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A LIFE BEYOND PSYCHIATRY
THE MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM
The mental health system is not all it pretends to be. This is
not news to many who attend this conference. Once it gets a hold
of you it does not want to let go. It may alleviate depression
for some but its interventions do not cure people usually in the
long term. This talk centres however around severe mental
distress, those categories of mental distress which usually
persist for a lifetime with periods of only partial recovery. For
those who have psychotic labels psychiatry does not ever want to
let go and it can enslave people’s lives by taking control
of them and taking measures which restrict them. Many of its
treatments are debilitating and some of them shorten people’s
lives. There is a great deal of social control and the forced
administration of psychiatric drugs is an integral part of this.
In mental hospitals human rights are suspended and treatment
given by coercion and force. There is no freedom and virtually
nothing to do and no privacy. Day centres are in part places for
monitoring and controlling people. What is done by the system is
always pedalled as therapy but its therapeutic value is often
dwarfed by the social control it represents.
For people who have less extreme forms of mental distress there
is some room to choose whether to be treated. For others this is
not the case. Unfortunately, especially for these people, it can
be extremely difficult for them to cope at all or impossible
without taking psychiatric drugs. The more this is true the more
pernicious are the drugs on which they tend to be dependent.
There are some who subscribe to the view that anybody can stop
taking psychiatric drugs and break free of this system and once
again be part of society. I have reservations about this point of
view.
I have been labelled variously schizophrenic, schizo-affective
and bipolar – take your pick. I have tried on several
occasions to do without antipsychotics but I have failed sooner
or later every time. This experience is shared by many more
people than those who share the experience of becoming drug free.
I am not convinced that I could be weaned off these drugs
successfully. The bottom line for me is that I do not want to be
in an asylum – ever again. If the price I have to pay is a
reduced and shorter life then it is a price worth paying because
in my estimation a lifetime in and out of asylums is a terrible
fate. I take their drugs to avoid contact with them.
There are other things which can help serious mental distress,
even cure it in some cases. But these things require time, space
and much human input. Given the huge numbers of people with
mental distress and the conservatism of the system, we are
looking a long way into the future to provide these things for
all. I have to make my choices given what is available now,
however hard those choices are.
I stay clear of hospitals, day centres, counselling, cognitive
behavioural therapy, ECT, lobotomy, patronage and lies. I see a
psychiatrist about every 4 months, albeit briefly, and the rest
of the time I get on with my life.
The system works to a large part through the pedalling of fables.
They withhold information about what they are doing and why. They
never go into detail about what they think is wrong with you.
They tell palpable lies about such things as why you are getting
certain side effects from the drugs and what the drugs actually
do. I am told that my memory is poor because I am getting older
and that the drugs replace a missing chemical in the brain. I
know my memory would be a lot sharper if I did not take
antipsychotics and I know they do not replace anything in the
brain – rather they block some of its activity, notably the
bits that make me feel good. The system works on the basis that I
am too feebleminded to embrace reality. They put a spin on their
treatments in order to reduce resistance to what is in the final
analysis being forced on me. Under the new mental health act that
force, out in the community, will become increasingly overt which
may reduce people’s leverage to negotiate treatments.
The system is utterly impersonal and few apart from those who
dissent within it show anything other than coldness. The
scientific approach has a lot to do with the cold distance they
keep as well as their own fears and inability to relate to us.
One of the biggest things lacking in people’s lives if they
find themselves with many kinds of mental distress is human
warmth. The system is also the very author of stigma and I find
it laughable that it should see itself as the solution to it. If
the system were really doing us any good as opposed to managing
chronic conditions as it sees them people would be moving out of
it, cured. But this is not happening.
WHAT I THINK ABOUT MENTAL DISTRESS
I do not subscribe to the medical model of mental illness, such
as it is. I do not believe that we are genetic freaks. I believe
that what gets us into even the most abstruse states is 90%
injury, even 100% for some. Whatever it was about us that may
have led to difficult situations arising, bullying or worse has
been compounded many times over before we go mad. Probably in
many cases people are entirely the victims of circumstance.
Nevertheless treating a problem as one of injury rather than
illness may not make intervention any easier and there may be a
place for drugs analogous to the reason why you might take
morphine after a car accident.
A LITTLE MORE ABOUT MY SITUATION
Figures from the USA suggest that those with the label
schizophrenia over there live on average as much as 25 years less
than the general population. Although we have a better welfare
system than in the USA, we have our fair share of rooflessness,
drug abuse and poor diets amongst those put in this category. It
would not be unreasonable to suppose that the situation is not a
great deal better over here. Antipsychotic drugs have been cited
as being the biggest single cause of this loss of life
expectancy, the main killers being heart attacks and strokes
related to these which account for more deaths that suicide,
according to one report I read.
On this basis, taking this demographic broadly, I have at 54
reached my life expectancy. I may last some time longer since I
do not take illegal drugs, drink heavily, eat unhealthily or live
on the street. But many of my friends are in a poor state of
health who are my age or younger and live a similar life style. I
do not expect to live to 80.
THE TRAP OF INVOLVEMENT
Although I have done a lot of involvement in the past I have not
done any significant amount for 10 years. I was always sceptical
about the degree to which I would be listened to by Health
Authorities, doctors, nurses and even mental health charities. I
was interested to get behind the scenes a bit and get a better
idea as to how the system worked. While service users can make
some impact on august committees it is not often translated into
practice at local level in psychiatry, where it matters. It can
be hard work and an uphill struggle to influence these committees
not least of all because one tends to be in a minority if not
alone. One committee where I believe I did have an impact was the
Working Party of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics for their
report “Mental Illness and Genetics – The Ethical
Context”. There were geneticists and psychiatrists on this
committee who had a monopoly on the scientific and clinical
information. However there were moral issues and issues of
interpretation of data to which I could address myself. I felt
marginalised and if it were not for the help of another member of
the party, who was a non-medical professor, who advocated for me
at times, I do not think my analysis would have had much impact.
As it was the role genetics might play in the future of
psychiatry was, I think, put into a better perspective in the
report than it might have been had the doctors and scientists had
a free hand. I hope the report had an impact. I am pleased to say
that the establishment of a genetic basis for schizophrenia has
not progressed much in the ten years since then. That at least
has made it difficult for the proponents of eugenics who would
have us aborted. I ask myself however when are the rank and file
of psychiatry once again going to seriously address themselves to
the social and interpersonal causes of mental distress?
While I was on the Nuffield working party I had a brush with one
of the psychiatrists which illustrates how easy it can be to fall
foul of them. The question arose as to what was special or
different about mental illness. I quite innocently remarked that
the mind was the centre of one’s being. A professor of
psychiatry immediately seized on this and started to imply that I
must hold some religious views to say this, which, as we all
know, equals delusional beliefs if you suffer from mental
distress. A professor of moral philosophy put her in her place.
But such is rank that without his support I would have been on
sticky ground.
SO WHAT DO I DO?
I do not like or believe psychiatry, I’m disaffected with
involvement and I am, to coin a phrase, socially excluded. Where
do I go? In the early 1990s I had discovered the group Voices, as
it was then. I gave up all committees apart from this one after
1998 to concentrate on a fundamentally independent voice for
those deemed to have the most severe forms of mental distress, a
distinctly marginalised group who do not always show prominently
even in the service user movement. Voices, as it was originally
called is a quasi-autonomous service user and survivor
organisation within Rethink (formerly NSF) now called National
Perceptions Forum. It is very independent and Rethink do not
interfere with its setting its own agendas and managing itself.
When I first joined I found that this was indeed a forum where I
could meet people away from the gaze of psychiatry. It was
amazing how much more freely people talked in the local Voices
group than in the day hospital which I had attended. I soon
became involved with the National Forum and became first
Treasurer and then Chair, a position I have held on two occasions
for a total of over 8 years. In its earliest days it was
basically a discussion group for people labelled schizophrenic
which met in London. It was more about giving voice than hearing
voices. People from NSF sat in on the earlier meetings but the
patients were in control and eventually met without them. Voices
developed into a network of local groups which met to socialise
and for support. After Community Care was introduced more groups
were set up by statutory services which were better funded than
ours and we found it harder to establish new groups. We now have
many fewer local groups than we once had. When I became Chair I
felt we needed a way of pulling the whole membership together
including those who did not belong to local groups. There were
increasing numbers of these members. So we started a magazine
made up of contributions by members where ideas and experiences
could be shared. This developed into being a forum also for
creativity in the form of poems, cartoons and artwork. We ran
several conferences about empowerment and self-management (in the
broadest sense). We also ran poetry competitions, developed a
website, produced leaflets and were a source of people who wanted
to do involvement. Lately we have started making DVDs. We were at
times funded by outside funders but eventually were adopted as an
integral part of Rethink and funded by them.
National Perceptions Forum amounts to a loosely knit alternative
network to the service based one. This is not to say that many of
our members do not have CPNs or go to day centres but that is
separate. People will ask why should we want to associate away
from ordinary society? The simple answer is that we feel very
marginalised by it and not on an equal footing at all very often.
We have become fed up with banging at its door and having it shut
in our face. I’m not saying it’s all society’s
fault. We can be awkward. We have a comfort zone in each other’s
company where we are not made to feel out of place.
Some people with mental distress are only too keen to reintegrate
with society. Many of them do not have all the problems we in
National Perceptions Forum experience. There are different forms
that mental distress takes and some of them are much more
acceptable to society than others. Those who would lump us all
together in my view are in denial. We are not all the same.
The Government would have it that people deemed to have severe
mental illness should be sent out to work. The people I know are
scared stiff by this. They do not view it as an opportunity but
as the road to hell. They expect to be ill-treated by other
workers and find themselves back in the asylum, even be driven to
suicide. As far as the anti-stigma campaigns go, when it comes to
us they are all but a waste of time. And we do not believe for
one minute that such campaigns will in any way ensure a smooth
transition for us back into the world of work and society.
Anybody who believes that they will is themselves in need of the
National Health. It’s not as if we have not tried. But it
just does not work. It is time that the Government showed some
compassion and allowed us to live our lives in peace. We have
enough to contend with.
Regardless of what people who would put themselves above us might
think we have carved out our own space. We have many very
creative people who share their work. A few of them are
professional artists. There is some work on display here today
which I hope gives a feel for the creativity of people who are
often seen as useless.
We propagate ourselves to the world through the internet. We have
compiled a large website with over 300 web pages with many
articles, poems and artwork which have previously been published
in our magazine. There is also a lot more, even downloadable
music composed and played by a couple of us.
We need our own space and to do things at our own pace. There are
many basically gifted people who are members for whom there is no
outlet in the wider world because they are slowed down by
antipsychotics, have particular problems relating to people and
are otherwise prevented from competing. But I think what they do
is good and needs an outlet. It would be cruel to make them do
menial work so that it could be said they were earning a living.
If they did not have the distress they would be capable of much
more. They find empowerment as I do in an alternative network.