Labels: Anxiety versus PS

Diagnosis that advertisers can make you identify with and feel okay about attaching to yours... And those that you give to others to accuse and excuse their behaviour.

No advertise for paranoid schizophrenia would try to lull a person into seeing a psychiatrist by talking in second-person, as if the viewer should agree that they have PS. Yet current pharmaceutical advertisers, part of a psychiatric ‘awareness’ campaign are attempting to do this with ‘anxiety’. Obviously there will be a new pill on the market to ‘manage’ anxiety. This is usually what happens after these 'awareness' campaigns. 
               I think the card, the archetype 'Anxiety' hands out in the end of this recent pharm advertise subliminally reads, 'Psychiatrist'. Because that's what psychiatrists do, make people anxious. They make me shake even before they've tortured me, because from my experience I know they're going to do that and there is nothing I can do to stop them. This shaking is then seen as a sign of my 'illness'. It is quite rational really. I do however have irrational anxiety when I hear an ambulance siren. I've found many other psychiatric survivors also have this. It is irrational because ambulances don't put on their siren to pick up those who are sectioned by psychiatry and I know it, but my body can't help but panic in memory of the times I've been strapped down in an ambulance, because I passively resisted going with them, because I knew I'd be harmed, not helped. The so called mental health system in my country has given me anxiety I would otherwise not have. But I have a well-developed rational self that helps talk me through my body's spontaneous distress reaction. Developing part of you that can do that helps. I also find automatic drawing helps. Writing a poem helps. Drumming, or playing guitar and singing, helps. I don't think this anxiety advertise is advocating natural coping methods. I wish it was. It's 'see your doctor' and think about it, what does a doctor do? Give you a prescription for a drug, rarely much else. They're not taught much else these days. They're almost completely ignorant of natural coping methods.

                Advertisements to get a person diagnosed with PS are different, because schizophrenia isn’t an everyday word like ‘anxiety’ or ‘depression’ and even 'paranoid' has connotations of not being 'normal' even though it is a very necessary survival reaction. Paranoid schizophrenia is  medical terminology that is recognised, by the public, from publicised court cases where people plea mentally unfit. Most people diagnosed with PS, however, have never been violent and probably never will. There’s around the same per cent violence in the general public as with people diagnosed with PS. The especially violent groups in society are binge drinking young males and footballers, where the per cent of violence is so much higher than the rest of society.

                To advertise PS, the public is urged to ‘get them to take medication’ to ‘screen them early’ to ‘look for warning signs’… more or less dob on a person who might have PS to medical authorities… to prevent, you know. They don’t say what you know is, other than 'worsening of the condition'. But people do think they know, they think they know because the propaganda tells them so, that people who get diagnosed with PS are violent in some way, even if they’re not yet… they will be if they don’t take the psychiatrist’s ‘prevention’ pill, is the thinking. It's a them and us propaganda technique. It helps sales and the perpetuation of psychiatric regimes even the UN has said fall under the definition of torture.

                Ads for anxiety are about saying there’s help to make you feel better. Ads for PS are about saying there’s help for making you feel better once these people with PS are diagnosed and on medications.

                Who are you?

                Well the only you that really benefits here is the whole industry of psychiatry, if people agree with their advertise and go on drugs for being human.

                I know the repeated words and phrases of psychiatry's advertise get in your head. But, honestly, you don’t have to go with them. You could think a little more. Don't fall for psychiatrism and yap about how ‘mentally ill people are so violent it’s horrible. I know it’s not their fault but it’s frightening’ in the street like a racist person linking blacks to violence and using the ‘n’ word to describe them. You're offensive when you do that! Don't know better? Change. Recognise that maybe you didn't grow up in the most humane society, but you're more intelligent than propaganda, surely. I mean, I know the jingle from Hungry Jack's, but I do not think their burgers are 'better'. I know they taste awful. So I don't eat them. I like real food, fresh stuff, vegetables, not chemical emulsifiers.

                Think about how offensive psychiatrism is the next time you use the word ‘sick’ or 'ill' to describe a person’s mind, when they actually haven’t done anything horrible enough to label their thoughts that way. Weirdness, strangeness, symbolism… that’s a communication barrier, it’s not a disease anymore than homosexuality was prior to 1973 when it was in the DSM as a mental illness.

                I was listening to an author on radio talk show about anxiety and in-between him talking was a horrible paedophile’s movie exerts. I never liked Woody Allen and his going off with young women in every movie, even before he violated his adopted daughter. I didn’t find him funny. I found him sick. And yet here’s an author and radio program acting like that sickness was okay and that anxiety is somehow funny whereas things like paranoid schizophrenia he says, 'cannot be.'

                Perception. I once wrote a book about that. Perception that is outside the range of most people’s understood sense. It is a humour book. You can still get it. But, because I’m not ugly like Woody Allen and because I actively try to stop psychiatrism, I don’t get radio interviews to publicise what is possible. If you look, there are reviews of my book that agree that this is a humour book, but it is also a book about a person who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, who while writing the book experienced unusual sensory experiences (including voices) and had been doing so for nearly a decade, who finished a diploma in writing and editing while having these unusual experiences and who had some rather spooky coincidences that created a kind of unusual humour that is confronting to many people. I have written another book about these unusual experiences, since then, that is slightly less humorous. Since that book, 'Naked ladies,' I have been through psychiatry's brainwashing, humiliations, horrific treatment regimes of forced-drugging with powerful chemicals in doses no zoo-keeper would give to a giraffe. I have decided that humour did not work. I have to be very straight forward for a while until the public get what is and isn't okay. Forced drugging is not okay. Labelling with me or others with unhelpful derogatory psychiatrisms, is offensive and really abusive.
           And, by the way anxiety is very like what gets diagnosed as PS. Only with PS the person thinks about what other people might think about the situation that is causing the anxiety and that tends to get put into 'voices'. What the hell is so much more disturbing about that, than any other kind of anxiety? Terms, it just comes down to bloody terms. Think about this though... if people didn't have spontaneous thoughts/ voices, there would be no novelists and certainly no playwrights or movie script writers. Need to think what others think in order to make leaps of understanding. But in order for you to do this safely, you need people who support what you do, or you wonder what is and what isn't and try to make bigger and bigger leaps of understanding despite not getting any support, hoping people will understand how much you're trying to do something they will like. But usually, they don't, because you're if leaping in a direction propaganda and advertising do not advise, you're not going to penetrate the minds of the hypnotised.
         I just want to add here, for anyone going to a psychiatrist for their anxiety they didn't know they had, that they're now aware of thanks to the wonderful Beyond Blue. I'd be careful. The doc may diagnose you with anxiety at first. But then after you take their drugs and decide you don't like them and try to come off them, 9 times out of 10 this will cause some kind of weird thinking, usually  'hallucinations' could be auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory or somatic, or a combination of them. You may also slip into a waking-nightmare ie become 'deluded'. That's when you'll get the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. No amount of trying to scrape that diagnosis off will rid it from your medical records. So, think about it, do you even want a mild label of 'anxiety' that fits another the other labels 'mentally ill' and 'psychiatric condition'? And... do you really want to become a drug addict into the bargain? Well, you like those sort of things go for it. But please do not recommend others follow your path to chronic sickness. Other people like being healthy. And do not allow your government to forcefully-drug people via psychiatry, especially when they are not at all violent.

I just want to give some direction here for anyone that is afraid and doesn't know what to do. People do have crisis periods. I know that. People do need support and assistance. I know that. But I do not think they should be abused because they hear voices. Anyway here's a link to a film about The Hearing Voices Movement that gives me hope.
Also here's Eleanor, a voice-hearer, who got diagnosed with PS, speaking about her experience and the way society and psychiatrists exacerbated her trauma.