A little drum

Bought a little hand-drum

And as I travel on the road,

My lover asks me to play.

It’s wonderful to have that

Encouragement from him

Compared to the memory

Of others telling me that

My rhythm should go away,

That my music isn’t their sway…

I beat out the intrusive past nagging.

I beat out what’s going on now,

Not between us lovers but

In government policy. Crimes…

So many things just around

The wrong way, still, today.

Laws that call torture ‘medicine,’

Laws that call forced-drugging ‘care’.

I’m throwing up the past inside

That flashes back its sense-memory.

And I pound and I pound my palms

As I hear those kind words,

‘You’re going to beat this

You’re going to beat this

Thing you’re not wanting,

This thing that stops progression,

That suicides a person’s health.

You’re going to beat this

Thing that has no right to exist

Psychiatric abuse cannot persist.’

All becomes sound

As I pound out the feeling

And the bad emotions go away

Gets put into the sound,

Sound that is heard, outside me,

Sound that says so much more

Than words will ever really.

I never want to misdirect

My justifiable anger from much

Denied rights and the damning

Of so many others still feeling

The pain psychiatry inflicts,

With which I very much empathise.

I never want to misdirect this.

I have memory of other things,

That sometimes get me too,

But I don’t misdirect that,

I don’t want another to suffer

The wounds of abuse

Ricocheting from my words,

That just need a drum sound

To clip their harsh content.

No, I don’t misdirect it,

That anger has a place to go…

And I have my little hand-drum

To beat and beat and beat

And a lover that is someone

Who gives me incredible amity

Such that I could never imagine

Possible before… He recognises

The serious flaws in mental health

Laws that attempt to manage

Diversity by crippling ability,

By infringing basic rights,

By dehumanising and debilitating.

I beat and beat and beat

So all goes into sound and I can

Find another way, another way

Another way that might get there

And give a panacea to pain

That intrudes from the past,

Traumas that demand some kind

Of way of being heard,

Even if not always through

Sensible words and legalese.

The beat becomes easy

And travels and morphs

Back to where I want to be

In the land of love, traveling home

With my lover beside me.

Beat out my heart then,

And the emotion between,

Love, love, love, that dream,

It cures all, that beautiful sense

Of connection drumming.

The Stables Studio: the end of a decade of rehabilitation

For around a decade I went to a place called The Stables Studio. This never received government funding, but Prahran Mission (Uniting Care) sponsored it.

It was a place where artists who had some kind of psychiatric diagnosis could do art. No religious pushing. It was amazing. A decade ago, I had only just found out about Prahran Mission’s Second Story program, that ran rehabilitation, via Job Supply (who the clinic had recommended). I said I could possibly work doing framing and they said Second Story did a program in that, which is not offered anymore. I was thinking it might help the metaphorical framing I wanted to do too. So I went there, found I was okay, but not accurate enough to work in the industry. Then The Stables Studio started and I was asked if I wanted to join. It was different from all these other programs, there was no structure, artists were free to create what they wanted and there was space to have an annual solo exhibition. But you had to be interviewed, have a folio and ability to work on your own and a huge love of visual art.

            The Stables Studio, gave me enough space to create a six-foot by eight-foot canvas and a life-sized papier-mâché crocodile and so much more. I was inspired and I really needed to get the visions in my mind outside myself.

Every year there, I thematically changed my approach to art. Highlights were my found objects exhibition that allowed me to express the way I linked things together in my mind and an abstract exhibition called, ‘But, what is it?’ I also got to do an intense recycling project called, ‘Containers’. For a whole year I threw nothing in the rubbish. All my paint water was put into papier-mâché and any dried left over paint was peeled and attached to some object I was making. My dead television got gutted and recycled into many things. Cunningham Dax bought one of these ‘Containers’ projects. Other things I made got bought as well, but I have many works still in storage.

            I was given a sketch pad at one stage when I first joined and I then began sketching all the time, relieving myself of unwanted emotions by putting them into spontaneous images. I dubbed this ‘The Automatic Hand’. It was a type of drawing where I had no idea what was going to happen on the page, but I trusted my intuition so much my hand tapped into my visual part of my mind and came up with the wild image conglomeration associated with the emotion.

            The people who worked in the office and organising things were fantastic, empathetic, but often over worked. They were all amazing artists, some of which had a history in creating iconic Australian sculptures and sold-out exhibitions.

            I got to do my first protest against psychiatric practices in an exhibition called, ‘Crowds and characters’.

And then there were life-drawing sessions…

But this year I felt I needed to move on. I hadn’t fully recovered my visual part of the brain from the bombardment of psychiatric chemicals, but my partner was encouraging me to paint landscapes with him and I was studying art therapy… I felt I didn’t need to be in rehabilitation anymore. And that urge that I had for ten years of going to a space daily to paint had dwindled.

Over the years the Stables Studio has moved three times. It was originally in an old dairy in one of Prahran’s side streets, that’s where it got its name, ‘The Stables’. Then it moved to a warehouse in South Yarra. This was the best place and individual spaces were built. But then due to costs of the warehouse, the studio moved again, to a church in Burke Road Malvern. It will continue to be there for the rest of this year, but after that, next year,  the whole project is being sized down to a small room at the back of Prahran Mission in Chapel Street.

I went to the Prahran Mission’s annual exhibition at Chapel Off Chapel this year, 2012, and all the Stables artists seemed really in shock. I know I would be if I was still in that stage of my life where I really needed the human contact of other artists, encouragement to create and space to do so, while at the same time the freedom of an unstructured program. But it just wasn’t financially viable apparently.

The Victorian government has put in changes to the way funds are allocated for mental health rehabilitation programs. The participant gets to choose where the funding goes. That sounds all good in theory. But I’m worried that there may be a tendency for psychiatrists, who are in control of things like CTOs, to point out what programs the psychiatrically diagnosed have to do in order to get off the CTO. Psychiatrists are very good at coercive control. They’re also very good at promoting their pockets. This may mean people never get access to programs that help people to express themselves, gain confidence, learn what is an isn’t okay for ‘friends’ to do, and, via their own explorations in things like visual art, writing and music, that they might not really have a disease causing a chemical imbalance and might not have to live as a zombie the rest of their life, that there is hope and ways of becoming what you love.

Here's the link to the Stables Studio (they even have a picture of my 2010 exhibition, 'Crowds and Characters' in their chapel gallery space.) http://www.prahranmission.org.au/stables-art-studio.htm Please visit, I'm sure there are some fantastic artists selling up for bottom dollar prices now they don't have any space to store their art.

Do pencils cure chemical prisons?

People don’t realise that forcing medication for months or years is repeated trauma. It felt like I was decaying from within when, in late 2010 and nearly all 2011, I was forcefully injected. I had no idea how long I would remain under this sentence, as psychiatrists could’ve kept me on this forever, for no crime.

I was told by psychiatrists that I had to be agreeable to their treatment. I also knew from lawyers that I had to let my psychiatrist know why they were legally obliged to change the drug I was on. Attempts to do this took over nine months. The long-acting neuroleptic lasted in my system another nine months or so. And the damage was well and truly done by then.

Part of the damage  is a symptom of this trauma, I’m still suffering from. It is a fairly mild form of Tourette’s Syndrome. The drug I was on, Zuclophenthixol, is known to cause this. I also believe the Tourette’s is a surface symptom, like a measles’ sore. Only I don’t have a biological illness, I have a psychological one. My system could not cope with the trauma the Zuclo caused. It freaked out. Although I suppressed suicidal thoughts, ruled out ever doing anything to hurt my family and friends, the Tourette’s continued to voice what it saw as the only way out of the chemical prison I was in.

Now what I have is kind of akin to PTSD. I had the repeated trauma of Zuclo last year, but this year I relive the feelings of hopelessness, deterioration and lack of life. I am, however, overcoming this. My life is good and I know it. I am building rather than breaking-down. It’s just sometimes the memory grabs me and surfaces into a detached thought, a muscle reflex that says, ‘I want to kill myself’, swears, or says in a little-girl voice, ‘Mummy’.

So I work through symbolism, what’s behind this image-wise, look at inner-critics, and do parts-of-self dialoguing… anything to shift this, have something change so that my mind doesn’t get the impulsive urge to say these seemingly irrational repeated lines.

There isn’t a chemical or surgical cure for Tourette’s Syndrome, because it’s trauma based. Well, what I have is. And from what I’ve researched this is generally said to be the cause.

Psychosurgeons try things and shit, then claim cures… Psychiatrists will prescribe a whole range of drugs that they normally give for epilepsy, Parkinson’s, psychosis, bipolar… They have no idea how to cure Tourette’s. This is admitted in Wikapedia.

I have a theory that my neurons were damaged by the Zuclo, so it was actually a physical trauma and the Tourette’s is a reaction to that. My mind is more or less saying, ‘I give up, I don’t know what to do!’ So, the lines I have are in a way a cry for help, hoping for some compassion and understanding. But, if spoke them in public, I wouldn’t get that too often.

If my body had continued being bombarded by the traumatic effects of the Zuclo prison, I would’ve probably ended up mouthing the Tourette’s lines in public. However, I am lucky that I have some mechanism that keeps my mouth shut while in public and only mouths the lines when I think I am alone. In public I will still get the lines in my head though and sometimes moving my tongue, but my mouth remains closed.

Tourette’s is very different from voice hearing (which psychiatrists term auditory hallucinations). Voice hearing isn’t something that happens to me anymore. But when I had that, for nearly 13 years, it wasn’t repeated lines, wasn’t accompanied by a twitch and it didn’t have the associated impulse to speak the words. And the voices were often located outside my head, never on the tip of my tongue. Tourette’s doesn’t lend itself to any conspiracies, further thoughts, delusions, self-criticism, or creativity like voices do. Tourette’s is more like a whip hitting me, a slap across the face, a momentary jolt, totally disconnected from my belief system and dreams/ nightmares that I have had while in psychosis and sleep.

I have days when the Tourette’s disappears. For instance I went to Venus Bay with my partner and it didn’t occur for the whole two days we were there. It was almost because I was accessing a part of my mind that had to do with neologistic experiences, my thoughts didn’t even touch on the part of my mind that still holds the unresolved Zuclo induced trauma.

I guess there is a certain amount of self-forgiveness I also have to go through because the weird things I said and odd accusations I made during what I consider my worst psychotic episode and my last. Worst, because I’d decided to stand up and protest against things, in the parallel world to the actual thing that was not being heard, recognised, or compensated by the public.

I made a video last year about attempting to gain momentary peace from the surfacing symptoms that made me worry and hate myself more. In this video I played a song I wrote about one of the Tourette’s lines.

Musical composition is one of the arts that I feel helps a person to transform their ‘problem’ into something that can be shared without seeming too much of a burden to the listener. Even if the composition is never shared with another, it is something that can be witnessed by the person who composed it, while they are performing it. And I think there is definite catharsis in this.

In the video I termed what I had as ‘post-psychotic-depression’, because there was an overwhelming emotion of sadness in me that I felt at the time, which I’d found some relief from by putting a pencil between my teeth. This worked the first time in giving me some happiness, really well, but the smile action of the muscle memory had less effect when I attempted to use the pencil more often.

I sat reading with the pencil in my mouth, drooling a bit and found even the tiny relief it gave was worth something. But it is only a memory trigger of some kind and the more I recognised that it was only a pencil in my mouth, not actual happiness, the less it worked. If you think of the Pavlov’s dogs experiment, the more often they weren’t given food after the bell rung, the less they would drool at the bell ringing, even when they’d been conditioned into it, by the reward of food. I smiled, remembered happier times, then recognised there was not much happening happily in my head because of the Zuclo prison and the happy effect didn’t last as long, or exist as strongly. My mind went, oh, it’s that pencil thing again is it? Well, don’t be so silly, I want you to get out of the rut you’re in and stop that chemical entering my system, get on with it! Don’t try and trick me in false feelings!

I wanted the feeling happiness, even if it was false, but my body is more sensible than that. I realised what I really wanted was to take all that stuff that was bothering me and make it humorous, then I could move on. I still haven’t got there, but I have so many beautiful, wonderful people in my life I believe I will get to the point of clearing my sore points.

 

 

notachemicalimbalance protest Ts