Allan Poe, Cole Porter, Ezra Pound, Charley Pride, Alexander Pushkin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Rembrandt, Joan Rivers, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Schumann, Mary Shelley, Rod Steiger, Mitch Snyder, Socrates, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Torquato Tasso, James Taylor, Peter Tchaikovsky, Dylan Thomas, Leo Tolstoy, Ted Turner, Mark Twain, Mark Vonnegut, Wagner, Mike Wallace, Walt Whitman, Robin Williams, Tennessee Williams, Jonathon Winters, Virginia Woolf.

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