Travels Through Psychiatry

  Mental illness, places it occupies, are messy and raw and if you tried to firsthand report, jumping in gonzo journalism style, you’d be confused about where to start and how to get an opening and where to end. You’d be shut down. Patients are protective, especially if they’ve been around, and back, and around again. Like me. The only order in going into psychiatric hospitals is what they don’t let you have. The only way to know what other patients think and how their lives are is to be locked in a ward with them. But it’s still elusive. There’s a lot of chaos there and hidden emotions. I’d believe I knew the patterns in mental illness and had concrete answers when it was impossible to make such formulations. Conclusions about mental illness can’t be drawn with certainty, even after sharing experiences from all walks of life with people in all kinds of mixed states and dissociated parts and degrees of willingness to participate in treatment.         ...

  I don’t want to speak for this child I once was. That was long ago. She’s part of me but she didn’t sign up for anything. She didn’t give permission to be a witness or an example or a symbol of what happened to me as far as mental illness, as far as treatment. I won’t sacrifice her in the name of promoting my causes. I won’t spoil her innocence and ownership of self to say, oh look, the bad started here. Look at the conditions. Because she’s not part of judgments I hold as an adult. Is there even value in propping up one’s past self in that way? I mean, whether it’s to show contrast between the potential and what that became? Or to show where all of these confusing and turbulent present conditions started, is there value? I’m feeling that a case could be made but needs to be balanced against actually using an idea of my younger self to do so. How can I know if it’s ethical in the sense of presuming to know what I thought then and what hopes and disappointments I faced. ...