The following is a preamble for Blog as a memoir of sorts – not a rant – to hopefully go towards improving things for BAME survivors (victims?) of psychiatric torture…and to also, hopefully, help to prevent atrocities of this nature from being so free to occur in times future for others.
Racism in the Bin !
I thought it would be useful to start by writing about my own years long ordeal…and I would advise others not to share their stories at this stage in the game or to comment either using your real name…fear of reprisal and/or guilt by association is well founded/understood.
I am informed and aware enough (I think) that there are some good psychiatrists out there but unfortunately we cannot assume that they have enough humility, autonomy or freedom from the herd/autocracy/hierarchical forces to not otherwise be what I call ‘psychiaracists’ such as the ones who said to me years ago :”you do know that you have a black gene, don’t you, which is causing you to be mentally ill”…Glory!
Whatever a person’s colour or tribe might be this doesn’t automatically stop him/her from subjecting a person to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’…the so called nurses who physically tortured me were/are also ‘black’…
My ‘psychiatrist – elect’ is a Jungian analyst. Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology. Jungian analysis isn’t so accessible unless a person pays privately here in the UK. His opus or great work was/is dismissed by so called normal people who put so much store by ICDeologyconformity/mediocrity/ignorance (?).
Furthermore, I was very surprised to hear that the consultant psychiatrist who diagnosed me as Bipolar when I was about 39 years old hadn’t even heard of Jung – the same psychiatrist who said that I ‘have a different kind of brain’ which according to him ‘lacks the foundations of an ordinary building’…whatever next ?
“Show me a sane man and I’ll cure him for you” – Carl Jung 🙂
No one knows everything there is to know about the mind – fortunately ! – just as no one can predict the future in life. Jung was a gnostic – didn’t fight shy of the ‘mystical element’ …and his writing – as with anyone else’s – has to be seen/evaluated fairly with respect to time of writing and so on…
He was slated by the herd recently enough, too, for being racist…my late former Jungian analyst who was a Jewish woman said he was not ‘racist’ – that he was exploring the collective unconscious, the shadow and his own. Jungian analysts have to know themselves – including deeply understanding prejudices, projections and dark side or shadow – very well before and as part of being/becoming an analyst. I have sampled other schools of psychotherapy/psychoanalysis and found the Jungian school suited me best – not because I am a racialised human being…more to do with having such an expanded consciousness – propensity for ‘manic phases’ – and/or my falling into the unconscious and the ‘numinous’ or ‘mystical’ realm, even, which was initially triggered by my drink being spiked unawares with an hallucinogenic drug at a party many years ago. I also read quite a lot of his writing in my early twenties…beginning with his autobiography titled: “Memories, Dreams and Reflections”…
There would appear to be little or no room for the ‘mystical element’ here in the UK..ICDeology is so reductive – limited/limiting, isn’t it?
“All thought is limited” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
I experienced ‘flashbacks’ which can look like hypomania but is not the same thing…it would appear that drug -induced psychosis and the damage to /impact on the brain of this isn’t actually very well understood. It’s highly dishonest to claim that an hallucinogenic drug triggers an underlying condition…this writer was ‘normal’ or ‘neurotypical’ enough beforehand.
My current analyst has a different approach…he recommended reading “The Drama of the Gifted Child” by Alice Miller…and has helped/helps me to see and understand enough to confront the cruel and unusual position I have found myself in…he said that therapy is about feelings. And. yes, unlike state – funded biomedical psychiatrists whose preoccupation is about control and limitation, really, he gave me a tissue for my tears…instead of dismissing my feelings as ‘lability’ and a reason or excuse to give me even more drugs.
“There’s a fine line between genius and madness”
Psychiaracists don’t acknowledge a person’s intelligence…or care about it either and hence the disproportionate labelling and over-medicating of black folk…a self-fulfilling prophecy perhaps ? Not possible to be or sound intelligent when a person has had a chemical lobotomy !’They’ have also inherited a shared delusion that ‘black’ people are dangerous as y’all know already I’m sure…when I recover the ability to act or appear dumb enough in a chemical straitjacket they’re happy to discharge me. Actually, this isn’t quite so since what typically happened was that they visited a section – legally or otherwise – on me for 6 months and then would discharge me just before the tribunal hearing date …in order to avoid the hearing no doubt.
The one and only tribunal hearing I have had in 20 years – a few years ago – I won…and against the odds if a person was to believe what is written in my psych notes…
White female Judge; “Are you saying that although Katy who is now in her mid fifties – has no criminal record and clearly respects the law – is a danger to others?”
Black male psychiatrist: “Yes”
I hope that I never lose the ability to cry – respond to sorrow and to care deeply about people and all the needless suffering arising from and caused by the psychiatric system in particular- even though my tears have been labelled and dismissed /diagnosed as ‘lability’ – where’s the humanity/compassion in that ?
Some of the cruel and dishonest things the psychiatrist said about me at the tribunal even though he’d only just met me made me cry. He then said : “Look, see – she is labile !”
More to say about this encounter/travesty …later…
My analyst said that he knows how dangerous it is for me to feel things…and yes it is such – I am a psychiatric torture survivor after all. I am not ‘free’…apart from being free to be a virtual recluse – free from the ‘usual reign’ as TS Eliot would put it at this great age…
Freedom of expression and/or speech is not a given or honoured as a human right – especially if a person is psychiatrised and/or happens to be from a racialised group – is a black or grey (mixed race) woman with no ‘tribe’ to protect and support her like this nobody-writer…and/or who like me has/had a ‘precocious intellect’ – I was a gifted child…I am not a precocious person though – attitudinally-speaking…am ‘little-headed’ /self-effacing (usually)…very good at humouring people who have/had the power to torture me and decide my fate. However, my grey matter and ability to think critically has been extinguished more or less by all those needless chemical lobotomies and prolonged hospital admissions though now…and all for what ?
“It’s you my love you who are the stranger” – Leonard Cohen
My psych notes made for dark and humiliating reading…and opened my eyes…misrepresenting and demeaning a person in writing is always deliberate. As is/was totally covering up the one and only planned serious suicide attempt on my part during those ‘torture years’- (1998 – 2014) – Not only did they omit it from the notes they didn’t write anything about the reason for my trying to take a fatal overdose either…! The reason/cause being that I didn’t think I could/would ever be free from the haunting/damage of being subjected to total deprivation/solitary confinement (in 2012)…(or free from the fear of further torture given what took place the following year ).. A policeman in the hospital said quite angrily that “Katy is not the problem – the hospital is the problem!”
What a cruel thing to do to a person who started to break down – couldn’t sleep for a number of days – a few months after losing her mother who died very suddenly…I was in that terrible seclusion room just terrified for so long that I lost track of time and hallucinated* for the first time which is a common reaction to this form of torture – it also triggered suicidal feelings and caused me to lose the abilty to connect with and/or recognise others… The psychiatrist worried that she couldn’t ‘bring me back’ and thought I would have to go into a care home…she also changed my diagnosis which I have since rebutted. There were/are many other forms (of torture) which I have been subjected to as an inpatient – ‘behind closed doors’ – which I will write further about later…
As my solicitor said to me years ago :”unlike most people , Katy, the cure for you has always been worse than the complaint”…and then …an inevitable/inescapable revolving door scenario…a person who cannot escape physically can only do so mentally at the end of the day – living in constant fear of a hospital of all places is/was no mean chalk…needing asylum from the asylum now ain’t that absurd !
I used to also have laughter in me too – was not short of a sense of humour…the joke is on me though or so it would appear. (Laughing is perceived as being high for a person who has been diagnosed as Bipolar).
As a worker in what was a kind of unofficial Soteria house or ‘retirement home’ for people who’d survived God knows what in the back wards in Friern Barnet hospital, I /we argued the toss with the survivors’ psychiatrists; questioning the usefulness of medication per se whilst respecting the right on an individual level of the people living there to take medication if they did or did not wish to do so – of course, people need(ed) the right attention and care in life – not just drugs.. .
I was naive about my being ‘tokenised’ essentially or ultimately by a local Mind group which was at the time the most ‘politicised’ arm of National Mind – mostly and openly ‘anti-psychiatry’ and committed, too, to SU involvement as a must…
How could I know that this good work would/could cause me to suffer so greatly later on as an inpatient myself? The house was the first place of its kind and served as a pilot for others…(before the Care in the Community Act)
In 1998 I broke down following a huge bereavement…before being transferred from a good hospital to Satan’s Inn (anagram of Saint Ann’s) where I was repeatedly physically tortured by the male so called nurses, a woman who worked in the Mind advocacy office in the good hospital said she had a note about me which said : “we have to look after this one”…but they didn’t or perhaps couldn’t when I was transferred. I had never before had to enlist a solicitor’s help to get out of what was supposed to be a hospital!
Taking a break from writing now…Thanks for reading, Katy
I’ll write further about what I mean by ‘hallucinated’ later on perhaps…
(Whilst it is not necessary or possible to include everything, some elements – especially those which illustrate the extent of iatrogenic injury – do deserve/need highlighting )
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Recovery in the Bin 