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Does "Mental Illness" Exist Ask a psychiatrist how lithium "works," or how ECT "works" and they will say "nobody really knows." Ask what is mental illness, or mental disorder, and they say, "it's hard to say." All they know is: some people act different, feel different, than most other people, and they don't fit in. It makes it hard for them to find work and live in society. Science has been pretty good at telling us things about the physical world, but it hasn't yet explained what's physically wrong with a person when they hear voices, or are desperate or sad. There are a lot of theories out there, and the experts don't all agree. Some believe that it's all brain chemistry. Some say it's society. Some say it's in the blood, hereditary. Some say it's the family, nutrition, the list goes on. Some used to say it was the mother's fault. But nobody agrees. The mind is not a simple thing. Since the experts are having a difficult time with it, we thought non-experts would have opinions of their own. We've asked people if they believe in "mental illness:" a disease of the mind, or a brain dysfunction. Here are some of their ideas. Healthy Body, Healthy Mind (K. L.) Doctors have treated patients that were very ill and their minds were not as capable of solving their personal problems as a healthy person's. It's been proven that when the body is made healthy, in time, the thinking and attitude improve as well. Very often, I've observed people get medicated and they don't realize that it takes some time for them to feel the way they'd really like to feel. Different medications have different results for different illnesses. Each medication takes out a certain virus. These medications don't make people well overnight. Even the slightest treatment will improve a person's thinking and help them function better in life. It takes time to make you well again, perhaps not the twenty years or so that it's taken you to become ill, but a certain time is needed. Out of the City (J. R.) I believe there is a mental disorder, but I believe it can be cured. Most of the people here are alcoholics and drug addicts and are being used by the middle class con artists. I believe the staff truly want to help the patients, but they truly have to help themselves. I was here for one year, treated really good, and the food was good. I think really, though, these (hospitals) are a waste of time-- take me to a YWCA or take me somewhere far away. In the city, people get all confused. Bring people out far away where they can grasp out their lives. These people never get help in the city. Is There Really Such a Thing as Mental Illness? (Graham Bacque) ...or is 'mental illness' just a fabrication created by a society in denial? It is well known that to be branded "crazy" imposes an arbitrary death sentence on one's credibility. This judgement places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the individual, allowing the system to go unchallenged. The bio-psychiatrists are at the cutting edge of this cycle of injustice. Viewing the whole range of human experience and emotion through the narrow lens of "acceptable behaviour," these individuals promote the idea that the very real feelings of anger, fear or sadness&emdash; as well as any outcry against oppression&emdash; can be dismissed as being the result of a biological malfunction, a "chemical imbalance," if you will. This opens the door to all kinds of abuse. The protests of the "patient" are effectively silenced, being viewed as no more than the symptoms of illness. The psychiatric view on acceptable behaviour is riddled with stereotypes. God forbid that you should be a person of colour, a woman, or gay, homeless, or poor, as this greatly increases the likelihood that the attention of psychiatry will become focused on you. What can be said about a "profession" that bases its doctrine on a white middle-class male worldview rather than on a bona fide medical fact? Not very much! There is so much more that could be said about this subject, but space and time constraints do not permit it at this point. I will, however, leave you with this question: Is mental illness a valid medical diagnosis, or merely a construct of society frantically trying to cover its ass? You be the judge. My Experience in the Mental Health System (K. W.) In my opinion, personal feelings classed as mental illness are caused by family problems or personal problems, but they're looked at the wrong way. They're labelled as mental illness, people are given psychiatric medication which causes even more problems. Low self-esteem, the feeling that you're worth nothing-- which I know because I talk to mental patients all the time and they tell me that their lives are worthless. It's unfortunate that some people will never see the outside world because they'll be stuck in the hospital for the rest of their lives. I was in Queen Street for three years myself and made a lot of good friends in here and some are still in here. I won't turn my back on them because I know they need a good friend that they can talk to. I wish that the hospitals were closed. It Depends on How You Say It (adapted from the writing of Leonard Frank) mania or Energetic There Really Is Only One Way Out (Randy Pritchard) There is probably more scientific evidence for the existence of God than there is for the fictional medical condition of "mental illness." So why do otherwise intelligent people buy into such an obvious load of crap? For the "professionals" who make a living off of human misery and suffering, the reason is obvious. They get to delude themselves into thinking they do something of value and that by working with nuts they are somehow made noble. Plus it pays pretty well. For families (the main allies of the psycho-industry), they get to absolve themselves of any responsibility for having screwed up their kids and therefore feel no motivation to look at their own twisted lives. For these two groups in the nut equation (providers + family = certified nuts, or: P + F = CN), the reasons for their adherence to the dogma of mental illness are as obvious as they are compelling. We can expect no better from them. So what gives with the nuts? Why do we accept being told that we are somehow defective? That we are so unworthy that we somehow deserve to be treated in the dehumanizing, infantilizing abusive manner which is the hallmark of the mental health system? Why do we choose to live on our knees? The answer is because it is easy. It is easier to accept a life of deprivation (emotional, spiritual and physical) than it is to say to oneself, "I have the power to change my life." It is easier to barely exist on the starvation rates of welfare or FBA than take a chance at improving your lot and risking failure. It is easier to claim mental illness as the cause of your emotional distress than to confront the true cause (usually a family member). It is easier to be in the company of service providers, who in a best case scenario won't inflict too much more harm on you, than it is to be alone with your thoughts and feelings. Recently, I realized that being a nut meant surrendering myself to the control of some nasty nasty people. People who despite their best protestations, did not have my "best interests" at heart. There really is only one way out. If you're in the bin, get out. If you have any dealings with the psychiatric industry, end them now. If you're caught in a family dynamic that encourages you to be "ill," walk away from it. Decide today not to be crazy anymore and if they haven't already given you a real disease with their treatment, you'll be okay. It's Spiritual (R. B.) Mental Illness is simply negative spirituality. It has nothing to do with a chemical imbalance. It can be temporarily controlled but not taken away. Psychiatrists can't tell people it's a spiritual problem. They have to say it's just a regular physical problem like any other disease. They say, "You need some medicine to adjust your dopamine level." Really, the medication just hammers you, and then the spirits come in and take care of the rest, negatively speaking. Mental illness is bad spirits holding people. There are people who go completely nuts, get medication and seem fine. But the spirits are just telling the doctors and the powers that be (the top spiritualists), "Oh, just feed them this medication." It's a trick by the spirits to hook the whole world on drugs, prescription drugs. Prescription drugs are more lethal than street drugs. The word 'pharmacy' comes from the Greek word pharmakeia which means 'sorcery.' In the last century or two, they called mental illness "lunacy," which means "touched by the moon." They came out with subtle terms like "disturbed," or "touched"-- what they were saying was that something is touching the person, a being of spirit. Everything is spiritual, as well as mental illness. The trick is to be able to discern good spirits from bad spirits. Admit to the Problem (H. F.) The first thing an alcoholic or a mental case needs to do is admit that they have a problem. Then they can seek treatment and solve the problem. If they don't admit they have a problem, they resent the treatment and pills and all that. Mental illness exists. I volunteered to sign myself into the old building, 999 Queen Street. I've been incarcerated for 37 years. In the old building, if you hit or fought back an attendant, they would wrap you up like a mummy, from head to foot, in cold wet sheets. When the government found out it caused pneumonia, they passed a law against it. These people today think they're suffering-- the old building was far worse. You're not Crazy (T. S.) Mental illness does not exist. It's a paranoia from a person's childhood. It's all in your mind. That's what my father used to say: "It's all in your mind-- you're not crazy." New Canadians ('George') When I came to Canada, I did not get much help learning English and no help to find a job. It happens to a lot of people who come here. When you finally hit bottom, then you end up in a place like Queen Street where people get paid a lot of money for their work as nurses, social workers, and all. Why Psychiatry Must be Abolished (Don Weitz) I've experienced psychiatry as both political prisoner and former psychologist (I dropped out of psychology in 1972). I'm horrified at psychiatry's near-total, ever-expanding power over our lives. After having been incarcerated and forcibly treated for 15 months in the early 1950's, I was damn lucky to be released alive from McLean psychoprison (a teaching/research psychiatric hospital near Boston) by conforming to the psychiatrists' stereotyped version of the good, middle-class college student. Thousands of other psychiatric survivors have not been so lucky. I have personally experienced and/or witnessed: staff violence against psychiatric patients; the violence of being treated against our will (without "informed consent"); the violence of being forcibly drugged with brain-damaging chemicals; the violence of being insulin-shocked; the violence of being electroshocked and permanently brain-damaged; the violence of being "restrained" by barbaric ropes, leather straps ("cuffs"), or "cold wet packs;" the violence of solitary confinement ("the quiet room"/"seclusion"); the violence of character assasination by being subjected to unscientific and permanently stigmatizing pseudo-medical labels such as "schizophrenia," "manic-depressive psychosis," and "borderline personality disorder;" the violence of psychiatric deceptions and lies such as professional denial of brain damage, permanent memory loss and other intellectual impairments caused by electroshock, drugs and psychosurgery; the violence of psychiatrists' routine trivialization and sanitization of many serious "side-effects" of the poisonous neuroleptics such as parkinsonism, dementia, tardive, epileptic seizures, blood disorders, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, and "sudden unexplained death;" the violence of the stigma and myth of "mental illness" or the "dangerous mental patient" routinely propagated by psychiatry, its mindless supporters the Friends of Schizophrenics, and the mainstream, right-wing media; the violence of homelessness and poverty sustained, sanitized and lied about by organized psychiatry and medicine. Canada is not democratic, Canada is not free, Canada is not just, so long as one innocent person is locked up, labelled and treated against his/her will in a psychoprison or any other prison. People incarcerated without trial or public hearing and forcibly treated in psychiatric institutions are in fact political prisoners, not "psychiatric patients." Our liberation from psychiatric tyranny is coming. We will overcome! Mind Over Brain (Jennifer Chambers) Mental illness is a metaphor gone wild. The mind has become defined as the brain. A review of the literature on "schizophrenia" or "manic depression" shows no conclusive proof that there are illnesses of the brain with a biological basis. These labels are not even meaningfully applied--- the same person with the same characteristics will likely be labelled schizophrenic in North America but will be called manic depressive in Britain. There may be some people who have organic problems with the brain. But which comes first? Extreme anxiety, for instance, will create changes in our "chemistry." Abuse survivors can suffer in ways that we can easily label "psychosis" or "depression." Abuse survivors learn to go off in their minds in order to endure the situation they are in. Abuse can lead to overwhelming feelings of worthlessness and sadness. And abuse survivors often do not remember being abused. A study of women in Toronto's psychiatric wards showed that 83% had a history of abuse. But none of them received help for this in the psychiatric system. We share similar traits with other mammals that don't have a "schizophrenic" population. We don't share our often strange and hurtful child-rearing practices or our society. When people are always treated well, when there is no profit to be made from "mental illness," when there are places for real healing, then we'll know if any amount of what is called "mental illness" today really exists.
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