I Guess I’m Still Shrunk
I’ve endured some awful treatment in 45 years with mental illness. It’s happened in encountering bad psychiatrists, bad psych units, and in dealing with each decade’s best and worst offerings. I carry around deep feelings.There were situations I walked away from never to be the same person.Those stay with me. I’m hardened and desensitized and wiser and more sensitive. I will stand by my need for treatment, no matter what I stumble into. I’m firm in this. The very thought of turning aspects of my mental illness, and how psychiatrists and therapists dealt with me, into an enterprise against the idea of mental illness itself hits as an attack on not only me, but anyone with mental illness. How could I assert with tremendous confidence that my experiences are everyone’s and that I have the knowledge, as if I’ve been to the mountaintop, to formulate a new way forward that rejects psychiatry and ignores all progress in the field. I won’t casually glance at psychiatry’s inherent...