It is not useful to say in front of a child who hits
other children, or a person who commits acts of road rage that they, ‘can’t
help it. It’s a disease, the schizophrenia that that they have.’
Not only does this kind of
excusing turn the label of schizophrenia into a banned pit-bull terrier, it
allows the inexcusable behaviour to continue.
Parents don’t want to be ‘blamed’
for behaviour that is awry in their child. And they don’t have to be. Sometimes
it takes children a period of adjusting to the world when, for some reason,
there is sensory dysphonia ie sound is too loud. Sometimes it takes a while for
a child to work out what is and isn’t dangerous, what is and isn’t okay in
their society.
I do find the pathologising of
unusual communication into ‘psychosis’ and ‘schizophrenia’ to be one of this
centuries most terrible crimes against humanity.
Children often communicate in
a symbolic way. When this becomes an anxiety for a parent the whole idea of
communicating naturally becomes ‘stressed’ and often really traumatised.
I used to work as a fairy for
children’s parties. In the 1990s there were many Fairy shops that existed in
Melbourne and flourished, but they have mostly disappeared.
The fairy business was all
about activating imagination. I would tell stories about my life as a fairy.
How I shrunk small to get through a keyhole into fairyland and how I would
create wishes through the thistle-down. And if the children saw thistle-down
flying, they should catch it and make a wish and hopefully it would be able to
make the long flight to Fairyland.
Telling stories for children
like this isn’t ‘lying’ it is talking in symbology. Creating ideas that can act
as metaphors to how the magic of the mind works. Making a wish, meant hope and
creating hope for something to happen sometimes actualises ways of getting
there, within the mind. This is the magic of theatre and roleplay and belief in
something like wishing. It’s active imagination at a young age where belief in
unusual things is okay, even encouraged, by most parents, because language and
consensual reality isn’t fully realised. The concept of symbols are merged poetically
with the clear and straight-forward language.
The children at the Fairy parties
would tell me their stories of how they met with fairies in their garden. That
imaginative part of them got heard. Their fascination with things that are
small, but powerful was validated.
Occasionally children would
want to test a reality. I had very long brightly coloured natural hair.
Children would ask me if it was a wig and if they could ‘pull it.’ I told them
that they shouldn’t pull my hair because that would hurt. And, they didn’t want
to hurt the fairy, so they didn’t do that. They were just wondering what’s real
and what’s fake.
Thinking about what is real and
what is fake is very important in friendship. If another child is only going to
pretend to be a friend when there’s something nice in the lunchbox, then they’re
a fake. If a politician is going to create a whole lot of propaganda to justify
invading a country that has surrendered all its weaponry, then a person has to
work out if the propaganda makes sense when there’s other evidence to say that
it was done for monetary gain and the 650,000 dead civilians of that country
didn’t really deserve to be vilified and murdered.
Declaring war on ‘schizophrenia’
is another issue that people may want to recognise for its malicious intent.
Effectively it is creating a war on someone’s attempt to communicate. Ignoring
the symbology and paronmasia in what people say – just pathologising their
communication as ‘ill,’ is horrible. So is the then treatment to manage this
communication, that is, bombing that person’s body and mind with neuroleptics
to make them submit. Shutting down their abilities, disabling their
functioning, making them upset, confused, a ‘nothing’, a number in the doctor’s
queue, sick, tired, sad, unacceptable, undesirable, obliterated… This is not a
system for public health. This is abuse of people who communicate in an unusual
way.
The freak out over a child’s
eccentric way of expressing themselves and pathologising of this expression as a ‘disease,’
is forgetting to ever allowing a child to explore art. When you pathologise,
your child becomes a labrat. When you do this, not only are you showing anxiety
over something that isn’t a problem, you are also trying to control the child’s
expression. Ask yourself: What are you afraid of? Why do you have to be so
controlling of their thoughts? Are you guilty of doing something to the child
you don’t want others to know about? Is that why you have to blame the child
and say they’re ‘diseased’? Do you understand how this behaviour of yours is
abusive? (It is verbally abusive; and physically abusive when you drug the
child. Committing this abuse also means you have less control of the child when
they actually do something that really is wrong, like hit another child.)
There is a proliferation of
videos on YouTube at the moment that I consider to be horrific. The parents
video their children and label them ‘childhood schizophrenic’ like their child
is some sort of medical side-show. This is so damaging. The rights of these
children to privacy is violated and they are subjected to such horrific abuse
when they attempt to communicate, plus they are drugged.
Admittedly I only watched one
of these videos, but saw that there was a whole lot of others. I don’t have the
stomach to watch more. It’s so sad seeing a child being abused. Even the
withdrawal effects of the neuroleptic, of a young child that chewed a blanket
until her teeth bled, were seen by the parent as the child’s ‘illness’ and
reason for her to be on the drugs. Blame, blame, stupid misdirected blame.
So where have all the fairies
gone? To psychiatrists, these days, is my guess.
