Coughing at the mental health convention

At the TheMHS conference, there was a keynote address by Bernadette McSherry on Debating Mental Health Laws.

McSherry brought up a slide on ‘a recent report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’

A large portion of the audience started coughing.

Coughing can mean the audience that wants to listen, misses words. It's very disruptive and loud. It is also something I recognise from my decade or so working in theatre. For an actor hearing raucous coughing from an audience, they know it is an old and deliberate way of members of the audience showing disapproval.

Disapproval of those in law trying to stop torture? Excuse me?!

The coughing, from those in suits, stopped being as vigorous as soon as the slide changed.

Yes, I understand sometimes people get a tickle in their throat. But, this wasn’t some poor fellow feeling embarrassed about their involuntary noise. This was about people making loud noises over the top of the speaker, deliberately, a large group of them, heckling, thinking they could then pretend it wasn’t deliberate.

Or maybe, those people that coughed, have a psychosomatic reaction when someone accuses them of being professional torturers? (not that McSherry did, but the quote from the UN more or less does, if you think about it.)

I appreciate what TheMHS is doing, but it was sometimes those asking the questions on the floor that I was happier hearing from. I feel there is far too much focus on establishment, those who are toeing lines and hedging their bets… not enough actual listening to psychiatric survivors, not enough allowing of psychiatric survivors to speak of the looming monsters that are allowed, via our government, to rule our lives (who assault us further with ad campaigns using their terminology of abuse.)

Any commission into mental health needs to be run by those with recent lived-experience of what psychiatric services do, because they know how it feels to be under this regime, of yes, torture. Yet those with lived-experience are only deputy commissioners in Australia.

There were speakers blathering on about patients making Advanced Directives, but there was little understanding of how to get psychiatrists to follow these unless they said exactly what a psychiatrist wanted to hear.

          I did that. A GP I got discharged to in 2012, when I was off a treatment order (CTO), asked me some questions on what she should do if I became ‘unwell’. I just said what I knew would sound compliant, so I wouldn’t be put back on a CTO. It was not what I wished. Ask anyone on a CTO, or anyone who has recently been on one questions about ‘care’ and they’ll just spout what they think will mean they won’t get put back on a CTO. They’ll also tell you that they’re satisfied with their treatment, when they really, really HATE the treatment, think it DOES NOT WORK and would not wish anyone else to suffer it.

The diagnosed get told that they must agree that they have a ‘mental illness’ that they ‘must be compliant with treatment’ etc… and they know what happens if they don’t parrot what the psychiatrist wants them to parrot, they get increased dosages, or another medication added to their daily swallow, or the depot, or electro-shock, or forced ‘hospitalisation’.

If I coughed at everything that upset me, to show my disapproval, I’d have a very raw throat!

That said, TheMHS is a progressive conference, but I sat back feeling somewhat hurt because my view was not on stage, that is, until some lovely audience members got up and said their piece. Put a smile on my face to have my thoughts spoken so clearly. I wished they were the ones on the panel on the stage. I think in future, the panels should include at least some token people that don’t toe the line and hedge their bets or put on that hard money orientated mean-face. It’s not as though those people are unknown. It’s just that those people are denied an audience. I’d like to see that change with a bit more tokenism of those activists with lived-experience happening. Sure, we’ll get the uglies coughing disapproval, but I don’t see why torturers should rule a convention! I’m not saying order them to leave the theatre, but you know… who wants to hear them? Annoying sick fucks.

          There are also things that really worry me about boarder protection in Australia, that was mentioned. That can mean the type of speaker I want to see isn't even allowed into my country. I guess I'm also worried for myself, not only for people I might ask to come here. So, if I go anywhere I'm checking in with that country's embassy first. Don't want to be booked in to speak in another country, flying all the way, then put into detention and forced to take psych drugs, because there's something on my passport that I don't know about that puts me in the same category as a terrorist!
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Talking about anger turned inward, grief and voices

Those who have read some of my blog, will recognise I do carry a fair whack of anger about certain issues relevant to the mental health system as it currently is. I put all that aside, when I think about love, when I listen to another’s poetry, and, when I’m at work.

                There are definite systems that allow us to exist, while getting us to focus on building things like recovery, hope for the future, alternatives, as well as established, recognised workable therapies. My work place fits well with my ideology, my training as a Transpersonal Art Therapist and also makes my writing and editing diploma relevant. It also makes me think beyond the wrecking-ball, towards building. It is a workplace, that I’m very happy to be in. One of the few work places that see my lived-experience as a skill and insight, rather than a problem.

                I’m delivering a talk, with a colleague, on: Anger turned inward, grief and voices. This topic is something I’ve been working on since January, but have thought a lot about before.

A memoir of mine, Naked ladies, looks at how grief and anger denied and suppressed can lead to voices and unusual belief systems that end up with hospitalisations and psychiatric labels. It also shows how anger and grief can be intertwined. I have, developed my ideas a lot further, though, since writing this action based memoir. I also have a lot better coping strategies.

I’ll mostly be talking about established ways of coping and paradigms of thinking towards being all you're meant to be. There is a lot new material, but it’s not something I’ve done on my own, it’s something I’ve developed alongside many others who have similar experiences. This talk is relevant to health professionals, social workers, carers, as well as voice-hearers and those who want to understand unusual percipience, their own thoughts, theories of mind etc

Bookings are essential and can be made HERE on the Voices Vic website. The talk will be an all day session, held on Wednesday 24th of July 2013 at 211 Chapel Street, Prahran.

Memories of trauma are surfacing as symptoms

The things that are

Called surfacing symptoms

Are on my tongue to say again

And I am making peace

With them, this time.

I am recognising that

Yes it did occur and yes

It was bad enough to

Harm me, but now I’m healed.

The wounds in my psyche

Have had recognition enough

To realise they don’t need

To worry about the worry

That existed in the past.

I am past that danger zone…

I drop those thoughts in

To the part of my mind

That is on remote control,

Drop those thoughts in…

Like a person with stomach

Ulcers trying to relax

The stomach that dissolves

The food in it automatically,

I drop those thoughts in…

Like an asthmatic meditating

And singing to get the automatic

Breath back to where

It is most comfortable.

I drop those thoughts in…

I am making the memory

Muscle of my mind relax

And stop being a problem,

Because it isn’t really,

It’s just a memory of trauma

That needed more conscious

Recognition that those things

That happened over years

And years, then happened

Again in other ways

With different people,

Weren’t okay and I won’t

Allow myself to be

Controlled that way again.

I know that love isn’t

An ambivalent thing,

It never should be

Extracted via fear, and if it is,

Then that is not okay

And should be acknowledged

For the wrong that it is.

Chipmunka… publishing first-hand experiences

Chipmunka has just recently published a memoir of mine called, Naked ladies about two psychotic episodes following the death of my father. It’s in ebook at this stage, but will be in paperback in a few months’ time. http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2264

 

            So wonderful it is to find a publisher that wants first-hand experiences of people diagnosed with psychiatric conditions. In Australia, people have some fears regarding attempting to understand people who have delved into the symbolic world of waking-dreams. They seem to worry that it might somehow ‘get them’ too. That the schizophrenia ‘disease’ is contagious by hypnotic suggestions of art from these 'deranged' people.

I studied Professional Writing and Editing at Melbourne’s RMIT University. I got into this course on the strength of something I’d written when I was 22, before I’d experienced what psychosis meant. I knew somehow that what I was writing at age 32, wasn’t going to fit with consensual reality. And, it didn’t.

            I had burning things to say, but I had to think about how to say them, so that the public could be able to read them. Tutors and students really helped me get to this point. I really got a lot out of my time at RMIT.  I realised there is so much ignorance around what happens in psychiatric facilities. There was so much prejudice and that belief that there is no market for is regarded as a ‘dirty tissue.’

            In Naked ladies I was able to take raw material I wrote while in an episode and write it in a way that can be comprehended. This book allows people to understand how I was able to be lured into the fantasy world of waking-dreams that lead to waking-nightmares, not just once, but again, with the same science-fiction themes.

            If you want to understand what it is like to hear voices, or have other sensory ‘hallucinations’ and strange ‘delusional’ belief systems, this book takes you through my journey of this. It’s a fast-paced book. Lots of things happen all at once. Very much what psychiatrists would term, ‘mania’, ‘paranoia’, ‘conspiracy theories’, ‘florid psychosis’, and ‘positive symptoms of schizophrenia.’ There are also breaks in between the ‘psychotic episodes’, where I resume a ‘normal state of being.’

The book also includes illustrations and paintings I did at the time, but it is a decent sized book. I like books to be at least 70,000 words, when they’re not poetry books or novellas.

I hope Australia will start publishing more first-hand experiences about altered states of consciousness that get labelled ‘diseased’ by psychiatrists. There is a growing market for these books. It is peer support. And books like this help people realise that people with lived-experience are not ‘consumers’ and ‘useless eaters’, we are people who have had unusual experiences. These experiences are our coping mechanisms. Yes they are flawed, but how nightmarish they become has to do with how these symbolic manifestations are treated by society. Treat unusual experiences with fear and prejudice and psychiatric torture and what does society expect will happen? A cure? Apparently that is the current belief… But that is not the truth of what’s happening. The truth will be found in books by those who have experienced psychiatric conditions first-hand.

Chipmunka has just recently published a memoir of mine called, Naked ladies about two psychotic episodes following the death of my father. It’s in ebook at this stage, but will be in paperback in a few months’ time. http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2264