I Guess I’m Still Shrunk

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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 self-criticism and say I don’t see it. I won’t lay claim to innovations that aren’t mine and that already existed long before I noticed them.

I won’t take part in the industries springing up that encourage hatred of mentally ill people with insinuations of weakness. Finding meaning and incorporating healthier habits are reasonable suggestions, but I would never, ever tell someone with mental illness, especially when they’re in crisis, to get moving already. The cruelty in the name of increasing business and profits is astounding, especially when people are hooked by exaggerations of medication harm and adverse effects, years-long torturous tapers, and pulpit-pounding sermon after sermon about the evils of psychiatry.

I don’t buy in. I tried in the past, but it all seemed so angry and superficial and discouraging. It flows one way, no challenges accepted, just toe the line, follow the leaders, and don’t even question why those are the chosen leaders. I call it all antipsychiatry and I also call it propaganda. They like to refer to the mentally ill in treatment as psychiatrized and I would turn the tables and say their followers are denialized and radicalized and fed lines they willingly repeat in hurtful ways to people down and out and struggling through to the next day. Imagine deciding that is fine and dandy, and in fact your responsibility to do.

I’ve been through crap and nastiness around my bipolar symptoms and extreme self-harming and suicidality. I’m not about to pretend I haven’t or to tone it down. And I’m not going to corrupt who I am, where I’ve been and the value in coming to terms just to seek retribution, constantly plunging a knife into a ghostly entity of psychiatry, demanding that it take the blame.

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